Featured Interviews
Merle Thornton
Former Public Servant, Activist, Lecturer.
Merle Thornton and Rosalie Bognor’s 1965 Regatta Pub Protest is recognised as one the defining moments of the Australian second wave feminist movement. Thornton went on to found the Equal Opportunities for Women Association which worked to overturn the law that required women employed in the Public Service to resign upon marriage – known as the Marriage Bar- and was successful in 1966. Thornton went onto teach Women’s Studies at the University of Queensland and continued to advocate for social justice.
Martha Ansara
Cinematographer, Activist
American born cinematographer Martha Ansara came to Australia in 1969 with some women’s liberation pamphlets she had picked at a conference in Boston. She shared them around, soon helping to coordinate the first Women’s Liberation meeting in Sydney. Ansara was a leading member of Sydney Women’s Liberation, the MeJane Collective, Mabel and the Sydney Women’s Film Group, which developed and promoted women’s and feminist filmmaking.
Margot Nash
Filmmaker & Activist
Margot Nash is half of ASIF – the Anarcho Surrealist Insurrectionary Feminists! Nowdays Margot is a Freelance Screenwriter, Director and Script Editor. She is currently an Honorary Associate Teaching & Research in the School of Communications at the University of Technology Sydney
Pat O’Shane
Magistrate & Activist
Pat O’Shane is a Yalangi woman from the Kunjandji clan of Queensland. She has been a trailblazer since becoming the first Indigenous teacher in Queensland, the first Indigenous person to earn a law degree, and the first Aboriginal magistrate. O’Shane penned an important essay entitled “Is there any relevance in the Women’s Movement for Aboriginal Women?” which asked white women to consider the black women’s perspective of oppression.
Alva Geikie
Activist
Alva Geickie was an inaugural member of the Women’s Action Committee and was involved in many of their radical actions including the Equal Pay Tram Ride (1970), the anti-Miss Teenage Quests (1970 and 1971) and the protests at the men- only public bars. In 2005, Alva received an Edna Ryan Award in Sydney, NSW, to honour her contribution as a feminist activist over many years.
Anne Summers
Journalist, Activist & Writer
Anne Summers is a legendary Australian journalist, activist, writer, former ‘femocrat’, one-time Editor of Ms. Magazine, target of ASIO surveillance, early member of Adelaide Women’s liberation, co-founder of feminist journal Refractory Girl, and co-founder of Elsie, the first women’s refuge in Australia. Anne’s 1975 book Damned Whores and God’s Police was a landmark piece of Australian writing and has been one of the most influential bestsellers of the past 40 years
Lilla Watson
Activist & Educator
Lilla Watson is a Gangulu woman who grew up on the Dawson River Central Queensland. She is an elder, women’s and Indigenous activist and educator. Watson was an active participant in events such as the anti- Apartheid Springbok protests in Brisbane, 1970, and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra, 1972. Lilla’s statement addressing white colonial hangups; “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together,” has served as a motto for many activist groups worldwide.
Kerryn Higgs
Writer & Historian
Kerryn Higgs, an Australian writer and historian, is currently a University Associate at the University of Tasmania and an Associate Fellow of the Club of Rome. Higgs has been an activist and researcher on issues of environment, social justice, and social-ecological limits for several decades. She has also published a novel and numerous articles on environment and politics.
Shirley Castley
Activist
Shirley Castley was instrumental to the formation of the Hobart Women's Action Group (HWAG) formed in 1972. That same year they founded the widely-read journal Liberaction, that was intellectual but simultaneously irreverent and brought a different spin to Women’s Liberation Movement literature being produced in Australia.
Jeni Thornley
Documentary filmmaker, Activist
Jeni Thornley is a documentary filmmaker, writer, film valuer and research associate at University of Technology, Sydney. Since leaving her job as Manager of the Women's Film Fund at the Australian Film Commission in 1986, Thornley has worked as an independent writer, director and producer. She is currently an Honorary Research Associate in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS and a consultant film valuer for the Cultural Gifts Program, Dept of Communications and the Arts.
Gillian Leahy
Director & Editor
Having completed an honours Anthropology Degree at Sydney University in 1973, Gillian Leahy studied at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. She worked as a clapper loader on four feature films and worked as an independent director and camera operator on a number of films. She was a member of the editorial board of FILMNEWS. She began teaching at UTS in 1983. She has directed over 16 films ranging in length from 10 to 55 minutes.
Barb Creed
Professor
Barbara Creed is a Professor of Cinema Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of six books on gender, feminist film theory, and the horror genre. Creed is a graduate of Monash and LaTrobe universities where she completed doctoral research using the framework of psychoanalysis and feminist theory to examine horror films. She is known for her cultural criticism.
Iola Mathews
Writer, Activist
Iola Mathews was one of the ten women who founded the Women's Electoral Lobby in February 1972. She was a journalist at The Age for many years, writing mainly on Education and Women's Issues. In 1996 she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for services to women's employment. She has published numerous books and articles and in 2006 established Glenfern writers' studios in Melbourne.
Eva Cox
Writer, Commentator & Activist
Eva Cox AO is an Austrian-born Australian writer, feminist, sociologist, social commentator and activist. She has been an active advocate for creating a "more civil" society. She was a long-term member of the Women's Electoral Lobby (WEL), and is still pursuing feminist change by putting revaluing social contributions and wellbeing onto political agendas, as well as recognising the common ground between Australia's First Nations and feminist values of the importance of the social.
Elizabeth Reid
Former Political Advisor & Activist
In 1973 Elizabeth Reid became the world's first advisor on women's affairs to a head of government, in the Labor Government of Gough Whitlam. Reid was a member of Canberra Women’s Liberation and a philosophy tutor at ANU. She bravely took on the challenge of bringing a revolutionary feminist perspective to the machinations of government, and making the state more accountable to women’s needs. When the Whitlam came under pressure to distance itself from Reid and the women’s movement Reid chose to resign over being moved to a lesser government department.
Dani Torsch
Author, Educator & Filmmaker
Daniela Torsch is a feminist author, educator, public servant, journalist and filmmaker. She attended the University of Sydney was elected to the Women's Union on the platform of a combined male and female union. She worked as a journalist with The Australian then became prominent in women's education policy and acted as consultant for the Commonwealth Schools Commission.
Biff Ward
Writer & Activist
Biff has worked in radical secondary education, equal opportunity, Indigenous adult education, human resource development and mental illness education. She has had a peripatetic writing career, including ‘Father-Daughter Rape’, a feminist analysis of the child sexual abuse literature from Freud to the early 80s, published by The Women's Press in London, 1984. Her memoir, ‘In My Mother's Hands’, is about her family's experience of her mother's mental illness.
Sara Dowse
Writer & Activist
Sara Dowse is an American-born Australian feminist, author, critic, social commentator, and visual artist. Her novels include Schemetime published in 1990, Sapphires, and As the Lonely Fly, and she has contributed reviews, articles, essays, stories, and poetry to a range of print and online publications. She was a Canberra public servant, the inaugural head of the first women's unit in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and oversaw the unit's growth from a section to an office.
Robin Laurie
Writer & Activist
Robin Laurie was a member of the legendary Melbourne theatre The Pram Factory and its subsidiary The Women’s Theatre Group – where, “People (men mostly) kept saying patronisingly what a relief it was that feminists could be funny.” Robin was also a founding member of Circus Oz and used to liven up anti-Vietnam War moratoriums with street theatre and acrobatics. Her 1976 short film with Margot Nash We Aim to Please is a legendary piece of feminist filmmaking and a powerful ‘up yours’ to the filmic conventions that privilege the ‘male gaze’.
Suzanne Bellamy
Writer & Activist
Suzanne Bellamy was part of the first group of Women’s Liberation in Sydney 1969. She worked on the first Women’s Liberation newspaper MeJane, taught Women’s Studies and Politics at Macquarie University 1974-80, and was National Convenor of the First Women and Labour Conference in 1978. She worked on all three Australian Women’s Commissions, the Coming Out show, the Awful Truth show, and worked with Bessie Guthrie on the child welfare campaigns to close the Parramatta Girls’ Home and end the practice of compulsory ‘Virginity Testing’.
Kate Jennings
Writer & Activist
Kate Jennings is a poet, essayist, memoirist, and novelist. At the University of Sydney in the she was active in feminist and left wing-movements and edited ‘Mother I'm Rooted’, an anthology of women poets which was the object of much controversy. She moved to New York City in 1979, where she wrote for numerous magazines and newspapers, as well as doing a stint on Wall Street as a speechwriter. Jennings is also known for writing outspoken essays and op-eds on the state of fiction and the direction of feminism.