Tales of Trailblazing High-Country Women
View at Oldbury, c 1826, by Charlotte Atkinson (Oldbury Farm, Moss Vale)
Towards the end of last year, a book caught my eye called ‘Sheilas – Badass Women of Australian History’ by Eliza Reilly. Opening the front cover, I read the introductory paragraph, where Eliza starts by saying:
Let’s be blunt. There aren’t enough women in our history books. There aren’t even enough we can name off the tops of our heads, compared to the blokes. The problem is, in our enthusiasm to incorporate a certain kind of figure into our national story, we’ve focused too much on the boys’ club of it all. And in fact, we’ve kinda left out some of the most badass people ever known. Well, not really known at all. That’s the point.
Obviously at this point, I was hooked and thoroughly enjoyed reading through Reilly’s book of notorious, strong-willed, and incredibly brave women; most of whom I had never heard of, much to my shame.
The book became somewhat of a turning point, and as an avid traveller and tour leader, I felt an overwhelming desire to know more about the unsung females who played pivotal roles in shaping the towns I was visiting. It soon became apparent that I wasn’t going to learn about these women by viewing the statues in the town parks—as tellingly only 4% of monuments in Australian towns currently represent women—and most of the books I found focused on either notorious women or the pioneering women of the great Australian outback, telling a narrative of survival against the odds that we love so much in Australia.
So, while tales from the outback were sometimes heart-wrenching and often enthralling and tales of Sydney madams and female bushrangers of Tasmania were fascinating, they didn’t help me on my quest to find out more about the everyday feisty females who lived in the towns closer to me. In particular, I wanted to read accounts of the trailblazing high-country women so I could share some of their stories on Academy’s new High-Country Trail tour. But alas, no such book existed (that I could find), so I needed to undertake some old-fashioned research, leading me to discover a group of fascinating women who met my criteria of being audacious, interesting, and inspirational, while also having some connection to the towns we plan to visit on the upcoming tour.
The High-Country Trail starts in Sydney before heading to the beautiful Southern Highlands. This fertile area, built on the traditional lands of the Gundungurra and Tharawal people, features genteel English-like estates with well-established gardens, famous art galleries and restaurants, and is home to many well-educated and cultured locals. My search found numerous interesting and inspirational women connected to this part of the world, one of whom was the adventurous, fiercely independent, emerging feminist icon, Charlotte Atkinson.
Self-portrait of Charlotte Waring Atkinson, c 1842–46
In the mid-1800s, Charlotte became Australia’s first children’s book author, an artist, and pioneer in the fight for women’s legal rights and education for all. This plucky trailblazer helped establish one of the finest estates in the area, ‘Oldbury’ at Sutton Forest, with her husband the local Magistrate, James Atkinson, before he tragically passed away at a young age. His untimely death left Charlotte alone to raise their four young children and secure a supporting income as the estate had been left in trust for her two-year-old son.
This was a difficult time for Charlotte, and soon after James’ death, she was held-up and most likely assaulted by an infamous bushranger, a man later dubbed the Berrima Axe Murderer. Shortly after that harrowing event, Charlotte made one of the greatest mistakes of her life, quickly marrying Geroge Barton, who turned out to be a violent drunk. As a battered wife, she fled her ‘raving lunatic’ second husband, taking her children and their pet koala by bullock dray down the precipitous Meryla Pass in the middle of the night - even though it left them homeless and penniless. To make ends meet she wrote and published ‘A Mother’s Offering to her Children by A Lady Long Resident in New South Wales’ in 1841 and the proceeds were enough to save her literally starving children. Not to be put down for long, strong-willed and clever Charlotte spent six years fighting for her rights and defended a landmark case in the Supreme Court of NSW, becoming the first woman to win the legal right to retain custody of her own children in Australia. I’m happy to say that a statue commemorating this trailblazing woman is currently being erected in Berrima Park, so her achievements will live on.
Following Charlotte’s strong-willed footsteps was legal pioneer Ada Evans. From an early age Ada was convinced that there was a need for women to be trained in the law to counter the prejudices of an all-male legal system. Although aware, as the law stood at the time, she would not be permitted to practice, in 1899 she enrolled at the Sydney University’s Law School and became Australia’s first woman to graduate LL.B. She sought to practice law but was refused on the ground that the admission of barristers and solicitors did not apply to women.
Ada Evans, first Australian female law graduate, 1902
Living in Bowral with her brother, Ada sent numerous letters to successive governments but with no result, until eventually she became the first woman to be admitted to the New South Wales Bar in 1921. Intelligent, confident, and compassionate, Ada Evans was well equipped to take her place as a member of the legal profession but was frustrated in doing so by the law itself. It has been stated that her reward was ‘the glory of the pioneer’, paving the way for other women to follow!
Other outstanding females from the area included talented artist Eirene Mor and her friend, Nora Weston, a wood carver, and cabinet maker who taught woodworking and crafts to wounded and convalescing soldiers during WW2. Another local lady who stands out is Amy ‘Starkie’ Caldwell who was so inspired by the visit of British aviatrix Amy Johnson in 1930, that she began taking flying lessons and gained her ‘A’ Pilot’s licence in 1939. Fearless Amy was actively involved in leading the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force (WAAAF) during WW2 and she spent the rest of her life developing opportunities for more women to become active in Australian aviation.
Amy ‘Starkie’ Caldwell (1910 – 1994)
Around the same time, another young woman of the highlands was determined to make a difference. In 1943, nature lover and country girl, Jocelyn Henderson, began a crusade to promote reafforestation and soil conservation. Growing up in the Snowy Mountains and later living in Bowral, she wrote extensively for newspapers, journals, and radio and gained the support of numerous bureaucrats and community leaders. Her passionate concern for the environment persuaded many farmers to act on soil conservation and reafforestation at a time when sustainable ecological management was still in its infancy. Jocelyn was a founder of the ironically named, ‘Men of the Land Society’ which later became known as ‘The Conservation Society of NSW’. She was certainly well ahead of her time!
Moving further south in Canberra and surrounds, we find many women who moved to the area, already successful in their various disciplines, who unashamedly challenged the status quo of their times and forged ahead regardless of the obstacles. These creative and brave souls include Marion Mahony Griffin, one of the first licensed female architects in the world who did the ‘drawings people think of when they think of Frank Lloyd Wright’ one of her collaborating architects. One architecture critic has commented that ‘Griffin was America’s, and perhaps the world’s first woman architect who needed no apology in the world of men’.
Portrait of Marion Mahony Griffin. National Library of Australia. PIC/9929/1958
In 1911, Marion married colleague and fellow architect, Walter Burley Griffin, and her watercolour perspectives of Griffin’s design for Canberra were instrumental in securing first prize in the international competition for the plan of the city. Marion and Walter moved to Canberra in 1914 to oversee the building of the city they had envisioned, and Marion managed their Sydney office, responsible for the private architectural commissions at the time. While many know of her male colleagues, Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin, Marion has been largely overlooked, despite producing some of the finest architectural drawings of America and Australia. Our capital city reflects her bold ideals of using the surrounding landscape and materials as architectural inspiration for a ‘city in its landscape’ that Canberra still struggles to maintain.
Like Marion, the next woman on my list also moved to the area and made it her own. She is the stylish and savvy, Betty Churcher AO, also known as ‘Betty Blockbuster’. After training as an artist, becoming a mother of four boys and working as a high school art teacher in Queensland, Betty became an astute art critic for The Australian newspaper.
Portrait of Betty Churcher, 1993 by Greg Barrett. National Library of Australia
Not content with this achievement, at the age of 44, Betty moved to London to study art history at the Courtauld Institute and later navigated the world of higher education at what is now RMIT. Due to her sharp intelligence, organisational skills, and insightful analysis of art, Betty was headhunted for the position of director at the Art Gallery of Western Australia before accepting the role of director of the Australian National Gallery in 1990. She hosted several television shows, including the popular ‘Hidden Treasures’ and authored numerous books, however, it was her determination to make great art accessible to all people that puts Betty Churcher on my list of outstanding women.
The wild mountains surrounding Canberra were also home to many feisty females. One of the most famous would undoubtedly have to be Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin. Stella was born at Talbingo in 1879 and grew up with her pioneering family on Brindabella Station. Stella, later known as nationalist, feminist, and novelist Miles Franklin, shared her father’s hardships and losses as he tried to survive on the land, watching her inheritance gradually diminishing during her early years. To make ends meet, Stella took on the role as a governess near Yass in 1897, an experience that inspired her to write her marvellously rebellious ‘My Brilliant Career’. The book was rejected locally but was published with the aid of Henry Lawson in the UK in 1901, bringing instant acclaim to the otherwise resourceless 22-year-old female.
Miles Franklin. Author – portrait 1901. State Library of NSW
Afterwards, Stella went on to work in the Trade Union League of America and was active in both literary and political fields. During WW1 she enlisted as a voluntary worker with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service in Macedonia. Despite the attentions of many ‘bright young men’ she hated chauvinism and finally rejected the thought of marriage, which she considered ‘rabbit work’. After her death in 1954, the ashes of proud and challenging Stella Franklin were scattered at Talbingo, near Tumut, and her estate founded the Miles Franklin Award for Australian Literature.
The beautiful mountain area where Stella grew up, was also home to Violet Josephine Bulger, stockwoman, midwife, and respected Ngunnawal elder. Violet was born at an Aboriginal station at Brungle (near Tumut) in 1900. Her father was an Aboriginal tracker and Violet grew up as a member of the Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal community. As a young girl she was forcibly removed from her family and placed in the Cootamundra Training Home where she trained to work as a domestic servant. She carried out that work for most of her early life, apart from a period when she rebelled and worked with her father as a stockwoman rounding up brumbies in the high-country! At a time when Aboriginal women experienced limited access to maternity hospitals, in her early 20s Violet learned midwifery from her mother who had been trained by a Tumut doctor. She used these skills throughout her life to assist pregnant women on Aboriginal reserves. Aunty Violet, as she was known, faced many challenges in her own life, yet despite these, she became a well-respected Ngunnawal elder, and in 1993, Violet’s Park in the Canberra suburb of Ngunnawal was named in recognition of her generous contribution to the community.
The beautiful yet harsh conditions of the Australian Alps became a challenge that some women found irresistible. These women include mountaineer Charlotte A. Adams, who in 1881 became the first woman of European descent to climb to the peak of Mount Kosciuszko, at the age of 21. Today the village of Charlotte Pass is named after her very impressive effort! The Snowy Mountains Scheme also saw many trailblazing women move to the area, such as Dr. Ina Berents and Georgina McQuade (the Duchess). Dr. Berents was the doctor at Cabramurra, the highest township in Australia at the time. She travelled in the freezing conditions in a rattly Land Rover to treat everyone from mothers giving birth to men with injuries from tunnelling accidents. Meanwhile, Georgina McQuade, the accommodation officer at Cabramurra affectionately dubbed ‘The Duchess’, refused to let the heavy snowfalls of the alps dampen her sense of style, always wearing stiletto heels and the most fashionable outfits of the day! Her quest for elegance set such an example that the engineers started arriving at social functions in their dinner jackets (with gum boots) and their wives appeared in the latest city fashions!
As we travel south to the picturesque Victorian high-country, we encounter two pioneering women who were highly unique in their own ways. The first is a lady that we have probably all heard of, but know little about, Ellen Kelly, mother of the infamous bushranger Ned Kelly. She was described in the Melbourne Argus newspaper as a ‘notoriously bad woman’, seen as harbouring her violent sons and being on the wrong side of the law. However, Irish-born Ellen Kelly was more than that. She had an adventurous and rebellious spirit as a teenager, and her adulthood was punctuated by heartache, betrayal by numerous men, persecution, and poverty.
Ned Kelly Parents: Ellen Quinn Kelly and John Kelly
The feisty, independent woman outlived seven of her 12 children and spent three years in Old Melbourne Gaol after she attacked a policeman with a spade in her home, while protecting her sons. She was in fact a prisoner in the same gaol on the day Ned was hanged. Because Ellen was a model prisoner, she was allowed to visit her son before he was hanged, and she was released in 1881. On her return home, there were scenes of an emerging Pro-Kelly civil rebellion and Constable Robert Graham, seeing the important role this fearless matriarch played, gained her confidence, and persuaded her to calm her sympathisers. Ellen did so and settled down to become a respectable and humble community member: although she continued to struggle with poverty. Throughout her life, Ellen did what needed to be done to feed and raise her children and grandchildren, and despite their imperfections, Ellen was always on their side putting her own life on the line to protect them.
Mrs Kelly and family group outside the Kelly homestead, 1881. State Library of Victoria
Meanwhile, at the same time, in the same part of the world, lived a woman that couldn’t be more different to Ellen, the author, poet, astute social critic and Reverend’s wife, Ada Cambridge Cross. Ada’s husband George conducted pastoral work in Beechworth and surrounding areas from 1870 to 1893. At first Ada was the typical hard-working wife of a country clergyman, taking part in all the activities of the parish. However, she experienced the loss of children to whopping cough and scarlet fever, had a near fatal miscarriage, and then a serious carriage accident, leaving her frail and broken hearted. Soon after the accident, Ada began to write, and her ideas were considered a little daring and improper for a clergyman’s wife!
Beechworth's Ada Cambridge Cross
Like the other women we’ve encountered, Ada was ahead of her time and one of her poems, the unconventional and hastily suppressed ‘Unspoken Thoughts’ (1887) expressed her religious anxieties, concerns about social injustice, touches on extramarital affairs, and explores the physical bondage of wives. She became Australia’s first recognised poet and her internationally acclaimed books focused on survival against the harsh environment. Despite regular good reviews, they were largely disregarded in Australia because she did not write in the literary tradition of the time that was largely non-urban and masculine!
Arriving in Melbourne we find such a list of interesting and inspirational women that it is almost impossible to narrow them down. So, in this brief overview, I’m going to touch upon three of my absolute favourite Melbourne sheilas.
The first is Marion-Bill Edwards, a flamboyant and jaunty transgender cross-dresser who was born in Murchison, Victoria in 1871. Marion spent most of her youth on her uncle’s farm on the Goulburn River, where she acquired good bush skills. In the mid-1890s she decided to take on a male persona, and dress and work like a man: so Marion became Bill. Marion-Bill appears to have been quite a character, and in one article in the Brisbane Courier, the journalist noted that Edwards was a ‘wealthy girl, horse owner, roughrider, masquerade, alleged burglar, painter, varnisher, fighter, barman, yardman, labourer, and ingenious lover’.
‘Marion-Bill’ Edwards, from The Lone Hand. Vol. 2. No. 9 (1 January 1908), Trove.
Marion-Bill was also a sharpshooter and became Australia’s equivalent to Annie Oakley or Calamity Jane. Considered a lovable person with nice ways, women everywhere adored Edwards. They had several publicised sexual affairs and marriages with women and was described as a ‘role model’ that women distinctly approved of in the highly male-dominated society. Marion-Bill dressed mostly as a man and when a journalist asked whether they preferred to be addressed as Bill or Marion, Edwards replied, ‘Bill will do as well as Marion, and Marion as well as Bill’. What a badass trailblazer for gender equity!
At the same time in Melbourne, our next daring lady was about to immerse herself into the scary world of Kew Lunatic Asylum. The brave and courageous Catherine Hay Thomson was working as an undercover investigative journalist at the time and in 1900 she suspected that real life in a lunatic asylum was not as peachy as visitors were permitted to see. So, Catherine being the gutsy girl that she was, posed as a mentally unwell woman and had herself admitted to the gloomy and prison-like Kew Lunatic Asylum.
Catherine Hay Thomson went undercover as an assistant nurse for her series on conditions at Melbourne Hospital.
After a fortnight of being a patient, she discovered that many of the committed women weren’t insane, but where suffering from institutionalisation and the poor conditions from which they had to live and survive. Her article resulted in massive changes to the system and contested the way Australian’s viewed those considered to be ‘insane’. In addition, she exposed the unhygienic practices at certain hospitals, challenged our concepts of disability, our attitudes towards single mothers (and the absent fathers) and once she dressed as a man to get a better idea of the lives of sex workers.
For all of her life, Catherine worked tirelessly bettering the plight of women everywhere. She founded the National Council of Women of Victoria in 1902 and, in a way that only a high-spirited woman could do, she dated her friend Thomas Legge for forty years before finally deciding to marry him, at the grand age of 72!
Our tour concludes at the beautiful Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne, so it is quite fitting that the final intrepid lady to make my short list is the formidable ‘Flower Hunter’, Ellis Rowan. Rowan, a passionate painter of plants, birds, and insects in the 1880s defied convention and travelled the world in the pursuit of beauty and rarity. She wanted to find things that no one else had found. She was a bold explorer who would travel through the unexplored regions of Cape York or venture into the hot and steamy jungles of New Guinea in 1916, wearing a long Victorian-style dress, gloves, and dainty hat to sketch birds of paradise and wildflowers.
Memorial portrait of Ellis Rowan, flower painter and authoress by John Longstaff, c. 1926, National Library of Australia
The famous male artists of Rowan’s time dismissed her as a hobbyist flower painter of no importance, and in 1888 the Victorian Artists Society members were appalled when Rowan’s watercolour of native Australian plants won a gold medal at the Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition, beating artists such as Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin. Undeterred she continued travelling, had three paintings accepted by Queen Victoria, and in 1898 released her biographical book ‘A Flower Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand’. In 1923, the Federal Government bought more than 900 of Ellis’ paintings for £5000, even though artist Norman Lindsay derided her work as ‘vulgar’. Today a group of people are gathering support to raise a statue to Ellis Rowan, and one of the team, La Trobe University historian, Clare Wright, has recently commented.
‘think of all the statues and monuments to men who killed and maimed, conquered and invaded. What about the women who created and curated, preserved and maintained and safeguarded? Their time has come’.
All I can say is, amen to that!
No doubt there will be some reading this thinking, why on earth didn’t you include Miss… or Mrs… or Senator… and I apologise, as there are undoubtedly hundreds more women worthy of our recognition. This list is not comprehensive in any way; the ones I have chosen are women who interest me, women of contrasts, as bright and bold as the landscapes they lived in. Women who fearlessly explored new horizons, who challenged the status quo, or made a difference in their own way.
I look forward to learning about more of these women and sharing more of their tales on our upcoming tours…
HIGH COUNTRY TRAIL
From the Mountains to Melbourne
Across 10-days, journey from Sydney to Melbourne via the High Country trail with archaeologist and historian Ben Churcher and scientific illustrator and historian Dr Bernadette Drabsch. Along the way, explore the lesser-known heritage of Canberra and the Snowy Mountains before experiencing the rich history of the Ned Kelly route from Beechworth to Mansfield. Throughout the tour, enjoy the colourful autumnal landscapes and excellent regional cuisine and wine.
