Academic literature on the topic 'Women dramatists, Australian Australia'

Objective: To ascertain the gender distribution across public health boards in Australia. Design & Setting: Analysis of data and information obtained from a cross sectional audit of online publicly listed health boards within Australia from October to December 2019. Results: The majority of public health boards have close to equal representation of women as board members however women are underrepresented in Chair roles. Victoria has significantly more women on health boards, whereas New South Wales has significantly less women on health boards and in Chair positions. Conclusions: Further efforts are required to drive gender equity in senior leadership roles in public health boards across Australia

Filipino women comprise more than half of the Philippine-born population in Australia. They adopt Australian citizenship readily and have high labor force participation. In this article, I examined Filipino women's practice of Australian citizenship in the world of work. Based on in-depth interviews with 36 Filipino women, I adopted feminist conception of citizenship which considers paid work as well as caring work in the domestic sphere. Findings from the study suggest that becoming an Australian citizenship not only provides Filipino women membership in the political community. More importantly, it empowers them to negotiate their subject position as racialized immigrant women in the labor market. Negotiating gender roles in the family, however, is a different arena.

The article explores the experiences of patients undergoing day surgery in an Australian public hospital for women. We draw primarily on interviews with these patients to identify the factors arising from the specific context which compromised their well-being.

Interest in women’s labour force participation, economic security and pay equity received substantial media and public policy attention throughout 2019, largely attributable to the federal election and the Australian Labor Party platform, which included a comprehensive suite of policies aimed at advancing workplace gender equality. Following the Australian Labor Party’s unexpected loss at the polls, however, workplace gender equality largely faded from the political agenda. In this annual review, we cover key gender equality indicators in Australia, examine key election promises made by both major parties, discuss the implications of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety for the female-dominated aged care workforce, and provide a gendered analysis on recent debates and developments surrounding the ‘future of work’ in Australia.

Sexual behaviour is determined by social, cultural and personal factors. Sexual behaviour studies have been conducted in many countries. However, information from Australia is limited. This study was conducted in Obstetrics Department, Westmead Hospital, Sydney. Questionnaire-derived demographic and behavioural characteristics for public and private patients were compared using bivariate and logistic regression analyses. Of the patients, 3036 were public, and 595 private. On bivariate analysis some significant differences were private patients more likely to be born in Australia and have a higher education level whereas public patients were more likely to have had a greater number of lifetime sexual partners and younger age at first sex. Public patients were more likely to be herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) antibody positive (12%) than private patients (6%). On logistic regression significant variables included country of birth, being HSV-2 antibody positive, and age at first sex. A number of sexual and social variables were significantly different, comparing patients in the public and private sectors. Evaluation of interventions to reduce the sexual risk to women in the public sector should be considered, including encouraging young women to delay their sexual debut, and reducing the number of sexual partners.

Limited statistics make for difficulties in producing a clear picture of the impact of equal employment opportunity policies in Australian police services. Available figures indicate that pre-entry physical ability tests are a significant source of attrition of aspiring policewomen. Women also appear to be disproportionately more likely to separate as a result of maternal obligations, and report higher incidents of sexual harassment and sex discrimination in promotion and deployment. Considering the historical marginalisation of women in policing, Australian police services have made large steps forward in reducing discrimination in a relatively short period of time. Improvements can nonetheless be made in making policing a more viable career option for women, and recruiting appears to be the main area where proactive measures are needed.

An anxiety scale and a knowledge about saltwater crocodiles scale were administered to 135 adults in the northern Australian cities of Darwin and Cairns so as to gauge their responses to and knowledge about an increasingly salient local predator. High levels of knowledge accompanied higher anxiety. Anxiety was more likely to be admitted by women and was associated with a positive attitude toward culling. No Australian regional differences were observed. The theoretical and practical implications of these results for the safety of northern Australian residents and tourists are discussed.

This paper includes a short history of Aboriginal women in Australia from about the turn of the century. This has been made possible by the writings of such women. Most non-Aboriginal women have been and are ignorant of this history. They need to understand this past in order to come to terms with it. Aboriginal women are also not aware of how misinformed non-Aboriginal women are of the role of Aboriginal women in their own society. An extensive dialogue is needed to develop the mutual understanding necessary for the construction of a peaceful and just post-colonial Australia.

There is an increasing body of work identifying and analyzing notions of resilience from indigenous perspectives. Notwithstanding the utility of this research for the Australian context (some parallels may be cautiously inferred for some Indigenous Australian groups), critical knowledge gaps exist in our understanding of how Australian Indigenous peoples, particularly Indigenous women, construct, perform and express resilience. This paper addresses this gap by presenting data from focus group discussions with 11 Indigenous Australian women, which highlights how the women confront the everyday challenges of ‘being Indigenous’. The women spoke of not only of a strong sense of identity in the face of negative stereotypes but also demonstrated their ability to adapt to change, rebound from negative historical socio-cultural and political systemic changes and ways to keep their identities and cultures strong within contemporary Australia. We contend that a focus on Indigenous resilience is more significant for social change because it not only moves away from deficit-discourses about Indigenous Australian groups, it highlights their remarkable strengths in adapting, recovering and continuing in white-centric, antagonistic conditions.

AbstractThe decades from the 1940s to the 1960s were ones of increasing contacts between women of India and Australia. These were not built on a shared British colonial history, but on commitments to visions circulating globally of equality between races, sexes, and classes. Kapila Khandvala from Bombay and Lucy Woodcock from Sydney were two women who met during such campaigns. Interacting roughly on an equal footing, they were aware of each other's activism in the Second World War and the emerging Cold War. Khandvala and Woodcock both made major contributions to the women's movements of their countries, yet have been largely forgotten in recent histories, as have links between their countries. We analyse their interactions, views, and practices on issues to which they devoted their lives: women's rights, progressive education, and peace. Their beliefs and practices on each were shaped by their respective local contexts, although they shared ideologies that were circulating internationally. These kept them in contact over many years, during which Kapila built networks that brought Australians into the sphere of Indian women's awareness, while Lucy, in addition to her continuing contacts with Kapila, travelled to China and consolidated links between Australian and Chinese women in Sydney. Their activist world was centred not in Western Europe, but in a new Asia that linked Australia and India. Our comparative study of the work and interactions of these two activist women offers strategies for working on global histories, where collaborative research and analysis is conducted in both colonizing and colonized countries.

There are many potential determinants of women?s labour supply including wages, unearned income, human capital endowments, demographic characteristics and family traits. Fertility behaviour, including the number of children and age of children, is also an important factor in women’s labour supply decisions. Many factors which affect women’s decisions on participating in the labour market and hours of work are also key influences on their decisions on starting a family and having a desired number of children. This thesis provides a comprehensive analysis of the determinants of labour supply and fertility behaviour of Australian women. Using cross-sectional data, labour supply models corrected for sample selection bias, and fertility models examining different aspects of family size, the thesis finds that women’s labour supply decisions are largely influenced by their wages and fertility behaviour. Their decisions on completed fertility, starting a family and having additional children are largely influenced by their actual or potential wages.

Margaret Ada Sutherland (1897-1984) is respected as one of the leading musicians in Australia in the twentieth century. She is widely recognised as having made significant contributions to the development of Australian musical composition and contemporary creative life. While a significant body of scholarly work has been completed on Sutherland and while it is varied in scope and purpose, to date, no study has been undertaken with a strong focus on the identification and examination of primary sources relating to Sutherland. Research on Sutherland and her creative life has been consistently hampered by problems such as numerous lacunae in the composer???s corpus of works and the transmission of errors from one study to the next. It is the thesis of this study that these problems can be addressed by a reevaluation of all previously-used primary documents as well as the study of newlyfound primary source material: returning to primary sources has uncovered a considerable amount of material, both by and about the composer, which has remained previously unexplored. In order to address omissions in Sutherland???s work list, the starting point for the current study is the compilation of a thorough catalogue of works which incorporates all known compositions by Sutherland. This catalogue is derived from the collation of comprehensive primary source material. Further to this, the close examination of extensive primary sources relating to Sutherland???s life and music provides insights into aspects of the contemporary musical network in which she worked and also into the particular problems she encountered as a female composer in a geographically isolated country. The diversity of her achievements is also illuminated. The resources used in this thesis provide the material which will enhance, augment, and sometimes offer new perspectives relating to the current understanding of Sutherland???s creative life. Thus, Sutherland???s contribution to Australian music can be more deeply understood.

The cultural determinism summoned in the discourse on the ‘war on terror’ embraces gender frames that invigorate the Islam and the West divide. In a vacuum of historical, geo-political and economic contexts, such frames conjure a Muslim woman archetype in opposition to Western conceptualizations of modernity. Ignoring the social milieu, as well as the current global transformations affecting people’s lives globally, conjectures in singular co-optations that isolate traits from religious dispositions have implications in how Muslim gender issues are perceived and addressed.This thesis intends to reconceptualize the Muslim woman image in an attempt to move beyond the gender polemics of cultural determinism and divide. Using narrative enquiry, the study makes a comparative analysis to discover how Muslim women in two disparate societies – Australia and Kenya are responding to the dynamics of change accelerated by globalization. Through primary research, it captures the narratives of 40 women along the axis of the two major influences on their lives - modernization and Islamization enhanced by globalization. In tracing the way global paradigms and policy changes at the macro-level have affected Muslim women and the responses produced, it provides an unconventional frame to view the lives of contemporary Muslim women.The study contends that in general, the issues facing Muslim women in the rapidly changing environment can be understood as challenges internal and external to faith orientation. On the one hand, the forces of a modern global culture offer opportunities and channels to redefine aspects of daily living and lifestyles. On the other, a resurgence of Islam manifests itself in an assertion of religious observance, cultural identity, values and morality that increasingly question these settings. The challenges are not confined to minorities in the West, but also borne by many in non-Western societies. Through its research findings, the study proposes that culture in itself is not immutable or a constant, but cultural expression is a vital part of utilizing opportunities availed by development and central to the process of development itself. As the means of comprehension without which life, lifestyles, objectives, aspirations and much more cannot be expressed, given meaning or be implemented, cultural expression is a vital aspect of human development. Accommodating these in the multicultural settings of contemporary environments is evermore salient in the globalized world.As the world becomes more interdependent, the challenges for a global society manifest in how societies organize themselves; how citizens participate and how decisions on collective issues can be more congruent to facilitate a more socially sustainable development. Through its schedule, the study attempts to provide an insight into the issues and challenges facing Muslim women in contemporary times and in the course of its findings makes a case for the value of diversity, cultural expression and a sustained representation of Muslim women within development issues.

Master of Philosophy
Grace Crowley was one of the leading innovators of geometric abstraction in Australia. When she returned to Australia in 1930 she had thoroughly mastered the complex mathematics and geometry of the golden section and dynamic symmetry that had become one of the frameworks for modernism. Crowley, Anne Dangar and Dorrit Black all studied under the foremost teacher of modernism in Paris, André Lhote. Crowley not only taught the golden section and dynamic symmetry to Rah Fizelle, Ralph Balson and students of the Crowley-Fizelle Art School, but used it to develop her own abstract art during the 1940s and 1950s, well in advance of the arrival of colour-field painting to Australia in the 1960s. Through her teaching at the most progressive modern art school in Sydney in the 1930s Crowley taught the basic compositional techniques as she had learnt them from Lhote. When the art school closed in 1937 she worked in partnership with fellow artist, Ralph Balson as they developed their art into constructive, abstract paintings. Balson has been credited with being the most influential painter in the development of geometric abstraction in Australia for a younger generation of artists. This is largely due to Crowley’s insistence that Balson was the major innovator who led her into abstraction. She consistently refused to take credit for her own role in their artistic partnership. My research indicates that there were a number of factors that strongly influenced Crowley to support Balson and deny her own role. Her archives contain sensitive records of the breakup of her partnership with Rah Fizelle and the closure of the Crowley-Fizelle Art School. These, and other archival material, indicate that Fizelle’s inability to master and teach the golden section and dynamic symmetry, and Crowley’s greater popularity as a teacher, was the real cause of the closure of the School. Crowley left notes in her Archives that she still felt deeply distressed, even forty years after the events, and did not wish the circumstances of the closure known in her lifetime. With the closure of the Art School and her close friend Dangar living in France, her friendship with Balson offered a way forward. This thesis argues that Crowley chose to conceal her considerable mathematical and geometric ability, rather than risk losing another friend and artistic partner in a similar way to the breakup of the partnership with Fizelle. With the death of her father in this period, she needed to spend much time caring for her mother and that left her little time for painting. She later also said she felt that a man had a better chance of gaining acceptance as an artist, but it is equally true that, without Dangar, she had no-one to give her support or encourage her as an artist. By supporting Balson she was able to provide him with a place to work in her studio and had a friend with whom she could share her own passion for art, as she had done with Dangar. During her long friendship with Balson, she painted with him and gave him opportunities to develop his talents, which he could not have accessed without her. She taught him, by discreet practical demonstration the principles she had learnt from Lhote about composition. He had only attended the sketch club associated with the Crowley- Fizelle Art School. Together they discussed and planned their paintings from the late 1930s and worked together on abstract paintings until the mid-1950s when, in his retirement from house-painting, she provided him with a quiet, secluded place in which to paint and experiment with new techniques. With her own artistic contacts in France, she gained him international recognition as an abstract painter and his own solo exhibition in a leading Paris art gallery. After his death in 1964, she continued to promote his art to curators and researchers, recording his life and art for posterity. The artist with whom she studied modernism in Paris, Anne Dangar, also received her lifelong support and promotion. In the last decade of her life Crowley provided detailed information to curators and art historians on the lives of both her friends, Dangar and Balson, meticulously keeping accurate records of theirs and her own life devoted to art. In her latter years she arranged to deposit these records in public institutions, thus becoming a contributor to Australian art history. As a result of this foresight, the stories of both her friends, Balson and Dangar, have since become a record of Australian art history. (PLEASE NOTE: Some illustrations in this thesis have been removed due to copyright restrictions, but may be consulted in the print version held in the Fisher Library, University of Sydney. APPENDIX 1 gratefully supplied from the Grace Crowley Archives, Art Gallery of New South Wales Research Library)

The most recurrent theme in the early literature on women and farming is of women's invisibility. By the end of the 1990s, however, an important shift had occurred with farm women's increased visibility. Two international conferences had been held on women and agriculture, numerous rural women's groups had been formed across the world and a substantial literature had emerged documenting women's role and work on farms. However, despite the increased prominence given to the private lives of women farmers, they are still largely unrepresented in the public sphere of agriculture. In the Australian cane industry, for example, women hold none of the 181 elected positions of leadership in their agri-political group, CANEGROWERS. This anomaly between what we now know about women's important role in farming and their absence from decision-making positions in the sector, has shifted the focus of academic work on women and agriculture from examining family farming to studies of organisational culture and leadership. This thesis contributes to this shift in academic focus by reporting on an in-depth study of a single agri-political organisation, the Australian sugar industry's, CANEGROWERS. Its significance is that it makes important and critical links between the gendered processes and practices on the farm and the gendered processes and practices of the agri-political group. In both metaphorical and real terms it makes links between the 'paddock' and the 'board room'. This research derives its feminist perspective from a commitment to five key principles. These are focusing on women, valuing women's experiences and knowledge, rejecting the split between subject and object, emphasising consciousness raising and emphasising political change and emancipation. The research design includes both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods. A case study of CANEGROWERS using in-depth interviews with fifteen elected members, participant observation and document analysis, provides contextual data on the organisation and its practices and processes. A survey of 234 women involved in the industry gives a quantitative perspective on the nature of women's farm work, the barriers to their participation in CANEGROWERS and possible strategies to facilitate greater participation. Two final case studies of the district locations of Mackay and the Herbert River are used to present a descriptive and localised understanding of the issues. Both case studies use a range of methods including focus groups with forty women, in-depth interviews with CANEGROWERS' staff members and women who have stood for election, participant observation and document analysis. The main finding that emerges from this thesis is that the path to leadership within the agri-political group CANEGROWERS is subjective, closed and distinctly gendered. This is in distinct contrast to the way it is represented by elected members and some CANEGROWERS' staff as a process which is objective, open and gender neutral. This gendered path to leadership begins with how the notion of farmer is constructed solely in terms of the on-farm physical work undertaken largely by men. Thus; importantly, women's work on sugar cane farms, what they do and what they do not do, is intricately connected with their level of participation in the organisation CANEGROWERS. The research provides evidence of the fact that women are actively involved on sugar cane farms performing a myriad of roles which contribute to the industry's sustainability. However, the roles they perform and the knowledge needed to conduct these roles are not valued. What work and knowledge is valued is that relating to on-farm physical labour. Despite the popular and mainstream rhetoric about the need for new types of farming and new types of farmers, there persists across the industry a view that the farmer is involved solely (or most importantly) in physical work and it is this which is given status. To be a farmer is to do physical work and to do physical work is to be a male. Furthermore, having legitimacy within the industry as an elected leader is equated with one's status as a farmer and the knowledge one has as a result of participation in on-farm physical work. Thus, while elected members cite the importance of having a diversity of knowledge to make up an effective agri-political board, the knowledge to which they refer is extremely narrow. The knowledge that women might have, for example, as a result of their high level of participation in financial management, is not afforded the same status and therefore does not entitle them to be a contender for industry leadership. Even on those few occasions in the sugar industry, where; because of their involvement in physical work, women have seen themselves as having a right to stand as an elected member, the gendered path to leadership continues to militate against their involvement. They are told to be visible in an industry where women are seldom seen, in an industry which rarely gives visibility to the work they do or the knowledge they have and in an industry where their contribution as partners in a farming enterprise does not necessarily entitle them to :franchise in the organisation. In addition, women do not have access to the same opportunities as men for demonstrating their visibility because the types of forums where visibility is judged (such as at industry meetings) are the very forums where women report their presence as being either denigrated or questioned. An understanding of rural culture provides further insight into the gendered nature of visibility and the way in which men's visibility is judged very differently from women's visibility. Within this culture, a woman who does demonstrate visibility may find herself censured by both women and men for operating against the status quo. The gendered path to leadership within CANEGROWERS culminates in both the definition and application of merit. While the term is purported by CANEGROWERS' elected members to be gender neutral an examination of the many extraneous factors which impact on the electoral process and the way in which they have differential meanings for women and men indicate that this is not the case. These factors include lack of options, longevity in office, grooming for office, the concept of tradition and family name, popularity, appointments outside of election, the conservatism of the constituency and protocol. Ultimately, within the organisation CANEGROWERS, merit has been equated with being a male. The research concludes that, while very few strategies have been initiated by CANEGROWERS to address the question of women's representation, there is some possibility for change in industry-based networks for women. These networks have the potential to challenge homogeneous and androcentric constructions of terms such as 'knowledge' and 'merit' and the potential to give women the confidence, space and opportunity to be 'visible'. Unfortunately, the findings indicate that there has been a high level of resistance to these networks. The resistance has characterised the involvement of women as a divisive force for families, communities and the broader industry. The potency of this discourse in terms of limiting women's involvement in networks is evident when one appreciates the way in which farm women so often subjugate their own needs to ensure that harmonious relationships are maintained. Overall, to be a successful force for positive change, sugar industry networks for women must be seen as legitimate forums for women to practice industry leadership, must be given unequivocal support from industry leaders and must be adequately resourced by the organisation. Most importantly, the formation of these networks must not be viewed as absolving the organisation from any need to make changes to its culture, processes and practices. The aim must be to make CANEGROWERS not just a 'men's organisation' as it was so often described in this research, with women's networks on the margins, but an organisation where both men and women can participate fully and equally. It would be unjust and inexcusable if CANEGROWERS' commitment to this research was used to suggest that impediments to women achieving leadership positions exist only in the sugar industry. The evidence that is available from the broader studies cited above is that this is not the case. What is different about CANEGROWERS is that they have commissioned research which has examined the nature of the culture and the construction of merit within the industry. That other agricultural industry groups have not cannot be used to suggest that CANEGROWERS or the sugar industry are particularly different from other agencies or industries. It is likely that very similar cultural constraints exist within their own agencies and industries. At the same time, knowing that women are likely to experience difficulties in participating in leadership in other agricultural agencies does not excuse or justify women's lack of inclusion in CANEGROWERS. This merely indicates that the entire agricultural sector needs to work harder to achieve greater diversity in representative decision-making positions.

The internationalisation of universities has attracted significant political and even media attention, as well as internal focus. Concurrently, global discourses evolving around the notion of borders, terrorism, security and identity have taken on a renewed significance. Today, the articulation of identities has significant and even dire consequences for many people living in different parts of the world. In Australia, too, the matter of what it means to be ethnic, indigenous, non-indigenous or mixed-race is highly contested, controversial and for some groups of people, in particular contexts, even dangerous. In Australian higher education, the term international is commonly used to refer to the other - citizens of other countries (including those who visit our educational institutions). They are seen as the global citizens and we are not. Cultural diversity is widely celebrated and legislated through the Commonwealth Government?s Living in Harmony policy. Yet there is a dearth of knowledge and/or discussion around members of staff who are different in our own universities. This raises questions about how we come to differentiate between us and them in an Australian socio-historical context, understanding how race and ethnic difference is made salient in identification, and the knowledge production process. This is a small-scale, in-depth qualitative study, which addresses a significant gap in the literature on higher education by focusing on the experiences of four women educators of colour, each of whom has brought with her a complex collage of diasporic experiences, histories, identities and ways of knowing. By employing a multi-race/ethnic dialogic methodology and a research conversation method, the study presents the women?s experiences in narrative form, integrating the autoethnographic writing of the researcher with the women?s stories about difference. The inquiry provides new insights into what race and ethnic identity mean to the women in an everyday, professional and ethical practice context. The women?s stories are not of the traditional career or romantic multicultural kind, but reach into the realms of the personal, political, philosophical and spiritual dimensions of human experience. As they traverse the political terrain of the Academy, the women have looked within and outside the university, navigating multiple identities to make sense of their work. By documenting four women?s experiences that have never been documented before, this small-scale study provides basic research for others to build on. This research affirms the salience of race and ethnicity in the university and the new higher education knowledge creation ethos. The study reveals there is little current evidence that Australian universities are capitalising on and applying opportunities provided by research on race, ethnicity and difference to higher education debate and reform. The women?s stories reveal that the issue of under-representation of women of colour is not unique to the university, but is reflective of the powerful and constitutive impact of discourses of race and difference in Australian society. By highlighting the issues of who has the power and authority in the university to determine what counts as a valid identity and how identity and knowledge boundaries are policed within the Australian university, this research raises questions about the wider implications of epistemological racism embedded in university practices in relation to governance, curriculum, policy, teaching and learning. Through its development and exploration of a multiple race and ethnic dialogic methodology, and the use of research conversations as a method, the study sheds new light on the complexities of Australian race politics in knowledge production and on women?s differentiated experiences in higher education.

AbstractReligious beliefs are central to the identity of many people, often signalled by their physical appearance, for example, clothing, hair or jewellery. If prevented from such a form of self-expression, some take action against what they consider a contravention of their human rights. The predominance of this discourse can obscure the possibility that there are others who are forced to signal a religious viewpoint which they may not subscribe to. This chapter explores the wearing of hijab by Afghan women who have lived in Australia less than 10 years. While some choose to wear hijab, there were others who spoke of being forced to wear hijab as a form of domestic violence. Furthermore, whereas for some, not wearing hijab represents a freedom to dress in accordance with their understandings of Australia as a secular society, a few felt that wearing clothes which marked them as Islamic increased the likelihood of attracting xenophobia and discrimination. Hence, for many women, decisions around hijab represented compromise between the demands of their family, the Afghan community and the wider Australian society, rather than a free choice. Consequently, if social workers assume women’s religious beliefs and identity are congruent with their appearance they may inadvertently be contributing to women’s oppression. As such, this chapter explores notions of anti-oppressive practice when working with Muslim women living in non-Muslim majority countries, particularly in respect of dress codes which are associated with Islam.

In this chapter, Chinese-Australian women’s first-hand accounts of their migration experiences during the White Australia Policy era are presented alongside historical census and migration data. By combining official records and Chinese-Australian women’s accounts of their migration history – as children, migrant wives, or students – this chapter illustrates that Chinese-Australian women were not only present in Australia during the White Australia Policy era, but they were internationally mobile. The diversity of the migration experience during this period, including various reasons and motivations for this movement, is also uncovered. This discussion challenges general assumptions of female immobility in global migration patterns and understandings of female Chinese migration. As such, the ability and value of utilising Chinese Australian women’s voices to supplement the official record is revealed.

Mary Chong and Gwen Fong were among the first female university graduates in Australia of Chinese heritage. They both went on to path-breaking careers, demonstrating a strong commitment to public and political life. Mary Chong, after graduating from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts in 1929, was employed by the Chinese Consul General in Sydney. Soon after she went to China, working first for the Republic of China government and later in journalism, returning to Australia in later years. Gwen Fong, who graduated with a degree in Medicine from the University of Melbourne in 1947, remained in Melbourne working as a doctor. While pursuing her medical studies and career, Gwen was politically active in the Communist Party of Australia, as a leader of the university branch and as an organiser of educational events. Education within the Australian university system allowed these pioneering women to take up fulfilling careers in Australia and in China. Their writings, which include protests against a range of Australian government policies, enrich the archive of women’s political history.

In July 1925, the body of a young Chinese-Australian woman was dragged out of the harbour in Fremantle, Western Australia. An inquest ensued, leading to the trial of her husband for murder. From press reports and legal documents concerning the case emerge details of family life in the small Australian Chinese community of between-the-wars Perth. Drawing on Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson’s concept of the singularization of history, the chapter considers the implications of research on one person, or one family, for a subfield such as ‘Chinese-Australian history’, or ‘the history of Chinese women in Australia’. Ruby’s was a singular story. How was it Chinese? How was it Australian? Where is the historiographical space for it to be recounted?

Despite ‘unchanging tradition’ being a key characteristic of the white wedding, the cultural practices that make up the white wedding have evolved and become integrally linked to the creation of the wedding photograph. From the late nineteenth century, increasing numbers of women, including Australians with Chinese heritage, were married and photographed in white. This chapter analyses Chinese-Australian wedding photographs from the 1890s to the 1940s within larger global movements in fashion and culture. It suggests that by marrying in white, Chinese-Australian women were not assimilating into Western, Christian cultural practices that already existed, but that they, alongside other women in Australia, China, Hong Kong and around the world, were building something new – the global phenomenon of the white wedding.

This chapter reviews the state of the field of Chinese Australian women’s history and provides an introduction to the historical presence of women of Chinese heritage in Australia. For too many years Chinese Australian women’s history has been doubly erased in a gendered and racialized historiography. This has been compounded by the perceived absence of the primary sources needed to undertake a recovery project. As feminist historians we now recognize that aided by the digital revolution and a creative use of newspapers, family histories, official statistics, and government records, it is possible to uncover and illuminate Chinese Australians women’s lives in the past. In doing so we question the framing of Chinese women as static or immobile while their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons took part in large-scale migration from Guangdong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Placing the movements of migrant and Australian-born Chinese women in an international context, we propose a spectrum of mobility along which women’s individual, and changing, situations can be situated. This introduction also surveys existing historical scholarship on Chinese women’s migration and settlement in New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, recognizing that international themes offer inspiration for Australian research.

From the 1970s social and political changes in Australia and the burgeoning feminist movement were challenging established power relationships and hierarchies. This paper explores how in the 1980s groups of women architects actively took positions that were outside the established professional mainstream. A 1982 seminar at the University of Queensland galvanised women in Brisbane to form the Association of Women Architects, Town Planners and Landscape Architects. Formally founded the association was multi-disciplinary and not affiliated with the established bodies. Its aims included promoting women and working to reform the practice of these professions. While predominately made up of architects, the group never became part of the Royal Australian Institutes of Architects, it did inject itself into its activities, spectacularly sponsoring the Indian architect Revathi Kamath to speak at the 1984 RAIA. For five years the group was active organising talks, speakers, a newsletter and participating in Architecture Week. In 1984 an exhibition ‘Profile: Women in Architecture’ featured the work of 40 past and present women architects and students, including a profile of Queensland’s then oldest practitioner Beatrice Hutton. Sydney architect Eve Laron, the convenor of Constructive Women in Sydney opened the exhibition. There was an active interchange between Women in Architecture in Melbourne, Constructive Women, and the Queensland group, with architects such as Ann Keddie, Suzanne Dance and Barbara van den Broek speaking in Brisbane. While the focus of the group centred around women’s issues such as traditional prejudice, conflicting commitments and retraining, its architectural interests were not those of conventional practice. It explored and promoted the design of cities and buildings that were sensitive to users including women and children, design using natural materials and sustainability. While the group only existed for a short period, it advanced positions and perspectives that were outside the mainstream of architectural discourse and practice. Nearly 40 years on a new generation of women is leading the debate into the structural inequities in the architectural profession which are very similar to those tackled by women architects in the 1980s.