International Women’s Day: We reveal some surprising stories behind SA female trailblazers in a new book
With International Women’s Day on Sunday, we find some surprising stories behind SA female trailblazers featured in a new book by SA Weekend editor Roy Eccleston and Carolyn Collins.
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Their success has earned them a spot in a new book but while the names may be familiar, you’ll be surprised by some of the stories of these SA women
1. Ex-prime minister Julia Gillard and TV personality Anne Wills
They’re a surprising double act from very different backgrounds – but they enjoy a laugh, love a lunch, and they’re both Libras. Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, and much-loved record-breaking Logie winner Anne Wills – she’s got 19 of the statues – have been firm friends since 2015 after meeting at the screening of Foxtel show The Devil’s Playground.
It was actor Simon Burke who brought them together, declaring at the screening that his two favourite women were in the audience. Willsy assumed it was his mum and sister, but it turned out to be her and Gillard. While the former bikini-wearing TV weather girl and film buff didn’t know the ex-politician (or especially support Labor), she took the chance to tell her how appalled she’d been at her treatment in politics.
The ex-PM then told Willsy how much she and her sister Alison loved her shows, and a friendship was sparked. They also had Gillard’s driver Ralf Hadzig (a former Fat Cat performer) in common, since Willsy knew him from her time in TV.
When they learned they shared a star sign, the deal was sealed. Since then the pair have had regular lunches with Alison, Willsy’s sister Susan her daughter Samantha McDonald, Terry Lindblom and Hadzig. Occasionally journalist and entertainer Matt Gilbertson and broadcaster Peter Goers have joined the party.
Willsy says Gillard was a huge support when the third Wills sister, Margaret, died late in 2018. “The day Margaret died we were due to go to her (Gillard’s) place for a barbecue and she said, ‘Still come, you’ll need to be with us’,” she recalls. “How fabulous. She was like our mother. Our mother has been dead 10 years. Julia was our mum that day. I said to Susan, ‘what do you think, have we got the strength to do it?’ When we got there we’d been up all night, we felt doped, but Julia gave us the biggest hug and Alison, too. We were allowed to cry, but we laughed, too … People help you through.”
2. Singer Julie Anthony
Julie Anthony’s real name was Lush but she changed it after an audience of Americans at the Wrest Point Casino began laughing at her even before she had begun to perform one night at the beginning of her career. The singer (pictured below) had just won a stint at the casino as a talent show prize. She was confused by the audience reaction until it was later explained that a lush was a drunk in the US. Her stage name was later taken from her manager Tony Brady.
3. Helen Caldicott, antinuclear campaigner
One of the world’s highest profile antinuclear campaigners in the 1970s and 80s, Caldicott did her medical degree in Adelaide. She once gave an impassioned appeal to a Hollywood party at the Playboy Mansion where she so impressed one guest, Patti Davis, that the young woman insisted Caldicott meet her father, saying she was the only person who might be able to change his mind on nuclear weapons. And that is how Caldicott got an audience with President Ronald Reagan.
4. Maggie Beer, cook and TV personality
A young Maggie Beer was so upset by her father’s business bankruptcy that she never felt able to handle bills, either paying them or handing them to customers. She let her husband of 50 years, Colin, handle that side. But the trauma she felt from her family’s sudden financial crisis did give her plenty of grit.
5. Singer, songwriter, festival director Robyn Archer
She suffered such terrible asthma as a child that the young Archer had to stay home from school for long stretches of time especially in winter. But she’d keep up the study thanks to her mum cycling to Enfield Primary school to get her homework, and somehow excel once she made it back to class. The asthma, which could put her in hospital, gave her a sense of urgency about life – to seize the opportunity to get things done, and not waste a moment whenever she was well.
6. Pam Dunsford, Australia’s first trained winemaker
A pioneer woman in the industry, her innovative work at Chapel Hill made the winery a force to be reckoned with. But her stellar career was cruelly truncated when, on a work trip to Switzerland, she contracted an infection on the plane that robbed her of her most vital winemaking asset, her sense of smell. Without it, the modest trailblazer lost her sophisticated palate – her ability to taste – and so the key to her success.
7. Mayor Joy Baluch
Before she became Port Augusta’s colourful mayor and a successful businesswoman, Mrs Baluch was a shy teenager who taught Sunday school and played the organ at church. In 1950, she was crowned Miss Port Augusta.
8. Councillor Susan Grace Benny
The first woman ever to hold office in any level of government in Australia was Susan Grace Benny, a mother of five, who, in 1919, was nominated to represent the newly created ward of Seacliff in the Brighton Council.
9. Pioneering bus driver Sylvia Birdseye
She was the first woman in SA to gain a commercial driver’s licence, drove an average of 3000km a week over her 40-year career to connect country communities across the state. She could change a tyre in four minutes and an axle in 20.
10. Dorrit Black, artist
South Australian modernist Dorrit Black became the first woman to run an art gallery in Australia when she opened the Modern Art Centre in Sydney in 1931.
11. Nancy Buttfield, politician
She was the first South Australian woman to sit in any parliament but less well known is the fact that Buttfield was the first woman to drink in the traditionally male bastion of federal parliament’s Members’ Bar. After making her entrance, SA Labor MP Clyde Cameron lightened the atmosphere by demanding she shout everyone present a round of drinks, which she willingly did “as a win for my cause”.
12. Nancy Cato, writer
Popular author and environmentalist Nancy Cato’s first job was as a journalist on The News. She won a competition for a cadetship at the now defunct afternoon newspaper after penning an imaginary “interview” with Oliver Twist. Her talent for fiction was obvious even then.
13. Freda Gibson, doctor
As a young woman, Australia’s first woman flying doctor Freda Gibson once pointed a gun at a man threatening her father with an axe. After he failed to heed her warning that she would shoot him in the arm if he didn’t drop his weapon, she coolly pulled the trigger and winged him.
14. Veta Macghey, school principal
As a young teacher, founding Adelaide Girls’ High School headmistress Veta Macghey used to ride to work on a motorcycle dressed in a black leather jacket, red scarf and high lace-up boots. She later graduated to stylish cars and used to drive her Jaguar into the Grote Street School yard.
15. Alice (Alitya) Rigney, school principal
After growing up at the Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission, Rigney went on to become Australia’s first female Aboriginal school principal in 1986, heading the nation’s first Indigenous school, Kaurna Plains School. There, she introduced the first Indigenous language curriculum in the Kaurna language, which had been “sleeping” since the death of its last known native speaker in the 1920s. However the discovery of letters written by Kaurna children in the 1840s to German missionaries bought it back to life – and “Aunty Alice” and her staff learned it in order to teach the students.
16. Doris Taylor, charity worker
Doris Taylor not only founded Meals on Wheels but is credited with convincing young solicitor Don Dunstan to stand for parliament and ran his election campaign. Dunstan described his wheelchair bound mentor as “one of the great unsung heroines of Australia” who, despite being paralysed, had the extraordinary ability to move “other people off their behinds”.
17. Mary Penfold, winemaker
While Mary Penfold has traditionally been portrayed as the supporter of her winemaker husband Christopher she has emerged as the force behind the wine that in her time won numerous international awards. One reporter who visited the Penfold’s estate at Magill in 1874 noted that Mary was the one who decided the blending of the grapes “not in conformity with any fixed and definite rule, but according to her judgment and taste.”
18. Theresa Walker, artist
While Walkerville is named after pioneer John Walker, who ended up flat broke and in prison, it was his wife, Theresa, who was the real star. She was Australia’s first female sculptor and she and her sister, Martha Berkeley, were South Australia’s first professional artists. Given her husband’s record, the money came in handy.
19. Pearl Wallace, sailor
She was Australia’s first female paddle steamer captain and spent most of her life living and working on the Murray and Darling rivers. Pearl Wallace recalled she worked the great waterways when the water was so clear she could choose the fish she wanted to catch.
20. Augusta Zadow, unionist
The determined Augusta Zadow, fluent in several languages, became the state’s first Female Factory inspector in the 19th century. She took on the task of battling for workers’ rights against some big and burly bosses – impressive when she was barely 122cm tall (a little over 4 ft).
Trailblazers, 100 Inspiring South Australian Women, by Carolyn Collins and Roy Eccleston, Wakefield Press, $70. Available at News Shop, 31 Waymouth St, city.
Special reader price, $50. Phone 8206 3316 or email the News Shop.