In June 1975 the Whitlam government approved a funding package for Australia’s 11 women’s refuges. We at Elsie were grateful of course, but we were also outraged it had taken so long.

Elsie was the first feminist refuge for women and children escaping domestic violence that a small group of us had opened in March the previous year by squatting in two vacant houses owned by the Church of England in Sydney’s Glebe.