Influential feminist, author … and Kathy Lette’s English teacher

LYNNE SPENDER: 1946 – 2024

“The real revolution that is taking place, is in the minds of women like us who simply do not believe men any more,” wrote Sydney feminist Lynne Spender, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, to her London-based sister Dale in 1982. Already a feminist and teacher, but not yet a lawyer, Spender went on to become immensely influential as an author, editor, creative industries leader, and mentor to many.

Lynne Spender, acclaimed feminist, lawyer and author.

Spender was born in Newcastle, NSW, in 1946. She grew up on a small property in Windsor with her parents, older sister Dale, and younger brother Graeme. From a young age, she was a determined larrikin, exploring the use of gutter water for washing her hair, inventing pen names for herself, fighting with boys, horse riding, fording flooded creeks, and with Dale, writing and reading voraciously. The teenage sisters endlessly discussed Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career and Sybylla’s overwhelming desire to be a writer. These discussions set in motion their close, lifelong trajectory as feminist writers.

A Burwood Girls High School alumni, Spender graduated in 1967 with a BA and Diploma of Education from the University of Sydney. At one of her first secondary school positions, in Gymea, she taught two young women who were to become impactful Australian writers: Kathy Lette and Debra Adelaide. Lette says that it wasn’t only that Spender was a good English teacher, but that she liked Lette as an individual, and it was this mutual respect that set her apart. Spender was the first person to suggest to the teenage Adelaide that she should go to university. In Adelaide’s words, “Lynne told me the astonishing news that I was intelligent, and that because I loved reading, studying English at university was the logical thing to do. It changed my life.”

During the 1970s, Spender’s feminism remained focused on changing the lives of young women through education and careers, and bringing attention to women’s literary history.

In her earlier years Lynne Spender was an English teacher, encouraging talented young writers including Kathy Lette and Debra Adelaide.

After moving to Canada in the early 1980s with her husband John Buchan and two young sons, Jay and Aaron, she joined the Feminist Party of Canada, internationally the first all-women political party. Impressed by its effective campaigns for legislative change to support equal pay, access to education, and the criminalisation of domestic violence, she determined to study law on her return to Australia.

While in Canada, Spender wrote her first book, Intruders on the Rights of Men: Women’s unpublished heritage (1983). She would go on to author, co-author and edit more than 30 books.

With Dale living in London, the Spender sisters often wrote to each other daily, debating and testing ideas, sharing news of the world and each other’s lives. Lynne had read and commented on drafts of Dale Spender’s impactful Man Made Language (1980). They were each honing words that would later become published chapters, essays and books. This correspondence became the basis for their influential Scribbling Sisters (1985), an edited collection of their letters, published in Australia, the UK and the USA. The book’s title belied its seriousness: the Spenders sought to understand and deconstruct patriarchal norms, to speculate on the “the shape of a society” if women’s work and voices had influence, and to excavate the “vast literature” by women that had so rarely been considered literary.

After her return to Sydney, Spender divorced, and while working and raising her sons, completed an MA in women’s studies and a law degree. She developed and taught the first Women and the Law course at University of Technology, Sydney. She worked with Women’s Legal Resources Centre (NSW) to publish the first legal guide for women, Law and Relationships: A Woman’s A-Z Guide (1991).

While raising her two sons, Lynne Spender also got a MA in women’s studies and a law degree.

As the managing editor of Redfern Legal Centre Publishing, Spender was instrumental in education, and providing access to state and federal laws in plain English language. This was the pre-internet era, and it was only through print publications that social workers, youth and disability workers, paralegals, public servants and others could access information about the law. Her work encompassed legal guides to practitioners and the public, including in credit and debt law, family law, social work and the law, housing law, wills and estates, and environmental law. She was for many years on the editorial board of the Alternative Law Journal, and used her plain legal language skills to write legal studies columns for high school teachers.

Emeritus professor of law and former Redfern Legal Centre solicitor and volunteer Simon Rice said, “Lynne was a leader in the accessible legal publishing revolution that transformed public access to law. I learnt so much working with her. Lynne understood law, people, communication and publishing as few others did. She was generous and supportive, and rigorous and demanding. Her sharp and irreverent humour kept lawyers and men in their place.”

Writers and sisters Lynne (left) and Dale Spender.Credit: Fairfax

Ever adaptable, and in need of additional income, she also wrote for various magazines, including a monthly column for Vogue Australia on legal issues that affected working and professional women. Decades before coercive control and financial abuse came into public consciousness, she co-authored What Every Woman Should Know About Her Partner’s Money (1994). De facto, divorced and married women wrote to her for years thanking her for the book.

Spender’s advocacy continued during her five years as executive director of the Australian Society of Authors (ASA) in the 1990s. Olivia Lanchester, ASA executive director, describes Spender as “a fierce, intelligent and relentless campaigner for authors’ rights. As well as being an author herself, she made a difference to the lives of all writers through her advocacy and capacity building.”

Spender researched and wrote some of the ASA’s first books on the rights of authors and illustrators in the new digital environment. Authors were guided (as they are still) to retain their electronic rights and license them only when a specific offer was made for them, and when authors knew how the rights would be used, to clarify where use would be made and what remuneration they would receive.

She was instrumental in campaigns to prevent cuts to public lending rights and to support education lending rights, programs which return income to authors. With author Libby Gleeson and illustrator Ann James, Spender successfully campaigned for recognition of book illustrators as creators of equal importance as authors.

Spender was also influential in the new public debates around digital technologies and their impact on writers. She was determined that women should have a place in the emerging world of digital communications. As CEO of the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA), from 1998-2002, she effectively assembled and mentored a team of women (whom she called her Digi-Chicks).

Lynne was a keen ocean swimmer.

AIMIA promoted the export of Australian multimedia products, liaised with state and federal agencies on policy and practice issues, and ensured that women and girls had visibility in the digital policy environment. This work culminated in her PhD studies and publication of her thesis Digital culture, copyright maximalism, and the challenge to copyright law (WSU 2009).

Everywhere she worked, Spender mentored younger colleagues, some of whom went on to be lifelong friends. Internationally awarded writer and filmmaker Julia Leigh first met Spender through the ASA. Leigh says, “She was my trusted consigliere. She talked the talk about women’s writing and for over 25 years she walked hand in hand by my side.”

An avid ocean swimmer, in the water early each morning in her red Speedo swimsuit, Spender was a well-known Coogee Beach local. Always a bon-vivant, Spender sometimes followed her swims with a sociable coffee with grappa.

For many years she was a volunteer committee member of McIver’s Ladies Baths. In 2022 she initiated and edited a collection of essays and short history of the pool, The Women’s Pool (Spinifex Press, 2022). With Rhonda Fadden, a friend from community legal centre days, and Colleen Kelly from the women’s pool, she curated While We Live We Swim, an exhibition celebrating the pool’s centenary. It is the most-visited exhibition ever held by Randwick City Council.

The Women’s Pool, edited by Lynne Spender.

Spender had long been a supporter of voluntary assisted dying. Of her mother Ivy’s death, she said that “Her pacemaker seemed to prolong her life and she literally starved to death … None of us has ever really recovered from this heartless imposition on those who are obliged to die according to someone else’s beliefs and rules.”

Her sister Dale’s lack of access to voluntary assisted dying, and the end to their lifelong conversations and intimacy that came with Dale’s death in 2023, were a source of distress and sorrow to Spender.

Spender became one of NSW’s first residents to benefit from the new law that came into effect in November 2023. Enduring late-stage pancreatic cancer, Spender remained at her home in Coogee, with its views of the sea, supported by family, friends and a palliative care team. On her final morning, she continued to share her laughter, insights and love with those who were with her. She died gently at Prince of Wales Hospital, amid a small gathering of family and friends.

Spender is survived by her beloved brother Graeme, sons Jay and Aaron, and grandchildren Lily, Darcy, Ivy, Blaire and Clancy.

Jane Messer

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