A triumph of resurrected voices.

When wanting to know about the women who have lived in my 1850s homestead near Kyneton, Victoria, the food bowl of Melbourne at that time, I found myself wanting to read about other women they would have known. For a time it seemed that Kyneton was a town without women, so buried were they beneath building programmes and the opportunity for 'Capitalists and Speculators' to make a fortune as advertised in the Observer newspaper during those heady years.

Leaping forward sixty years to Thursday January 27, 1920 there appeared in the Kyneton Guardian newspaper a column headed 'In the Public Eye'. The editor devoted two and a bit broadsheet columns to the article, which, as its title suggests, is about those from Kyneton who had enjoyed some recognition, although not necessarily in the town, in professions, politics or for their artistic or sporting achievements. One hundred and forty column centimeters are devoted to the men. Ten centimeters of the third column is found for the women.

      Then come the daughters of Kyneton. Most of them found their
   vocation in matrimony and the rearing of sons--such sons as upheld
   the honour of the old town at Gallipoli, in France, in Mesopotamia.
   Some however have carved careers for themselves. Perhaps the most
   distinguished woman ever connected with Kyneton was Mrs. Caroline
   Chisholm--the great immigration expert ... She lived in the old
   store in High street kept by her sons one of whom contested Kyneton
   boroughs for State Parliament.

The article lists the names and achievements of eleven other women connected with Kyneton, seven of whom were nurses, with a musician, an artist, a Deaconess and a missionary who completed the list.

The 21st century reader might think that the column was written by a man, but it could have been written by a woman. Kyneton, whose name it was suggested in the 1860s be changed to Oxford for its excellent educational reputation, was full of educated middle-class women, who achieved the status derived from the achievements of the men of their families. Any of them could have compiled the list. The most likely woman would have been Barbara Armstrong, daughter of the founder of the Kyneton Guardian (one of the original founders of the Melbourne Age) who wrote and helped edit her father's newspaper after his death in 1908, until close to her own death in 1951. Proud of her home town and its people, Barbara had the contacts, loved the high achiever and thoroughly enjoyed a touch of social reporting as her extraordinarily detailed accounts of 'society' weddings over the years revealed.

However in 1920, Barbara was the busy Secretary and Office Manager of the Australian Women's Electoral League (AWEL). The AWEL, of which Barbara was a member since 1904, was established in that year to heighten women's awareness of their political responsibilities. In this position, which she held from 1918-1922, she lobbied for equal pay for equal work and and supported any argument that promoted women as political candidates and parliamentarians. Eventually frustrated by the highly conservative agenda of the AWEL Barbara came home to Kyneton and devoted herself to the family newspaper, and the town's many humanitarian groups, becoming known by the younger generation as 'one of the old maids of the town'.

If Barbara Armstrong had written 'In the Public Eye' it is doubtful that she would have devoted so few lines to Caroline Chisholm. For several decades she ran in the family newspaper extensive articles about Caroline Chisholm's life and work. To these articles, which she published from other sources, she always added the 'Kyneton component', that is Caroline Chisholm's life in Kyneton.

To celebrate the 1936 centenary of the founding of Melbourne Barbara Armstrong was the convenor of a book about pioneering women in Victoria. The same year the Kyneton Guardian under the sub-heading 'The Women's Movement' included Caroline Chisholm and several other town's women, while an expensive 36 page booklet authored by a local councillor resembles the 1920 article. Only two women received a few words in this booklet, one being Juliana Jeffrey, the aristocratic, widowed, pioneering matriarch who chose to live in a tiny wattle and daub cottage in the Victorian wilds to support her sons pastoral adventures (and perhaps to protect her investment); the second was a woman about to celebrate her 100th birthday. The other women were excluded including Caroline Chisholm.

Barbara Armstrong is one of the first to be thanked by Margaret Kiddle in her 1951 history about Caroline Chisholm and it is clear that any essay, story or play performed in the town about Caroline Chisholm had Barbara's influence behind it. An example published in the Guardian not long before her death is another example.

      In the early days the wife of the Governor on one or two
   occasions visited Kyneton to open church bazaars and Kyneton felt
   truly honoured. How much more honoured were Kyneton residents by
   Caroline Chisholm for her name is embalmed in the world's memory
   as one of  the Benefactors of the world, as a woman who gave her
   health and strength to the service of her fellow women, who saved
   girls from  destruction ... She cast a lustre of glory over the
   whole district, a lustre that indifference and ignorance have
   somewhat dimmed but which will never die away. To be a district in
   which Caroline Chisholm lived and worked is no small honour, the
   pity is that our imaginations are so blurred by our own selfish
   absorption in our own interests that we forget to whom we owe much
   that we possess. Kyneton had something in which she could rake
   legitimate pride, but filled with enthusiasm for lesser things she
   heeded not. It is to be hoped this simple resurgence of interest
   will have some lasting and practical effect.

Of all the women found in 'Friend and Foe' Barbara Armstrong is the one who most resembles Caroline Chisholm, although she never married. She shared with her heroine a feisty spirit, a loathing of suffering and an impatience with bureaucracy. Like Caroline too, the older she grew the stronger these characteristics became. It is the aim of two Melbourne academics to see Barbara Armstrong entered into the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Upon her death in 1951 Barbara Armstrong did not leave a memoir, and the only writing in her own hand, a travel diary, was rescued from an incinerator. Her friends the Misses Stewart Murray, especially Marie, who supported Barbara's many causes and who wrote at times for the Melbourne Age, is almost as invisible in our history as are the indigenous women. A wonderful glimpse of Marie Stewart Murray is when Kyneton women much to the contempt of the local council wanted a new infant welfare centre, and a rare barrage of letters led by Miss Stewart Murray, were printed in the newspapers. The Kyneton Guardian during Barbara Armstrong's life is worth a study of its feminist content during the first half of the twentieth century, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s.

A woman of strong personality, great talent and enormous drive who spent a little time in Kyneton, was Ellen Davitt, who was a sister in law to Anthony Trollope (he married the mousey one) and who lost her job as the female principal of the Melbourne Model School which had been established in 1855 to demonstrate excellence in education. She was criticised for wearing trousers and having undue undue influence over her husband. Eventually the pair were dismissed. Arthur Davitt died shortly alter and from 1860 Ellen Davitt made a living as a school teacher, artist and writer. (She published the first Australian murder mystery.) She also became a popular guest speaker. She had a series of lectures entitled 'Women in Art', "The Vixens from Shakespeare" and 'Woman and her Mission'. Ellen Davitt was invited to speak in Kyneton in January 1864. The Kyneton Observer reported that a 'respectable but not numerous' audience appeared to hear Mrs. Davitt speak on a number of leading women from history. What can be said of Mrs. Davitt's lecture is that her line up of leading women made Caroline Chisholm and Barbara Armstrong look like a pair of kittens. If the town's women hoped to have their virtuous selves reinforced that night they were in for a shock, as Ellen Davitt informed them of as many fiery, courageous women she could find in the pages of history. Her lecture included Judith and Esther from the Bible, Joan of Arc, various Queens and women who promoted personal freedoms, education and the arts and who wielded influence over husbands, Kings, Napoleon and the Pope. To conclude Ellen Davitt referred to the heroines in fiction, emphasising that their inspiration was derived from women who had lived.

Ellen Davitt was at pains to show the influence of women in privileged, and not so privileged positions on men throughout the ages. Many of these women may have had a strong father, some may have had an even stronger mother. While Barbara Armstrong's father was undoubtedly a powerful figure in her life, it is interesting to consider the confidences shared between Barbara and her oft-pregant mother. Sarah Armstrong was an inaugural and life member of the Ladies Benevolent Society. She was witness to many a harrowing experience endured by women from the early 1860s until the early years of the twentieth century. Without a close personal memoir from Barbara, we can only imagine a few of the things that her mother, in their quieter moments together, had to say about the plight of women. Mothers, aunts and respected local women can be of strong influence upon young females. This is evident in the life of Miss Maisie Harper a World War II veteran and Kyneton's first female councillor and shire president.

Maisie Harper was born on November 9, 1913. She was the third and last child, and only daughter, of May Thompson and John Harper, and granddaughter of Sara and Robert Harper, whose store was purchased by the Chisholms. Tiny in stature but deceptively strong, Maisie had an expressive and thoughtful face and a quirky sense of humour. She was reserved, developed her opinions slowly, and when inspired had a determination that few could match. After leaving school she worked at the Kyneton Butter factory as a clerk, 'not because my family could not support me on the farm, but because I wanted to assert my independence'. Maisie enjoyed the esteem of being attached to Kyneton's earliest residents, as the following extract from a recent women's history shows, every step that she took in the town had some connection to the history that her family had witnessed or in which they had been involved.

   Of a Saturday night Maisie would join her friends and walk into the
   town to the dances. In the summer months they would short-cut down
   Harper's Land, cross the Campaspe River and come up behind the
   hospital, then turn into Wedge street with its ghosts of wagons and
   wayfarers on their way to the richest goldfields in the world. On
   they would go to Baynton street (Baynton was father-in-law to
   Barbara Baynton) to pass the home where Sarah Metcalf received the
   letter from her dying brother (wounded during the Kelly siege at
   Glenrowan in 1880) then past the state school the outcome of a
   meeting convened by her grandfather. Their next turn was into Ebden
   street, which honoured the first squatter in 1837 and signalled the
   passing of Brebie and her people, and where the gentle clipity clop
   of Caroline Chisholm's little grey ponies can still be heard by the
   fanciful. Then into Jennings street and past the stone lockup where
   fifteen year old Ned Kelly spent three cold, lonely weeks 70 years
   before and the court house were he mutely agreed to his
   incarceration, then to the bright lights of the shire hall.

At the start of the war, Maisie drove the same distance to the Shire Hall to join the Downing's First Aid and Home Nursing classes. It was not until May 1941 that Maisie joined the Volunteer Aid Detachment (VAD). Her mother kept saying 'Why aren't you doing your bit?' Mrs. Downing would say 'Why am I training you all if you are not going to help?' But, had Maisie pondered the feminist articles which regularly appeared courtesy of Barbara Armstrong in the Guardian? Had she tucked a favourite piece under her pillow, which said how females were 'in business as individuals not as women' and how they were 'not as creatures apart--specimens--but people just as men were people'? Had she read it over and over, growing in confidence, imagining herself far from Kyneton, on the war front?

Just how much Maisie cherished her experience as a VAD is clear from her editorial position for twenty-four years of the VAD newsletter. This regular effort enabled her and the other women to keep in touch and to relive the adventure of sailing on the Queen Mary, in blackout, to the Middle East where they worked like never before in unimaginable situations, and returned home with the heroic 9th battalion in their charge. During the post war years Maisie became Kyneton's first female councillor and Shire President.

Since Maisie's foray into local politics several women have followed her lead, with two being Shire President. Also since then women have moved into positions of responsibility in law, medicine, education, business, public service and banking. Yet little change has occurred it would seem in certain areas. They are still reluctant to write letters to the newspapers and there is a continued reluctance to take the president's role, the one that requires public speaking, in different community groups. The Kyneton Historical Society is an example of this. During the fifty-three year history women have held the president's position only seventeen years, but for forty three ears have acted as secretary and treasurer. Since the 1970s only ten of those years has the society had a female president. Yet it is women who have written almost all the papers that have been published by the society over that period. Through their work the residents of Kyneton know of the town's suffragettes, the Misses Jarret, Johnson, Brown and Brister. These four women rallied the town's women to sign a petition requesting the franchise for women and were all seated with Vida Goldstein, Australia's leading suffragette at the time, on stage at the Kyneton Mechanics Institute when she spoke to the town's people in 1900.

Because of these women we know about the struggles of the schoolmistress Rachael M. Begg. A single woman in her early forties with twenty years junior teaching experience at Melbourne's Trinity College, Rachael Begg, in search of professional autonomy, bought a school in her town in 1919. Taking over from a highly popular male, the darling of the social elite, Rachael Begg's experience was not an easy one. Yet through her refined strength and individuality, she was a positive influence on many students, the most outstanding being Jean Ferris (later Oliver) who rose to prominence as a playwright in the 1950s and 60s concentrating on plays with an Australian vernacular, something rarely tried by a woman, or anyone before. The irony of Rachael Begg's lithe is that, suppressed for years in her professional life, she is now considered by many to have been a man. Having acquired land and some savings she, upon her death, bequeathed it to the people of Kyneton, for an 'old colonists' residence. Having abbreviated her name and spelt it Ray, not Rae, her great legacy is considered the generous donation of a man.

Women who have settled in Kyneton over the past few generations can be likened to Kyneton's earliest women. The ten pound emigrant mother of the 1950s worried as much about single, lone, young women who flirted with the crew of the immigrant ship, as did Caroline Chisholm all those years ago. Being situated in a scenic part of Victoria many people are drawn to the area, with new arrivals being mostly from England, drawn to a familiar landscape and social group. A woman settling from the English midlands can feel as homesick as a pioneering woman when she thinks about the woods back home abloom with bluebells in the spring.

Kyneton was a town with bright, lively talented women, women who were too busy taking care of their families, marriages and social agenda, their livelihood, churches and schools, women who spent too little time reflecting on their lives and far too little time recording their experiences.

The result of twenty years research has developed an encapsulated image of the contribution made by women in Kyneton that is representative of women's lives in all other towns and cities across Australia. It has also produced a book, Friends and Foe--The Women's History of Kyneton 1840-2004, written and published by Brenda Stevens-Chambers, the author of this article.

'A triumph of resurrected voices ...' announced Professor Marian Quartly of Monash University, when launching the book in July 2004.