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In February this year, two linked conferences held at Macquarie University
in Sydney marked the retirement of Professor
Jill Roe. At the 'Jill Roe Festschrift' various scholars celebrated Jill's contributions
to the fields of women's history, religious history, labour history, literary
history, urban history and more generally to Australian history. Jill has been
at Macqarie for 25 years and has served as Chair of the Australian Dictionary
of Biography and as President of the Australian Historical Association. She
is the author of Beyond Belief, a history of Theosophy in Australia and edited
My Congenials Miles
Franklin and Friends in Letters. Her biography of the writer Miles Franklin
is due out later this year.
The keynote address was delivered by Judith Allen (Gender Studies, Indiana University).
Other papers included Desley Deacon (ANU) 'Mooning on verandahs in Newport and
Brindabella: Growing up feminist in the United States and Australia: Stella
Miles Franklin & Elsie Clew Parsons', Pat Jalland (ANU) ' "A secular
philosophy of grief": Katharine Susannah Prichard confronts death and bereavement',
Susan Magarey (Adelaide) 'Secrets and Revelations: a newly-discovered diary'.(of
C.H.Spence), Lynn Milne 'Miles Franklin's First Novel? Lord Dunleve's Ward',
Pat Thane (University of London) 'Women's movements and the making of Social
Policy: How Australia showed Britain the way'. Judith Godden (Sydney) 'Ambitious
girls went to India': careers, class and choices in the mid nineteenth century',
Margaret Allen (Adelaide) 'Around 1955: Jill's school days in Adelaide', Alison
Mackinnon (UniSA) 'Between the Cold War and the Hot Sixties: women, higher education
and subjectivities in Australia and the US in the 1950s and early 60s' and Lucy
Taksa (UNSW) 'Jill Roe, labour historians and the city'
To the richness of this conference organised by Mary Spongberg and a team at Macquarie, was a two-day conference. 'New Directions in Women's History'. Papers here included, Robyn Arrowsmith (Macquarie) '"See you in Frisco!" Australian war brides: love and marriage during WWII', Hsu-Ming Teo (Macquarie) 'With love from Australia: a gendered reading of Australian Love Letters', Lisa Featherstone (Macquarie) 'Whose breast is best? Wet nursing in late nineteenth- century Australia', Carly Millar (Monash) 'Bessie Rischbieth and (Inter)national Feminist Networks, 1909-1967', Zora Simic (Sydney) '"Mrs Jessie Street - there is a subject!": Historicising Jessie Street', Kate Murphy (Monash) The 'unnatural' woman: urban reformers and the ideal of rurality after Federation, Ruth Ford (LaTrobe) '"Oh I helped with the cows but that's about all I done" Re-writing the history of white women on the land in Australia, 1930s 1945', Vicky Grieves (Newcastle) 'No Place for a White Woman? Pioneer: Farming on the Manning 1845-1865', Nicole Moore (Macquarie) 'Treasonous Sex:: Rethinking birth control obscenity and the making of white Australia'.
Professor Angela Woollacott has been appointed to a chair in History at Macquarie University.
Compiled by Margaret Allen