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1 "The Rights Women: Rewriting the Human Rights Record Through the Power of Stories" 2016 Fanny Reading Human Rights Lecture, NCJWA (Vic) Sunday 11 December 2016, Glen Eira Town Hall – Introduction Distinguished guests, members of the audience including supporters and members of the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia and also including many members of my family and friends. Thank you so much for coming this evening. I am honoured to be delivering the 2016 Fanny Reading Human Rights Lecture. I’d like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and pay our collective respects to the elders, past and present of the Kulin nation. I value the opportunity to acknowledge country as a simple yet important act of reconciliation. I have called this lecture – "The Rights Women: Rewriting the Human Rights Record Through the Power of Stories" as it enables me to draw upon a range of themes I’d like to develop with you as we honour and mark the contributions of Fanny Reading and, indeed, women throughout history and those living today who we thank for their contributions to society broadly and, specifically, for their commitment protecting and advocating for the rights of their fellow human beings. The Power of Stories The power of stories has become central to my thinking over the past 5- years as I have worked with the National Library of Australia, collecting oral histories of trailblazing women lawyers. I shall return to the power of oral history but I want first to concentrate on stories and to share this message sent by Dr Judith Rosenbaum – Executive Director of the Jewish Women’s Archive –the day after the US election results signaled the unlikely election of Donald Trump.
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Fanny Reading Human Rights Lecture 2016 - For publication. · Fanny Reading And who better to start with than Fanny Reading – in whose honour I speak. I didn’t have the privilege

May 28, 2020

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Page 1: Fanny Reading Human Rights Lecture 2016 - For publication. · Fanny Reading And who better to start with than Fanny Reading – in whose honour I speak. I didn’t have the privilege

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"The Rights Women:Rewriting the Human Rights Record Through the Power of Stories" 2016 Fanny Reading Human Rights Lecture, NCJWA (Vic) Sunday 11 December 2016, Glen Eira Town Hall – Introduction Distinguished guests, members of the audience including supporters and members of the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia and also including many members of my family and friends. Thank you so much for coming this evening. I am honoured to be delivering the 2016 Fanny Reading Human Rights Lecture. I’d like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and pay our collective respects to the elders, past and present of the Kulin nation. I value the opportunity to acknowledge country as a simple yet important act of reconciliation. I have called this lecture – "The Rights Women:Rewriting the Human Rights Record Through the Power of Stories" as it enables me to draw upon a range of themes I’d like to develop with you as we honour and mark the contributions of Fanny Reading and, indeed, women throughout history and those living today who we thank for their contributions to society broadly and, specifically, for their commitment protecting and advocating for the rights of their fellow human beings. The Power of Stories The power of stories has become central to my thinking over the past 5- years as I have worked with the National Library of Australia, collecting oral histories of trailblazing women lawyers. I shall return to the power of oral history but I want first to concentrate on stories and to share this message sent by Dr Judith Rosenbaum – Executive Director of the Jewish Women’s Archive –the day after the US election results signaled the unlikely election of Donald Trump.

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The JWA is a rich online quality resource [https://jwa.org] that I visit frequently due to its extensive content, freely available through the world. Judith’s message went to the Archive’s subscribers: She wrote:

History is unfolding every day. …. But .. rarely are we aware of history as it is unfolding. This is one of those unusual times of keen awareness. We cannot deny the historic weight of the unexpected election results, and no matter our personal feelings about the outcome, we must respond with serious attention and intention. I am rarely at a loss for words, but yesterday I found myself struggling to find the right words—to explain the election results to my children; to provide meaningful, healing conversation with JWA staff; to enter the public conversation as a woman, a Jew, and the leader of JWA. You, the JWA community, showed me the way, by reminding me that JWA’s medium—stories—is the message that we need right now. … Stories matter now more than ever. Not just the stories of prominent leaders, politicians, rabbis, and activists, but also our own stories—our experiences of everyday life with its moments of challenge, connection, success, and resistance. Sharing stories connects us to one another; it comforts us; it teaches us; it inspires us. [She continues] Stories will heal us—individually and as a nation—and they will also ignite us to come together to work for a more just world. So today, and in the coming days, reach out to someone and share a story or engage in conversation. Speak with those whom you trust and love, and also with those who are unfamiliar or different from you. … …

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That message resonates with me and it has influenced the structure of tonight’s presentation. I would like to identify the ‘rights’ women and their stories. I identify them as ‘rights’ women because they have been active citizens contributing to both the private and public spheres of our lives. In telling their stories – and enlarging the group of women whose stories we should all know about and tell others about, we are– rewriting the human rights record. Fanny Reading And who better to start with than Fanny Reading – in whose honour I speak. I didn’t have the privilege of meeting Dr Fanny Reading who lived from 1884 to 1974. I was 9 when she died, but I’ve felt a several fold connection to her even so. First – she shared the name of my paternal grandmother –Fanny Rubenstein nee Barasch, born in Lygon Street Carlton on 11 May 1911. As a child growing up in the 1970s - the name Fanny seemed a period name–to chuckle over – no matter how much we adored our Nanna Fanny. We didn’t know of many Fannys – so it struck me when I first visited the National Jewish Memorial Centre in Canberra in the 1990s and had my first lunch in its large upstairs hall, the Dr Fanny Reading auditorium, thanks to the support of the National Council of Jewish Women in contributing to the Centre’s construction. And it was in Canberra, where my family moved in 2006, that I came to hear more about Dr Reading. Only last week in fact, one of the older members of the community, Margaret Beadman, well known to NCJW women, told me about her encounters with Fanny Reading which further brought to life the things I’ve read about her. From Dr Hilary Rubinstein’s Australian Dictionary of Biography entry we learn of Fanny Reading’s birth on 2 December 1884 at Karelitz (Korelichi), near Minsk, Russia, as the eldest of five children of Nathan Jacob Rubinowich, merchant, and Esther Rose, née Levinson, both of whom were orthodox Jews. In 1918 her father adopted by deed poll the surname Reading. In 1889, Fanny and her mother joined her father, who had migrated to Victoria. She spent her childhood in Ballarat which Rubinstein notes: ‘then had one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in Australia.’ 1 1http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/reading-fanny-8168

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Once again I feel a connection as my mother’s maternal family, the Lazarus family – were one of those Ballarat Jewish families. Fanny Reading would’ve left Ballarat by the time my late grandmother, my mother Susan’s mother Zara better known as Bobbie Lazarus, later to become Bobbie Joseph, was born in November 1913. By then Fanny Reading would’ve been in her late 20s. Perhaps my grandmother’s older sister by almost 18 years, the well-known Joan Lazarus (1896-1974) born 7 years after Fanny arrived in Ballarat, who was later to become Joan Rosanove and the first woman to sign the Bar Roll in Victoria and the first woman QC in Victoria, knew Fanny Reading’s connections to Ballarat. That is certainly one conversation I’d like to have had with Joan, and many others besides. But living in Ballarat may not necessarily reflect well on the large Lazarus family. As Marlo Newton recounts in her excellent book Making a Difference – A History of the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia Dr Reading’s is said to have told one of her patients that “When we came to Ballarat – no one wanted to know us.” From that Fanny ‘determined then, that if any of [her] efforts could prevent it, no one would ever be lonely again.” According to Marlo Newton that sense of loneliness never left Fanny and throughout her life she shared an affinity with the migrants making their way in a strange new country.2 Again from Hilary Rubinstein we see that Fanny and her family moved to St Kilda, not far from here, beginning in 1906 a bachelor of music course at the University of Melbourne, teaching part-time at the St Kilda Hebrew School and serving as honorary secretary of the Maccabean Union, a Jewish literary and debating society. She was also a founder and vice-president of the influential Jewish Young People's Association, established in 1911 to counteract apathy and assimilation. She gained a diploma of music in 1914, and commenced a teaching career. But an increasing interest in health and welfare led her in 1916 to study medicine (M.B., B.S., 1922). To be a woman at University in 1916 was a novelty –Fanny may well have known Dr Constance Ellis, the first woman graduate of the University of Melbourne to obtained the degree of M.D. (by examination) in March 1903. As many here may also know, Dr Constance Ellis was also Jewish. Her ADB entry by A.S Ellis states: 2MarloNewton,Making a Difference – A History of the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia page 7.

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Constance Ellis was born on 2 November 1872 at Carlton, Melbourne, sixth child of Louis Ellis, deputy sheriff and later sheriff of Victoria, and his wife Lydia Constance, née Phillips; both parents were born in New South Wales of Jewish stock…3

I speak of Connie Ellis because of the Jewish connection, but also to emphasise a point I hope to return to in the lecture. When thinking about women’s entry into the professions, including these women who I will call ‘rights women’ there is an interesting contrast between women doctors and women lawyers. Mary Jane Mossman, a Canadian academic is interesting about this. ‘The role of women doctors [she says] could be explained as an extension of women's roles in the 'private sphere'; by contrast, women lawyers were clearly 'intruding on the public domain explicitly reserved to men'.4 I will come back to this - (apologies for these breadcrumbs to be picked up later on) but I’m sharing these stories about these women I’m calling ‘Rights Women” –as their world and life context and background is important in our thinking about re-writing the record of human rights. And so from Constance Ellis, first woman doctor, let’s return to Dr Fanny Reading’s story, as she moved to Sydney to join her brother Abraham Solomon Reading in general practice. Like most female physicians of the day, and consistent with Mary Jane Mossman’s comment just shared, 'Dr. Fanny' treated mainly women and children. In due course, she became an honorary medical officer at St George Hospital, at the Rachel Forster Hospital for Women and Children and the Wolper Jewish Hospital, which she helped found, and she was appointed a life governor of the Benevolent Society of New South Wales, the Dalwood Children's Homes, and the Women's Hospital, Crown Street. But importantly for NCJWA - Dr Reading believed that Jewish women should

3http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ellis-constance-connie-61074MossmanMJ2006TheFirstWomenLawyers:AComparativeStudyofGender,theLawandtheLegalProfessionsHartPublishingOxford,14.

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work actively to achieve improvements in their own community and in the wider Australian society. She was a ‘rights woman’. In 1923, following discussions with a visiting female emissary from the Jewish National Fund of Palestine, Fanny Reading founded the Council of Jewish Women of New South Wales (president, 1923-31). The council was dedicated to four ideals: Judaism, the land of Israel, Jewish education, and philanthropy in both Jewish and non-Jewish communities. In 1925, it affiliated to the International Council of Jewish Women, of which Dr Reading was to become vice-president in 1949 and in due course the council federated to become the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia, with the first conference of Jewish Women of Australia held in Sydney between 21-29 May 1929. There is also an interesting legal aspect to Fanny’s life – that is referred to in the ADB entry – but helpfully further elaborated upon by Peter Wertheim – Executive Director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. He wrote in 2013 when the Racial Discrimination Act, s 18 was first being raised for repeal – and poignantly now subject to a Parliamentary Committee review. Fanny Reading’s ‘legal’ rights story is relevant to the political issues of this very day: Peter says:

Those who would dismiss Australia's laws prohibiting racial vilification as a mere concession to latter-day political correctness and 'the culture of complaint' should remember that such laws were called for by a distinguished Supreme Court judge as far back as 1949. In the immediate aftermath of WWII and the Holocaust, Jewish refugees stranded in camps in Europe were barred by the British authorities from migrating to Palestine to start new lives. The cruelty of this policy was condemned by many people all over the world, including most Jews, and was resisted, often violently, by several Jewish groups in Palestine. In May 1947, a Jewish communal event was held in Sydney to raise money for Youth Aliyah. Then, as now, Youth Aliyah raised money to pay for the passage of homeless and needy Jewish children from all parts of the diaspora to the Jewish homeland where they could be cared for. On 31 May 1947 the newspaper Smiths Weekly published a front page story with the headline "JEWS RAISE HUGE SUMS TO FIGHT BRITISH –

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HEAVY LEVIES ON JEWS IN AUSTRALIA". Posters that appeared outside almost every news agency throughout Australia carried the headline, "AUSTRALIAN JEWS FINANCING TERRORISTS IN PALESTINE - KILLING BRITISH SOLDIERS". The story singled out Youth Aliyah, to which Australian Jews had donated money, as a terrorist front organisation. … Dr Fanny Reading, the acting President of Youth Aliyah in Australia, sued the publisher of Smiths Weekly in the Supreme Court of NSW for libel. The case was heard before Justice Leslie Herron, who later became Chief Justice, and a four person jury. [Peter continues:] … Fanny Reading's case against Smith's Weekly resonated with many of the kinds of issues that provoke debate in contemporary Australia – refugee children, terrorism, conflicts in the Middle East. During the trial, Fanny Reading was questioned for the better part of 3 days by the most ferocious cross-examiner at the Sydney bar at that time, Jack Shand KC. Fanny was 64 years old and the ordeal took a terrible toll on her nerves and health. With the agony of the Holocaust still fresh in the public memory, Shand put it to her that "Jews are their own worst enemies". Yet Fanny Reading was steadfast throughout. She said that no levy was imposed on Jews and no compulsion or duress were applied, nor could they be. "Those who contributed did so out of sympathy and love for Jewish children, many of them orphans, homeless and unwell". … Justice Herron ultimately directed the jury to enter a verdict for the Defendant. He ruled that the Smiths Weekly story could not reasonably be read as referring to Dr Reading as distinct from any other members of Youth Aliyah. As there was no law against group libel he had no alternative but to find against her. But the judge also had this to say:

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I give this decision with some regret. The plaintiff, on the evidence, appears to be a woman of distinction in the Jewish community and a woman who has contributed much in time and money towards the social and patriotic causes of Australia. The article, as the evidence stands, casts unwarranted aspersions on the Youth Aliyah movement. I believe that the article must have wounded her and filled her with a sense of injustice, not only against the Jews, but also against those who supported the movement. However, it is cold comfort for her to know that as the law stands no such attack on a class, or sect or congregation of people, however unwarranted, can be subject of a libel action in this court, and this court cannot assist her to condemn the paper. It is for Parliament to reshape the law if any redress is thought to be necessary in such a case as this, but hard cases make bad law, and I have to give to the law the effect as I see it, although it brings about a regrettable decision, so far as the plaintiff is concerned. [Peter writes] It would take another 40 years before any parliament in Australia would take Justice Herron's hint… She lost the case because the law did not provide for group libel, but won a moral victory for the Jewish community when the judge directed the verdict with regret.5

Her brief appearance as a legal claimant is interesting to the latter part of this lecture in terms of using the law (even if formally unsuccessfully) to protect rights –and it is one of the many examples of Dr Reading’s interventions as a rights woman. Human Rights Day – Eleanor Roosevelt As we are talking about Human Rights, and this lecture named as the Fanny Reading Human Rights lecture falls today, let us note that it falls, the day after the United Nation’s Human Rights Day.

5Seehttp://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=15856

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Human Rights Day is observed every year on 10 December. It commemorates the day on which, in 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Another ‘rights woman’ who is relevant to the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is Eleanor Roosevelt, and I want to mention her rights story now, as it is also a lead back to my interest, as a younger Jewish woman in oral history and story- telling, as a means to re-write the human rights record. Eleanor Roosevelt, as the then chair of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, was the driving force in creating the 1948 charter of liberties which became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My particular interest in Eleanor Roosevelt – began in 1992. I visited the Smithsonian, National Museum of American History in Washington DC, USA, sometime between June and November 1992. I was living in Washington DC after completing my graduate work in Law at Harvard, in Boston. Within the Museum, on the second floor, there is an exhibition First Ladies: Political Role and Public Image. It is described in promotion material now as:

one of the most popular and successful of the museum's displays. The exhibition traces the changing role of the first lady politically and socially and holds up a mirror to the changing role of American women in general.6

I felt drawn to this exhibit and, in particular to the section on Eleanor Roosevelt. It was immediately prior to Hilary Clinton becoming a first lady so I only had a brief sense of Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of FDR, who Hilary would later proclaim as a mentor (and who I would later find out was born a Roosevelt being Franklin’s cousin)7.

6JeffHardwick,EditorialReview(nodatenoted)foundathttp://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?node=entertainment/profile&id=799650(14October2005)7 Eleanor and Franklin were fifth cousins, once removed. They descended from Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt who emigrated to the USA in the 1640s. His grandsons were Johannes and Jacobus. Eleanor descended from the Johannes branch and Franklin descended from the Jacobus branch. See further http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt

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I was soon entirely enthralled by Eleanor. Within the exhibit is an audio recording of a stirring radio address Eleanor gave to the nation on the eve of the US entering the 2nd World War. The recording gave me goose bumps; it compelled me to head to the bookshops and I soon discovered that a “new” book had just been released – a biography of Eleanor by Blanche Wiesen Cook. In that book were the seeds of my interest in story telling as a way to recording rights activity. As Wiesen Cook’s introduction summarises, Eleanor was greatly influenced by her teacher, Marie Souvestre who introduced her to an “alternative way of being – assertive, independent and bold.”8 Souvestre was in fact Principal of the English school that Eleanor was sent to at the age of 15 after both her parents died. That school - Allenswood - was not an ordinary finishing school for the smart set but, rather, a collegiate environment that took the education of women seriously at a time when they were denied access to the great halls of learning. Feminist and progressive, Allenswood and its predecessor, Les Ruches, were responsible for the education of several generations of outstanding and notable women.9 Any graduate of Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC) Melbourne would immediately identify, as I did, with Allenswood. I have earlier alluded to a connection with PLC when I described to you Constance Ellis – the first woman to get a medical degree from the University of Melbourne who was also a PLC Melbourne graduate. Indeed, as Katherine Fitzpatrick, writing about PLC’s origins explains “[t]he struggle for the higher education of women began in England,”10 and so my recognition of Marie Souvestre’s school makes even more sense. When Eleanor set off for Allenswood in 1899, PLC Melbourne was already 12 years old and, in fact, 30 years before Eleanor set off to England for her education, a special Committee on the Ladies College had been established.11 Over a century on, PLC could well make the same claims as Allenswood, of having produced several generations of outstanding and notable women, including many Jewish graduates.

8BlancheWiesenCook,EleanorRoosevelt,Vol1:1884-1933(Viking1992)4.9Ibid103.10KathleenFitzpatrick,PLCMelbourneTheFirstCentury1875-1975p23.11ProceedingsofthePresbyterianChurchofVictoria4May1869ascitedbyFitzpatrick,ibidatpp32and36.

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Joan Montgomery And the Principal of PLC -Joan Montgomery - can be included as one of those women. Joan Montgomery began her student years at PLC when the school emulated through its own practice, its underlying belief in women being entitled to do anything. For 1938, Joan’s first year as a year 7 PLC girl, coincided with the first year of the first woman Principal, Miss Mary Nielson. Perhaps more significantly, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick points out, when Joan Montgomery became Principal of her former school on 4 February 1969 she came to that position never having known the days when the College had a male head. She was to build upon the strong underpinnings of the school in ways that she may not have articulated herself as “feminist” but which were entirely consistent with a world in which women, like me, viewed their rights to full participation as intrinsic and unquestionable. It was Joan Montgomery as Principal, not school girl, who came into my mind as I read about Marie Souvestre and Eleanor. In fact, it wasn’t even Joan Montgomery but “Miss Montgomery” who I thought of. It took me until I was in my 40s myself before I began to refer to her by her given name; having always called her Miss Montgomery. And it takes quite a bit of conscious thought and discomfort to move to that position of addressing someone by their given name when you are so used to the more formal address! Towards the end of my own fifth form year at PLC, I was appointed by my peers to be School Captain, the second Jewish girl to have been given that role (Karen Mahlab was the first). Joan’s practise as principal was to meet with the School Captain and her Deputy each morning of the week in her office, for 5 minutes or so before the school day began. On the Monday, we would also go up on stage with her into assembly, and she would give her weekly address to the students and staff. The other days, other staff would be involved with assembly but we would still meet Miss Montgomery before the day began. Before that experience, my relationship with her was like other students, listening to her morning assemblies and passing her in the corridor and her knowing my name. The respect that I held for her and the pedestal upon which I think she sat for many of us meant that when I received the phone call from her one evening to tell me of my appointment as School Captain, it left me almost speechless. I sat up the entire night, talking with my very proud mum, unable to sleep at all. When I came to meet with her for the first time after that phone call, I literally stumbled over my words …and I was already a seasoned

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debater, later that year representing the State of Victoria in the Schools National Championship! I managed to fall back into my own more confident self after getting into the routine of our daily meetings, and over the course of that year my respect and admiration only grew. When I left school I stayed in contact with her. She invited me back to address the students on my return from a year in Israel between my final year of school and my University studies, and it was during that year of my return, 1984, that the controversy over her term as Principal at PLC arose so clearly in the public domain when the PLC School Council announced that they would not renew her contract as Principal at the end of 1985 after she turned 60. The insecure status of her term as Principal had been bubbling away since the Presbyterian Church split in the 1970s, and therefore, during my year as School Captain. Even meeting her every day during my final year in 1982, I had no sense of there being any impact on her running of the school. None of her discussions with students nor my relationship with her ever touched upon it. But perhaps there was enough in the discussion outside the school that led me to have a slight quaver in my voice when I stated to the gathered audience in the Hamer Hall in the Melbourne Arts Centre on Wednesday 8th December 1982, in my School Captain’s speech, that my job was even:

[m]ore enjoyable because of [the] opportunity to work with Miss Montgomery. Her willingness to listen to people’s suggestions and her commitment to work for a particular ideal has been of great influence on my outlook on both school and life. Our daily morning meetings gave us an insight to the truly busy life she leads, and my memories of Miss Montgomery will always be fond ones, for her mark on PLC is one that will always be appreciated, by those who recognise the excellence of this school.

When I got to the end of that sentence I had to stop and wait for the applause for Joan to subside. She later commented that we “basked in reflected glory”. While having had that special experience of getting to know Miss Montgomery more than my fellow peers, my reading of Wiesen Cook’s book in Washington DC made me ponder how little I knew about Miss Montgomery’s life outside PLC. I think I had known she was a student at PLC – and I knew (as we all did and often

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as school girls speculated about the fact) that she was not married. When I was in year 9, I knew that Kirsty Knox, School Captain was Joan’s niece, so that meant she had siblings who produced offspring! And indeed those girls who were in the year levels of each of Joan’s nieces who went to PLC in the early 70s (Judy Shaw and Kirsty’s older sister Robin Knox) knew this. But beyond those facts, I really had no knowledge of Joan’s world outside PLC. I had no idea for instance of the close parallels to the aspects of Wiesen Cook’s book that caught my attention. That Joan, like Eleanor Roosevelt, had lost her parents when still young. That like Eleanor, Joan had been greatly influenced by a particular teacher. Nora Wilkinson, taught Joan geography, and had taken her aside around the time of her mother’s death and had a real influence; transforming her from the mischievous and spirited school girl into a sensible School Prefect. I also began to think much more about the fact that little was known about my Principal who had been of influence to several generations of women’s education, when I read the following paragraph in Weisen Cook’s introduction: We have tended to constrict the range of historical inquiry about women, failing even to ask life’s most elemental questions. We have been encouraged to disregard the essential mysteries of a woman’s life: What is energy – to write, to organise, to love? How do we acquire courage, develop vision, sustain power, create style?12 At the same time as pondering these questions in Washington DC, I ventured up Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC to the bookshop Politics and Prose to listen to a fellow Australian, expatriate Jill Kerr Conway speak about her edited book Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology13 The strong message I took from that evening is - women are far less inclined to write their memoires and life stories. Her introduction to the book explains that the autobiographical selections included “all claim our attention because of the powerful motivations which led these writers to cast aside the convention of female “modesty” and set them to telling the world about their lives.”14

12BlancheWiesenCook,EleanorRoosevelt,Vol1:1884-1933(Viking1992)1113Vintage1992.14JillKerrConway,WrittenbyHerself:AutobiographiesofAmericanWomen:AnAnthology(Vintage1992)atxii

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This very same modesty dictated Joan’s response when I first raised the possibility of writing her biography in January 1993. Recently returned from my time in the US, with Wiesen Cook’s and Kerr Conway’s books under my belt, I felt a desire to find out the answers to those questions on courage, vision, power and style. “But my life is so ordinary” she proclaimed, confirming Kerr Conway’s thesis. But as we talked and I persisted she reflected, “I suppose that nothing has been written about the whole PLC and Presbyterian Church experience, and I do think that is an important story to be recorded”. To satisfy her modesty, we began talking about it as a PLC project – a PLC story, which of course she had been a part of for 19 years as Principal, not to mention her school girl days. And as I began to interview her regularly, we spent more and more time on her life, her family, her mentors, her friends, her travels (in particular her two major trips to England in the 1950s including the significant coronation trip), the books that had been of influence, her life unmarried, and intimately connected to that; her life as a Principal. I also met others who told me their stories about Joan. Over the course of some 11-12 years I gathered material to write a book about the Joan Montgomery and PLC story, listening to Joan’s perspective, as a great admirer of Joan Montgomery. Now, some 23 years after that first meeting with her I am pleased to say I spoke with Joan this morning, now aged 91 and she has another 30 pages to read of my first full draft of the book which is currently 388 pages or 280,000 words! But the reason for telling you that story, my story, of my journey to writing about someone else’s life, is to explain how that experience led to me linking more about what had otherwise been an extra-curricular activity to my own academic work on citizenship. Next week, the second edition of my book Australian Citizenship Law will appear in print, some 15 years after its first publication – and during those 15 years I have been spreading my research interests, linking questions about citizenship and membership with questions about gender and life stories. And it is to that which I now turn to explain the Trailblazing Women and the Law Oral History project which I have been leading for the past 5 years and its links to Rewriting the Human Rights Record through the power of stories. The Trailblazing Women and the Law Project (‘The Trailblazing Project’) The Trailblazing Women and the Law Project (‘The Trailblazing Project’) funded, in part, by the Australian Research Council (ARC), has created, and is showcasing

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and analysing the first publicly accessible, national, oral history of seven decades of Australia’s pioneer, ‘trailblazing’, women lawyers.15 The Project commenced in early 2013 with the aim of recording forty-five interviews over three years. It builds on the early narratives from five interviews recorded in a Pilot Project series, I ran with the National Library of Australia between 2010-11 and it brings together the disciplines of gender, oral history, biography, law and citizenship, social networks and cultural informatics and ePublication and women’s history archiving.16 The final stage of the Trailblazing Project includes the establishment of an online exhibition, featuring the biographical details of 500 women nominated as trailblazer women lawyers and significant contributors to law and society in Australia which was launched formally at the National Library of Australia a few weeks ago! See http://www.womenaustralia.info/lawyers/index.html Indeed, those 500 women featured on the online exhibition website arose from the process of determining in collaboration with women lawyers around the country the potential interviewees for our oral history project and this list was supplemented by local and national records, identifying leading women lawyers. During the pilot stage of the project, complete life history recordings, totalling approximately 50 hours, were made with six trailblazing women lawyers: Valerie French (first woman to sign the Western Australian Bar Roll),17 Eve Mahlab (founder of Mahlab Recruitment, Liberal Feminist Network, and early WEL member and law reform lobbyist),18 Megan Davis (first Indigenous Australian woman appointed by the Australian Government to a permanent United Nations

15TheLinkagepartnerssupportingtheprojectincludetheNationalLibraryofAustralia,togetherwiththeUniversityofMelbourne,theFederalCourtofAustralia,theFamilyCourtofAustralia,theNationalFoundationforAustralianWomenandAustralianWomenLawyers.16FellowChiefInvestigatorswithProfessorKimRubensteinareGavanMcCarthyandHelenMorganfromtheUniversityofMelbournewhoseexpertiseisinsocialnetworksandculturalinformaticsandePublicationandwomen’shistoryarchiving.KevinBradleyisaPartnerInvestigatorfromtheNationalLibraryofAustraliawhowillbecontributingsubstantialoralhistoryexpertise.OurResearcher/CoordinatorDrNikkiHenningham,alsoattheUniversityofMelbournealsobringstotheteamgreatoralhistoryexpertise.17ValerieFrench’sinterviewisfullyaccessibleonlinethroughtheNationalLibraryofAustralia’swebsite.SeeFrench,VandRubenstein,K.2010.‘ValerieFrenchinterviewedbyKimRubensteinfortheTrailblazingwomenandthelawpilotoralhistoryproject’[soundrecording],http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/37397954;18EveMahlab’sinterviewisfullyaccessibleonlinethroughtheNationalLibraryofAustralia’swebsite.SeeMahlab,EandRubenstein,K,2010.‘EveMahlabinterviewedbyKimRubensteinfortheTrailblazingwomenandthelawpilotoralhistoryproject’[soundrecording]http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/37954372.

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Body),19 Jane Mathews (first woman judge of the New South Wales Supreme Court and former Federal Court Judge),20 Rebecca Irwin (the first Australian woman to have a speaking advocacy role for Australia in an International Tribunal)21 and Mary Hiscock (first full-time female academic and reader of Melbourne University Law School).22 These interviewees represent the diversity we desired to examine in the overall Trailblazing Project in terms of age (61, 73, 35, 70, 39, 71 at the time of interview), ethnicity (Anglo-Australians, WW2 Austrian Jewish Refugee, Indigenous), geography (Queensland, Western Australia, Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales), legal community (Bar, Judiciary, Law Firm, Politics, International Law, Academia) and type of legal role (Solicitor, Barrister, Judge, Entrepreneur, Lobbyist, International Advocate, Legal academic).23 The Pilot Project interview material was invaluable in developing the Trailblazing Project’s framework. They highlighted the methodological importance of treating oral histories as a text upon which to draw and to question, in departure from the traditional treatment in gender and law analyses of the narrative as primarily a source for compiling data on types of experience (eg. of promotion or discrimination).24 With the pilot component completed, the Trailblazing Project commenced in early 2013 and ran over a three-year period to produce a further 45 life recordings or interviews. It will analyse the experiences of those interviewees recorded through innovative conceptual links between oral history, biography, citizenship and law. 19MeganDavis’interviewiscataloguedthroughtheNLA.SeeDavis,MandRubenstein,K.2010.‘MeganDavisinterviewedbyKimRubensteinfortheTrailblazingwomenandthelawpilotoralhistoryproject’[soundrecording],http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/38072298.20JaneMathews’interviewiscataloguedthroughtheNLA.SeeMathews,JandRubenstein,K.2011.‘JaneMathewsinterviewedbyKimRubensteinfortheTrailblazingwomenandthelawpilotoralhistoryproject’[soundrecording],http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/150970048.21RebeccaIrwin’sinterviewiscataloguedthroughtheNLA.SeeIrwin,RandRubenstein,K.2011.‘RebeccaIrwininterviewedbyKimRubensteinfortheTrailblazingwomenandthelawpilotoralhistoryproject[soundrecording],http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/150970049.22MaryHiscock’sinterviewcataloguedthroughtheNLA.SeeHiscock,MandRubenstein,K,2011.‘MaryHiscockinterviewedbyKimRubensteinfortheTrailblazingwomenandthelawpilotoralhistoryproject[soundrecording].http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/156083755.23Theinterviewshavebeentranscribedandtimemarkedandsubjecttotheirreleaseconditionsareavailabletothepublicthroughdifferentmeans.TwoareimmediatelyaccessiblethroughtheNLAwebsite,andothersrequirespecificpermissionfromtheintervieweeforresearchersoutsideourresearchproject.24Kerwin,HandRubenstein,K,2011.'ReadingtheLifeNarrativeofValerieFrench,theFirstWomantoSigntheWesternAustralianBarRoll'inDavis,F,Musgrove,NandSmart,J(eds)Founders,FirstsandFeminists:WomenLeadersinTwentieth-centuryAustralia,TheUniversityofMelbourne,Melbourne:172.

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These stories are now in the NLA’s collection,25 and separately as an online exhibition through the Australian Women’s Register26 and, ultimately I plan to write a biographical monograph to deliver what I hope will be an outstanding national, cultural and historical resource. This large-scale application of oral history to the history and analysis of law as a social and political institution is unprecedented in Australia. Oral history as a method of data capture is essential in our case because until now, as Jill Kerry Conway27 and Mary Jane Mossman28 argue, the personal histories of pioneer women within the professions have not only been silenced officially, but have been precluded from informal discussion. In practicing oral history, this Trailblazing Project hopes to transcend and complicate the traditional disciplinary conception of oral history as a scholarly ‘panacea designed to fill in the blanks in… women’s history’ or provide a ‘purer version of the past coming unadulterated from the very person who experienced it’.29 Instead, interviews are treated as accounts of subjective experience, telling us far more than the recounted facts. As Daley writes, ‘what women remember and retell, and how they retell it, tells us much about their individual experiences and their understanding of their cultural place with their community’.30 This method targets our dual aims for the interviews to elevate trailblazers in public memory and enable critical research of their diverse experiences. By exploring the merit of this ‘post-structural turn’ on oral history, the Trailblazing Project also seeks to foreground the storytelling of legal practitioners as an important method of legal research, responding to parallel, ‘ethno-historical’ research approaches which advocate the uniqueness of legal participants’ stories to revealing the contours of law as a social institution.31 Fundamentally, our aim is for our work to form a new empirical basis for theorising the value of oral history to legal research.

25Subjecttotherestrictionsintervieweesimposeontheirrelease.26Seehttp://www.womenaustralia.info.27Conway,JK,1999.WhenMemorySpeaks:ReflectionsonAutobiography.AlfredA.Knopf:NewYork;.28Mossman,MJ,2006.TheFirstWomenLawyers:AComparativeStudyofGender,theLawandLegalProfessions.HartPublishing,Oxford.29Sangster,J,1994.‘TellingOurStories:Feministdebatesandtheuseoforalhistory’Women’sHistoryReview,3(1):7.30Daley,C,1998.‘“Hewouldknow,butIjusthaveafeeling”:GenderandOralHistory’Women’sHistoryReview7(3):344.31Starr,JandCollier,J,1987.‘HistoricalStudiesofLegalChange’CurrentAnthropology28(2):367.Ewick,PandSilbey,S,TheCommonPlaceofLaw:StoriesfromEverydayLife.UniversityofChicagoPress,Chicago.

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By recording and analysing these unheard narratives, the Trailblazing Project aims not only to understand trailblazing and oral history methods further, but to tap and broadcast the wealth of experience possessed by living trailblazers to inform the way we think about gender and citizenship in Australia. Interrogating the life narratives with these questions will no doubt uncover the uncomfortable truths about women lawyer’s limited access to the State in their attempts to use law as a form of citizenship and active participation in Australian civic life. Returning to Mary Jane Mossman’s statement that while ‘the role of women doctors could be explained as an extension of women’s roles in the ‘private sphere’; by contrast, women lawyers were clearly ‘intruding on the public domain explicitly reserved to men.’32 This ‘intrusion’ into the public sphere is far from complete and the last 100 years has seen many new women pioneers at the ‘rolling frontier’ of the Australian legal profession and public life more generally, as they enter previously male-only areas of practice, adopt new ways of practicing, take up elite legal positions and enter the profession from increasingly diverse socio-political, ethnic and religious backgrounds. The position of trailblazing women lawyers is exceptional, important and ground-breaking, however many of the women we have interviewed - despite being well known in their field - are not mentioned in many public records. We do not have a historical picture of women’s experiences upon first entering the legal profession and pushing into the public sphere. A much more demographically complex picture of trailblazing actually exists in the unheard stories of women trailblazers across generations, jurisdictions, practices and ethnic, marital and religious statuses. Tracing these differences in women lawyers’ experiences is essential to responding to the hypotheses that pioneer women lawyers’ lives are heavily contoured by their professional and social backgrounds, to contradicting the traditional presentation and study of women as a unitary class and to ultimately opening up new ways to move towards an equality of citizenship in the legal profession and in society more broadly.33 The Trailblazing Project’s completed interviews, in combination with the five life recordings from the Pilot Project, have already hinted at oral history’s ability to foster the equal representation of women in public memory and to reflect on how women tell their own stories. Our continued study of these life recordings can

32Mossman,MJ,aboven14,14.33Thornton,M,aboven27;Rhode,DL,2002.‘GenderandtheProfession:TheNoProblemProblem’HOFSTRALawReview30:1001;Mossman,MJ,aboven14.

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weave women’s remarkable actions into national identity and provide women with an enlarged national space to inhabit, reflect and imagine their diverse experiences. In this sense I believe it has the capacity to broaden our sense of the meaning of citizenship and governance, diversity, networks and a history of women’s rights and rights in society more broadly. The interviews also provide the potential for us to think beyond the domestic jurisdictional space and to consider how women lawyers’ contributions have been significant in transnational and international contexts, to further enlarge our thinking of lawyering at both the local and international contexts. The online exhibition and the collection of these stories housed at the NLA will be an enduring, loud and clear voice which speaks to us about trailblazing women lawyers’ contributions to Australian culture, society and institutions over the last seven decades – – for this and other reasons I include them as ‘rights women’ in Australia and seek to emphasise the importance of rewriting the human rights record through the power of their stories. Conclusion - Ethics of Responsibility underpinning Rights Women So, to conclude, I return to our first ‘rights’ woman discussed tonight and to whom this lecture is in honour – Dr Fanny Reading. Fanny Reading’s commitment was a human commitment, but also a particularly Jewish commitment. As Lord Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the UK tells us in his powerful book – To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (first printed in 2005 – but a title that speaks out as a current and pressing title 11 years later) – ‘one of Judaism’s most distinctive and challenging ideas is it ethics of responsibility.’ He notes:

‘the ethics of responsibility structures Judaism’s entire approach to the world. An obvious example is that biblical ethics is constructed in terms of responsibilities – not rights. Does this make a difference –[he asks]? Are rights not simply responsibilities seen from another point of view? Thou shalt not murder - creates a right to life. Thou shalt not steal - creates a right to property. The obligation to administer justice creates the right to a fair trial, and so on. He continues: That is true but it omits one feature

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insufficiently alluded to in discussion in law. Rights are passive, responsibilities active. Rights are demands we make on others; responsibilities are demands others make on us. A responsibility-base culture exists in the active mode. It emphasizes the giving over receiving, doing not complaining. He continues, ‘A society that does not train its citizens to be responsible will be one in which, too often, rights talk will be mere rhetoric, honoured in the breach not the observance.’34

In setting up the foundations for the National Council of Jewish Women, Fanny Reading was an active citizen – she was in the active mode always –as has been the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia. The original aims of the Council of Jewish Women focused on four areas, summarized, as Marlo Newton writes, – ‘by the banner across the first letterhead of the fledgling organization; ‘religion, education, philanthropy – social.’ Fanny Reading, Newton writes, was ‘extremely worried by the prevalent assimilating tendencies of the Australian Jewish Community in the 1920s and wanted to provide a framework for Jewish women to recommit to Judaism. Secondly, council stood for Jewish education - Mrs Harris Cohen, Newton continues - stated ‘we must instill knowledge and pride in ourselves and only then will we feel inclined to serve our people.’ Third, as a charitable institution, it stressed at the outset that the translation of the Hebrew word Tzeddakah related to social justice – that is the obligation of all Jews to make the world a better place by ensuring Justice for all – and for Fanny Reading it was obvious that Jews needed to work for the community in which they lived as well as for their co-religionists, a point Marlo Newton notes was a radical viewpoint for the early 1920s35. The rights women – who have been active citizens – in my mind are an essential part of the Human Rights record, and involve stories that we all need to share. And as Judith Rosenbaum’s message at the beginning implores upon us, we need to share our own stories, as I have sought to do with some of my own story this evening, and the stories of others – to return to Jewish thinking once more – Jonathan Sacks speaks of Maimonides in that same book – ‘With Judaism there are

34JonathanSacks,ToHealaFracturedWorld:TheEthicsofResponsibility(2005)page183.35MarloNewton,MakingaDifference:AHistoryoftheNationalCouncilofJewishWomenofAustralia(2000)

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both laws and narratives, codes and stories. Judaism is full of stories because it recognizes the limits of law in teaching us how to live.’36 Law is important to rights protection, but so is story telling - may we be inspired by Fanny Reading’s stories, and the many women referred to and hinted at tonight – the active ‘rights women’ – and be motivated to ensure their spirit – and their message lives on. Thank you.

36JonathanSacks,ToHealaFracturedWorld:TheEthicsofResponsibility(2005)page242