The game dames: The bold Australian women who found the world, then brought it home

I was idly flipping through the Oxford Companion to Australian History this week – “Retirement going a bit slow, Richard?” – when I noticed the entry for Miles Franklin, author of My Brilliant Career. I thought I knew her story, working as a bush governess. Did you know, though, she went to Chicago in 1905 where she joined the Women’s Trade Union League, edited a journal for American female workers, then moved to London in 1915, a force in working-class and feminist politics? And that she then worked on the Macedonian front line in the First World War?

Oh, you knew all that? Well, it sure wasn’t in the movie.

Here’s what caught my interest: her story chimes with that of other intrepid Australian women in the first two decades of the 20th century. Much has been written about the Australian expatriates of the 1960s – people like Clive James, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes. But what of this earlier era and its well-travelled women: these game dames?

This column has already featured Teresa Cahill, who, along with her brother Reg, set up Sydney’s famous Cahills restaurants. But what about her life before Cahills? According to her entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography – another work I’m obsessed with – she travelled to America in 1919, finding work in Los Angeles as advertising manager for the Peerless Motor Co. She was soon promoted to superintendent of the tuning and testing section. Back in Sydney, she hoped to set up a motor business but lacked funds. Instead, she started Cahills. Before you fall into a reverie about their famous caramel sauce, take a moment to admire her chutzpah. Here was a young woman, fresh from Catholic school in Enmore, who went to America in her early twenties, just to see.

She wasn’t the only one. Vida Goldstein – who gave her name to the Victorian electorate – departed Australia in 1902 to participate in the Suffrage Conference in Washington DC. In 1911, she travelled to England to assist the Pankhurst suffragettes. In 1919, she was agitating in Zurich.

Or what about Muriel Matters? The Adelaide-born feminist moved to London in 1905, chained herself to the grille in the House of Commons and piloted an airship over London to drop pamphlets. There’s a top book about her by Robert Wainwright.

Meanwhile, Australia’s early medical women were also keen on visiting the world. It was a measure, I guess, of the daring you needed to be to become a female doctor in the first place.

Dr Helen Mayo – another pioneer who gave her name to an electorate – graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1902, the second woman to do so. She was top of her class. She took herself to London, Dublin, and, in 1905, to Delhi. She worked at St Stephen’s Hospital for Women and Children – India’s first hospital specialising in women and children. One medical colleague wrote to her own mother, back in Ireland, gushing over Mayo’s kindness, skill, and her rapid ability to speak Hindi. She’d learnt it, remarkably, in a few months. Mayo returned to Adelaide in 1906 and spent the rest of her life dedicated to the health of that state’s women and children.

Dr Vera Scantlebury graduated from Melbourne Uni in 1914. Female doctors were forbidden entry to the Australian Army Medical Corps, so in 1917 she sailed for London and became a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps. She, too, came home and shook things up. She dominated infant health in Victoria from 1926 until her death in 1946.

Or there’s Elizabeth McMillan. After a childhood in Sydney, she travelled to Paris in 1899. After that she visited the US, Ireland and South Africa. She then trained as a nurse and was among the first Australian women to serve during the First World War – sailing in August 1914 to German New Guinea. A year later, she was deployed to the Greek island of Lemnos. Her Gallipoli nurses uniform of red woollen cape and leather belt is held in the collection of the Anzac Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park. The belt is marked with her own handwritten record of the places she served: “Lemnos 1915, Cairo 1916, France 1917-1919.”

Next, you could add the female artists – subject of Dangerously Modern, the recent exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. They, too, were hungry to travel. Sometimes solo, sometimes in small groups, they left Australia for Paris, Spain, Morocco. There are too many to mention, but let’s start with Margaret Preston, Hilda Rix Nicholas and Grace Cossington Smith.

Were Australian men as well travelled in this era? What made these women so keen? Was it a measure of the restrictions of home, or of their own passion and daring? Or is it more accurate to see their travels as part of a spirit of Australian female boldness – the assertive attitude that saw Australian women – well, the non-indigenous ones – becoming first in the world to have the right to both vote and stand for office?

I’m not sure of the answers to these questions, but I propose a round of applause for these inspiring women. In the two decades following Federation, they discovered the world, then brought it home.

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