After a while, if you repress the origins, it will be as though the founding revolution simply never happened.
TERRY EAGLETON
Ibsen and the Nightmare of History, 2008
1911 proved to be a false dawn for English women.
In November Asquith announced a Manhood Suffrage Bill, to be presented in the next parliamentary session. This measure paved the way for an extended franchise for men. It would allow for a female franchise only if the Commons saw fit to introduce an amendment—which, in the absence of government support, would never get up. The Conciliation Bill had been scuttled and the suffrage campaigners sunk in a clean strike.
Emmeline Pankhurst—so confident of a peaceful resolution to the Four Years War that she’d agreed to undertake a speaking tour of America in the second half of 1911—now wrote to Christabel from Minneapolis: Protest imperative! The truce was over.
Truth be told, the writing was on the wall well before that. The summer of 1911 continued in a national pantomime of over-the-top pageantry and under-the-surface tension with the King and his court centre stage. But the audience should have been shouting, ‘Over there! Look over there!’
Over there…to Bermondsey, a densely populated working-class borough two miles from the City where, in August, the factories emptied as fifteen thousand female workers went on strike. The Bermondsey Women’s Uprising, as it became known worldwide, was attributed to the combination of the usual appalling pay and conditions and the effects of the long, hot summer. Spoiled food; rising infant mortality; a general air of irritability and fed-upness. And a mood of female defiance. These women—who weren’t unionised—took to the streets, marching together with banners and a sense of industrial solidarity that had previously been the exclusive domain of their fathers, brothers and sons. The streets were now their streets. They expected more and better. Prominent among the organisers who came in to lend moral and organisational support was Muriel Matters.1
Over there…to Ireland where, while George V was being crowned in London, a Sinn Fein meeting in Dublin was condemning all Irish participation in the coronation festivities. Where anti-imperial sentiment received a boost in August, when the constitutional deadlock between the House of Commons and the House of Lords was broken though legislation restricting the Lords’ veto. The same legislation, the Parliament Act, also made Irish home rule a possibility in the future. The threat of self-government was sufficient to see seventy thousand Unionists and Orangemen (staunch opponents of home rule) march in protest the following month.
And further over there—to Germany. In 1911, Kaiser Wilhelm was squabbling with France and Spain over territory in Morocco. In August, Germany sent a warship to make its intentions clear. Britain backed France. A new arms race between the great industrial powers of Europe was underway. The lines between aggression and defence became blurred. The hawks circled—and swooped.
The glorious late summer of Edwardian England was about to shatter like a cheap vase.
Writing her memoir three years later, in 1914, Emmeline Pankhurst could see through the clear lens of hindsight what was not so readily apparent at the time. A mountain peak of a year was 1911, she wrote, and that June the world’s happiest month for long to come.
For the WSPU, Asquith’s intransigence made protest not only imperative but also incendiary. The period of suffragette militancy with which we are now most familiar started with Asquith’s act of personal and parliamentary belligerence in November 1911. The window-smashing. The letterbox fires. The torching of hedges and golf courses. The slashing of famous works of art. Wholesale destruction of property, public and private, was now an official campaign strategy rather than an occasional publicity stunt. The stone—not the banner, the meeting or the demonstration—was the new weapon of choice.
The Cat and Mouse Act was the government’s response: a revolving door of gaolings, hunger strikes and force-feedings: release from prison when near death, rearrest when recovered. You will go down in history as the man who tortured innocent women, one MP barked at Asquith on the floor of the Commons.2 But still, throughout the next year, and the next, Asquith and his ministers refused to budge. The full-scale arson, bombing and stone-throwing campaign was as divisive within the suffrage movement as it was offensive to the government and obnoxious to the general public. The Pethick-Lawrences and two of the Pankhurst daughters, Sylvia and Adela, became estranged from Emmeline as Mother’s hold on the leadership became a full nelson.
Yet there were still plenty of true believers, Christabel included—and none more ardent than Emily Wilding Davison. Davison, a university-educated activist who was arrested nine times, went on seven hunger strikes and was force-fed almost fifty times, wrote herself into the history books by throwing herself in front of the King’s horse at Epsom on 4 June 1913, while news cameras filmed the race. Her death made her the suffrage movement’s first bona fide martyr. Her funeral procession of five thousand mourners was held on 14 June, almost two years to the day from the Women’s Coronation Procession in which women had worn white to symbolise the moral purity of their struggle. It has been described as ‘the last of the great suffragette spectacles’.3 Emmeline Pankhurst was not able to join the black-clad masses channelling their bereavement through London’s streets, having been rearrested that morning under the Cat and Mouse Act. ‘Hated and loved, praised and blamed,’ writes her biographer, Emmeline was nothing if not the most talked of person in the world today.4
In Australia, which had enjoyed its status as the most talked-about country in the world—the van of nations—political women looked on in horror and awe.5 On 10 June 1913, Vida Goldstein’s WOMAN VOTER opened its regular column on the Civil War now being waged in England with a reflection: History in the making is no different from history that is already made.6 The suffragettes had resorted to extreme tactics, but the principles for which they fought held true for all women who had struggled against oppression throughout the ages. Emily Wilding Davison’s self-immolation, her death petition, as Vida called it, was a sacrifice for all women wronged by political, moral (i.e. sexual) and industrial slavery.7
Meanwhile, Vida was locked in her own domestic battle: another attempt at a parliamentary seat, this time in the House of Representatives in the ultra-conservative electorate of Kooyong. Again, she stood as an independent. Again, she lost. Vida’s open endorsement of and assistance to the suffragettes undoubtedly cost her votes, but some commentators believed that had she stood as a member of the Victorian Labor Party in a working-class seat, she would have triumphed. We struck another blow for Freedom, Justice, Truth, Principle, Vida declared to her supporters on 17 June 1913, after her trouncing. What a glorious campaign it was! 8 Some thought her stance as self-sabotaging and ultimately futile as having your head trampled by a royal racehorse.
Nor was Andrew Fisher riding high by the southern winter of 1913. At the federal election, Fisher’s government lost office to the Liberal Party by a single seat, though the ALP retained its majority in the Senate. Moreover, of the six referendum questions put to voters at that election, not one was successful. Fisher had been fighting an uphill battle since his return from London after the Imperial Conference, the trouble starting before he even boarded the ship. He’d granted a meeting with journalist William Stead, the prince of interviewers, for the English edition of REVIEW OF REVIEWS. In it, Fisher praised the ties of sympathy between our Dominion and the American Republic while appearing to condone various measures for loosening the apron strings of empire. We are independent, self-governing communities, Fisher was quoted as saying of the five dominions…free to take our own course, in our own interests, without anyone preventing us. There is no necessity for us to say we will or we will not take part in England’s wars.9
It was a bold addendum to the various acts of colonial self-assertion Fisher had made during his stay in London. Stead characterised him as a responsible man…not afraid of ideas—which included, according to Stead’s interpretation, ‘cutting the painter’: the contemporary idiom for establishing constitutional independence from Britain and making the Commonwealth of Australia a completely self-governing republic. Stead was all right with that: if Fisher was in favour of dissolving the ancient Empire of Britain, it was to make way for a higher ideal of a great World State in which brother nations associate in peace and mutual service.10
But by the time Fisher stepped off the boat in Melbourne, there was hell to pay. He had to do some fancy footwork to disavow what appeared to be an almost treasonous sentiment. Fisher made the time-honoured politician’s protest that he’d been taken out of context, the Labor Party blamed the Australian capitalistic press for whipping up a frenzy and eventually the furore died down.
Fisher’s government had continued to implement important measures of social legislation, such as the Maternity Allowance of 1912, carrying on the pioneering innovations of the social laboratory down under.11 Australia continued to be seen as a paradise for Women…the cynosure of all eyes.12 But by mid-1913 Fisher’s grip was slipping. It was Dora Montefiore who analysed the root cause of popular disaffection with the world’s first elected socialist government. The Labor Party is no longer a working-class party, she wrote in an article called ‘The Rebellion Down Under’ for the London DAILY HERALD in August 1913, it is the party of the rising Australian manufacturers…This party cannot, and will not, free the workers; the workers must free themselves. The convergent and sometimes conflicting forces of nationalism, imperialism, socialism, federalism and feminism created a distinctive political culture in Australia in its first decade and a half of nationhood—a culture that produced bedfellows not only strange but sometimes unfaithful.
Vida Goldstein and her Women’s Political Party remained loyal to the WSPU, but for the most part Australian suffragists had concluded that British women must fight their own battle for freedom. And even Vida pulled back. Throughout 1912 and 1913 she continued to petition the British Parliament through the ground troops of the ANZWVC, but her predominant claims were for reform of the iniquitous naturalisation laws that discriminated against Australian women. It was for National reasons that she continued to meddle in British politics.
But Vida’s English adventures had not been in vain. For one thing, she now found herself returning the hospitality of the Pankhurst family. When Emmeline decided that her increasingly refractory daughter, Adela, must leave the nest, it was towards Vida that she pushed her. Adela was crushed. The paltry £20 of loose change that was Emmeline’s parting gift was less insulting than her mother’s rejection. Whereas Vida had arrived in London to a cheering throng, twenty-nine-year-old Adela disembarked in Melbourne a lonely, if stoic, figure. I felt that in another country, she wrote, I should find my feet and, happiness, perhaps.13
Adela embarked for Australia on 2 February 1914. How was she to know she was sailing away from a continent that was lurching towards war?
The historian Paul Ham subtitled his book 1914 ‘The Year the World Ended’. ‘The democratic ideals of a more humane and tolerant world, expressed in art and literature’, Ham argues, ‘were to be throttled, ignored or postponed.’ With the onset of World War I, the forces of conservatism fought back against a generation of radicalism, idealism and experimentation. The ‘party was over’.14
Certainly, the Edwardian suffrage era was over. Emily Wilding Davison would be the suffragettes’ first and last martyr. With the announcement on 4 August 1914 that Britain was at war with Germany, Emmeline Pankhurst called the WSPU’s final truce. She suspended all militant activity. The government responded by unconditionally releasing all suffrage prisoners. The sacrifices required for the deliverance of God, King and Country trumped the sacrifices of women for the cause of their own freedom.
Emmeline had utter faith that, in exchange for their war work, British women would be duly granted their citizenship rights. Millicent Garrett Fawcett had a different interpretation of Asquith’s motivations: the war gave him a ladder down which he could climb in renunciation of his former errors.15
And climb down he did. It was the service of women in World War I, not suffrage activism, that was the official rationale for passage of the Representation of the People Act 1918, which granted British women over the age of thirty the right to vote, enfranchising 8.5 million of them.16
For Australia, the cataclysmic event that ostensibly marked the end of British women’s political bondage precipitated the birth of a nation. Or at least a new national narrative. It was, we are told, Australia’s participation in World War I—and specifically, the Gallipoli campaign—that proved our worth in the eyes of the world. Australia’s confidence as a nation can be attributed, it is said, to its performance in the Great War. This narrative has established the tendency to equate patriotism with military service, rather than with national traditions associated with progressive reform and democratic rights.17
In 1982, historian Bill Gammage proposed that ‘in the twentieth century, no Australian, for or against Anzac, has ever discerned or proposed a stronger national tradition’.18 Coming so soon after Federation, his argument goes, the Gallipoli campaign provided a ‘blood sacrifice’ in which nationhood, grit and grief were inextricably intertwined. As Gammage explained, here was the moment in which anxiety about whether Australians ‘could help Britain in war as much as they expected Britain to help them’ was finally cast aside: for Australia had excelled ‘on the stage of the world’.19
John Hirst has nominated this blood-soaked event as ‘the occasion when by common consent Australians threw off their colonial self-doubt and believed themselves to be a nation’.20
Gammage’s remark exemplifies a trend in historical scholarship to explain why Australians were (and are) so powerfully drawn to the Anzac legend as a primary foundation story. But Hirst sought to justify why it should naturally be so. ‘People,’ he asserted, ‘are stirred into hero worship by daring, recklessness, self-sacrifice, grace, a master player or a master spirit.’ And just in case we were unsure quite whom Hirst might have had in mind as risk-taking nation-builders, he adds: ‘For obvious reasons it has been mostly men who have been able to achieve heroic status.’21
But as we have seen, five years before Gallipoli the Commonwealth of Australia asserted that it was ‘bound to achieve greatness’ because of its democratic agility and proficiency, its sociopolitical courage and grace. By 1914, Australia was riding a wave of optimism, confidence and hearty self-belief to which the events of 1910–11, both at home and abroad, had greatly contributed. As early as 1908, an English observer noted that Australians feel themselves a chosen people, different and superior from any other race.22 And not long before the outbreak of World War I, sociologist Clarence Northcott’s study of the Australian character depicted a people marked by courage and initiative, with much in their thought and outlook…that is spirited and idealistic even if their philosophy of life is a reckless optimism.23
Northcott was mostly describing a people whose mettle had been tested not by war, but in peace. Until 1914, the Australians had known war only at Britain’s side against the Boers in South Africa. (Also, of course, on the contested territories in their own country against Indigenous owners and occupants whose sovereignty had never been ceded. But at the turn of the twentieth century, these brutal killing fields of the Australian frontier were not discussed in martial terms.) In 1908, the ARGUS reported the Reverend Doctor Bevan’s confidence that the Australian Ideal was rooted in the practical activities of common life and in the critical moments of national life. His example? The striving of women for effectiveness in making the franchise a reality.24
Before 1914, before Gallipoli, young Australia had burst onto the global stage not only promising hope for a better future, but also delivering evidence of how that future might be gained. In the social laboratory of the antipodes, Australian women and men had together come up with an experimental formula for robust democracy and had tested its results. Trial had not produced error. The sky had not fallen. The proof of concept was there for the world to see and to emulate.
Up till February 1914, the WSPU’s VOTES FOR WOMEN was still running a regular column called In Australia, Where Women Vote, giving updates of measures improving conditions for women and children, equal pay cases, opening of the public service employment to women and the Maternity Allowance: a payment from general revenue direct to all mothers, married or not, as remuneration for and recognition of the rights of citizen-mothers. The Maternity Allowance was described by one politician at the time as a grave and great departure from the existing order of things. Andew Fisher justified it on patriotic grounds: Maternity is more dangerous than going to war.25
Fisher may have had in mind the words of a particular American journalist. In 1906 the BOSTON WOMAN’S JOURNAL recognised that Federation in Australia was the moment that democracy won such an historical triumph as still echoes around the world.26 The men who had worked so arduously to enshrine women’s suffrage as a cornerstone of the Federation ideal have served their country more efficiently in peace than the soldier does in war. But they could [not] have achieved much if it had not been for the women.
Andrew Fisher is remembered now for saying that Australia would follow Britain into war until the last man and the last shilling. Who recalls that he also told a captive London audience that a true democracy can only be maintained honestly and fairly by including women as well as men in the electorate of the country?27
Or that two weeks later, Fisher’s wife marched at the head of a contingent of proud Australians, sheltered in the lee of a huge banner that proclaimed to the world that Australia, not Mother, knew best.
Seen in this context, Gallipoli—with its militarist narrative of youthful sacrifice, not youthful optimism—was not the birth of the nation. It was the death of the nation we were well on the way to becoming.28
So how did Dora Meeson Coates’ banner go from being the artistic and political jewel in the crown of the Women’s Coronation Procession (not to mention Australian patriotism) to being tucked away in a dimly lit corridor of Parliament House?
Well, not all British suffragettes or suffragists laid down their swords when their nation went to war. They continued to hold processions and outdoor meetings, where banners were carried, including by Australian women living in London. After Vida’s return, Margaret Hodge and Harriet Newcomb kept the ANZWVC alive, organising contingents of expat marchers with their native banners.
Another who continued to agitate for women’s rights was Sylvia Pankhurst. On 11 April 1916, she organised a demonstration of East End women in Trafalgar Square. They carried banners, including one that read: Coercion is not Government. Thousands came out to watch the procession of the Workers’ Suffrage Federation, who were protesting against the restriction of popular liberties in England (much as Vida Goldstein and other Australian suffragists, unionists and religious groups were leading anti-militarist campaigns against the Wartime Restrictions Act in Melbourne and Sydney). The crowd that day, suspicious that the event was motivated by the peace movement, rushed the procession the moment it entered the square. The angry mob seized and tore up the banners and flags, snapping poles while processionists were jostled and speakers were showered with bags of flour. The suffrage demonstrators retreated and the crowd, led by some Australian soldiers, sang the national anthem.29 Australian newspapers reported the affray, where Australian and New Zealand soldiers broke up a ‘human suffrage’ meeting dousing women with red and yellow ochre.30 An eleven-year-old girl was pelted. Particularly unruly Anzacs were arrested.
Dora’s banner had been on show once again in Hyde Park in 1912, but that was its last reported airing. Perhaps the increase in militancy after the wonder year dissuaded Dora (or George) from high-profile engagement in suffrage activities. Perhaps, once the truce was called in 1914, Dora found alternative avenues for the expression of her morality and worldview. Perhaps the destructive behaviour of Anzacs in London made her fear for the integrity of both her artwork and her country’s reputation.
Whatever the cause, Dora Meeson Coates’ magnificent banner slipped from view for the best part of a century.
Then, in the mid-1980s, the Fawcett Library, a British collection relating to women’s history, including a large collection of suffrage memorabilia, was clearing out its storerooms for renovations. On the top of the library shelving—a pragmatic rather than ideal situation31—they found an uncatalogued banner folded up, gathering dust, and sent it to be restored. They had no idea of the banner’s provenance, but the object was distinctive. Banners made for the great pre-war suffragette processions were generally embroidered, whereas this one was painted, oil on hessian. Perhaps for that reason the conservators botched the restoration, rendering the canvas banner solid.32 It could no longer be folded or rolled up, and the library had space neither to store nor exhibit it. Across the top of the banner was written Commonwealth of Australia. They alerted Dale Spender, an Australian feminist scholar living in London.
Spender wrote to the Commonwealth government, making a case for the banner’s ‘return’ to Australia. The timing was good. Australia would be celebrating its bicentenary the following year and, as Susan Ryan, then minister assisting the prime minister for the status of women, noted: there are very few items available for display which record women’s part in the early political process of this country. The Banner would, I believe, go some way towards filling this obvious gap.33 It was not just ‘herstory’ that suffered for lack of concrete memorials. The banner represented no less than the material heritage of Australian democracy itself. This was the bigger picture.
It was rare (unheard of!) for the library to part with such material, Spender wrote,34 but eventually a deal was struck. The Women’s Suffrage Banner, as it was now referred to, was purchased from the Fawcett Library by the National Women’s Consultative Committee, with funds from the Australian Bicentennial Authority, brokered and managed by the Office for the Status of Women, as a bicentennial gift to the women of Australia.35
James Mollison, Director of the National Gallery of Australia, was excited. It had been thought until now in artistic circles that the banner had been lost or destroyed, Mollison wrote.36 (Meeson’s talent as an oil painter and portraitist was well established, but no one in the art world had viewed her most ambitious work.) The ACTU requested to borrow it for its ‘Art and Shared Belief’ exhibition at the Royal Exhibition Building, to be displayed next to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party.37
Interestingly, many feminists were less thrilled—mainly on the grounds that the bicentennial celebrations themselves were indefensible. Dear Sisters, wrote Di Lucas of the ACT to the NWCC, collusion with the ABA is collusion with invasion and genocide. I support the sovereignty of the Aboriginal people and regard the 1988 ‘celebrations’ as an exercise in crass commercialisation and nationalism, colonialism and racism.38 Sue Hird, writing for the Women Against Racism Collective, highlighted the fact that by celebrating 200 years of white invasion of Australia you fail to acknowledge the aboriginal people.39
NWCC convenor Edith Hall replied that the banner hand-back activities would not be celebratory. We are emphasising the need for ‘eternal vigilance’ to protect those gains achieved, she assured Di Lucas, and for renewed vigour and involvement of all women in political action, with the aim of equality for all.40
The issue was the appropriateness of using bicentennial blood money to buy the banner. None of the sisterhood pointed out that it was only white Australian women whose victories the banner celebrated. Nationalism, colonialism and racism were as integral to the banner’s history as to the history of the Commonwealth itself.
*
The banner arrived in Canberra on 12 February 1988, eighty years after it had been created in a light-filled Chelsea studio. On 8 March 1988, International Women’s Day, Prime Minister Bob Hawke officiated at a historic handover ceremony at the Lodge. In front of a crowd that included politicians (mostly female, if the photographs are anything to go by), journalists and members of Dora Meeson Coates’ family, Hawke unveiled the banner, which hung from the rafters of a portico in the garden. The sun beat down. Senator Margaret Reynolds, who had done more than anyone to broker the handover, was draped in white linen, beaming. In his speech, Hawke referred to Australian women’s role in the forefront of the achievement of franchise rights.41
The official rationale for the twenty-five-thousand-dollar public spend was broad: the banner would remind and inform women of their political and social history and the need for continued and renewed involvement in the political process. Margaret Reynolds’ interest was more historically specific, though just as politically pointed. The banner, she said in an OSW press release, represents the efforts of Australian women to assist in achieving female suffrage in Britain. Australian women led the way at the turn of the century and are still at the forefront of international progress in raising the status of women.42
While women at the garden party lined up to have their photographs taken next to the banner, protestors rallied outside the Lodge, proclaiming that the banner’s purchase by the ABA had sullied the work. Take the Taint Off Dora’s Paint, demanded one of the protestors’ banners. Mrs Tanya McConvell was quoted: the banner should not be associated with white supremacy in Australia.43 She was clearly unaware that the history of women’s suffrage was intimately bound to the history of white imperialism.
After the fuss of the handover on 8 March 1988, the banner was whisked off for conservation—the National Gallery of Australia expected the work to take two weeks. Over a year later Margaret Reynolds began to make enquiries as to its whereabouts. In October 1989 it was located in a storage unit. No conservation work had yet been carried out. But eventually the National Museum of Australia agreed to conserve the banner, and the architects for the new Parliament House proposed it be permanently exhibited in the foyer to the main committee room, where it would have a close conceptual relationship with the historical period of the Opening of Parliament paintings located there.44 Later advice recommended it be placed next to Tom Roberts’ painting. The final say went to the textile conservators who recommended that, even housed in a humidity-controlled display case, the banner would need to avoid strong spot-lighting. They proposed the left-hand wall of the public pause space leading to the committee room foyer. The banner had finally found its home.45
In 1988, Dale Spender was commissioned by the Office of the Status of Women to prepare a banner educational kit for schools. Her brief was to explain the connections between the British and Australian [suffrage] campaigns taking care that the Australian campaign is presented as a direct response by the Australian women to their own circumstances and not simply as derivative upon the British movement. Stress was to be placed upon non-violent tactics and all means taken to explain the context for militant strategies. In other words, the message was to be nationalist and moderate.
Spender fulfilled her commission. The banner, she explained, depicts a female figure of ‘Australia’ urging the figure of ‘Britannia’ to trust the women—as Australia, where women already had the vote, had done. Nothing to startle the horses here. But she went further in arguing the banner’s importance in Australian and indeed world history.
The Commonwealth of Australia Banner depicts women’s pride in their responsibility and commitment. Its presence on the British suffrage scene points to their international awareness and participation. The Banner is a symbol of women’s success, for to have convinced men that they should give away their exclusive power and grant votes to women was one of the greatest political victories there has been.46
Perhaps Spender’s interpretation, emphasising the global over the local, was not patriotic enough. Perhaps it was too in-your-face feminist, pitching the message in terms of historic sex antagonism, rather than as a benign history tutorial. There is no evidence that the kit Spender was contracted to write was ever printed or distributed. The story of Australian women’s leadership in an international movement of radical political consequence was left to rest in a yellowing folder in the archives: abandoned like the banner itself.
In 1988, Bob Hawke presented Dora Meeson’s banner as a gift to the women of Australia. The official rationale for purchasing it was to remind and inform women of their political and social history. But the story that the banner tells is not just Australian women’s story. It is Australia’s story.
Of course, an object’s meaning is not static, frozen in time. What the banner meant in 1908 when it was made is different from what it meant in 1911 when the wife of the prime minister rallied beneath it. What it meant in a fading Edwardian England or a freshly minted Australia is not necessarily what it means now. How it was used then is not how it is used now. It was once a dynamic object, made for a purpose, to be paraded, carried aloft, raised inspirationally above a crowd. It is now a static object, rigid, behind glass, never to touch the wind. But perhaps in both instances—in its active and passive state—the banner can function as a means to mobilise, to prod, to hector; even to lecture.
Dora Meeson Coates’ extraordinary gift is the ceaseless material reminder that nation-building is not the exclusive prerogative of men (or indeed any other faction of society). Nor is the story of the suffrage movement relevant only to a few academic purveyors of ‘women’s history’. In creating the banner, Dora unwittingly created a founding document, telling us as much about the aspirations and identity of the young nation as the still-wet constitution itself.
The banner represents a particular historical moment but asks a timeless question: what does it mean to count? Or, indeed, to count for nothing? To stand up and be counted, as citizens and as individuals?
Is there a legacy, ‘an object lesson’, for our present lives? As a new form of Australian citizenship led to the creation of the welfare state, can women—who historically have understood the challenges of being treated equally—continue to advocate for a world where justice is prized?
At a moment when the Anzac legend threatens to subsume Australia’s collective identity and purpose, and when democratic and human rights the world over remain persistently under attack, Dora Meeson Coates’ beautiful banner is a reminder that before the Sons of Empire died on the beach at Gallipoli and rebirthed a nation, we were the Daughters of Freedom: and this was the story of us.