In the year since Muriel Matters had showered London with WFL pamphlets from heaven, Prime Minister Asquith had dug his heels in deeper than an Irish bog—and the Votes for Women campaign had stepped up a notch.
Hundreds of suffrage meetings were held in homes, halls and public squares around the United Kingdom every week. Fundraising drives were incessant and profitable, and the funds continued to pour into the WSPU coffers, overseen by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. Meanwhile, the WFL (who had themselves raised over £60,000) staged a four-month rolling picket line of Westminster, hoping to doorstop Asquith. Delegations marched on Downing Street, stones were thrown, windows broken and suffragettes chained themselves to a variety of stationary objects. Scores of protesters continued to opt for prison terms rather than pay their court-ordered fines. By 1910, a total of 450 women had been gaoled. One WSPU prisoner, Miss Marion Wallace Dunlop, went on a 91-hour hunger strike in Holloway after she was gaoled for wilful damage. (This was a spontaneous act of self-denial rather than a co-ordinated campaign—unlike Muriel’s stunts, which had been plotted from above.1) Both organisations continued touring the UK, fishing for new suffragette souls. The storm centre of the warfare waged from East to West, from Lapland to Italy, from Canada to South Africa, was England, wrote one chronicler of the times, in the throes of the revolutionary suffragette movement.2
In late 1909 and early 1910, Muriel and fellow WSPU member Violet Tillard travelled through Wales and Ireland, where they addressed the newly formed Irish Women’s Franchise League, being pelted with potatoes and sods when they weren’t being showered with affection and support. She is an Australian, wrote the Swansea CAMBRIAN after one of Muriel’s anti-Asquith speeches to a crowd of over a thousand cheering enthusiasts, clear-minded mistress of happy phrase, physical attractions, enthusiasm, courage and a sense of humour. The Women’s Freedom League made no mistake in importing her.3
The balance of trade might have been weighted in Australia’s favour (wool and outspoken women cornering the market) but there was no evidence that its example would persuade the government to change its mind on the franchise. Throughout 1909, Asquith steadfastly refused to speak to suffrage delegations or introduce a womanhood suffrage bill. But by 1910, his government was in trouble. At the general election in January, the Liberals lost 123 seats: in just over two years, the Liberal landslide had caved in around Asquith’s tone-deaf ears. With a slender two-seat majority over Balfour’s Tories, the embattled Liberals could only form government with the support of the Irish National Party and the Independent Labour Party. In February, Asquith hinted that his government would introduce a Conciliation Bill, a legislative measure that could lead to women’s suffrage on equal terms with men. Though he wouldn’t be seen to yield to coercion, it was the first time that Asquith had appeared to temper his animosity towards the suffrage movement in any way.4 The WSPU and the WFL agreed to call a truce to militancy while they waited to see the Conciliation Bill materialise.
It was against this backdrop of political limbo that Muriel made a decision. By 4 May 1910, just three weeks after the Australian Labor Party had clinched its world-historic victory, she was sailing towards the Western Australian coastline with her friend Violet Tillard by her side, returning to the sunburnt country she had not seen for five years. I realised, with a tremendous rush of feeling, reflected Muriel as she steamed through Albany Heads, what my own land meant to me, as never before. As she gazed at the approaching shore, she remembered the factors that made Australia what they are…colour everywhere:
In the depth of the sea, the delphinium blue of the sky, the ruddy hillside tracks ascending from rocks a combination of purple and brown. On every side the eucalypt showed its individual form; beneath its shade tangled masses of wild violet, scarlet runner and yellow wattle gorse ran wild…Land of the sun it truly is.5
The Heroine of the Grille had come home. Not to stay; not yet. But for now. And for a very special purpose.
The idea for a lecture tour had first been sparked in the summer of 1909 when former Adelaide journalist Beaumont Smith was scouting the London dance halls and theatres for new acts to bring to Australia. He and his boss, wealthy impresario William Anderson, were mostly signing up pantomime actors, comics and circus performers, but they were interested in anyone who could pull a crowd—and the crowds were swarming in London, Cardiff and Dublin, to see Muriel Matters. So why wouldn’t Australian audiences queue to hear a first-hand account of those unsexed hyenas in petticoats, as the UK’s attorney-general had recently called the suffragette agitators?6 Smith had witnessed the shocking scenes of violence and struggle himself: at one rally he’d seen a policeman on horseback slap a woman in the face in broad daylight, while another woman was assaulted by a protester in full view of an indifferent officer. Why not have the drama recounted by a woman who had not only observed history being made, but also was herself playing a leading part in making it? One Victorian cynic scoffed that bringing a suffragette to suffragists is worse than carting coal to Newcastle,7 but Anderson thought he was backing a winner. Muriel accepted his invitation to mount an Australian lecture tour as soon as her English suffrage work allowed.
For Muriel, this was a (fully paid) opportunity to accomplish what Nellie Martel had been trying to do before her sudden departure from the WSPU: appeal to the women of Australia to help British women win the vote. The women of free Finland have sent their greetings and offered to come over and help their English sisters, Nellie had coaxed in a letter widely published in Australian papers in December 1906. I know Australia will be ready and willing to help… English women are looking to their Australian and New Zealand sisters to stand up for them in this critical juncture of their great battle.8 Now that the militants’ truce had been declared, Muriel had the chance to set her dear, free sisters of Australia straight about exactly what was happening to the less fortunate women of England. She need not embroider the facts with fancy work. She could tell her own story of assault and imprisonment, effrontery and fortitude, to bring home the staggering lengths to which British women must go to win their freedom.
From Albany, it was sixteen hours by rail to Perth, where all of Muriel’s immediate family now lived and where Leonard Matters was waiting to greet his sister. The long train trip gave Violet the chance to gaze out on a landscape so different from any she had seen in her thirty-six years as a devout Quaker—no English green is seen but tones of mystic blue and grey. Muriel had no fear that her friend from the WFL caravanning days would be thrown by the unfamiliar landscape, for Tillie was shot through with an almost daredevil gaiety when faced with situations requiring nerve and set purpose. She might be tall, slender and delicate, with a touch of English reticence to her nature, but they had been in Holloway together, and Muriel knew Tillie possessed the grimmest kind of determination and will. When others were edgy or had grown weepy with strain, she was ever cheerful and calm.9
The train journey also gave Muriel time to reflect. As she listened to the liquid lament of the native magpie and watched the sunrise quicker and fuller than in other lands, flooding the world in flame, she realised that it is useless to expect English friends aboard the train to see or feel as we do. They could admire the stars, cut out of the heavens, so near, so brilliant, but they (Tillie?) couldn’t be touched to the core by the Cross of the Southern Land stretch[ed] athwart the sky.10
After that, there was no rest for Muriel, the Western Australian girl who has become world-famous, as the local press announced her.11 First she attended a Women’s Suffrage Guild reception to welcome her as a representative of the British movement.12 For the women’s rights campaigners of the west, it was exciting to have such a VIP in their midst. They had not been so honoured since Vida Goldstein came to Perth on a speaking tour in 1906. They wasted no time in getting Muriel to address four meetings, at which resolutions of admiration and sympathy for the English suffragettes were passed.
There were many reasons for the general public to fete the woman who had departed from this, her adopted state, so many years ago.13 Not only had Muriel’s impending lecture tour been widely hyped, with papers extolling her enthusiasm, her eloquence, her wonderful, magical voice, but the airship craze had recently reached Western Australia, and inhabitants had seen mysterious lights in the heavens and heard whizzing noise of machinery high over their heads.14 Here was the chance to find out what it was like to fly an airship—and over Big Ben no less!
Rarely, wrote the WEST AUSTRALIAN, is the opportunity given to an Australian woman to become famous as has been given to Miss Matters.15 The Perth DAILY NEWS pointed out that Muriel was as unique as any sideshow performer, having been associated prominently with the militant suffragists in the old country…[she] has had a series of remarkable experiences which few women have gone through.16 The WESTERN MAIL got a little carried away, claiming that Muriel had addressed over two million people in her gipsy van. But all the papers pointed out that Muriel’s lectures would fill an important gap in knowledge about the British suffrage movement, which is comparatively little known or understood by Australians who had had to rely on bare cable news, or the often distorted or misrepresented gossip of visitors ‘home’.17 And those who had already caught a glimpse of Muriel knew that the charming, young, piquante, mistress of satire was about as far away from the old idea of suffrage cranks and vinegar visaged dames with baggy, ill-fitting clothes and ugly knobs of hair as you could get.18 Brains, beauty, stories to tell and pictures to show: no wonder Beaumont Smith had signed her up.
Whereas in England the crowds came to see what a real enfranchised woman looked like, the people of Perth thronged to see a genuine suffragette in the flesh. Muriel’s first public lecture, at the Perth Literary Institute on 19 May on the topic of ‘The Women’s War’, was a runaway success, with eager crowds and positive press reports. Her lecture set the tone for the rest of her Australian tour, becoming a set piece on which she could improvise to suit the city or audience. Over two hours of unscripted oratory, she held her hearers’ close attention.19 Muriel expressed pleasure to be home. She spoke of her initial astonishment when arriving in London to see the undignified and vulgar spirit of some English women, about whom she’d been priggish enough to say: Why do they behave in this way? In Australia we got the vote without these antics. It was only later she realised that justice was not to be had for the asking. The press was against the suffrage campaigners at every turn, she pointed out, and the women of England had been wandering forty years in the wilderness. To whom was the vote denied? Criminals, lunatics, aliens, paupers, children—and women. So long as women are outlaws, Muriel told her rapt audiences, they would be rebels.
She briefly relayed details of the grille incident that had made her famous (for five minutes I told the members what we thought of them), but preferred to dwell on the ten thousand hours that WFL members had stood on the picket line, and the twenty thousand suffrage meetings convened by all societies over the past five years.20 She demolished the standard arguments of the Antis with gusto, eliciting much laughter in lampooning the reactionary old dinosaurs of England. But she made serious and salient points too. To the argument that women should remain disenfranchised because they were not capable of bearing arms, she raised the recent spectre of the war in South Africa.
During the Boer war, 25,000 men fell on the battlefield in the service of their country. In the same period, 25,000 women at home fell and died in giving birth to the future generation. The men marched out with the plaudits of the nation; the women fell without even praise—and with this further difference, that, whereas the men died, the women in dying gave birth to life.21
It was a grim reminder of the reality that faced all women, whether propertied or paupers, at a time when maternal mortality was still the number one killer of women.22 To lighten the mood, she finished the lecture with her display of magic lantern photographs of leading suffragettes, their male supporters and political opponents, the ascent of her airship and other interesting scenes.23
Though Muriel’s lectures—the second one in the series was on ‘The Torch of Feminism’ followed by a third on ‘Inside Holloway Prison’—were generally well received, not everyone was convinced. One journalist pointed out the sheer futility of trying to convince an Englishman that he is wrong: he has the strongest objection to be humiliated, and, when he has attained to any position of dignity, to be ridiculed. Certainly, a system of attempted terrorisation where ministers were henpecked in deadly earnest was bound to fail. He was especially critical of Muriel’s suggestion that for women to cease to be treated as doormats they must engage in a general strike, quoting her most inflammatory line: We won’t be wives, we won’t be mothers, we won’t look after the home. We will just sit and wait till we get what we are entitled to.
If she continued to counsel such tactics, Miss Matters could be rightfully accused of injuring unintentionally a cause to which she had pledged herself in good faith.24
The ‘women’s strike’ idea caught the attention of the Perth correspondent to the BUNBURY HERALD, too.
This Miss Matters made some remarks that read very much like a threat that the feminine ganders would go on strike, and refuse to wash their lord and master’s dirty shirts and socks, or cook his meals and, worse still, would refuse to canoodle or be canoodled.25
Muriel replied with a letter to the editor clarifying that she was speaking of women making a political doormat of themselves by aligning themselves with one political party or another.26 No, she said firmly, the days of petitioning and processing are over. Active resistance, not toadying, was the only means to a result.27
After two weeks of acclimatising and agenda-setting in Perth, Muriel and Tillie left for Adelaide. They made the five-day journey by mail boat—the transcontinental railway was still being kicked around as a political football—and arrived on 4 June, to a warm hometown welcome from the suffrage societies that had been lying in wait to prove to her that her native city has not forgotten her.28 Everywhere she went, Muriel was presented with bouquets of autumn leaves and flowers in the WFL colours of yellow, green and white. Prospective Adelaide audiences for Muriel’s lectures had been treated to reports from the Western Australian press of the woman who dares to be free with her whole heart—free from all preconceived ideas as to how women should work for their cause.29
One journalist who interviewed Muriel couldn’t help but be moved by her love for humanity and her burning desire to help it on towards the attainment of a wider and broader ideal of life in which the two halves of humanity shall strive together for a grander national freedom.30 It was a relief to observers to realise that women such as Muriel, who belonged to the militant wing of the suffrage movement, were neither unwomanly or hysterical. Rather, they had the stuff heroes and martyrs are made of:
they are prepared to sacrifice everything—money, position, friends, reputation—so that they may do something to push forward that which has flashed as a great white ideal across their hearts and lives.
Adelaide residents could not wait to see their very own racially pure Joan of Arc, the woman who had gone to the front rank of the movement and been entrusted with all the most important work.31 But, although each of her three Perth lecturers had been attended better than the last, Beaumont Smith decided Muriel would have only two dates in Adelaide: 11 and 13 June. He took out large ads in the papers, touting her as The Lady of the Grille and That Daring Australian Girl.32
The ad in the CRITIC was sandwiched between competing events including a special production at the Lyceum of pictures taken at the funeral of King Edward VII, who had died on 6 May, two days after Muriel arrived in Albany. Like his mother, Victoria, Edward had been a trenchant opponent of women’s suffrage. The pictorial commemoration of his passing, juxtaposed with Muriel’s lecture, was a fitting montage of the changing times. An accompanying editorial spelled out the position Muriel had assumed in world historic events.
Miss Matters has risen practically to a leadership, and had been entrusted with all the big organising movement. When one thinks that the various women’s leagues, all fighting for the same cause, have a total membership of no less than three millions, one realises the honour conferred upon the Australian girl, and the high esteem in which her power as an orator is held.33
Three million suffragists who mourned the passing of their king, yet looked to his son, George V, as the hope for their aspirations.
A strikingly beautiful photograph accompanied the article: a staged studio shot, with Muriel looking away from the camera towards the light, her open hand held out in a gesture of supple resolve, her lips slightly parted as if about to speak. A huge hat is tied to her head with a broad white scarf. She looks active yet contained, entreating yet endearing.
The publicity worked a treat. A third show was quickly added and the dates for her Melbourne appearances were announced for the end of June. By now, she had a string of adjectives trailing her movements: fluent, expressive, masterful, comprehensive, lucid, racy.34
In her Adelaide shows she warmed up and cut loose, perhaps remembering that she was preaching to the converted in Australia, not fishing for souls. What was the problem of men-made law? she asked the audience. Women don’t count. The speaker repeated that to make sure the audience heard it. Women don’t count. She gave more details of the grille incident, keeping people in stitches with a description of her arrest on the charge of obstruction: One policeman was 6ft 2 in height; the other 6ft ‘And I’—she pointed proudly at herself—‘I was the obstruction’.35
The male portion of the audience particularly enjoyed her flashes of quick humour and her sharp thrusts at men…who chuckled audibly at times at some of her daring hits. A bantering relationship—for, like Vida Goldstein, Muriel never flirted with sex antagonism. Both women had tenuous relationships with their fathers but close and loving alliances with their brothers. And Muriel was also quick to point out that Australian women had got the vote, not because they’d behaved nicely, but because our men had evolved sufficiently to appreciate the work of the pioneer women, who shoulder to shoulder battled with them.
This sentiment did not go down well with at least one (female) journalist, who was old enough to remember that it was primarily due to the untiring energy and womanly work of our grand old lady, the late Miss Spence, that the women of South Australia had been enfranchised—Yet she obtained our privilege without any of the violent tactics resorted to by our sisters of Great Britain.36 Although she was evidently piqued by Miss Matters’ youthful hubris, the journalist agreed that if the suffragists can help our less fortunate sisters then God be with them and aid them in their endeavours.
Muriel’s first two lectures were vivid. But she saved her most theatrical turns for number three: ‘Life in Holloway Gaol’.
Grim descriptions of the privations suffered by the imprisoned rebel women—largely respectable, middle-class women who were supposed to reform prisons, not inhabit them—were a feature of reporting in the suffrage and mainstream press in England. Teresa Billington-Greig recognised that the success of militancy hinged on the modern lust for excitement in the masses…the public loves a drama with lust and blood in it.37 Militancy, argued Billington-Greig, had an advantage over murders and accidents because you could inform the press beforehand when to show up. The same was true in reverse. After the fact of riots, arrests and imprisonments, women were alive to tell their shocking stories of mad bravery.
Muriel now found that her Australian audiences were as enchanted by her account of her time in gaol as any British reading public would be—and she milked it. After recalling the night of her arrest for obstruction, she would step offstage, only to reappear dressed in full prison garb. (I am presuming it is a copy, wrote one reporter, for I suppose even political prisoners are not allowed to carry their uniforms away with them.38) Dressed in her drab sack skirt and ugly green blouse, the broad arrow painted in dull yellow, rough blue and white check apron and dirty white cap, Muriel described in fine detail the tiny, foul-smelling cell with its wooden shelf and sleeping mat, its small ventilator clogged with dust. With a dramatic sweep of her skirts, Muriel revealed her harsh and uncomfortable undergarments and showed her stiff woollen stockings. (Red–and-blue ones like those footballers wear.39) She pointed out that her shoes were made for a woman ten inches taller.
She described the prison routine: rising at 5 a.m., shirt-making, sheet-making, only a bible for company. A male doctor to examine all prisoners. (Miss Matters complained of this especially.) And eventually naked on a stone floor, a wardress asking her religion. Did they ever hear such cant, such hypocrisy, such humbug before? the Wesleyan-raised Muriel regaled her audience. Even the most pious prisoners felt half-inclined to answer—‘No religious convictions’.40 Muriel noted that her prison term was in November, the dreary, foggy November of England. Was it any wonder that her depression and sorrow were pretty real things, as one reporter observed.41 And yet she had not suffered the worst of it.
Muriel told a story. To prove that working-class prisoners were treated more cruelly than their genteel suffragette sisters, Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton had disguised her identity, got herself arrested at a protest rally and subsequently been gaoled. Lady Lytton had been to prison once before, using her title, so she had a point of comparison when she was incarcerated as the ugly seamstress Jane Warton. None of the same courtesies were shown to her as she had previously experienced. When she refused to eat her stale bread ration, she was held down by warders and a doctor thrust a four-foot tube down her throat. (Other women attested that tubes were inserted through their rectums and vaginas.) ‘Jane Warton’ vomited all over her hair, clothes and the walls of her cell, and still she was force-fed liquid through the tube until her stomach was full. As the doctor left, he gave the prisoner a slap on the cheek, not violently, but, as it were, to express his contemptuous disapproval.42 The whole process was repeated seven more times before her true identity was discovered and Constance Lytton was released. As Muriel commented, if the tactics of the militants were vulgar, well, vulgarity seems to be the only way now.43
Muriel concluded her hair-raising description of her incarceration with the revelation that she had come out of gaol a wiser woman. The ordeal had steeled her like no other experience before or since. She kept her eyes and ears open, vigilant for danger but also revitalized for social reform.
If Muriel Matters was ever lukewarm in her commitment to helping British women win the vote, prison had set her on fire.
With the Adelaide leg of the tour successfully squared away, Muriel and Tillie travelled to Melbourne—still the seat of Federal Parliament—which offered a very different opportunity.
Muriel’s intention had never been to simply entertain audiences with her alarming anecdotes and pithy one-liners. (Men are not able to mother a nation as well as father it, was one of her favourites.44) Beaumont Smith may have wanted to put bums on seats, but Muriel wanted to change the course of history by enlisting the sympathies of enfranchised women to help their British sisters. She had told a journalist on her arrival in Perth that people in Australia had little idea of what good a little sympathy from the colonies could do. The mother country, while much loved by her colonial offspring, was arrogant and complacent. It was often a very good thing for England, Muriel noted, when the child turned round and scolded the parent.45
Lectures were not enough: something concrete must be done; some tangible outcome must occur. Melbourne was Muriel’s chance to make that something happen, and not only because it was the federal capital. More importantly, her visit was to be chaperoned by one of Melbourne’s most influential politicians: Vida Goldstein.
For Vida, her entire life devoted to the cause of international feminism, meeting Muriel was the closest she had yet come to standing shoulder to shoulder with a leading suffragette. For Muriel, the impeccably well-connected and respected Vida was the key that would unlock the halls of power. She would not have to chain herself to any railings to get a hearing in the big house. After all the picketing and deputations and rallies and rushing and interrupting required to get close to a politician in England, the openness and proximity of Australia’s MPs was a revelation to Muriel. The ease with which the Australian woman can approach the politician and have their wants attended to, she reflected, is conclusive proof of the power of the woman voter.46 Perhaps not every female voter with an axe to grind could wield it in the face of her parliamentary representatives, but Vida could certainly command an audience. After all, she had been writing many of the members’ speeches and questions for years.
Vida welcomed Muriel and Tillie on the platform at Spencer Street on the morning of 16 June. It was very early, and a dense fog had settled around Melbourne. Muriel was tired from her tedious over-night journey from Adelaide.47 Muriel stepped off the train and watched in amusement as a slight figure of a woman, aglow with energy and enthusiasm, sped towards us with outstretched hands as a breath of spring. It was a great joy for Muriel to finally meet the woman she had read and heard so much about, the Political Grace Darling who had done more than anyone to steer the women’s movement through rocks of party prejudice on either side. It was almost unimaginable, thought Muriel, that this woman had polled over fifty thousand votes in the last Senate elections, when she had just come from a country where women are not even allowed to vote. Muriel felt light-headed. One breathes more freely as a woman for a visit to this country of Australia, she reflected, where women stand equally with men.
On the surface, the two women now bustling out of the station had little in common. Vida: tall and dark, forty-one, private school educated, daughter of the squattocracy and fixture of the Melbourne establishment, who had shared the platform with prime ministers and counted judges, authors and clergymen among her closest friends and allies. Muriel: small and fair, thirty-three, cabinetmaker’s daughter, raised in the bush and public schooled, an aspiring actress turned political street fighter. Vida had used nothing but constitutional means to push forward the case for women’s political equality. Muriel had gone to astonishing lengths to break rules. But, unlike Nellie Martel and Dora Montefiore, they were both native-born Australians, instinctively independent, and both were unmarried. Both were described by the press as having the saving grace of humour and a brain of masculine strength.48 They got along like two peas in a politically charged pod.
Muriel had three lectures scheduled for the Princess Theatre, her most prestigious venue yet. But first, on the evening of Thursday 18 June, she was treated to a welcome reception by the Women’s Political Association, with Vida making the introductions. The venue was Sargent’s Café, which had opened in December 1909 to great excitement and had quickly become a popular dining and musical venue—an alternative to the men-only Savage Club and the alcohol-soaked city hotels. It was the de facto HQ of the thoroughly modern Women’s Political Association.
On the evening of the eighteenth, Sargent’s was decked out in the colours of both the WPA (lavender, purple and green) and the WFL, whose yellow, white and green tricolour was reproduced with golden wattle, chrysanthemums and ferns. Muriel was presented with bouquets and given a rousing welcome. Vida had invited important guests to Muriel’s reception, including the Commonwealth Postmaster-General, the Hon. Josiah Thomas, and the Hon. Charles McDonald, speaker of the Federal House of Representatives. Thomas was a unionist and a Labor member (also a Methodist lay preacher and a teetotaller) who had long argued that the chief reforms for which the Labor Party was duty bound to fight were compulsory arbitration and adult suffrage. Of the two measures, he told a meeting of miners in 1901, the franchise matter was fundamentally of greatest importance.49
Now Thomas listened to the sympathetic speeches delivered by his friend Vida Goldstein and the young Australienne grill-chainer Muriel Matters. A motion was put, to which Thomas spoke in support.
If it was thought that a resolution passed by the Commonwealth Parliament advocating that the women of England should be given the vote would be likely to help the cause, he would be glad to act in the matter.50
Charles McDonald also spoke in fellow feeling with the cause, and Muriel was chuffed to realise that in these two esteemed gentleman she had discovered keen militants.
Who first came up with the idea for a parliamentary ‘resolution’? Who introduced the motion that Josiah Thomas seconded that night?
On 25 June, a week later, an interview was published in the Melbourne WEEKLY TIMES in which Muriel said: Australia could help the suffrage movement in England greatly by getting her politicians to pass resolutions of sympathy with the demand of the women of Great Britain for enfranchisement.51
It was the first time that Muriel had spoken of ‘resolutions’ from politicians: the first practical expression of her desire to see the sensible colonial child slap the petulant imperial parent. Most likely, it was Vida who put the idea to Muriel in the two days between meeting her at the station and feting her at Sargent’s; they may then have sounded out Josiah Thomas before the reception. At any rate, the idea was not a new one.
Vida had used the tactic of soliciting parliamentary support for the British cause once before. In 1907 she collected testimonials from high-ranking Australian officials, including the prime minister and other MPs, and forwarded them to England as evidence that the wide blue Australian sky had not fallen when the Commonwealth enfranchised her women.
The idea of a formal resolution—an ambitious and potentially quite insolent amplification of the previous testimonials—was an idea she had been fostering since before she befriended Muriel.
On Christmas Eve 1908, Vida wrote in her diary that Sylvia Pankhurst had requested a petition of Australian women to put to the British government. External pressure, Sylvia thought, might help to budge a belligerent Asquith. Five days later Vida wrote to her friend and ally Dr William Maloney, asking for his assistance.52 Instead of a petition of women, Maloney asked, why not a resolution of the Australian House of Representatives?
The idea gained no traction. Perhaps Prime Minister Deakin was too timid to act; or unwilling to prioritise the struggles of English women over more pressing matters closer to home; or unable to get support from his conservative coalition partners—if indeed the proposition was ever put to him. But after Andrew Fisher was elected—and Muriel Matters came to town—the time was ripe.
For some reason—a winter cold? exhaustion?—Muriel didn’t complete her scheduled Melbourne lectures. Instead, she and Tillie travelled to Sydney where, almost a month after the luncheon at Sargent’s, she played to packed houses at King’s Hall in Phillip Street. Again, her appearances were heavily publicised, with journalists never failing to lead their articles with the revelation that Muriel did not fit the image of a loud declamatory fighting suffragette.53 Or as one outlet put it: she does not wear white stockings and elastic side boots or even short hair and a bowler hat.54 (Another noted that, despite Miss Matters’ many charms and ingenuity, she had not managed to get within cooee of Prime Minister Asquith.55)
As in the other major cities she had visited, Muriel attracted large and diverse crowds. She gave one special address to the Sydney Labor Council (facilitated by Annie Golding, who had knifed Nellie Martel on the witness stand at the Watchman trial). In introducing Muriel, the president of the council was at pains to talk up the SLC’s record on rights for women, particularly where wages were concerned. When women in the Old Country had the same opportunities as women in Australia, he told the assembled members, they might be relied upon to return a Labour majority in the House of Commons… For that reason alone, apart from its interest in human rights, Labor in Australia must wish the women of Great Britain speedy success.56 It was only three months since Andrew Fisher’s government took office in Australia, and the labour movement was still bullish.
Sensitive to her audience’s perspective, Muriel assured them that the suffragettes were confining their demands to the property vote because of the extraordinary conservatism of the average British man. Adult suffrage had been on the table from the outset in the Commonwealth because the Australians were not so backwards…not so obstinate and pig-headed as the men of Great Britain.57 She pointed out that even before women won the vote in Australia, it would not have been necessary to stage a grille-like protest, for women in Australia wishing to attend parliamentary sittings had always been as free to do so as men…[not] shut up in a monkey cage.58 When the limited franchise had been secured, she reassured the audience, then the British women would go forward and claim equal rights with the men. In thanking her hosts, Muriel promised to convey the expression of Australian Labor sentiment to the Labour Party in the Old Country.
In the last week in July, Muriel arrived back in Melbourne, greeted by unpromising, wintry weather.59 She now completed the public lectures that she’d previously cancelled, adding several drawing-room addresses in Toorak and Brighton accompanied by Vida, who stuck to her new buddy’s side like a thistle. To her familiar trio of lectures, Muriel added new material, including addresses on ‘Prison Reform and Individual Responsibility for Corporate Sin’ and ‘Women as Wives, Mothers and Workers’. In her lecture on ‘The Torch of Feminism’, she mined history to demonstrate that women had always rebelled against their state of subordination, pitting their wits against men’s physical force.60
But it was not the speaking gigs and salons that would make Muriel’s long and wearying journey home ultimately worthwhile. It was what happened at Parliament House on Friday 22 July.
It was easy enough to get the three of them, Vida, Muriel and Tillie, a seat in the public gallery of the House of Representatives that day. Vida practically had a name plaque on the seat closest to Dr William Maloney, with whom she’d forged a working relationship going back more than twenty years. Maloney, born in the Eureka year of 1854, was known for his bohemian style of dress—white silk suit, bright yellow tie, waxed moustache and panama hat—which he’d adopted while travelling in Europe with the artist Tom Roberts. He’d entered the Victorian Parliament in 1889 as the Labor member for West Melbourne, on a platform of socialism, republicanism and women’s enfranchisement. That year he introduced into the Victorian Parliament the first women’s suffrage bill in the British Empire. Now, as the federal member for Melbourne, Vida’s eccentric but loyal ally was about to go into bat for women’s rights again. In the dying minutes of Friday’s session, he used an adjournment sitting to propose that the word ‘illegitimate’ be struck from the census forms.
I, as an Australian, object to future innocent citizens of the Commonwealth being stamped with a brand of infamy which they do not deserve in connexion with the approaching census enumeration. I wish to ask the Minister of Home Affairs if he will take steps to have the word ‘illegitimate’ removed from the census paper.
Mrs. Williams, of Brisbane, a lady whom the Prime Minister, as a representative of Queensland, would be proud to know, has declared that a child born out of wedlock should be described, not as illegitimate, but as the legitimate child of illegitimate parents…I thank her for coining so excellent a phrase, and I ask the Minister of Home Affairs to take steps to see that the census enumeration does not stamp infamy upon hundreds of our Australian units.61
It was a special moment for Muriel, who was not used to sitting ringside as a woman’s perspective was voiced in Parliament—but she was more excited by what had occurred prior to the adjournment. There was a luncheon party at Parliament House that day, to which Vida and Muriel had secured an invitation. There, over lobster salad and chicken tartare, Muriel was introduced to Prime Minister Andrew Fisher.62 She told him of her wish to get resolutions from a number of representative political bodies.63 Three months into his government, Fisher was fending off accusations that his Labor government would be unable to achieve any of its precious socialist reforms. But on this day, Fisher gave Muriel Matters his word. A motion would be introduced into the Federal Parliament shortly.
I have the Prime Minister’s promise to that effect, Muriel told audiences who turned out to see her in the Western Australian goldfields town of Kalgoorlie in September, on a whistlestop tour en route to Perth. Mr Fisher was very sympathetic and he and a number of his Cabinet have been very kind to me.64 So kind and sympathetic, in fact, that Muriel had been asked to stand for parliament as a member of the Australian Labor Party. While flattered, she told Fisher that she considers party government iniquitous and prefers to go on with her work in England.65 In 1910 it was not every day that an actress turned activist was invited to stand for parliament.
As Muriel and Tillie prepared to leave Perth on 12 September, spring was returning a harsh edge to the western sun and the pocket-sized pugilist reflected on a truly remarkable five-month tour. She had been toasted by miners, mayors and ministers of both the cloth and the Crown. She had given speeches to the Socialist Party and the grand dames of Toorak. She had met pioneers like Rose Scott and Annie Golding. Everywhere she went, Muriel was asked to convey sympathy and support to her colleagues in Britain. Resolutions were passed expressing the heartfelt endorsement of Australian citizens for the Votes for Women Crusade—no motion dearer to her than the one Vida passed at the farewell dinner of the Woman’s Political Association before Muriel left Melbourne, that:
this Association always has supported and always will support the brave women who are ready to risk their own lives in the attempt to win for all women the means of self-protection and recognition of the mother as the chief factor in moulding national characters—the only sure foundation of national greatness.66
But most astonishing of all, she had the word of the Prime Minister of Australia that the people’s resolution would be matched by a parliamentary declaration of national support.
Her collaborators would have not only the moral mothers’ endorsement of their aims and principles, but the founding fathers’ too.