Film - Sophie Boord, 'The Great Petition Sculpture', 2008, Creative Victoria

Penelope Lee: There hasn’t been a significant artwork dedicated to women’s history here in the State, so there was recognition that this was pretty much pioneering something, and so it had a magnitude in itself. We were able to bring together quite a comprehensive group – a bipartisan group of women

Susan Hewitt: ..that could inform us and educate us about what the work was to be, or what they could sort of see it to be.

Penelope Lee: They were really adamant that they wanted it in a public space in the CBD, because the suffragette movement was about claiming the public domain. So they wanted it prominent. They wanted people to see this work. It was interesting because what needed to happen was that we needed to find a bit of…some cultural material, which encapsulated something. What really finally sort of struck us was…there was this Monster Petition.

Susan Hewitt: When you saw this 260m of paper all carefully collected on A4 sheets – or it would have been a different measurement at that time – by a number of Victorian women, you know, walking around door to door. So you could actually see the magnitude of the effort and the time required to have put this petition together. We ended up having three concepts in maquette stage. Penelope and I had a number of meetings, initially with the engineer in putting together the final drawings in which the fabricator is obviously going to work from.

Penelope Lee: We knew it was going to be mild steel, but as to how that steel is subsequently supported

Susan Hewitt: …and how it would translate as well…

Penelope Lee: … and constructed and translates, and finishes and such…

Susan Hewitt: So that’s where we were guided by the engineer in obviously making recommendations to the form of steel that would be used – and also under…having an understanding that even though we had the maquette and we wanted the work to be virtually identical to that, there was going to be some limitation.

Penelope Lee: It doesn’t matter how many maquettes you do, until you have the physical reality of something scaled up, you know, you …there is always a sense of “How exactly is this going to work?” I know that I’ve done all my checks and balances; I know we’ve considered everything, but really, what presence is it going to have?

We decided that we would have the work sitting on a bluestone plinth…that emulated the steps of Parliament House. It was a great platform on which to put their primary signage, because I don’t think we wanted the meaning to get lost in any way. And what’s so beautiful is that the way it’s going to be achieved is using an age-old skill of…you know…chiselling into a piece of bluestone. It’s a tradition that’s…that really hasn’t changed over…I wouldn’t…you know…hundreds and hundreds of years, so it’s been a really nice element to see…again, some of these old skills being brought into the work.

Susan Hewitt: So it will read as, 'Referencing the Monster Petition of 1891, this artwork celebrates the individual and collective efforts of Victorian women and their fortitude in claiming the right to vote. It is a permanent acknowledgement of those who united to bring about change.'

Penelope Lee: We had the extra challenge though of actually not having the site determined for this work. We came up with the ideal spot, Susan and I on many evenings, walking around Melbourne, came across this small triangular piece of land at the top end of Collins and Bourke. We had spent some time thinking about site characteristics and it ticked the box on every level. It feels very natural in that environment, I mean it’s commanding, though it’s not intrusive in any way. People can pass it by the tram…you’ve also got the proximity of Parliament Station…a number of pedestrians that walk in and around the work…so that the way in which people can engage with the work is on multiple levels. There is also the opportunity to sit within the park, and probably considering, I know Susan and I would be thrilled to think that maybe in future generations it could ultimately be a meeting spot for people.

Susan Hewitt: Fabricated in steel and bluestone, the work symbolises the strength, the determination, and the courage of Victorian women, and finished in parchment, the work is a testament to their grace, subtlety and ingenuity. In our consultations one emphatic request was made by a prominent ex-Parliamentarian, 'Make it big so the blokes can see it'.

Penelope Lee: Our brief has been to create a lasting public work that would capture and celebrate the immense, but for many, unknown history of women and Victorian suffrage.

Premier of Victoria, the Hon John Brumby: As we’ve heard from Penelope and Susan, the sculpture was inspired by the Monster Petition – the suffragettes’ response at the time to the then Premier’s challenge to prove to the Government, to prove to the Parliament, to prove to the People, that ordinary women did, in fact, want the right to vote – and this unveiling today of this sculpture is a strong reminder, I think, if all that’s been done, and that remains to be done over the next decades and hundred years ahead. So it now gives me great pleasure to formally launch ‘The Great Petition’ by Susan Hewitt and Penelope Lee. Well done!

Film - Sophie Boord, 'The 1891 Monster Petition', 2008, Public Record Office Victoria

Diane Gardiner (Public Record Office Victoria): This is the 1891 Women’s Suffrage Petition, which is one of the most wonderful documents for women’s history in Australia, and especially in Victoria. They stated that they wanted equal status with men, that half the population shouldn’t be without the vote. The women who were collecting the signatures spent a mere ten weeks…it was the most amazing logistics! If you think about it today; no mobile phones, no telephones, and here they were going throughout Victoria and suburban Melbourne as well.

How they were able to achieve it was that they went along the railway lines, and of course, the railway was the labyrinth throughout Victoria. And then they would collate them all, stick them on with glue, old-fashioned glue – flour and water I presume – onto linen and cotton and sew it together.

There’s a lot of research being done on it. This is the Centenary of the Women’s Suffrage Year. I think with this year we’ll learn even more about these women and what they were doing and why they were doing it.

This is a little catalogue done by the Central Goldfields area, and they had an exhibition in which they featured stories from these women who had signed it in that area.

I have a personal interest in the petition because my great-grandmother signed it: Hannah Toole…and we were so excited, the whole family, to find that she had done this. She’d come out as a young woman (she was about 18, I think it was) with her family from Bristol in Gloucestershire, and they had settled in the goldfields. It must have been incredibly tough. A couple of years later she married William Toole and she proceeded to have ten children. I think she knew what it was to want to have some rights! Obviously, from the time when Hannah signed it, she saw tremendous changes: women in the other states gained the vote and then eventually in Victoria in 1908. I think she could appreciate that women had gained a huge amount. They certainly didn’t have those rights in England or the United States. Australia was ahead of its time.

I think about my ancestors because I think there’s a couple of others who also signed it and that was the beginning. We got the vote, but then women still had to achieve so much more. I’m old enough to have started work when we didn’t have equal pay. I was part of the movement to get equal pay for women and equal rights in so many other areas. But, you couldn’t have done it without their work…their dedication…their organisation in the first place.

Film - Sophie Boord, 'The VWT and 100 years of Suffrage', 2008, The Victorian Women's Trust

Mary Crooks (Victorian Women’s Trust): What we decided to do here at the Women’s Trust was to try and celebrate suffrage in a range of really interesting ways, and so we determined to have three public forums throughout the year, and…and on top of that, we determined to come up with something really, really special and memorable.

Let me give you Kavisha Mazella, for the first public airing of Love and Justice.

[Applause; Kavisha Mazella singing]

Mary Crooks: We commissioned Kavisha Mazella, who is a much loved Melbourne-based singer, to compose a women’s anthem.

[Kavisha Mazella singing]

Mary Crooks: It’s a very poetic and powerful statement about what women did back in the suffrage era and where we’ve come from and where we’re still to go.

[Kavisha Mazella singing]

Mary Crooks: It was very important for us to ground ourselves quite a bit at the beginning of the Suffrage Celebration Year, so that we…we actually had a good strong feel for what had happened back in the suffrage movement…who its leaders were, what they did, and so on. So we undertook a fair bit of research, and I suppose one of the things that happened through that is…you can’t help but gain this enormous respect for the big players…the big female players…at that time, and the thousands of ‘little women’, we might say, who worked to secure the vote for…for us.

I think through doing the research and grounding ourselves…in the past, it makes me realise how much more work we need to do to put this kind of history on the public record, because, really, there were women, like Vida Goldstein, for example, who had enormous reputations internationally, and yet, apart from the fact that there’s a Federal seat named after Vida, there’s very little really public evidence about the huge role that she played, and what an iconic figure! I think if Vida had have been a bloke, her name would be on peoples’ lips in terms of having a really important place in Australian history.

So I’ve found, I think, that the Suffrage Year has…has been a tremendous affirmation and a consolidation, in terms of women’s politics and their activism.

[Women singing]

Mary Crooks: It invigorates women. I think it actually says to women “strength to our bows, let’s continue and let’s even push harder to achieve what we think makes for a better society”.

[Kavisha Mazella and women singing; applause]

Film - Sophie Boord, 'Victorian Women Vote 1908-2008', 2008, Office of Women's Policy

Angela Bourke, Office of Women’s Policy: When we first started thinking about suffrage, what we wanted to do was to make it relevant to people today. What we decided to do was to go out with a grant program, just to find out what people actually thought about suffrage, or what does it mean – what does it mean to your community? That gave us a whole range of different projects: research projects (they include a grants program); there’s a fabulous new art installation; there’s been development of curriculum materials. So there’s been a whole lot of different ways to actually think about and talk about what does suffrage mean – what does it mean that women have had the vote for 100 years in Victoria? The amazing thing with the grants was that you actually sort of thought that the response would be interesting but fairly limited. But in fact, what we’ve found is that people responded in all sorts of different ways.

The Art of Suff-RAGE, Ursula Dutkiewicz and Fern Smith Celebrate the Centenary of Women’s Suffrage…votes for women…free newspaper. The Art of Suff-RAGE is a travelling art installation, which travels around all over Victoria through this centenary, and maybe into the future. So it’s the banners…ten banners made by Fern, and 100 ceramic suffragettes. We dress up as roving suffragettes. We have our newspaper and we can also run workshops, which we’ve done…a couple of events so far.

Out Loud and Heard, Gay Hawkes, Dallas Neighbourhood House Association We’ve had people coming and going a bit, but this is the core of the group who are working on the six banners we’re doing, and the stitching and painting and design work that’s a celebration of the fact that women got the vote 100 years ago. We wanted to show that women…you know…were strong and that they were joyful about that.

Bindi Cole: Jirra Lulla Harvey invited myself and another artist called Lorraine Connelly-Northey to create a body of work. We looked at women’s suffrage through Aboriginal eyes and what that meant to Indigenous women and how it affected them. I went away and came up with a number of ideas for images, and then I came back and spoke with Jirra and Lorraine about those again, and then Lorraine went and made sculptural objects that could then be part of those images as well.

Mary Bereux, Office of Women’s Policy: This is a project that was based on the 1891 Monster Petition. We got calico banners and the idea was for them to travel round the State, come back to us and we’d send them out again for people to sign. Every time a banner goes out there’s usually a story in the local paper, so then people read about it and request one. So this one’s from Marion College, and that’s a school in Sunshine, in Melbourne’s west. This is the Certified Practicing Accountant who requested a banner for an event they had. This banner here I just got back this morning and it’s from Ouyen, from their Great Vanilla Slice Triumph.

Angela Bourke: So it really varied. It just shows you, I think, that a lot of these milestones for women are actually still really very much in people’s mind. It’s not just about the past. It’s actually…you know…a lot of these things are being hard fought now.

Film - Sophie Boord, 'An Interview with Bindi Cole', August 2008, Creative Victoria

BINDI COLE: Artist Jirra Lulla Harvey invited myself and another artist called Lorraine Connelly-Northey to create a body of work. We looked at it…at women’s suffrage through Aboriginal eyes and what that meant to Indigenous women and how it affected them. I went away and came up with a number of ideas for images, and then I came back and…spoke with Jirra and Lorraine about those again, and then Lorraine went and made sculptural objects that could then be a part of those images as well.

So what we did is…she made the objects…I used them in the shoots that I did, and then, within the gallery space, both were exhibited, my images and her objects.

One was based around inter-racial…marriage and relationships, and, during the course of kind of looking at that and doing research about that…I discovered that, in fact, you couldn’t really find…well, I couldn’t really find any kind of commercial images of Aboriginal women in wedding dresses. So I thought it would be a kind of a nice twist to do…similar to a bridal shoot I guess, but with a Koorie woman…and Lorraine then created a razor-wire garter, which I just loved because it just...is was very loaded in terms of being married to a white man…how much do you have to leave your culture behind, and how much of that is related to sex and all sorts of kind of interesting, intriguing things that I found very interesting.

Another image was a recreation of an old ethnographic image of a woman holding a baby, and so we had a Koorie baby, but a fair-skinned Koorie baby. I was quite interested in bringing into that theme…that looked at ‘half-castes’ and all of this terminology around classifying indigenous people, because that was another way that you could vote…if you were half-caste and you behaved in a white man’s manner and associated with white people, then you could be considered…not Aboriginal, and you could vote. But if you were half-caste, you would actually be officially classed as half-caste, and if you were, but you then associated more with Aboriginal people than with white people, they would take that classification away and reclassify you as…Aboriginal, and therefore you would have to go back to the missions, therefore not allowing you to vote.

The final image that I created was…looking again at another movement in the 1940s. All the men were off at war and so the women, for the first time, were encouraged to come out of the homes and go to work in the factories and in the fields and keep society running. There was a particular organisation at that time called the Women’s Land Army…and of course women…Aboriginal women did work for the Women’s Land Army, but they weren’t really represented in any way, in fact in every image, it’s always a white woman smiling and herding cows. And so I thought it would be a good idea to kind of reclaim that and stake our part in that history.

Film - Malcolm McKinnon, 'Validating Women's Work in a New Nation', 2008, Castlemaine Art Gallery & Historical Museum

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JANE CAREY: Here we are outside the exhibition buildings, where in 1907 the first exhibition of Australian women's work opened to great fanfare. The exhibition ran for five weeks. It had 250,000 visitors over that period. There were 16,000 displays. And this was a very significant event, if we look at it in terms of women's world history. If we put it on that broad scale, It was quite unique. There had been nothing quite like it before.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

LAURETTA ZILLES: The exhibition was really important, because what it did was it brought women out of the woodwork and gave them an opportunity to show their work to the world and also to each other, because many of these women were probably working away in their own little groups and own little communities, and didn't have the opportunity to actually meet with other women or see other women's work. I think the time was certainly ripe for it to occur, but also with federation and wanting to unite the nation. It was such an important thing for women to have a face and to be able to come out and say, well, this is what we have to offer this new nation.

[APPLAUSE]

KIRSTEN MCKAY: There was the middle class wealth that led to a plethora of interesting crafts being undertaken at the time-- Women taking up China painting, wood carving. And there were those that then took it on and actually made a career of those particular interests. After the federation, there was great nationalistic sentiments throughout music, the arts and design, and everything really diverged on the Australian flora and fauna.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JANE CAREY: The exhibition also certainly served in many ways as a celebration of women's political citizenship. Australian women in all Australian states and nationally had already achieved the vote by this stage. Victorian women hadn't yet achieved suffrage, but they were going to get this the next year, and it was seen very much as inevitable. So it wasn't political in that sense, in terms of political rights. But the very idea of discussing women's work in this way was political at this time.

LAURETTA ZILLES: It was a revolutionary moment, and it was an evolution as well. I think it's really important to revisit history, to go back and see what was achieved and to appreciate what we have now, and to build on that as well. It's a real shame that it did get lost for so long, but it still has relevance today, I think. And I think it's still motivates women that what they're doing is worthwhile, and that it should be shown and should be happy.

[MUSIC PLAYING]