Monday, 6 May 2024
C. ex Coffs, Coffs Harbour
Her Excellency the Honourable Margaret Beazley AC KC

Thank you, Aunty Jenny^[1] for your warm Welcome to Country. I pay my respects to you and to Gumbaynggirr Elders – here on one of the most beautiful stretches of coastal Country in NSW. Thank you for protecting and caring for Country, culture and community over many thousands of years.

 “Giinagay”: “Welcome” - to each delegate here and those watching online.

It is always an honour to be part of the CWA community and we thank you for your invitation to be here with you today. 

Opening the 97^th annual conference in Albury, five years ago, was one of my first official duties. It is a fond memory of a hectic time - I was sworn in as Governor on Thursday and by Sunday, Dennis and I were on our way to Albury, albeit I had to drop into Albury Base Hospital for a few hours having stepped on a wet leaf on a slippery step before leaving Sydney.

We had planned to be at the conference in Newcastle the following year, but it was scuppered by the pandemic. You, however, remained agile, with postal voting ensuring that your essential work was ongoing. Then it was a ‘zoom’ contribution to open the 99^th conference in Bega, and I was delighted to address you face-to-face in Sydney when you ‘cracked the ton’ in 2022.

Last year, I missed you – sending a message from the other side of the globe where I was championing NSW in the United Arab Emirates, as Dennis and I were returning from the Coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla at Westminster Abbey.

Today, having just commenced the 2-year extension of my term, it is again a privilege to open your 2024 Conference with its theme: ‘Building and Binding Communities – The ripple starts with you’, a theme which has been played out on the ground by CWA since its inception 102 years ago.  

In reflecting on the work of CWA over those 102 years, I found myself reaching for your wonderful centenary publication, The Women Who Changed Country Australia.[2]

This, in turn, led me to thinking about women who have changed Australia.  There are those depicted on Australian banknotes, Dame Mary Gilmore, writer and journalist who advocated for the vote for women and both old age and invalid pensions; the convict Mary Reiby, who became a successful businesswoman; Edith Cowan, social reformer, advocate for the rights of women and children and public education, the first Australian woman to serve in any Parliament; and Dame Nellie Melba, whom we all know.  And perhaps we should acknowledge her as the patron saint of non-retirement – something which is almost a mantra for the women of CWA. 

There are others, whose contribution to society sometimes sits shrouded behind the fame of a more famous family member. 

Louisa Lawson, poet, publisher and suffragette springs to mind.  In 1887, she bought the ailing newspaper The Republican. In 1888, she commenced a new publishing venture, Dawn, a newspaper dedicated to advocating for women’s rights, including suffrage, and support for working women, including the availability of childcare.    

One aspect of her story caused me to smile wryly: the Typographical Association, a trade union formed in 1880 which had a life of some four decades, and refused membership to women, tried to force Louisa to dismiss her printers; it tried to get advertisers to boycott the publication and members of the Association harassed her female workers.  With the aplomb of a diplomat, or someone simply used to mediating the squabbles of her large family, she met these attacks by writing, in Dawn, on the benefits of trade unionism. 

Then there are: Jessie Street, suffragette and campaigner, Australia's first female delegate to the United Nations, who ensured a sex non-discrimination clause in the United Nations Charter; ‘Mum Shirl’, Wiradjuri activist, founding member of the Aboriginal Legal Service, the Aboriginal Medical Service and Aboriginal Children’s Services; Germaine Greer, feminist, advocate for sexual liberation, and writer.  Whilst Germaine Greer was ‘more out there’ than those that I have mentioned - or maybe it was that the language had changed - advocacy in the 1970s for women’s rights at least made it difficult for law firms to refuse to employ women, which was a significant problem for us at that time.

Up there in this pantheon is Grace Munro, volunteer, first aid and charity worker during the First World War, an expert horsewoman from Bingara who could drive a buggy at a gallop. The loss of her youngest child to illness while she was away in Sydney getting medical care for another of her four children galvanized her fight to improve the medical care that was available to women and children in rural areas. And so, a star was born – and within a few years, and with the help of others, the Country Women’s Association of NSW.

I will add another name that will be familiar to some of you: Millicent Preston-Stanley, who on 25 August 1925, rose to deliver her ‘maiden’ speech as the first woman elected to the NSW Parliament. She reminded her male colleagues that: “women’s questions are national questions, and that national questions are women’s questions”.^[3]

It is no surprise that she was a compatriot of Grace Munro, and certainly not averse to causing a ripple or two. One of the early causes that engaged her was the high levels of maternal mortality. On the floor of the Parliament, she castigated the University of Sydney for appointing a Chair of veterinary science, with a special focus on obstetrics, before considering a Chair of midwifery. Not surprisingly, Millicent’s speech: ‘Horses rights for mothers’ made its way into the national headlines.^[4]

Of that first speech to Parliament, the Herald wrote that her tongue was a “stiletto ripping into Labor’s policy” and the benches “writhed and squirmed under the lash of it.”^[5]

What all these women had in common was an unstoppable desire to improve conditions for women and to make a positive impact on their communities. From the beginning, that was the ethos of the CWA, and 102 years later, in the language of today, is probably best described as its DNA. 

Listing your achievements over these 102 years is to take an inventory of things which seem so obvious that we take them for granted: 

• The first CWA rest room in Bingara,^[6] founded by Grace Munro; maternity hospitals and baby health centres, the first opened in 1925; the then Flying Doctor being established on a secure footing in Broken Hill with CWA funds;^[7]
• Warning signs erected at railway crossings; aged care facilities in country towns; bus services for country school students; mobile cancer units in country areas – all advocated for in in the 1950s;
• The compulsory fitting of seatbelts in cars, pedestrian crossings in front of schools, more women on juries, better housing on Aboriginal reserves – all debated in the 1960s’ State Conferences;
• The ‘Buy Australian’ campaign to support farmers, compulsory helmets for cyclists, childcare deductions, garment fabric labelling, more women on hospital boards, mobile mammogram units in country areas, compulsory child restraints in private vehicles …

The list goes on. I am told even the yellow and white lines delineating the edges of country roads are a result of CWA campaigning.

Recent ‘wins’ include increased government focus and funding for renewable energies, and medical research; the labelling of the dangers of alcoholic drinks to pregnant mothers, and the removal of the GST on feminine hygiene products, enacted from 1 January 2019.

Issues which remain at the forefront of your work include the accessibility and affordability of healthcare for rural communities; the growing disparity in health outcomes between rural and metropolitan areas; the protection of land and water; access to the digital economy, education and mental health services - all essential for health and wellbeing.   

Then there are this year’s specific agenda items, among them:

• Subsidies for transport to Early Childhood Centres and pre-school education for rural children;
• Universal skin cancer checks;
• Housing for nurses and midwives in rural, regional and remote communities;
• 24 hour policing in country towns; and
• Affordable accommodation to house the growing number of homeless, single older women in our community.

I am particularly mindful of your strong advocacy for women and families experiencing the devastating impact of domestic violence, such as the CWA Awareness Week campaigns for domestic violence awareness and prevention, and the CWA domestic violence roundtable forums in 2020 and 2023 that have been conducted with NSW Government partners and agencies.

The Minister - your advocate, our advocate, indeed, society’s advocate - is here today not only to speak but to listen.

So, is it really scones and tea for which the CWA is famous? Why not?  If Dennis were here, and he sends his apologies, I know exactly where he would be standing right now. But this Conference’s agenda brings me back to what Millicent Preston-Stanley said in her maiden speech: “women’s questions are national questions and national questions are women’s questions.”

You are still building and binding communities, and from your long experience you know that ‘the ripple starts with you’. 

There is a power that we each possess to bring about change in our community. Creating ever-expanding ‘ripples’ of advocacy and action will not only bring the changes that are needed, they will strengthen and unify our community.

Country Women’s Association of New South Wales - for being at the centre, building and binding our rural communities - thank you!

I wish you well over the next four days as you discuss and vote on more than 25 important motions up for debate. This Conference’s ‘ripple’ starts with you.

It is my great honour, as your Patron, to open the 102^nd Country Women’s Association of NSW Annual State Conference.

[1] Aunty Jenny Skinner

[2] The Women Who Changed Country Australia, Liz Harfull, 2022

[3] NSW Parliamentary debates, 26 August 1925, page 369:

https://www.aspg.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Inaugural-speeches.pdf

[4] ibid

[5] Women in Parliament Factsheet: The Advent of a Woman:

https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/news/Documents/WIP_Fact%20Sheet_The%20Advent%20of%20a%20Woman.pdf

[6] 1924

[7] 1938