Dinner With the Devil: Women and Melbourne's Queen Vic: Their Pride and Shame, Joy and Sorrow

Preface

In 1896, smack bang in the middle of Victoria’s worst economic Depression, the small community of Melbourne’s earliest women doctors asked every woman in Victoria to donate a shilling to fund a general hospital. In this hospital needy women and children would be treated by women doctors. At the time a seamstress earned around 14 shillings a week – or less – for 60 hours of work and landlords in Collingwood charged as much as eight shillings a week for two small rooms in poorly drained houses.

On 26 February 1896 an estimated 1,181,796 people lived in Victoria. Of them 378,593 were women and too many suffered for the want of medical treatment from a qualified woman doctor.

The Shilling Fund raised £3162, 11 shillings and 9 pennies, enough to buy a small building in the central business district of Melbourne. Circumstances have changed too much to draw exact comparisons but a building of similar proportions today would cost several million dollars.

As the hospital grew in size and stature and wove itself into the fabric of the city, the people of Melbourne came to know it, with affection, as the Queen Vic. You can’t go far in Melbourne without running into someone who was born there, or a woman who went there for the birth of her own child, or a nurse who worked there, or someone who was once a Queen Vic patient.

Nearly a hundred years later in April 1989 a woman I knew rang me at my Flinders Street workplace in central Melbourne.

‘The government says it’s going to sell the Queen Vic buildings,’ she said. ‘They have no right and I’m part of a campaign to stop them. Those buildings belong to the women of Victoria.’

Her name was Christine Gillespie. Like me she was a feminist. We knew each other from the time she taught English as a Second Language in the TAFE system and I coordinated the adult literacy program at the Council of Adult Education (CAE).

Christine told me that the Premier, John Cain, had agreed to meet the campaigners the next morning and they wanted representatives of women’s organisations to wait outside his door while they met him, to show him that the campaign had wide backing from women.

‘Will you come along and represent women in adult and vocational education?’ she asked.

I had passed by Queen Vic’s wrought iron fences unnumbered times on my way to and from places like the State Library, the University of Melbourne, the Melbourne City Baths, and Flinders Street Station, without setting a foot inside the grounds. The red brick Queen Vic buildings were etched into my mental map of the city but I knew nothing about them. I wasn’t born at Queen Vic. I had no children of my own there. I didn’t know why the government had closed it down.

Next morning at 11.00 I milled around with thirteen other women outside the closed wooden door of John Cain’s offices at 1 Treasury Place. The five women inside John Cain’s office, plus the fourteen outside, represented about a quarter of women’s organisations in Victoria at the time. We were a snapshot of the reasons why women join together to do advocacy and support one another – single mothers and their children, rural women, midwives, domestic violence, health services, politics, education, information, contraception, housing, different ethnic backgrounds, peace, justice, and young women. The organisers claimed that our collective membership numbered 1.5 million women.

The right, the left, and the middle-of-the-road had gathered to lean on the Premier because they wanted to honour the women doctors who founded Queen Vic in 1896 and return at least some of its assets to the women whose grandmothers and great grandmothers donated their shillings to set it up. The bi-partisanship intrigued me. Was their common cause strong enough for the long haul? Could women rise above ancient tribal loyalties and rejection of ‘the other’ that left and right political cheer squads rely on?

When the meeting finished, Sharon Laura, a women’s liberation activist, Barbara Cameron from the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEA), Gracia Baylor, from the Victorian branch of the National Council of Women (NCW), Jean Tom from the Country Women’s Association (CWA), and Christine Gillespie filed out of the Premier’s office, their faces serious and determined.

I watched Gracia and Sharon speak forcefully to television crews on the flagstones in front of 1 Treasury Place and admired their conviction. The Premier had offered them nothing – except a challenge to give him conclusive proof of their legal and moral claim on the buildings, and a look of utter amazement when they told him they wanted to set up a women’s centre in the three Queen Vic towers fronting Lonsdale Street in central Melbourne.

Christine gave me a press release, a short history of the hospital, and an account of the campaign to date. I took these documents back to work and read about the Shilling Fund for the first time. The doctors who asked for the shillings were first-wave feminists who campaigned for the right of women to vote, to train as doctors, and to be treated by women doctors when they got sick. I accepted Christine’s invitation to support women in the health sector that morning because she asked and because that’s what feminists did. We turned out for each other when we could. But the story of the Queen Vic doctors and the women who donated their shillings in hard times to found their own hospital drew me into the campaign. I wanted all women who lived in Victoria to know the story and be proud of it.

A month later the Liberal and National Party coalition, with a majority in the Victorian Legislative Council, backed the campaign and refused to pass legislation to free the Queen Vic site up for sale. After some hard-headed bargaining with the Cain Government, the campaigners accepted Tower F on the corner of Lonsdale and Russell Streets for the use of women, and the legislation went through. This was by no means the end of the story. To create an actual women’s centre in the tower would take years of effort.

When Joan Kirner replaced John Cain as Premier in 1992 she persuaded the property developer to swap Tower F for the larger, more beautiful, central Tower E, now a valued heritage building dwarfed by glass and steel neighbours. It houses the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre (QVWC). The centre is a great disappointment to many women. As a wholly owned and operated government organisation it fails to honour the vision of the women doctors who founded the Queen Vic and the women who campaigned for the hospital to be saved. As a result it’s had a hollow heart from the day the Kennett Government opened it for business.

I waited twenty years for someone else to interview the leaders of the campaign and bring their stories together into a connected narrative that would explain our disappointment. From time to time women would say things like this: ‘Young women could learn from our experience.’ Or, ‘The women appointed by the government to run the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre need to know why it’s such hard going to make anything of it. You could write that story.’ I resisted. I was busy on other projects. Then, in 2012, Christine Gillespie died from breast cancer. Her death spurred me to action. The story might never be written with the detail it deserved unless I wrote it myself.

I set my other work aside and brought my records of the campaign up from the garage into the house. They stirred up old resentments about the way women I worked with were sidelined and silenced. Troubling questions about why we failed surfaced again too. Still reluctant I drew up a list of women to interview and started to track them down.

A few weeks into the process Sharon Laura came to my house and sat down at the kitchen table for an interview. I was a stranger to her. The day I saw her come out through the Premier’s door in 1989 was her last day as an active campaigner for Queen Vic. She’s lived in Sydney ever since. Before she answered any of my questions she had two for me.

‘Who are you, and what are you doing this for?’

I took the first to be a question about my politics. The second was a version of a question I use myself: whose interests will be served by your project? I got the point. If she didn’t like what I said, I wouldn’t get an interview. Without Sharon the tower would have been razed along with the rest of the hospital yet all the accounts of the campaign going around were silent about her. She was entitled to confront me about my intentions.

When Christine rang me and I joined the campaign, I was forty-five years old, a member of the Fitzroy Uniting Church, the Collingwood branch of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), the Network of Women in Adult and Further Education, and the Victorian Adult Literacy and Basic Education Council. I had worked at the Council for Adult Education (CAE) for nearly thirteen years and was now a senior manager, preoccupied with its uneasy position in the pantheon of TAFE providers and in the burgeoning field of adult education. My name was Helen Gribble. I changed it to Helen Macrae in 1994. I thought of myself, amongst other things, as a democrat, a Christian, a socialist and a feminist. The complexities of these ideas milled around in my head like the women outside John Cain’s office and I felt a particular affinity with Constance Stone and Annette Bear-Crawford, prime movers in the foundation of Queen Vic, when I realised that their lives were framed by a similar set of ideas.

I didn’t tell Sharon any of that. Instead I told her about the five years of voluntary effort I contributed to the creation of a bi-partisan women’s centre in the tower, how they ended in failure, and how they ended my membership of the Australian Labor Party. I said that I wanted to tell the stories of Victorian women who campaigned over more than a century to win a better health deal for women and that as much as possible I wanted to tell the stories in their words.

Then Sharon told me about a book she roughed out herself in 1994. ‘There’d been approaches that I should write something. I found myself so angry in the writing of it that I couldn’t complete it. I’m still pretty pissed off by things that happened. I had to let it go.’

Her question about my political identity triggered a kind of existential uncertainty in me along the lines of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poem Who am I? Bonhoeffer juxtaposed the external calm and dignity other people saw in him with the fear and confusion of his inner life. The outcome of my work with Queen Vic Women’s Centre Inc left me angry and confused. I wondered if it would be the same for me as it was for Sharon. Could I finish this story? The Melbourne writer, Helen Garner, read one of my early attempts to find a narrative voice and told me to get over my anger if I wanted to write it well.

Anger wasn’t the only stumbling block. Anyone who sets out to tell a story that has so many participants, all with their own point of view, can run into trouble.

Many years after the events described in this book, Sharon Laura was at a dinner in Canberra, seated next to a woman she thought of as a loyal foot soldier for the Labor Party. Labor was out of office in Victoria.

‘This woman had a good reputation,’ Sharon said, ‘and she was presented at this function as the person who had campaigned for, and saved, the Queen Vic. She talked about the great campaign, the great struggle, the great victory. She said it was their campaign. They’d saved the Queen Vic tower. She didn’t even know my name. Oh, she said when I told her. I was beside myself.’

Barbara Cameron stepped around this problem in her short version of the story, published in 2005 as The Host Behind: The Campaign for a Victorian Women’s Centre. She wrote in the preface that she wanted to acknowledge feminist selflessness amongst the campaigners by making us anonymous. Sharon said, ‘I saw Barbara Cameron’s book and thought, well that’s Barbara’s story. I knew it wasn’t the whole story but no story ever is.’

My version isn’t the whole story either. Far from it.

As I pieced the saga together from interviews, documents and newspaper accounts I came to see that we all did the best we could according to our lights. And the more I found out about the contribution of other women and what motivated them, the more my anger fell away. A change in understanding brought about a change in my response.

The story of Queen Vic has given me a deeper appreciation of Melbourne as a city.

I wanted to draw attention to the reasons why a general hospital for women emerged in Melbourne, and to give a good account of the greatness of Melbourne’s culture and institutions, and some glimpses of the women and men who built them.

Most of all I wanted to heap praise on Victoria’s community-based women’s organisations.

They stand in the same democratic tradition as the suffragist doctors and community leaders who founded Queen Vic. Those suffragists had a clear idea about how to involve ordinary women in the struggle for the vote and in decision making about Queen Vic. They used the Shilling Fund to give ordinary women a stake and a vote. Donors had membership status and could vote at annual general meetings. The campaign to get the vote for women, and the founding of Queen Vic, are outstanding examples of problem-solving, self-governed, locally-based activism, autonomous from the state. Some argue that this sort of activism offers democracy its best hope of renewal.

Contemporary community-based women’s organisations are owned by their members too. The women who work in them have an impressive grasp of democratic governance and use it with flair and imagination to advance social peace and justice.

The consensual, democratic bedrock of Victoria’s community owned and managed women’s organisations exposes the weakness of the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre. The government owns that centre. Women don’t. Women can’t be members. They can’t vote. They can’t be part of its decision making. If women from a wide political spectrum could own and run a great hospital, surely women in the 21st century can be trusted, not only to own and run a women’s centre but to create a great institution there.

It’s a pity that successive governments haven’t asked women’s organisations what they could do with the Queen Vic tower if ownership was handed back to them. But maybe it’s too late now to ask them?

Part 1.

The history of Queen Vic, 1896–1986

Giants of women’s health

On a spring Saturday in 1896, nine years after the first women graduated as doctors from the University of Melbourne, eleven women met at a private house in Gipps Street, East Melbourne. At 40 years of age Constance Stone, who called the meeting, was the oldest. The youngest was 22. They were all medical graduates and they made the decision to open a general hospital for women. Their Victoria Hospital would be open to all women and children of the colony who were in ‘poor and distressed circumstances’.

The doctors filled in a roster for three days a week and set up a management committee amongst themselves with Constance Stone as president, her sister Clara as treasurer, and Gertrude Halley as secretary. To start the budget Constance Stone chipped in £2 sent to her by a private patient from Queensland ‘for the benefit of women’ and they opened straight away in a borrowed church hall near the corner of Queen and Latrobe Streets.

Earlier that week the Women’s Hospital – previously the Melbourne Lying-in Hospital – weighed up three candidates for the position of assistant resident – two men and one woman. The woman was Gertrude Halley, one of the eleven at the meeting, and they knocked her back. Gertrude Halley wanted to be a surgeon. To realise that ambition she needed to work in a hospital.

The eleven doctors in alphabetical order and with their ages were:

Lillian Alexander (35)

Amy Castilla (28)

Freda Gamble (25)

the sisters Jane Grieg (24) and Janet Grieg (22)

Gertrude Halley (29)

Bertha Main (23)

Helen Sexton (34),

the sisters Clara (36) and Constance Stone (40) and their cousin Mary Stone (31).

They took the Latin translation of ‘for women by women’ as their motto – Pro feminis a feminis – because they aimed to give ‘poor women the opportunity of being treated by their own sex, and in the presence of women only.’

That same Saturday – 5th September, 1896 – bike riders enjoyed yellow wattle in full bloom by cycling to Doncaster. Some of the most active men and women made it as far as Warrandyte on roads in excellent condition. On that Saturday you could have chosen to go to the races at Caulfield, the Essendon versus Collingwood football game at Victoria Park, or the last day of the Royal Agricultural Society’s show at Flemington. The day before twenty-five women horse riders competed in the show’s high jumping contest under a dull and threatening sky. Mrs Bird (formerly Miss Bonzio), the first to go round, had a bad fall. Luckily her horse didn’t land on top of her.

Factory workers and sales assistants worked all day. Parliament had just approved a weekly half day holiday as part of the Factories and Shops Act. The Act aimed to remove the worst examples of sweated labour, places where men and women worked for long hours at low wages in disgraceful conditions.

Would the holiday be on Wednesday or Saturday? Debate swept the city and swept many of its citizens into lively public meetings. The mayor of Melbourne held one for ratepayers in the Town Hall to push for Saturday afternoons. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Thomas Carr, moved the motion for Saturday to a crowded public meeting of ratepayers. The Rev Dr Charles Strong supported him and the motion was carried.

Charles Strong came from Scotland to be the minister of Scots Presbyterian Church in Collins Street but ran into trouble with them over his liberal theology. Most Melbourne Presbyterians would have crawled to Warrandyte over broken glass rather than share a platform with a Roman Catholic. In the end he resigned.

The wider Melbourne community loved Charles Strong and many Scots Church parishioners left with him to set up the Australia Church in Russell Street. Among them were Isabella Goldstein and her daughters of whom Vida was the eldest. In 1894, along with Isabella and Vida Goldstein, he became a foundation member of the National Anti-Sweating League, calling for a minimum wage and the end of sweatshop factories. The League’s treasurer was the courteous and conservative Alfred Deakin, destined to be Australia’s second Prime Minister.

On Friday evening 4th of September the Brunswick Town Hall was packed with local people. They greeted Sir Graham Berry, Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, with prolonged cheering. Saturday was the natural day for the holiday, he declared, because it wouldn’t break up the working week. No other parliament in the world had introduced such an advanced reform and care should be taken to make sure the reform was permanent. The crowd cheered him again and passed a unanimous motion for a Saturday afternoon half-day off. Brunswick shopkeepers had signed a petition in favour of the motion – though they took more profit on Saturday afternoons – because that was in the best interests of their employees. Not a view shared by all 21st century residents.

Earlier in the week a good sized audience had gathered at Cliveden, a palatial mansion finished in 1888 for Sir William and Lady Janet Clarke. Their guests watched a performance of The Parvenus – a parvenu being a person from a humble background who has rapidly gained wealth or an influential social position. Melbourne had quite a few parvenus in 1896. The evening raised a substantial sum towards the establishment of a proposed infectious diseases hospital.

The Clarkes brought a team of craftsmen over from Florence to give authenticity to their mansion’s Italian Renaissance style. It had 28 bedrooms, five bathrooms, accommodation for 17 servants, looked out over the eastern suburbs from the place where the Hilton stands today, cost an astounding £182,000 to build and was the epicentre for the social lives of Melbourne’s elite.

The Passing Show was a column of The Argus for fifty years, written by a succession of witty and intelligent journalists, all called Oriel. The day Queen Vic was born Oriel poked fun at the ‘pirates’ of the New South Wales Parliament. He mocked them for lining their own pockets and ignoring the pleas of the unemployed. In modern times piracy among members of the New South Wales Parliament has persisted. And elsewhere.

The portly vice president of the Royal Agricultural Society got off lightly, but we are meant to think him ridiculous, and even obsequious, for beaming at Lord Brassey, the colonial governor of Victoria, when that august personage visited the show grounds.

Then Oriel really cut loose. The Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works had just connected the city’s first toilets to the sewerage scheme. He compared the chairman to a crowing bantam, boasting about his achievements to Lord Brassey while the governor put up with water underfoot and an ‘inundation of sewage from above.’

Still the water party formed an admirable opportunity of explaining to the public what a magnificent body the MMBW really is – a point which has hitherto not been generally recognised – and we know now on the assurance of the chairman, that every time the pipes go wrong, and the plumbers are called on, future generations will praise and bless ‘the giants of these days.’

Perhaps many of us do feel vaguely grateful to the forefathers who gave us sewerage but only a handful know enough to praise and bless the giants of women’s health who met at Constance Stone’s that day.

Those eleven women might have noticed another report in The Argus that day. The irascible Minister for Agriculture, Mr Taverner, MLA for Donald and Swan Hill, had met a delegation from the Victorian Dairymen’s Association (VDA) the day before.

At the meeting Mr Wightman from Alexandra objected to the term ‘mixed butter’ being stamped on butter boxes because that meant ‘butter and margarine’ to Londoners.

Mr Taverner pointed out that New Zealand had changed their butter export regulations without adverse results.

‘I don’t care about New Zealand,’ said Mr Wightman. ‘They have women’s suffrage there and all sorts of things.’ Some of those present laughed.

‘You don’t believe in women’s suffrage?’ asked Mr Taverner.

‘No.’

‘I suppose you have suffered enough,’ said Mr Taverner, drawing more laughter.

Mr Wightman wouldn’t have cared much for South Australia either because on 18 December 1894 the South Australian House of Assembly passed an Adult Suffrage Bill. The right of women to vote and stand for Parliament in South Australia was gazetted on 21 March 1895 and women had already voted in South Australia by the time Mr Wightman was mocked by Mr Taverner.

The doctors who met at Constance Stone’s house believed in women’s rights and women’s suffrage. Like Mr Wightman they knew that the New Zealand House of Representatives passed an Electoral Bill in June 1893 that gave the vote to both Māori and Pākehā women.

The colony of Victoria had an early appetite for democracy. Separation from New South Wales was proclaimed in 1851 under a red gum in the Botanic Gardens, cut down in 2015 because it was ringbarked and killed by unknown persons. Luckily seedlings from the tree are planted all over the state in school grounds.

In November 1856 Victoria got a constitution and in the following year, free and responsible government with two houses of Parliament. Work started on Victoria’s impressive Parliament House at the top of Bourke Street in December 1855.

The appetite for democracy did not extend to Indigenous men and women. By 1851, a mere 17 years after the first white settlers and their stock landed illegally at Portland in 1834, the only areas of the colony not in white hands were in remote north-west and south-east districts. Tribes resisted the takeover of their lands but they were overrun by armed and determined Europeans. The Aboriginal population sank from an estimated 50,000–100,000 in 1834 to fewer than