Australia has more statues of animals than women, so these bronze ladies are very important

The first two women elected to the Australian Parliament on September 24, 1943 have been sculptured from an image captured in a photograph held in the Australian War Memorial.

Now they stand tall and together on the north-east corner of the King George Terrace verge bounding the old House of Representatives just by the Ladies Rose Garden and adjacent the Centenary of Women's Suffrage Commemorative Fountain.

The mighty bronzes carry the life-like casts of two important figures. Enid Muriel Lyons, born in 1897 in Smithton Tasmania, the first woman elected to the House of Representatives and the first woman to serve in a federal cabinet.

Serving for eight years from 1943 and representing the UAP and the Liberal Party, she had been best known as the wife of Joseph Lyons, prime minister of Australia.

As the Australian Dictionary of Biography records, the mother of six children by 1922, Enid played a leading part in Tasmanian election campaigns, talking politics, especially to women, in the practical language of "pots and pans and children's shoes."

In her first pitch for office - in the 1925 election standing for the seat of Denison she lost by a mere 60 votes. That campaign was run during a whooping cough epidemic infecting five of her children and with her 10-month-old baby dying of pneumonia.

By the time she entered the Commonwealth Parliament in 1943 she had 12 children.

Enid's statued walking partner Dorothy Margaret Tangney was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1907 and was the first woman elected to the Senate in 1943.

She too had tried to be a politician before, unsuccessfully contesting the state seat of Nedlands for the Australian Labor Party in 1936 and 1939. She failed in 1940 to gain a seat in the Senate representing Western Australia but, in the Labor landslide of 1943, she was unexpectedly elected to fill a casual vacancy.

A single woman and 36 years old, she became Australia's first woman senator, representing Western Australia for the Labor party from 1943 to 1968, a formidable 25 years of service.

It is remarkable that it took over 40 years for women to be elected to the Australian Parliament given women had the right to vote in and run in Commonwealth elections from 1902.

Beyond Lyons and Tangney's earlier runs, we can even return to 1897, before the Commonwealth was formed, to see the very first woman run for political office in Australia.

Catherine Helen Spence nominated to be elected as member of the Constitutional Convention to draft the Australian Constitution, held in her hometown of Adelaide, with South Australia giving women the right to vote and be elected in 1894.

Spence refused to be included on a party-political ticket and her decision to run as an independent, as well as dirty dealings by male opponents, cost her a seat at the table.

Spence's active citizenship was striking on so many fronts. While not a drafter of the Australian Constitution, her contributions to Australia's democracy are profound.

When introducing proportional representation for Senate elections in 1948 then-attorney-general Dr H.V. Evatt said "the fairest system and the one most likely to enhance the status of the Senate is that of proportional representation."

Here Evatt was repeating Catherine Helen Spence's advocacy from the 1860s seeking to widen the pool of parliamentary representatives. It was advocacy also taken up by Andrew Inglis Clark, and the often-named Hare Clark system of proportional representation should be called the Hare Spence system.

By using Spence's system of proportional representation, the Senate has been more diverse than the House of Representatives.

It is telling that the Australian Electoral Commission reported that 191 out of 421 (approximately 45 per cent) nominations for the Senate in the election of May 2022 were for women and the current Senate has 43 women of the 76 senators, representing 56 per cent of the Senate.

Women's active citizenship is key to the UN Women's International Women's Day theme for 2023 of "Cracking the Code."

And this needs to be affirmed in the way we represent the contributions of women, in our urban landscapes. The way cities memorialise individuals also reflects on the continuing lack of full gender equality in our society. The dearth of women's sculptures is a reminder of whose work is recognised as worthy, reinforcing how the contributions of women have been devalued and far from planner's minds.

As the work of A Monument of One's Own identifies, Australia has more statues of animals than of women and less than 4 per cent of Australia's statues represent historical female figures.

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY:

The addition of two more women in Canberra's urban space from today is therefore significant - but we have a long way to go in bringing attention to women's contributions to Australia into public consciousness. Presently, a large and compelling statue of Andrew Inglis Clark, a drafter of the Australian constitution, stands proudly on Constitution Avenue in Canberra.

It would be fitting and timely to have standing diagonally opposite him in conversation, Catherine Helen Spence, reminding the public that it was her work that led to his recognition and for everyone to remember her as the first woman political candidate in Australia.

And we should also be encouraging a statue of Ngingali Cullen, a prominent Aboriginal activist who was co-chair of the National Sorry Day Committee. Cullen was one of the three names shortlisted - and the only woman and Indigenous name - when deciding on what to name Canberra's third House of Representatives seat following the redistribution undertaken by the Australian Electoral Commission in 2018.

The seat was named Bean after the first world war correspondent Charles W. Bean and an advocate for establishing the Australian War Memorial - the institution that houses the photograph used to inspire the new Lyons and Tangney statues appearing today. As the War Memorial record of the photograph notes, the King George V Memorial can be seen in the near background. Welcomed and not before time, that precinct now adds the statues of our first two women federal parliamentarians. Let us hope that this further recognition of the role of women represents a new balancing up with more memorials to come as a signal of hope for a more gender-equal future.