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And thank you to the women of Leichhardt for becoming part of this project, and thank you for giving us a chance to represent you all, I am surprised you only got 14 nominees, I would have thought Leichhardt was full of women who should have been nominated and hopefully in the future we can encourage them to do it more, maybe it will encourage a few other local government areas to do it, we can actually footnote many more women who deserve it at least as much as we do. I would like to just say a couple of things about particularly some of our predecessors, which are Maybanke Anderson and Edna Ryan. Maybanke Anderson I read about fairly recently with considerable interest and I think there are some biographies of her. She seemed to be the sort of person that seemed to be doing everything, she was involved in education, she was involved in the Married Women's Property Act she was involved in an enormous range of things. I can remember the Maybanke Kindergarten, I don't know if it is still there down in Ultimo, and I often wondered where the name came from and then discovered what it was. Having been a long term child care advocate I was delighted to see her name there. I wanted to say something particularly about Edna Ryan who died a couple of years ago now and because in a sense, and I've said it before and I'll repeat it again, she was my political godmother. When I was about eleven or twelve I used to go to Girl Guides with Julia Ryan, who is one of Edna's daughters, and on every Friday night I would go round to Edna's place before Julia and I set off for guides. It was a fascinating thing because it was a completely political household. I mean Jack Ryan had a long background, they both had backgrounds, first of all in the Communist Party until Jack got expelled and Edna sort of followed him out, then in the Labor Party many years afterwards. And Edna of course was even then, full of issues around women type stuff, and later on when Jack died, she moved into the city and then moved into Glebe down the road from me. There was a constant flow, and I would get to the phone "Eva have you seen so and so, what are you going to do about this, what are you going to do about that" and I think there were many other women who did that too - she was an amazing fighter for women's rights and I would really like to acknowledge the contribution she made. Shannon is here and I also know about the contribution she made, and she can speak on her own behalf on that one. But I just think it is very important that we do actually remember what has happened. I was also amused when I came in here and started going through the list and realised that the first woman Mayor was Anne Cathman, who went from 1963-68 and then we didn't have another woman until Moira Sheehan, 1995 - here we are in the enlightened area of Leichhardt and we are just only beginning to catch up. Obviously this means for the next130 years we are going to have to have women as Mayors in order to get the balance right. So I think we still have a long way to go, but Leichhardt is a good municipality I think for feminism, people make rude comments about the ghetto's around Annandale, Balmain, Glebe and various other things - there are a lot of feminist activists in this area, a lot of women who contributed in many other ways and I would like to thank them all for the contributions they have actually made and celebrate this day with the rest of you. Thank you |
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Thank
you very much.
