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I thought as women we might as well grab the podium and be up here and make our statement that women's place is everywhere, so here I am. Welcome to all of you, I would like to acknowledge firstly the Aboriginal people, the Eora people and thank them for the care they took of this land when it was solely in their charge. I would also like to acknowledge, we have with us this afternoon, Sandra Nori who is the state member for Port Jackson which is our own seat here in Leichhardt. Welcome Sandra. And welcome to councilor Alex Murphy, who is a Leichhardt councilor over here. And a very special welcome to Eva Cox and Shannon Simons. And it is wonderful that we can have them both this afternoon and welcome to all of you. It's a great pleasure for me to finally get to this point, this was an idea we had well over a year ago and as is often the case we put our own projects aside while we get on with other things, but we finally got to the point where we have a post card and we can now officially launch it. So it is a great pleasure to at least to have got to this point. The aim of the project the "Significant Women's Postcard Project" was to acknowledge and celebrate the work of women on International Women's Day, the work that women have done to make the lives of other women better. I think there are many women out there who toiled to make the lives of everyone better, but I think it is particularly important that we acknowledge women who are prepared to get out there and be an inspiration for other women to fight for the rights of women, and to encourage all of us to do the same. And of course no better time to do it than International Women's Day. We are very lucky here in Leichhardt to have a great many talented and enthusiastic and very capable women. And as a local government area I think we are blessed more than most, we've a great number of those women. And I felt that it was important too that we acknowledge local women, and of course some of the women we are acknowledging here are known throughout Australia for what they have done for us other women, but we particularly wanted to acknowledge the efforts that they have made and the contribution they had made because they come from here. I was on 2SER FM "Skirt Programme", earlier this week and they were interviewing me for this project and about International Women's Day and asking me if I thought International Women's Day was still relevant, and was a necessary thing to do. And I guess I had to say sadly yes it is! There are still many things that feminists have to do, I think women would like to do to help other women and make the lives of other women better. In terms of independence it has been for a very long time that middle class women, or women form higher income brackets have always had a lot more independence than women from lower income brackets. Now unfortunately this is still pretty much the case, while there are probably many of us here today who started our lives in what we would consider a working class background many of us are now considered middle class, although in my own mind I'm still a working class girl. Many of us have been able to make that leap because of the work of feminists in the past and present. We have been able to get from the point where we can have careers we can do many things and that's a wonderful thing, but there are still women from low income families and low income brackets who now have the privilege of being able to do all of the things, all the caring and go out to work. So I think sadly there is still more to do in that regard. There is also still much to do in terms of women's incomes, and I know particularly Edna Ryan, was very enthusiastic writer for pay equity and women's pay rates have improved but they are now at the point where they are beginning to fall further and further behind and we have some studies released just in the last week or so that show that. So the struggles are still there, the battles still to be fought. I could go on and on and some say I do, but that isn't what we are here for today. What we are here for is to celebrate, to celebrate each other and to celebrate what many of the women here today have done for each other and for their broader community. I will tell you a little about the project, and what we did, was sometime last year - many of you probably came - we had an afternoon tea where we launched the idea, and asked people to nominate women. And we advertised the local papers and we had a very good response. We sent out lots and lots of applications and we got fourteen nominations and we then had a panel who had the difficult job of selecting four women, because we didn't think you would be able to see their faces if we put all fourteen on a postcard. So that panel had a very difficult job and what they had to do was select the four women who would appear on this first postcard and most of you have seen who those four women are. They are ... Eva Cox - Edna Ryan - Shannon Simons - Maybanke Anderson And I think there are profiles of those women on the back of the card, and also on the back of your invitations and you can see that they have all contributed a great deal but they have all done quite different things, while heading toward a similar direction. All from different eras, but all have had an association with Leichhardt, and that is something I am very proud of and I am pleased that we could get this project up and going. So I will now call on Eva Cox who has agreed to say a few words to you all this afternoon to come forward and do so. |
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Hello
everyone,
