AEU and ACT History Teachers’ Association members Becky Gill and Oscar Jolly recently organised a highly successful professional learning session about the award-winning Australian documentary Brazen Hussies, which explores the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The event, hosted at the National Archives of Australia, brought together educators, the film’s director and key actors from the era to discuss the power and importance of teaching the women’s liberation movement as part of the history curriculum.
Oscar and Becky spoke of their experience teaching this new area of study, which explored the importance of this era of Australian history that has long been overlooked. Oscar remarked on the significance of such shifts in the Australian Curriculum. He argued that such developments in the curriculum give history teachers an opportunity to empower our next generation with the knowledge of the past.
L to R: Biff Ward, Elizabeth Reid, Angela Burroughs, Catherine Dwyer, Oscar Jolly
AEU ACT Branch President Angela Burroughs joined a stellar panel comprising ‘living legends’ Elizabeth Reid and Biff Ward as well as Catherine Dwyer, the writer and director of Brazen Hussies. Elizabeth was the world’s first ever Women’s Adviser for the Whitlam Government and Biff, a former AEU ACT member, is a women’s liberation activist and author.
Participants were awed and inspired by the courage, perseverance, and resilience of Elizabeth and Biff and the thousands of women who joined the women’s liberation movement. The enormity of its achievements, securing changes that seem normal and obvious to us now, contribute to it being the most successful movement to date. These included the removal of the ‘marriage bar’ requiring women to resign when they got married, equal pay for work of equal value, free access to higher education, protections for single mothers, access to paid maternity leave and greater control of their own bodies.
Despite these successes, challenges remain and the audience was reminded that rights won can be lost. That’s why it is so important that students understand that the rights of women today were imagined and won by the extraordinary women of the not so distant past.
After the panel discussion, participants were given the opportunity to handle original archival records from the era in a workshop hosted by National Archives. This included ASIO files held on some of the second-wave feminists profiled in Brazen Hussies, as well as letters from Australian women and girls to Elizabeth Reid.
Becky Gill is the vice-president of the ACT History Teachers association and Oscar Jolly is a 2023 HTA Hillary Brettell scholarship recipient.