Culture Victoria transcript
Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage
Mary Crooks (Victorian Women’s Trust) What we decided to do here at the
Women’s Trust was to try and celebrate suffrage in a range of really interesting ways,
and so we determined to have three public forums throughout the year, and…and on
top of that, we determined to come up with something really, really special and
memorable.
Let me give you Kavisha Mazella, for the first public airing of Love and Justice.
[Applause; Kavisha Mazella singing]
Mary Crooks We commissioned Kavisha Mazella, who is a much loved Melbournebased singer, to compose a women’s anthem.
[Kavisha Mazella singing]
Mary Crooks It’s a very poetic and powerful statement about what women did back
in the suffrage era and where we’ve come from and where we’re still to go.
[Kavisha Mazella singing]
Mary Crooks It was very important for us to ground ourselves quite a bit at the
beginning of the Suffrage Celebration Year, so that we…we actually had a good
strong feel for what had happened back in the suffrage movement…who its leaders
were, what they did, and so on. So we undertook a fair bit of research, and I suppose
one of the things that happened through that is…you can’t help but gain this
enormous respect for the big players…the big female players…at that time, and the
thousands of ‘little women’, we might say, who worked to secure the vote for…for us.
I think through doing the research and grounding ourselves…in the past, it makes me
realise how much more work we need to do to put this kind of history on the public
record, because, really, there were women, like Vida Goldstein, for example, who
had enormous reputations internationally, and yet, apart from the fact that there’s a
Federal seat named after Vida, there’s very little really public evidence about the
huge role that she played, and what an iconic figure! I think if Vida had have been a
bloke, her name would be on peoples’ lips in terms of having a really important place
in Australian history.
So I’ve found, I think, that the Suffrage Year has…has been a tremendous affirmation
and a consolidation, in terms of women’s politics and their activism.
[Women singing]
Mary Crooks It invigorates women. I think it actually says to women “strength to our
bows, let’s continue and let’s even push harder to achieve what we think makes for a
better society”.
[Kavisha Mazella and women singing; applause]