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COPYRIGHT 2005 Mulini Press
When wanting to know about the women who have lived in my 1850s homestead near Kyneton, Victoria, the food bowl of Melbourne at that time, I found myself wanting to read about other women they would have known. For a time it seemed that Kyneton was a town without women, so buried were they beneath building programmes and the opportunity for 'Capitalists and Speculators' to make a fortune as advertised in the Observer newspaper during those heady years.
Leaping forward sixty years to Thursday January 27, 1920 there appeared in the Kyneton Guardian newspaper a column headed 'In the Public Eye'. The editor devoted two and a bit broadsheet columns to the article, which, as its title suggests, is about those from Kyneton who had enjoyed some recognition, although not necessarily in the town, in professions, politics or for their artistic or sporting achievements. One hundred and forty column centimeters are devoted to the men. Ten centimeters of the third column is found for the women.
Then come the daughters of Kyneton. Most of them found their vocation in matrimony and the rearing of sons--such sons as upheld the honour of the old town at Gallipoli, in France, in Mesopotamia. Some however have carved careers for themselves. Perhaps the most distinguished woman ever connected with Kyneton was Mrs. Caroline Chisholm--the great immigration expert ... She lived in the old store in High street kept by her sons one of whom contested Kyneton boroughs for State Parliament.
The article lists the names and achievements of eleven other women connected with Kyneton, seven of whom were nurses, with a musician, an artist, a Deaconess and a missionary who completed the list.
The 21st century reader might think that the column was written by a man, but it could have been written by a woman. Kyneton, whose name it was suggested in the 1860s be changed to Oxford for its excellent educational reputation, was full of educated middle-class women, who achieved the status derived from the achievements of the men of their families. Any of them could have compiled the list. The most likely woman would have been Barbara Armstrong, daughter of the founder of the Kyneton Guardian (one of the original founders of the Melbourne Age) who wrote and helped edit her father's newspaper after his death in 1908, until close to her own death in 1951. Proud of her home town and its people, Barbara had the contacts, loved the high achiever and thoroughly enjoyed a touch of social reporting as her extraordinarily detailed accounts of 'society' weddings over...
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