How to bring into cultural memory Queensland’s suffrage story of the women’s campaign to win the vote, especially when there is not much documentation, is a question Dr Deborah Jordan grapples with.

Conducting a walking tour with the Brisbane Labour History Association, she stopped alongside the statues of Sir Charles Lilley, who first introduced the idea of a woman’s right to vote into Queensland Parliament in the 1870s, and Emma Miller, feminist Chartist and Unitarian who led the way for one-woman one-vote from 1894 to 1905.

By visiting key sites such as the old Trades Hall, the old Town Hall, and the School of Arts, with different walking groups from the Lyceum Club, Brisbane Living Heritage Association and radical feminists, very different perspectives in our long-shared history in creating democracy can emerge.

Click here to read: Deborah Jordan, ‘Writing and walking the history of early women’s suffrage in Brisbane’, Queensland Journal of Labour, No. 33, September 2021, pp. 38-48 (via Informit).