- Title
- The activist's archive - Merle Thornton
- Creator
- Dever, Maryanne; Henderson, Margaret
- Relation
- Australian Feminist Studies Vol. 27, Issue 72, p. 221-223
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2012.676759
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- When Merle Thornton and Ro Bognor chained themselves to the foot rail of the front bar of Brisbane’s Regatta Hotel in March 1965 to demand the legal right for women in that state to drink alongside male patrons, their actions marked a new turn in the history of feminism. As Kay Saunders observed three decades later: ‘when you use the term ‘‘second wave’’ it actually started in Brisbane’ (Saunders 1999). In a leaflet distributed in the bar that day, the two women were at pains to articulate that their primary concern was not with the exclusion of women from drinking opportunities; they were concerned with what the legislation symbolised: women’s wider exclusion from public spaces and from public life. They were staging a protest for equal citizenship, a demand that underpinned much of Thornton’s subsequent career as a feminist activist. As she later recalled: ‘What we did at the Regatta represented an idea whose time had come. It was the idea of ending the confinement of women to the private domestic sphere’ (Thornton 2007, 51). We have recently completed a project focused on securing Thornton’s personal papers for the National Library of Australia (NLA). Our desire to undertake this project was driven by recognition that the conditions of possibility for researching the history of Australia’s second-wave women’s movement and, in particular, accounts of the role of activists within it are determined in no small part by the movement’s archival legacy. Her papers represent a valuable addition to the current records of that movement, not least in how they document early grassroots feminist activism taking place outside the more familiar south-eastern axis of Sydney Canberra Melbourne. The project was undertaken with the assistance of Marie-Louise Ayres and Emma Jolley of the NLA, with a consultant archivist, Jane Ellen, and with financial support from the Sidney Myer Fund and the Office of the Queensland Premier. In this respect, it was a model of what converging scholarly, institutional and philanthropic interests can sometimes achieve. The project saw Thornton’s papers professionally processed and boxed in situ at her Melbourne home and a descriptive box listing produced. In addition, we recorded an oral history interview with Thornton for inclusion in the NLA’s collection. When Thornton completes her current work a memoir the papers will be released to the Library.
- Subject
- Merle Thornton; Regatta Hotel, Brisbane; feminism; equal citizenship
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1063984
- Identifier
- uon:17437
- Identifier
- ISSN:0816-4649
- Language
- eng
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