Labor’s first female frontbencher and feminist trailblazer immortalised in Canberra statue
A woman’s place is in the house.
And the Senate. And the cabinet. And anywhere decisions are being made.
Susan Ryan helped make the slogans a reality. As the ACT’s first female Senator, Ryan became the first woman appointed to a Labor frontbench, later becoming the first woman to sit in a Labor cabinet. She was the first woman to be the minister for women. It was a role she didn’t take lightly.
The mark she left on Australia has now been honoured with a statue in the Canberra parliamentary triangle, immortalising Ryan as she addressed a women’s work rally in 1977.
The Lis Johnson sculpture has been placed in the old parliament house’s Senate rose gardens, where the late Ryan’s children remember playing in when they were young. She died in 2020.
In the sculpture, Ryan was wearing what was then the newest women’s fashion – a wrap dress – which designer Diane von Fürstenberg had created only a few months before Ryan spoke at the rally.
Von Furstenberg had been inspired by seeing footage of Julie Nixon Eisenhower defending her father, Richard Nixon, while wearing a wrap top and skirt of von Furstenberg’s together. Von Furstenberg created it as one piece, forever changing women’s fashion. Ryan wore the style often while campaigning for women to be treated equally to men, forever changing the lives of Australian women.
Both are now forever immortalised in Australia’s national capital.
In 1981, as a senator in opposition, Ryan introduced a private member’s bill for a sex discrimination act, which was adjourned without a vote.
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She spearheaded the campaign while in government and in June 1983, introduced the sexual discrimination act legislation into the Senate. The bill that explicitly named sexual harassment as a form of actionable wrong, a first for Australia.
After fending off a campaign that claimed the legislation was a backdoor to turning Australia into a communist wasteland, where women would be forced into labour camps and children raised by strangers in education centres, Ryan and the Hawke government passed the legislation and on 1 August 1984, it became law.
The Canberra Times heralded the start of the world-leading legislation with 264 words on page 17 announcing that from now on “people at work can now hit back at crude comments, bottom slapping and other forms of sexual harassment which can undermine their ability and make their life a misery”.
Ryan would continue fighting for gender equality for the rest of her life, saying in 2017 that it was an injustice she felt in her bones.
“I felt from the youngest possible age that it was unfair, intolerable really, that females were regarded as secondclass citizens,” she said.
“That was going to be the big thing that I wanted to change.”
Ryan is remembered as a champion of justice and her sculpture continues her trailblazing tradition of placing women’s achievements alongside those of men, with the ACT funding it through its “recognising significant women through public art program”.
Last year, Dame Enid Lyons and Dame Dorothy Tangney became the first Australian women to be honoured with a statue in the parliamentary triangle, joining former prime ministers Ben Chifley, John Curtin, Jack McEwen, Robert Menzies, John Gorton, Edmund Barton and Alfred Deakin.
It was Gorton’s sculpture that kickstarted the campaign to have more women and Indigenous people honoured within the National Triangle, after it was pointed out that the inclusion of Gorton’s beloved kelpie-cross Susie Q meant there were now more dogs recognised in the triangle, than women or Indigenous people.