Australian Women's History

 See new women's history Links added below

 The Victorian Tailoresses' Strike, 1882-83
While researching material to include in Searching for Mary Ann , I looked particularly for published information about women in unions.  Although I didn't actually find anything, I did come across many references to the Melbourne Tailoresses' Strike of 1882-83.  The references, however, tended to be fleeting, and did not satisfy my desire to know more about the women who led the strike.  This prompted me to begin researching the incident myself, and I was intrigued by the events as they unfolded in the Melbourne daily newspapers of the day.  I found that membership records of the union, and the Strike Book were archived in the Butlin Archives, Australian National University - and no true genie would leave a list of names untouched!  I am therefore also preparing an index to the Membership Roll and Strike Book of the Victorian Tailoresses' Union.  This is still a Work in Progress .
 

 Australian Women's Work Exhibition, 1907
Again, while looking for sources containing Australian women's names for Searching for Mary Ann, my attention was directed to a microfiche publication from the State Library of Victoria, containing the program and catalogue of the exhibition.  These fiche contained thousands of names of Australian women who entered exhibits in the competitive and non-competitive sections of the Exhibition, which was held in Melbourne.  Unfortunately it did not have an accompanying index, and I felt that an index would be well worthwhile to enable researchers to properly extract information from the State Library fiche.  The index to the names in the Work Exhibition has now been published on microfiche.  For further details see Lenore Frost's Virtual Bookshop .