Described as ‘a woman for all seasons’ Barbara van den Broek was a registered architect, town planner and landscape architect, as well as a person committed to lifelong learning.
A founding member of the Queensland Institute of Landscape Architects in 1965, she later served terms as secretary, and as president from 1973-75.
Margaret Feilman OBE was Perth’s first female town planner. She also had a successful career as an architect and landscape designer and was an early advocate for identifying and protecting built heritage.
A founding member of the Western Australian Town Planning Institute in 1950, she was also – in 1959 – a founding member of the Western Australian branch of the National Trust of Australia.
South Australian architect Marjorie Constance (White) Simpson became the first female Life Fellow of the state chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects in 1993.
She and her architect husband Peter Simpson worked for the Commonwealth Department of Works in Sydney and then in Adelaide. They designed their own home in both cities; their commissions included design and documentation of the Woomera Rocket Range in 1951.
Judith (Moreau) Macintosh graduated from the University of Sydney in 1944 with honours in architecture, winning several major awards that showed her early brilliance.
The first woman to receive the University Medal in architecture, her plans for a modernist, curtain-wall skyscraper office building won the University’s Sulman Prize for Design. The architectural plans for this building have now been recognised as being astonishingly progressive for their time.
Margaret Keitha Findlay was the first registered female architect in Tasmania and the first woman in Tasmania to qualify as an associate of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects,becoming a member of the Institute’s state council. In 1944 she became the first female architect employed by the state’s Public Works Department.
In 1945 Margaret Findlay was appointed Instructor in Architectural Draftsmanship at the University of Sydney, the only female academic at the school, working there until her retirement in 1970. As the department grew she became responsible for an entire group of instructors.
Nancy Lorne Allen registered as an architect in 1932; in 1935 she set up a practice in Perth with WG Bennett.
Her designs including the heritage listed Manjimup Infant Health Centre (1946) and Paxwold House, Lesmurdie (1957).
Eleanor Beresford (Grant) Cullis-Hill qualified in Sydney as an architect in the 1930s and was one of the first women to run a solo architectural practice.
Working from her home office she successfully combined a long-term, busy design business with the raising a large family. Eleanor Cullis-Hill’s work is well represented by houses, domestic renovations and school buildings on Sydney’s northern suburbs, as well as in the Southern Highlands of NSW.
Architect Cynthea Mary Teague became the first woman in the executive level of the Commonwealth Public Service in 1964.
During her long public service career she was involved in many projects around Australia, including armament factories, schools and housing in Darwin, the Springvale Hostel in Melbourne, overseas diplomatic accommodation, and Commonwealth office buildings in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Darwin.
In 1971 Cynthea Teague was awarded an MBE for her services to the Commonwealth.
In a long and varied career Mary (Mollie) Turner Shaw played many roles in architecture: designer (especially of interior fittings), project manager, public works architect , pioneer architectural librarian and historian.
Though she downplayed her success as an architect, she was a leader in opening new pathways for women architects.
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Winsome Hall graduated from the University of Sydney in 1928, then moved to England in the early 1930s where she worked on several large scale, modernist projects that received major awards.
In the mid 1930s she worked with Eric Andrew on the design for the Manly Surf Pavilion, an elegant, modernist structure which won the Sulman Award in New South Wales in 1939. Her architectural portfolio of over 40 years covered a wide range of public, private and commercial work. Like many of her contemporaries, however, Hall Andrew’s overall contributions to the built environment have not been fully recognised.
Elina Emily Mottram, a Brisbane trained architect, opened her own practice in 1924, the first woman architect to do so. At the time of her retirement in 1975 she had become the longest practising architect in Queensland.
Elina Mottram also studied landscape architecture, in 1967 enrolling at Queensland Institute of Technology in the state’s first such course.
Heather Sutherland’s legacy is readily seen in Canberra’s earliest suburbs, where she and her husband Malcolm Moir designed houses between 1936 and 1953.
In the 1930s theirs was an adventurous architecture, ‘overtly modernist and avant garde’. In a city barely ten years old where conservative domestic styles were more evident, their work added a new character.
Melbourne architect (Edythe) Ellison Harvie specialised in hospital planning and project administration, including the planning of the layout and interior schemes.
Ellison Harvie contributed to hospital projects in almost every Australian state, including Melbourne’s Mercy Hospital in East Melbourne (1934—36) and the original four multi-storey buildings of the Royal Melbourne Hospital (1936-41).
In 1938 Ellison Harvie was the first woman to graduate with a Diploma of Architectural Design. In 1946 she became the first woman Fellow of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects.
Western Australia’s first woman architect, Margaret Pitt Morison’s career spanned more than 64 years as practitioner, educator and historian. She registered as an architect in October 1924 and worked and stiudied in Melbourne for the next four years.
In the 1930s she worked on the Perth buildings the Myola Club in Claremont, the Adelphi Hotel, the Karrakatta Club and the Emu Brewery; in the early 1940s in partnership with Heinz Jacobsohn she designed Perth residences including the Marginata Flats and a substantial house for herself and her father in the suburb of Dalkeith.
Ellice Maud Nosworthy was a practising architect for almost 50 years, graduating in 1922.
In the earliest cohort to enroll in the new architecture course at the University of Sydney under Leslie Wilkinson, she registered as an architect in 1923.
Her work included many houses; additions to the Women’s College at the University of Sydney; childcare centres for the Sydney Day Nursery, the Nursery Schools Association and the Karitane Mothercraft Society; and housing for the Kuring-gai Older Peoples’s Welfare Association.
Australia’s first female academic in architecture, Eileen Good was appointed a demonstrator in the Architecture School of the University of Melbourne in 1924 and a lecturer in 1949. She taught at the University until her retirement in 1961.
Eileen Good was also the University of Melbourne’s first woman graduate in Architecture in 1920; she later observed that she had wanted to study engineering but found this impossible for a woman student.
Beatrice May Hutton became Queensland’s first woman architect when she was accepted as an associate member of the Queensland Institute of Achitects in March 1916. She worked on many buildings in Rockhampton and also in Sydney, where she moved in late 1916. In Sydney she worked as an architectural assistant. She was registered in Sydney in 1923.
Beatrice (always called Bea) Hutton’s first design was probably the 1915 house in Spencer Street Rockhampton for the manager of the Bank of Australasia. Domestic architecture was her chief focus as she thought it was there that women architects could have a particular impact.
Florence Mary (Parsons) Taylor OBE made history when she became the first woman to qualify and practice professionally as an architect in Australia. Later she was to become a strong advocate of town planning as an important element in the built environment.
Her enduring legacy lies in the contribution she made for over fifty years as a major publisher, writer and editor in the fields of architecture, construction and town planning.
Architect Marion Lucy Mahony Griffin was among the first women to prove that women had the intellectual capacity, creative talent and administrative ability to contribute to the profession of architecture, previously regarded as the right of men.
She was the second woman in the United States to gain a degree in architecture, awarded by the Boston Institute in 1895 and in 1898 the first woman to complete registration examinations to qualify for the practice of architecture.
