2025 is the Centenary Year for Society of Women Writers NSW of whom I have been a member for a mere eight years. Celebrations culminated with a lunch in the NSW Parliament House.

There is much to tell of that day. Too much for one blog post, so I will treat this first as a background briefing.

In 1925 a group of journalists from various countries met to explore Australia and to engage in discussions about international relations and press freedom (this summarised from newspaper articles of the day). They were called the Empire Press Delegation and they were attending the Imperial Press Conference.

According to an item in the weekly magazine Table Talk of 24th September 1925 (published in Melbourne from 1885 – 1939),

“When the Empire Press Delegation was in Sydney, women writers of that city intended to do something special in the way of entertaining the women of the delegation, but they were informed by the chairman of the Australian section of the Empire Press Union that it would be quite out of order to do so, as they, as women writers, had no locus standi. This was a shock to the sisters of the pen, who were under the impression that there was nothing wrong with their status, but they took the count and bowed to the powers that be. However, without more ado they called together a meeting of women of the writing fraternity, and during that meeting the Society of Women Writers came into being. Mrs Baverstock (a daughter of the late David Blair, one of Victoria’s most notable newspaper men), and herself the doyen of women journalists in New South Wales, was elected president, and the rest of the office-bearers are women prominent in the press world of Sydney, and so, when next distinguished literary ladies visit New South Wales the new society will be armed cap-a-pie to do them honor.”

What a perfect example of, “Don’t get mad, get even.” 100 years on, who has even heard of the Empire Press Union? (Actually, according to Wikipedia, renamed as the Commonwealth Press Union (CPU) it endured until 2008).

Wikipedia has a brief, yet interesting entry on Florence Baverstock, with reference to her original Vice-Presidents: Pattie Fotheringhame, (Dame) Mary Gilmore, Isobel Gullett and Mary Liddell. These, along with many other equally well-qualified women writers formed the core of the Society whose aims were “to promote the knowledge of literature and encourage Australian women writers; to foster social contact between writers, and to strengthen the ties of interest between Australian and visiting writers.”

You can read more on the website of the Society of Women Writers NSW Inc. https://womenwritersnsw.org/about/the-organisation

For now, let us turn to just one piece inspired by this centenary. There are more. This poem is the copyright creation of member Helen Lyne. You can find more about her at https://helenlyne.com.au/

Society of Women Writers NSW Centenary 1925-2025

At the start of this Society
when women dressed as flappers
already we were rebels,
feminists and rappers.
We dared to smoke in public
and defied the dull convention,
imposed by men, that certain things
a woman shouldn’t mention.

They thought our place was in the home,
cooking, cleaning, washing.
If a young girl had ambition
that ambition needed quashing.
If she chose to be a writer
what publishers expected
was recipes and children’s tales.
Wild passion was rejected.

There’s nothing wrong with recipes
with whisky, rum and wine.
If a tale paints putrid parents
young children think it’s fine,
so we started this Society
a century ago
to write with impropriety
of things we shouldn’t know.

In the 60s we shocked publishers
when with adjectives we said
what a man should do to please us
if invited in our bed.
They also didn’t understand
a woman thought it poor
that her boss could squeeze her bottom
and not break any law.

We’re lawyers, teachers, physicists.
We’re a long way from the War
when we worked for half the male wage
upon the factory floor.
But,
when our books win competitions
we dance in spangled tights
then skip back to our keyboards
still demanding women’s rights.

We’re journalists and playwrights
and some of us write crime,
or sci-fi full of monsters
that slither out of slime.
We write our family stories,
poets flout syntactic rules
and satirists aim the big guns
when world leaders act like fools.

We tackle any subject
like destruction of the earth,
dementia, age and violence,
and our waist’s increasing girth.
We elicit condemnation,
alarm and sometimes mirth
when we write of life’s essentials
like the fun of giving birth.

Our membership’s illustrious
with many famous names
but I won’t mention any
in case someone exclaims
that her name’s missing on the list,
then proceeds to cry and moan
and in my haste to add it on
I might delete my own!

We’re not in it for the money
though money’s always nice.
If a large advance is offered
we grab it in a trice.
Submitting to a publisher
is like a throw of dice.
The cake of fame’s a metaphor –
we’ll take the largest slice.

If a publisher rejects our work
we deem their judgement poor
cos among us there’s the talent
the Nobel Prize to score.
And in our second century
we’ll be working to ensure
we beat all records with our sales
and see our royalties soar!

© Helen Lyne
helenlyne.com.au

As of a week ago, the manuscript for my historical novel, Louisa, is with the publisher, David Reiter, of Interactive Publishing. https://ipoz.biz/about-ip/. It is scheduled for the first half of 2026. I can do no more work on that, so with a bit of luck I will catch up on my blogging. There is more to say about the birthday celebration, plus so many stories of the trip to the USA waiting to see the light of day.

No rest for the wicked! x Garrulous Gwendoline