The Women Should Have a Voice Edith Cowan’s legacy of social justice in Western Australia By Toni Church, Museum Curator, Old Court House Law Museum
“The women should have a voice” – Edith Cowan MLA OBE, Inaugural Speech to Western Australian Parliament, 28 July 1921. On 28 July 2021, it will be 100 years since Edith Cowan delivered her inaugural speech to the Western Australian Parliament – the first woman in Australia to do so. Marking this centenary, a new exhibition has been launched at the Old Court House Law Museum focusing on Cowan’s legacy of social justice. “The Women Should Have a Voice”: Edith Cowan’s legacy of social justice in Western Australia commemorates Cowan’s enduring influence in her community, displaying objects loaned by the organisations she established and supported that are still operating in Western Australia today. Edith Dircksey Brown was born on 2 August 1861 at Glengarry, her family’s homestead on a large pastoral station near Geraldton, Western Australia.1 The descendant of prominent colonial Swan River families, Brown and Wittenoom, Edith was raised in a well-regarded family and was sent to boarding school in Perth at the age of seven, after her mother died in childbirth. In 1876, Edith experienced the lifealtering personal tragedy of her father’s hanging after he was found guilty of the murder of Mary Ann Tindall, his wife and Edith’s stepmother. The emotional effect of such violence and the ensuing fight for justice in her early life had a profound influence on Edith Cowan’s later advocacy work.2 On 3 January 1876, Kenneth Brown
shot Tindall, at the culmination of what was later proven to be years of shocking and sustained domestic violence by Brown. Criminal proceedings against Brown commenced from 5 April 1876 before Chief Justice Archibald Paull Burt at the Supreme Court of Western Australia – held in the Old Court House. The trial attracted national attention not only for its shocking content, but also for the rumoured perversion of justice by two hung juries populated by Brown’s influential friends and colleagues.3 The Brown family were wealthy pastoralists, members of whom also served in the ranks of magistrates, and so held power and influence in the colony. Burt’s frustration at this influence culminated in the Chief Justice closing the court at the end of the second trial, selecting members of the jury himself from those in the public gallery before swiftly carrying out the final trial on the same day the former ended: 26 May 1876.4 This third trial jury promptly returned a guilty verdict and Brown received his death sentence.5 On 12 November 1879, Edith Brown married James
Edith Cowan MLA, Member for West Perth, 1922. Courtesy of the State Library of Western Australia 6004B.
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