Eleri Harris cleverly combines levity and gravitas in her history of the first women in Federal Parliament.
Two books recognised in this year’s Children’s Book Council of Australia Book of the Year Awards have appeared in earlier editions of this column: Younger Readers Honour Book Sandy Bigna for Little Bones (UQP) and Eve Pownall Award winners Stephanie Owen Reeder and Ingrid Bartowiak for Peculiar Parents (NLA Publishing).
Author-illustrator Eleri Harris was awarded the Eve Pownall Honour Book for A Loo of One’s Own (Allen & Unwin, Australia 2026). The book provides a history of some of the less illustrious aspects of our national parliament and its persistent misogyny/patriarchy.
The text recounts the experience of the first two women elected to Federal Parliament, Dorothy Tangney and Enid Lyons. This was in 1943.
These very capable women entered a parliament which was very much an old boys’ club. However, although other women worked in the building in many capacities, no toilet facilities were provided for women. Astoundingly, it was not until 1974 that the government finally created a women’s toilet!
Eleri Harris has illustrated this interesting history in an Art Deco style appropriate to the time of women’s entry into Federal Parliament, but both the style and tone are also decidedly modern, cleverly combining levity and gravitas.
We are left in no doubt about the contribution (beyond toilets) that these and other women made to our democracy – and indeed how far we are yet to go in this regard.
The CBCA judges describe Eleri’s palette and composition as “confident”, and her take on the period as “irreverent 21st century breeziness”. They say that she brings a “unique blend of sharp observation and sense of fun” to the genre and hope that this continues in a long list of picture books to come.
Irene Wettenhall’s collection of eight poems explores an ancestor’s migration from England and the author’s need to uncover her past.
On the subjects of remarkable women and history, The Mary Poems by Irene Wettenhall (Independently published, 2026) is an affecting imagining of the life and thoughts of the poet’s ancestor, Mary Burgess Wettenhall née Bussell (1809 to 1896).
This delicate collection of eight poems traces key parts of Mary’s life, from leaving her native village of Paul in Cornwall in 1835 with her husband as emigrants to Van Diemen’s Land, to the author’s own voyage to England and Scotland in 2025 in search of her ancestry.
Period photographs accompany the poems and offer a moving expression not only of Mary’s life and feelings as imagined by her current-day relative, but also of the author’s need to uncover her past and consider her own mortality.
Irene has drawn on some family history material in selecting key moments in Mary’s life, but it is the sympathetic touch, the fellow feeling of one woman to another, shown in her words, that lends such power to these word pictures:
Our silver polished, the trunks were packed:
Bibles and hymn books, seeds for a garden
Wordsworth and Austen, the linen
Pressed and folded with lavender,
…
I woke up on the other side of the world.
The poet takes the words far beyond documentary poetry, into a category the works could be classified as. They clearly show Irene’s ability to identify with her ancestor, and with this woman’s hopes and fears as her life changed so radically in the wake of her husband’s war service.
When the Royal Navy scaled down after the Napoleonic Wars, her husband was laid off on half pay and encouraged to emigrate. At the time, the prospects looked rosy, but things turned sour as economic recession hit in the 1840s.
Irene refers us to the words of Jordie Albiston:
One must allow oneself to be moved, to feel the breath, to see the most trivial moments as moments in a life.
And this is indeed what Irene does so beautifully here. And hence, so does the reader. The book is a disciplined collection which perfectly achieves its goal.
Barbie Robinson is co-founder and a content creator for Living Arts Canberra, a not-for-profit media outfit supporting arts and community in the Canberra region and books worldwide through its website, podcast interviews and a 24/7 internet radio station, at Living Arts Canberra.
