She was widowed at 43, left with 57 pounds in the bank and five sons to raise. Twenty years later, she was running the Australian parliament.
On 9 October 2012, Anna Burke was elected Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives. She was the second woman to hold the office in the chamber’s history. The first, Joan Child, had resigned it twenty-three years earlier. Between them, every Speaker had been a man. Child was ninety-one when Burke was elected. She died four months later.
Joan Child AO was an Australian Labor politician who represented the Victorian seat of Henty and served as the 19th Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives from 11 February 1986 to 28 August 1989. In the parliament’s eighty-five years of federation to that point, no woman had held the role before her.
Table of Contents
| Full name | Gloria Joan Liles Olle (later Joan Child) |
| Born | 3 August 1921, Kew, Melbourne |
| Died | 23 February 2013, Melbourne, aged 91 |
| Party | Australian Labor Party |
| Electorate | Division of Henty, Victoria |
| Speakership | 11 February 1986 to 28 August 1989 |
| Honours | Officer of the Order of Australia (1990); Victorian Honour Roll of Women (2001) |
Growing Up in Regional Victoria
Joan Child was born Gloria Joan Liles Olle on 3 August 1921 in Kew, Melbourne. Her father, Warren Olle, was a postmaster, and the family relocated with his postings, living in the regional Victorian towns of Yackandandah and Beechworth before settling in East St Kilda in 1932.
She won a scholarship to Camberwell Girls Grammar School, did well academically, and by her own account felt socially out of place there. She left school at fifteen and took work as a receptionist.
Her husband, Hal Child, served with the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II. They had five sons: Peter, Andrew, Geoff, Gary, and Roger.
Widowed at 43, Five Sons, and 57 Pounds in the Bank
Hal Child died suddenly in the mid-1960s. Joan was in her early forties with five boys aged between seven and seventeen, a widow’s pension of less than $20 a week, and 57 pounds in savings.
To keep the household going, she worked in factories, shops, and as a cleaner and cook. At a Melbourne knitting mill that employed mostly immigrant women, management had started timing the workers’ toilet breaks with a stopwatch. Child began talking to the women on the floor. The timing stopped.
She joined the Australian Labor Party in 1964, the same year her husband died. She became active in the Union of Australian Women, with a focus on equal pay, and later worked as a liaison officer for Jim Cairns, then serving as Minister for Overseas Trade under Gough Whitlam. That role gave her a working knowledge of manufacturing and trade policy she would carry directly into parliament.
The Division of Henty and the Road to Parliament
The Division of Henty, in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs, had never returned a Labor candidate. Child spent the better part of a decade building a presence there: community outreach, door-knocking, and working with elderly and disabled residents across an electorate the party had no history of holding.
She ran for Henty in 1972 and lost narrowly. When the seat became winnable under the Whitlam government in 1974, better-positioned candidates came forward for preselection. Child fought them off, backed decisively by ALP figure John Button. She won the seat.
Her victory made her the first woman the Labor Party had ever elected to the lower house of the Australian parliament, and only the fourth woman in the House of Representatives’ entire seventy-three-year history. She was, at that point, the only woman currently sitting in it.
Her parliamentary focus was consistent across her entire career:
- Social welfare, particularly for single mothers and pensioners
- Housing policy for low-income families
- Health funding and support for the unemployed
- Opposition to foreign ownership of Australian natural resources
From her own parliamentary record:
“The wealth of a country is not measured by the number of backyard swimming pools, skyscrapers or massive overseas contracts. It is measured by the amount of care and compassion that we extend to our deprived citizens.”
She lost the seat in the Liberal landslide of December 1975. She stood again in 1977 and lost. She won it back in 1980. On returning to parliament, one of her first moves was to ask Speaker Sir Billy Snedden to stop addressing the chamber as “honourable gentlemen.” Snedden agreed. The official language changed.
First Woman Speaker of the Australian Parliament
After the 1983 federal election, Child was appointed Chair of Committees and Deputy Speaker, becoming the first woman to sit in the Speaker’s Chair of the Australian parliament in any capacity. The full role followed three years later.
On 11 February 1986, she was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives by 78 votes to 64, defeating the Liberal Party’s candidate Allan Rocher. The Australian Labor Party had nominated her as its sole candidate. She was sixty-four years old.
Her Speakership covered a significant transition. When the parliament relocated from Old Parliament House to the new building on Capital Hill in May 1988, Child was the last Speaker to work in the old chamber and the first to occupy the new one.
One item did not make the move. The ornate Speaker’s Chair, a gift from the British parliament containing timber from Admiral Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory and from Westminster Hall, became a point of discussion about whether it should be installed on Capital Hill. Child refused. The chair stayed.
She was re-elected Speaker after the 1987 federal election, defeating Liberal candidate Don Dobie.
By August 1989, her health had deteriorated under the strain of managing a chamber widely regarded as notably rowdy during that period. She resigned the Speakership at sixty-eight and confirmed she would not stand at the 1990 election. The seat of Henty was abolished in redistribution shortly after. She left parliament.
The Quotas She Opposed
Throughout her career, Joan Child argued against gender quotas for parliamentary candidates. She held that individual effort was the right measure for political office, and her own path through the system appeared to support it.
In September 1994, four years after she left parliament, the Australian Labor Party introduced mandatory gender quotas for its candidates.
| Period | Women in the House of Representatives |
|---|---|
| 1901 to 1974 | Three women elected across all parties in seventy-three years |
| Post-1994 quotas | Women surpassed 30%, then 40%, then 50% of the ALP caucus within three decades |
When Joan Child first entered the House in 1974, she was the fourth woman to hold a lower house seat since federation. The policy she had spent her career opposing had, in thirty years, produced what seven decades of her preferred approach had not.
Anna Burke’s election as Speaker in October 2012 ended the twenty-three-year gap. Joan Child died four months later.
Death, Honours, and the Honest Assessment
Joan Child was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in June 1990 and inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2001.
She died on 23 February 2013, aged ninety-one. Her state funeral was held in Melbourne on 5 March 2013. Prime Minister Julia Gillard delivered the tribute:
“Women like Joan didn’t have a guidebook. Instead, they wrote it. Joan never forgot who had put her into politics or why. She was a powerful voice for the needs and rights of women, especially working women and women doing it tough.”
Joan Child described her qualification for parliament as life experience: the factory floors, the widow’s pension, the decade spent building a seat the Labor Party had never held. She was right that those years made her more capable in the chamber than many who preceded her. What the system that produced her as its one exception never had to answer was why it took eighty-five years to let someone with those qualifications run it.
