The first day of the Federal Parliament's second last week before the election was Monday 17 June, an anniversary of some significance, depending on your literary, political or sporting interests.
It was, for example, the birthday of Venus Williams (1980) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (1954) and of Igor Stravinsky (1882), a brilliant, controversial composer. And Shane Watson (1981), a sometimes brilliant, recently controversial cricketer. And Henry Lawson (1867), whose mother, Louisa, not born in June but commanding our attention by a few degrees of separation, would have found Australian political life during the past few weeks utterly fascinating and somewhat familiar.
Founder and editor of The Dawn, easily the most successful women's journal of its time, Louisa Lawson was a courageous, dynamic and indomitable supporter of women in all their aspirations. These included the vote, equal opportunity in the workplace, marriage law reform, independent as distinct from husband-governed access to medical treatment, and, as a prerequisite of all these, respect.
'Women must learn,' she wrote in The Dawn, 'that if they bear wrongs, other women must bear the same, if they do not claim personal respect neither can their sisters. If they are weak or oppressed how can their children be strong or noble? This habitual self-effacement leads to all manner of weakness.'
Louisa entered the world of men respectfully but firmly and, eventually, paid a personal price for having done so. But for a couple of decades she gave various entrenched male monopolies such a run-around as to establish her name as a pioneer of women's rights in Australia.
'Men legislate on divorce, on hours of labour, and many another question affecting women, but neither ask nor know the wishes of those whose lives and happiness are most concerned,' announced the inaugural Dawn on 15 May 1888. 'Here then is Dawn, the Australian Woman's journal and mouthpiece.'
As her influence grew and as The Dawn's reach stretched far beyond Sydney, various forces and organisations turned their attention to silencing this mouthpiece.
To produce The Dawn, for example, she employed only women, 11 of them. To her surprise this brought her into head-on conflict with the New South Wales Typographical Association which banned The Dawn, mounted a scare campaign against its sponsors and argued 'it is not in the interests of humanity that young girls or young women should be employed at an occupation 50 per cent of whose followers die of chest and lung disease'.
The ban threatened the journal with extinction, but Louisa joined battle with enthusiasm, using her editorial to fight back:
In the sacred name of humanity the compositors step in to save unthinking women from sacrificing themselves on the altar of this fatal occupation ... women are not wanted in the trade, because it is a nice, easy, healthy occupation, where wages are kept at a good level, and therefore well suited to the tastes of the present possessors.
Louisa won her fight with the union and triumphed in numerous other skirmishes designed to show women they should not enter the male domain of public life and business.
When a cocky young, impeccably dressed journalist from a rival paper, The Christian World, entered the Dawn premises unannounced and uninvited and began to goad the busy staff, he was ordered out by Louisa. When he announced that he was 'not ready to leave', she threw a bucket of water over him. When still he stood firm, she picked up a bucket of lye, used for cleaning the type. A thick black scum jellied across its viscous surface.
'Do you see this?' she said, holding the bucket an inch from his nose. 'Do you think you might be now ready to go?' He left. Where he had stood defiant there remained only a large puddle.
Taking a holiday from the well-established Dawn, Louisa invented and patented a mail bag buckle which solved a long running problem of mail transport. She stood to make enough to finance her retirement and cope with increasing and debilitating health problems, but the Postmaster General, Patrick Crick, stole her invention. Her compensation of £300 was reduced on appeal, after a long and exhausting legal battle, to 60.
On the face of it, life for a strong, talented and ambitious woman in 19th century Australia was much tougher than it is now. Yet a brilliant and determined woman like Louisa Lawson, though grievously discriminated against and continuously derided, thwarted and undermined because she dared to excel, was never demeaned, degraded, or personally debased with the vile and scandalous detail that has been the lot of Julia Gillard.
Gillard, regardless of her failings, of which most of us are well aware, is our Prime Minister. She is my Prime Minister. Who licensed the Sattlers, Joneses, Broughs, Pickerings and their cronies to ignore and trash our stake in the dignity of our country's leader? One feels helpless as the indecent tirade continues, punctuated by periodic, empty genuflections to the defunct Westminster System.
A few well-aimed buckets of viscous lye wouldn't go amiss — for a start.
Brian Matthews is honorary professor of English at Flinders University and an award winning columnist and biographer.