Doing Democracy, one stitch at a time.

Our blog features regular posts by people passionate about politics, participation and democracy in all its forms.

Doing Democracy, one stitch at a time.

The Centre of Democracy (CoD) is a distributed museum which has a permanent gallery in Adelaide, South Australia, and extends its presence through online and temporary physical spaces. Its mission is to share stories about the history of democracy in South Australia and to encourage and support civic engagement. Throughout...

As I cannot write – A blog for Stitch & Resist

Lizzy Emery is a PhD candidate in the Department of Women’s Studies at Flinders University whose dissertation focuses on feminist craft practice, including craftivism. Lizzie has taught textiles at the UniSA School of Art since 2014 and has facilitated workshops in a variety of areas of textile crafts over the...

The Vietnam Moratoriums in Australia

On 29 April 1965 Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced that in response to a second request from the Government of South Vietnam, Australia would commit an infantry battalion for service. The decision was motivated by the belief that ‘the takeover of South Vietnam would be a direct military threat to...

Tailoring Don Dunstan

Don Dunstan’s pink short shorts are a South Australia icon. When Premier Dunstan posed, beaming, on the steps of SAs Parliament House on November 22nd 1972 wearing his pink shorts, a white t-shirt and white knee-hi socks, he made headlines. “Dazzling Don Dunstan has done it again”, The News reported:...

Against her better judgement?

On 18 December 1894 the South Australian Parliament passed the Adult Suffrage Bill which granted women the right to vote and to stand for election. Since this required a change to the Constitution of the Parliament of South Australia, royal assent was required. The Bill was enacted two months after...

Representing Women’s Suffrage Activism and Legal Change Across Literary Form

Suffrage activism by women in South Australia took place in a global discussion about women’s rights that was legal, political, and cultural.[1] In this post I want to consider two novels, Anno Domini 2000; or, Woman’s Destiny,[2] by Julius Vogel, and Nellie McClung’s Purple Springs [3] These works examine...

Suffrage 125: The Great Miscalculation (or how South Australian women gained the right to stand for Parliament)

Women’s suffrage was raised in seven separate (unsuccessful) Bills in the South Australian Parliament between 1886 and 1894. During this time, public meetings, lectures, letters to the press, deputations and petitions punctuated public life and slowly turned the tide of public and parliamentary opinion. A driving force behind the...

On Collecting Camp

Some of my favourite objects are disobedient ones: objects linked to acts of defiance – past and present – or things that simply challenge one-dimensional interpretations. Among the Centre of Democracy objects is protest badge worn by members of the South Australian branch of CAMP (Campaign Against Moral Persecution). First...

Resisting the Triumph of Women’s Rights – Anti-Suffrage Anti-Utopias

Suffrage 125: Resisting The Triumph of Women’s Rights – Anti-Suffrage Anti-Utopias** Utopian fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became one literary space in which writers interested in social reform, including women’s suffrage and broader gender equality, found an outlet for imagining what a different world might look...

Suffrage 125: Women, suffrage and self-determination

Did female suffrage signal the end of gendered double-standards or was it more a major stepping stone in the ongoing struggle for equality? In the nineteenth-century, under British common law, women were subordinate to men. This was reflected in the fact that women were legally subject to their fathers until...

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