Inside the red brick block of Richmond Library, in a windowless room tucked at the end of a hallway, lies one of the most significant archives of women’s art in the southern hemisphere. For forty-nine years the Women’s Art Register (W.A.R) has maintained records of Australian women’s art, exhibitions, practice, craft, and writing. Since its inception, W.A.R has been driven by an unassuming yet radical model of artist-led archival practice-in-action, which evolved from oral histories and slide presentations into Wikipedia edit-athons and ongoing digitisation initiatives. 

The Women’s Art Register has its origins in the experimental art models and women’s movements that flourished both locally and internationally during the 1970s. 1975 marked International Woman's Year and to celebrate, art critic Lucy Lippard was invited to Australia to deliver an inaugural lecture for the Power Institute at the University of Sydney.¹ In addition to her lecture, Lippard undertook a number of speaking engagements, gallery and studio visits across Melbourne.

Lippard’s passionate commitment to women’s art was invigorating, and she was unafraid to ruffle feathers, famously taking the late gallerist Bruce Pollard to task over the lack of female representation at his avant-garde gallery Pinacotheca.² At the University of Melbourne, Ewing and George Paton Gallery curators Kiffy Rubbo and Meredith Rogers invited Lippard to speak, and word quickly spread, as the organisers aimed to invite every woman who made art in Melbourne. On July 6 a large crowd gathered at the Ewing and George Paton Gallery for Lippard’s lecture.

In New York, Lippard had started a collection of slides and contact information from female artists, drawing on the work of feminist art network West-East Bag, and spoke about her work developing this network and archive.³ Lippard’s visit proved to be a turning point and call to action, inspiring artists Lesley Dumbrell and Erica McGilchrist, along with Rubbo and Rogers, to organise a similar slide register in Victoria. W.A.R founding member Isabel Davies recalled Lippard’s visit in 2023:

there were about a hundred women at the Ewing Gallery who came to that venture. And they made a list of all the women and after that they had a slide night, where every woman brought a slide of their work along.⁴

The first showing of slides from the Women’s Art Register took place in the George Paton Gallery on September 21, 1975, in the midst of Janine Burke’s exhibition Women Artists: One Hundred Years, 1840-1940. Developed from research into regional and institutional collections, Burke brought together work by significant yet little-known female painters to uncover the role of women in Australian art who, until that point, had been excluded and unexamined by predominantly male art historians. Hosting the first meeting of W.A.R in the midst of Burke’s exhibition allowed women artists to situate themselves and their shared experiences historically and to chart a future that their own work emerged into.

During this period, other women’s art collectives sprung up across Australia. From 1974, the Sydney Women's Art Movement ran projects including a slide register from the National Art School’s Tin Sheds, and from 1976 the Adelaide Women’s Art Movement operated out of the Experimental Art Foundation, putting on frequent exhibitions and talks.

Speaking in 1976 after the disbandment of Sydney’s Women’s Art Register, artist and educator Vivienne Binns summed up what she saw as the challenges facing feminist art groups and organisations: conflicts between political ends and art practice, the emotional and psychological involvement of working as a close group, and the weight of expectations colliding with societal pressures on women.⁵

Binns contended that W.A.R's alignment with the George Paton Gallery ensured its continuation as ‘…it had an umbrella organisation, a prestige organisation associated with it that gave it credibility’. The Paton Gallery provided a level of institutional backing that still allowed for autonomy and flexibility. While the gallery provided a level of institutional support, housing the register until 1979, Rubbo and Rogers emphasised from the outset that it was the energy and commitment of artists that sustained W.A.R. W.A.R was never driven by archivists, historians, or administrators but by artists themselves, who learnt as they went and were not beholden to received wisdom. The subsequent support of the Richmond Library, where W.A.R sits to this day, was also crucial to its endurance. Over time it became necessary to separate the slide register and archives from the other programs of the Women’s Art Register, and so in 1979 Richmond became home-base for the coming decades.

Beyond W.A.R’s flexibility and independence they were also multigenerational from the outset—not simply a bra-burning collective of early twenties student radicals. Early members included the trailblazing activist and sculptor Ailsa O’Connor, who was also a founding member of the Contemporary Arts Society as a teenager in 1938, and an important feminist and leftwing organiser; Isabel Davies, who attended VCA under John Brack as a mature age student in the late sixties and went on to an expansive and multidisciplinary career that continues to this day; and fellow artist Erica McGilchrist, whose deep involvement with W.A.R continued into the eighties.⁶ McGilchrist’s belief in W.A.R’s mission and tireless work ensured the organisation’s survival through significant funding challenges.

Though W.A.R is an archive, its most important work has always extended beyond the files, publications and slides it cares for.  Artists Bonita Ely and Anna Sande created the Women’s Art Register Extension Project in 1976, researching and expanding W.A.R’s files to include historic female artists.  In the 1978 Mildura Sculpture Triennial, W.A.R exhibited Profile of Australian Women Sculptors 1860 - 1960, an extended research project coordinated by Ely and Sande. Consisting of a slide show presentation and accompanying catalogue, this project argued for a reassessment of the Australian sculptural canon, much as Women Artists: One Hundred Years, 1840-1940 sought to revise the history of Australian painting.

The Register itself went beyond the collation of images of work and slides contributed by artists. Members would actively document and visit exhibitions around Melbourne and interstate, clip advertisements from art magazines and take photographs in gallery stockrooms. They would then contact artists for permission to include their work in the archive. It was an active, expansive method of collecting that extended beyond the inertia of a traditional archival repository. Ely recalled that she ‘scoured every publication of the magazine, Art & Australia, for essays by and about women artists, for examples of their artworks to be photocopied, catalogued, and filed.’⁷ Later, from the early 1980s, W.A.R created and distributed educational slide kits to schools across the country, enabled by the community focus and inter-library lending networks of the Carringbush library.

Although archives assert neutrality and are ostensibly non-hierarchical, non-western and non-institutional ways of preserving or passing on knowledge are often devalued by this paradigm. Who dictates an archives value and what is accepted or discarded? How is access to an archive granted, and on what terms? W.A.R’s approach actively contends with some of these questions, challenging more officious archival practices. Anyone who identifies as a woman or gender diverse may submit their work, and anyone may access over 20,000 images and documents—depending, of course, on the availability of dedicated volunteers. Thanks to a five-year preservation project, and ongoing digitisation, W.A.R’s material holdings will be secured and preserved.

The Womens Art Register is an archive that seeks to assert the presence of Australian women artists. They make no sly claim to neutrality and sound loudly in the face of historical silence and invisibility. As W.A.R approaches its fiftieth anniversary they continue to provide an invaluable resource and inspire community action. Many contemporary projects still draw upon the W.A.R’s legacy and work of organising and openly sharing knowledge, of writing and constructing different histories and encounters with the past, of revising and revisiting. The legacy of W.A.R and the women’s art movement more broadly has impacted and enabled projects such as The National Gallery of Australia’s Know My Name initiative, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s Unfinished Business, Mindy Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index project, the transnational archival work of AWARE, and The Countess Report, a statistical report and analysis of women’s representation in the arts. The project of the women’s art movement is far from finished business, and W.A.R’s ability to inspire and engage continues to resonate.