BARBARA DARLING is a Fremantle resident described as “colourful, creative, kind, generous, funny and gangster”. Years ago she started a campaign to get a statue of a woman in Fremantle – and can’t believe we’ve made it to 2024 and nothing’s happened. 

THE rubbish truck driver has a slice of cake from house number 9 every Thursday, and this morning it is a woman. 

I hand it over above the roar of the rubbish truck yelling, “You are a woman”. 

And I do a little dance of joy. 

“Yes, I am a woman” she says. 

It is as if my life’s aim has to some degree been realised. 

A woman driving a rubbish truck. 

All that time, 50 years of demonstrating, writing articles and letters, and waiting, waiting for equal pay and for equal work. 

“Ooh,” she says.

“Its good money” and she draws it out.

“We are better, not that it is a competition, no, but it is the same as the haulpack drivers up north. We do it efficiently and carefully and faster with no accidents.

It is the housework gene through the ages, the wisdom and short cuts and “hard at it” attitude. 

It’s the double shifts women do, and I ask the women at the tills in Woolworths and they all go home to cook meals and look after the children. 

The double shift is a given.

Meg Burns is her name and she can’t believe her luck, nor can the women holding the slow sign. 

I stopped and talked with her last week.

“I am holding up a sign,” she said “and I am getting paid beyond my wildest”, smiling as if she still can’t believe it.

“I am holding a sign”.

Now in the right wing paper The Australian we have one far right journo who writes teeth-grinding articles often using feminists as a dirty word. 

Feminists are now the cause of male suicides, she asserts and other equally disturbing opinions.

Now that that one’s been mentioned here’s another big time gripe with me. 

Several women were involved in writing to the Herald in 2007, then 2015 about this lack of representation of women in any public space in Fremantle.

It’s now 2024 and strong action is due. 

It’s unbelievable to me that there is still not one statue of a woman in Fremantle. Not one!

This is scandalous when just asking your phone reveals women who worked hard and long, doing significant things while holding the fort at home with children, meals, a husband with his pre-expectations of a woman’s place.

John Curtin holds a paper leaning dramatically towards the workers. 

John Curtin, who could never do what he did without Elsie his wife, who did not just “help”. No. 

Besides assisting him with speeches and official occasions and fighting off unwelcome visitors, she was all the while setting up her own system to support the women and girls, pregnant with illegitimate children, who had nowhere to live, no support at all, until Elsie Curtain came along and shook up the whole place. 

Elsie Curtin

Do we ever hear of Elsie Curtin? 

No, we do not – only John. 

What about Dorothy Tangney who served as a Senator for WA?

She was the first woman elected to the Senate and one of the first two women elected to Federal Parliament. 

She worked hard as a teacher and took disadvantaged children on yearly holidays as well as working hard for all the disadvantaged; appalled at the site of grown men begging for food.

She was a strong advocate for the use of Federal powers for the National Health system, increased child endowment and pensions for deserted wives, war widow’s and many other social justice inequalities. 

Take a look at the WA Women’s Hall of Fame’s roll of honour, where there are so many highly achieving women who worked tirelessly for social justice, especially for women and children.

So there we have it.

How can we in this so called progressive city of Fremantle have statues of men only; not a woman to be seen. 

We start again this time; more letters, more action, more women, and this time a campaign is needed. 

We want women acknowledged and honoured publicly in the form of statues in Freo.

The two footballers taking a high mark, in a highly visible area outside the markets, just doesn’t cut it with me. 

How about to women footballers?

Women are still not where we want to be. 

How about a statue of Meg the rubbish truck driver, where there is still not yet one statue of a women. Not one. 

Let’s get a statue of Meg up next to John Curtin in the main square. 

We all deserve to see women who should be seen in the form of statues and it’s about damn time we did in this our ‘progressive’ city.