Women Wharfies: The Epic History of Australia’s Maritime Women

For our first Talking History of 2026, Professor Diane Kirkby brings to light the stories of women working in the maritime industry.

In 1932, a Melbourne journalist claimed nothing was ever written about the women ‘doing a man-sized job’ at sea, whereas epics were written about seafaring men. Doing a man-sized job did not mean doing men’s work. Women’s work was invisible to those celebrating heroic deeds in battle, or in adventuring and navigating to ‘discover’ new lands to colonise.

From the early 19th century stewardesses were ubiquitous, indispensable to women’s travel. Being heroic was part of doing their job, especially in times of shipwreck, or war.  By the end of the 20th century, women were also the officers, Masters, and engineers on board ships, and driving cranes as wharfies on the waterfront. This paper comes from a project restoring these women to visibility and understanding their experience of working in an industry in which they were always seriously outnumbered.

Professor Diane Kirkby is an internationally renowned historian of women, work and the labour movement. She is the author of several books including the highly acclaimed ‘Barmaids: A History of Women’s Work in Pubs’ and a co-author of ‘The Australian Pub’. Her book ‘Maritime Men of the Asia- Pacific’ (with Lee-Ann Monk and Dmytro Ostapenko) was awarded the 2023 Australia and New Zealand Law and History Society Prize. For many years she taught history and art history at La Trobe University in Melbourne and is now Professor of Law and Humanities at University of Technology Sydney. She is an elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and the American Society for Legal History and recipient of the Australian Historical Association’s WK Hancock Prize.

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Image: ‘The Heroine of the Coogee’. (1904, January 16) in ‘The Weekly Times’ (Melbourne, Victoria: 1869 – 1954), p. 10. State Library of Victoria.