This neglected story of women in business will be the focus of the 2025 Russell Ward Annual Lecture, to be delivered by acclaimed historian, Dr Catherine Bishop at the University of New England. Her lecture, The Legend of ‘Home Duties’: Navigating Social Expectation and Economic Necessity in Australia, will uncover the realities that census takers and electoral rolls obscured, and ask what these myths of domestic passivity reveal about Australia’s past.
“We’ve long assumed that women weren’t central to Australia’s economic history”, Bishop explains. “But women were constantly negotiating the balance between social expectation and financial necessity. The phrase ‘home duties’ is misleading. Women were always working, often in ways that went unrecorded.”
Dr Catherine Bishop is one of Australia’s leading historians of women’s business and economic life. She is the author of Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney (2015), which won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize, and Women Mean Business: Colonial Businesswomen in New Zealand (2019). Her current research project, Gendered Enterprise: A History of Australian Women in Business Since 1880, is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award and based at Macquarie University. Her work is renowned for weaving archival research with public storytelling to recovering the lived experiences behind statistical and archival silences.
The Russel Ward Annual Lecture commemorates Professor Russel Ward (1914–1995), one of Australia’s most influential historians and long-time member of the University of New England’s history department. Ward’s landmark book The Australian Legend (1958) reshaped national debates about Australian identity and what he called ‘the national type’ by tracing how the figure of the rugged male bush worker came to be seen as the quintessential Australian.
Yet, as many critics have noted, women barely featured in Ward’s story. By focusing on the realities behind “home duties”, Bishop’s lecture both builds on and critiques Ward’s legacy. Like Ward, she interrogates the myths that underpin Australian identity, but she does so by recovering the voices and contributions of women who were largely absent from his narrative.
In this way, the Russel Ward Annual Lecture continues its tradition of showcasing historians who bring fresh perspectives to the past while honouring Ward’s commitment to bold, accessible scholarship.
A distinctive feature of Bishop’s broader project is its openness to public contribution. She is actively inviting Australians to share family stories of businesswomen — mothers, grandmothers, aunts — whose hard work might otherwise be forgotten.
“History is written not only in boardrooms and parliaments, but in corner stores, farms, and family-run businesses”, Bishop says. “Every family has a story of a woman whose economic contributions were vital, even if they were never officially recorded. These stories deserve to be part of our national history.”
The Russell Ward Annual Lecture 2025 with Dr Catherine Bishop, Macquarie University presenting, will take place on Wednesday, 22 October at 5.15 pm in the A2 Theatre, Arts Building. All welcome and admission is free.
