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Article Excerpt
The role of women in Australian churches, in particular of the wives of clergy, has always been a limited one in the formal sense of leadership. The churches have been seen as 'the most patriarchal of institutions' where 'a woman's work' meant Sunday School teaching, singing in choirs and convening fetes, and not much else. (1) The clergy wife was crucial in the development of Protestant churches in Australia, yet she has been largely overlooked in church histories, being regarded as little more than parish organiser of the female rank and file. Her role was confined to the private realm; the husband was the public figure. The concept of the 'incorporated wife' developed by Beverley Gartrell in relation to academic, police and colonial officers' wives, fits the clergy wife well, relegating her role to one of 'usefulness' as hostess, conversationalist and partner, managing the household and soothing her husband at the day's end. (2)
This demeaning picture of the clergy wife, however, has been questioned in recent writing on Australian women in religion that has emphasised the diverse ways in which individuals pioneered new areas of endeavour and found a voice in spite of patriarchal structures. These women were far from passive. Though not wielding power from the top, they still presided over certain areas of church life, filling complementary roles as advisors or stabilisers. Contemporary writers such as Sabine Willis, on the subject of the Mothers' Union of the Church of England in Australia; Shurlee Swain, on the philanthropists Mrs Hughes and Selena Sutherland; Renate Howe, on the Salvationist Cornelie Booth; and Anthea Hyslop, on the Presbyterian Marie Kirk of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Victoria, depict women exercising an influence over, and even dominating, certain areas of church life. (3)
Such a perspective on women in Australian religion finds further affirmation in the life of Edith Nicol (Joan) Davies (1892-1979), who lived on Thursday Island in far northeastern Australia before the second world war. The wife of a long-term Anglican bishop of Carpentaria, Joan Davies's relationship with her husband challenges the view that women performed in the merely private and subservient realm. Joan Cronin was thirty-eight years of age when she married in 1930, a woman of independent habit experienced by years of charting her own course of action. How 'true' was the fit between roles asserted in theory and the lives of church women in practice? Was the white male on the Australian frontier the 'public' figure while the wife occupied only the 'private' and dependent realm? As a white Anglican clergy partner on the Australian 'colonial' frontier in Torres Strait, Joan Davies was an 'incorporated wife' who owed her position to her husband's; but her role was much more than that of a woman chorister or fete convenor. The daughter of a grazier, F F Cronin of Memsie Station, Bridgwater-on-Lodden near Bendigo in central Victoria, Joan Cronin described herself as 'one of those extraordinarily fortunate women who, because of their mateship, appeal to a man'. (4) She demonstrates that the triple role of wife, advisor and manager could be played out within a male-dominated hierarchy.
From 1928 Joan was Federal Secretary of the Women's Auxiliary of the Australian Board of Missions (ABM) of the Anglican Church. Her employer was Canon J S Needham, chairman of ABM. In day-to-day affairs her immediate superior at the national office in Sydney was the redoubtable head of ABM's executive committee, Sibella Macarthur-Onslow CBE, great-granddaughter of John and Elizabeth Macarthur, pioneers of the Australian merino industry. Sibella lived at the historic property Camden Park south-west of Sydney, where she entertained state governors, bishops, headmasters of various private schools, and politicians from Country and United Australia parties in patrician style. Sibella Macarthur-Onslow was a woman of decided views and daunting appearance to match, with lorgnette in one hand and black ear trumpet in the other to overcome a hearing difficulty. 'She controls all' the auxiliary work at the ABM head office, remarked Joan Cronin to her fiancee, and, to show the match would have the blessing of the ABM's presiding matriarch, added, 'she has a passion for Bishops'. (5)
This amounted to a ringing endorsement for her fiance. The Right Reverend Stephen Harris Davies had lived on Thursday Island ('TI') for ten years from his appointment as Bishop of Carpentaria in 1921. About three kilometres walk around, 'TI' is situated at the head of the Great Barrier Reef, on the sea passage between Cairns and Darwin. Davies described it as 'a sun-baked tile on the north of Australia'. (6) Thursday Island was strategically important because communications between eastern Australia and the Dutch and British empires in South East Asia went through Torres Strait. It was the last port of call on the east Australian coast for overseas liners bound for the Dutch East Indies and Hong Kong. As a pearling and commercial centre 'TI' sheltered up to two hundred pearling luggers during the annual monsoons.
As Joan Cronin discovered, there were two seasons in her new home: from April to November the climate was described as cool, but between November and April the heat during the day was intense, with heavy rain at night and ants and beetles crawling over the white residents outside the wire-screen protection of their houses. After enduring the hot season for ten years Stephen Davies told her that February was 'really a bad month in the north' when 'people's nerves get on end', and 'everyone resigns if they can'. (7) From 1935, following the birth of her son, Stephen, Joan Davies regularly spent the months between April and December in Sydney. Some two thousand people were living on Thursday Island at the time of her arrival in mid-1930--Europeans, Malays, Chinese, Japanese and Philippinos, including 180 children of all races--but there were no Torres Strait Island villages. The rambling wooden Bishop's House, the former theological college where Joan would live, was described as 'a kind of open house to all missionaries'. It was the largest domestic building in Torres Strait.
Stephen Davies's engagement to Joan Cronin was a congenial choice for both partners. Born in 1883 at Waters Upton, Shropshire, England, one of nine children of the Reverend J B Davies, Stephen had attended Hereford Cathedral School,...
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