Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives Inc

Australian Society of Archivists National Conference, Melbourne, 26 September 2017

Abstract

With this paper, I first of all acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the traditional owners of the land in Australia. I go on to mention early radical actions by lesbians and womyn, including setting up the Queen Victoria Women’s Hospital in 1896, and how lesbians and feminists in Victoria joined the worldwide Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) to fight for womyn’s rights from 1969 onwards. The paper explains why there was a need to set up a WLM Archives in the first place, the herstory of the Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives (VWLLFA) and the reasons for maintaining and adding to the collection into the new millennium.

The Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives Inc was established in 1983 with the objective of collecting any and all of the material relating to the WLM in Victoria from 1969 onwards; to store, archive and preserve this material for posterity and make it accessible for research and other purposes.

Now housed at the University of Melbourne Archives, the VWLLFA is a unique record of the enormous amount of political work lesbians and feminists in Victoria have done over the past 50 years.