Women's History & Public Life
Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives
The exhibition and book that asked Victoria to look more deeply at the women who built it.
History? Herstory.
In 2001, the year Australia marked the centenary of Federation, the Victorian Women’s Trust set out to tell a different story about the past hundred years. The result was Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives: a touring exhibition documenting the lives and contributions of 264 Victorian women whose work had been vital to their communities, and largely invisible to history.
How it worked
The process began with a public call for nominations, placed in metropolitan dailies and thirteen regional newspapers. The invitation was simple and deliberately open: think of someone you know. She might be living or gone. The more you think about her, the more you realise the genuinely heroic dimensions to her life. So ordinary on the surface, and yet, the closer you look, how extraordinary these women were.
More than 260 nominations arrived. The stories were so compelling, so varied and necessary that VWT abandoned the original plan to feature a small selection. There was no choice but to include them all.
"This is such a wonderful and humbling exhibition. It left me with tears in my eyes and joy in my heart."
Attendee
The exhibition
Featured women were grouped across twelve themes — With Passion, Dare to Begin, Always Work to be Done, Defying the Odds, Community Treasure, The Getting of Wisdom, Burning for Justice, New Country Women, Beyond Our Shores, Who Cares?, True to Her Word and Meetings Always Meetings — each one capturing something essential about the breadth of what women do, and have always done.
The exhibition toured twelve locations across Victoria: Melbourne, Brunswick, Ringwood, Traralgon, Lakes Entrance, Wangaratta, Bendigo, Mildura, Portland, Geelong, Ballarat, and back to Melbourne. It attracted 21,703 visitors and a flood of response wherever it travelled. A companion book was produced alongside the exhibition, with 5,000 copies distributed across Victoria. More than half went directly into secondary schools.
"The rooms were filled with exhilaration — it was palpable, everywhere I looked someone was smiling. The exhibition inspires curiosity and engagement and really does justice to the lives it represents."
Attendee
Why it mattered
Historian and former VWT Board Member, Professor Marilyn Lake AO wrote about the exhibition for The Age in 2001:
“The significance of this exhibition is that it suggests the need to not just admire women’s contributions to Victorian and Australian history, but to theorise it afresh.”
The exhibition’s twelve themes deliberately refused the conventional classifications of economic, social and political history — private versus public life, production versus reproduction — and brought together women’s untold stories across class, culture and generation. In doing so, it made a conceptual argument as much as a historical one: that women’s work, paid and unpaid, has always been foundational to everything we share.
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