By Elisabeth Grove OAM
President, Williamstown Literary Festival
With an election only weeks away, the right to vote of all adult Victorian citizens is taken for granted. In 1902, Australia was the first country in the world to grant full suffrage to women (of European heritage only). Less well-known: in 1908, Victoria was the last state to grant voting rights to women, despite decades of suffragist struggle that included the ‘Great Petition’ signed by 30,000 women and presented to the Victorian Parliament in 1891, demanding voting rights ‘on equal terms with men’.
Among those signatories was Ada Cross (née Cambridge), whose husband George Cross was rector of Christ Church Beechworth. By then a household name, Ada Cambridge was among Australia’s most popular and successful writers, with a national and international reputation. Although not a political activist, she was a radical, if unlikely, advocate for women’s rights at a time of widespread debate on ‘The Woman Question’.
After her death in 1926, her prolific output was largely forgotten: dismissed as ‘romance fiction’ at odds with the prevailing literary mythology of bush life, mateship and male egalitarianism. Cambridge’s preoccupations were the opposite: domestic life, relations between men and women, middle-class marriage, the moral and social issues of the day – definitely lacking machismo.
A revival of interest by feminist scholars in the 1970s and 1980s revealed her to be anything but conventional: independent, critical of social customs and all forms of hypocrisy, even questioning organised religion. Currently, researcher Dr Zoe Smith of UNSW is exploring how Ada Cambridge and other female colonial writers contributed to contemporary debate on marriage, divorce law reform and gender relations more broadly – shining a subversive light on women’s rights, their lack of autonomy, and domestic violence (including rape in marriage and coercive control).
To our shame, violence against women remains a major problem today – this year alone, up to August 2026, 47 women in Australia have died at the hands of intimate partners.
Ada Cambridge may have been forgotten elsewhere, but in Williamstown, where she resided from 1893 to 1912, her memory and extraordinary achievements have been honoured for decades – the commemorative bronze plaque in the foyer of Williamstown Town Hall (1946); the Ada Cambridge Forecourt outside the Town Hall (2012); and Willy Lit Fest’s annual Ada Cambridge Writing Prizes, ‘The Adas’, established in 2005 and continuing to this day.
Her life and career were indeed extraordinary. Born in Norfolk, Cambridge arrived newly married in1870, spending most of the rest of her life in Australia. Over 50 years, she produced 25 novels, three books of poetry, two memoirs, numerous short stories and essays – an astonishing feat for a parson’s wife with five children (three lost to illness), often in poor health, beset by money troubles and writing incessantly to help support the family.
For 23 years, they moved from one regional parish to another (Wangaratta, Yackandandah, Ballan, Coleraine, Bendigo, Beechworth), finally arriving in Williamstown, George’s last appointment, in 1893 and remaining until 1912. Several of her most celebrated works were written in the Vicarage of Holy Trinity Church of England overlooking Hobsons Bay, including the fine memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903): ‘And now here I was living by the sea at last — the desire of my heart from childhood.’
Please join us as we celebrate Ada Cambridge in the centenary year of her death and launch The Adas 2027 on Saturday 31st October, 2-4 pm, at Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Nelson Place Williamstown.
For booking details, check the Willy Lit Fest website and newsletter.
