Beatrice Eileen Faust AO (19 February 1939 – 30 October 2019)^[1] was an Australian author and women's activist. In 1966 she was president of the Victorian Abortion Law Repeal Association.^[2] She was also a co-founder of the Women's Electoral Lobby in 1972 and co-founder of the Victorian Union of Civil Liberties c. 1966.

Life and career

Beatrice Faust was born Beatrice Eileen Fennessey in Glen Huntly, a suburb of Melbourne, on 19 February 1939. Her mother died shortly after having given birth. This had been predicted by doctors, who knew of a uterine canal anomaly which would lead to such, however being of Roman Catholic and Irish descent the use of contraceptives was denied her parents and subsequently her mother became pregnant.

She was cared for by her father and grandmother Emma Fennessy for the first two years of her life, and after her grandmother died by her gather and step mother. Her paternal grandfather, Tom Fennessy, had emigrated from Ireland in the late 19th century and she always identified with her Irish roots.

She attended Mac Robertson Girls High School from 1953 to 1956 and enrolled in an Arst Honours degree at Melbounre University in 1957. Here she became acquainted with Germaine Greer. She married CLive Faust in 1959. They later divorced though she kept his name. She completed her BA Hons in English and History in 196 and a Masters degree in , thoug her bachelor's degree in English and sub Much later in her life, the higher degrees of PhD and LLD were conferred upon her, the former for her 1991 book Apprenticeship in Liberty and the latter for her life's work in general, as a social reformist and researcher.

She had one child, Stephen David, born out of wedlock in 1965 from her relationship with the Finnish academic Adam (Aimo) Murtonen.

She was a campaigner for civil liberties, abortion law reform and well-informed sex education for all.^[3] In 1966 she co-founded the Victorian Union of Civil Liberties to advocate for civil rights and, in 1972, the Women's Electoral Lobby, to agitate for legislative reform along specifically feminist lines and to give Australian women a greater voice in politics.

In 2001 Faust was awarded the Centenary Medal.^[4] In the same year, she was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women. In 2004 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for such efforts and more.^[5]

Among her early writings, she contributed to the Australian edition of The Little Red Schoolbook^[6] and, during the 1970s, she wrote regularly as a reviewer of films, and also photography exhibitions, for The Age newspaper, as well as contributing to Nation Review and elsewhere. Later, in the late 1980s into the 1990s, she had a regular column in the Weekend Australian, one result of which was a court case involving Jeff Kennett, the then Victorian premier.

In the latter part of her career she returned to one of her earliest vocations, as a teacher, becoming a lecturer in English at, first, RMIT, Melbourne, and then Monash University, Victoria, where she widened the scope her concern to include the educational syllabus of Australia on a more general level.

After her retirement she lived in Churchill, a town in Gippsland, Victoria.

Bibliography

References

Further reading

• Adelaide, Debra (1988) Australian women writers: a bibliographic guide, London, Pandora
• Mitchell, Susan (1984) Tall Poppies, Sydney, Angus and Robertson.

External links

• Beatrice Faust and WEL