Knowing Bessie Guthrie

Sydneysider: A personal journey

I must have met Bessie Guthrie in 1970. I was studying at Sydney University and my wife Ruth Hando had just dropped out of uni and was working at Max Factor down at Glebe Point. We were living in the block of flats on Pyrmont Bridge Rd and we were interested in the Glebe Tenants Association and I guess we must have met Bessie at one of their meetings.

Bessie was president of the association – which was then involved in the ultimately successful campaign to have the Federal Government take over the expiring leases of the Glebe Estate and also against the Department of Main Roads’ plan to wipe out much of historic Glebe for the M4 motorway. I think we were aware Bessie was also heavily into the new Women’s Liberation Movement headquartered at 67 Glebe Point Rd, and somebody told me she’d been a furniture designer. But the rest of her amazing history was unknown to us.

We didn’t know she’d been a popular writer on, and a lecturer in, design and interior decoration; a publisher and book designer; head draughtswoman for De Havilland Aircraft during the war; a radio and film broadcaster after it. We had no idea of her relentless and pioneering campaign, from the 1950s on, against the abuse of women in prisons and institutions and the horrendous conditions suffered by children in the state’s child welfare system and church-run homes.

To us she was a feisty little old lady (even though she was then just 65), grey-haired and bright-eyed, and perhaps because I told her I was doing the new Fine Arts course at Sydney University, she invited us around to her place for a chat.

When we turned up at 97 Derwent St Glebe she answered the door and led us through the house.

It was in a sadly Dickensian condition. Water had come in through the roof and in places the floor had rotted and caved in. We picked our way gingerly down the hall as Bessie explained that she and her husband had more or less abandoned the house because of the dangerous condition of the floor and were living in the stables out the back. We had no idea that Bessie had run, for many years, out of this very house, a sort of private forerunner of the womens’ refugees and rape crisis centres.

There were some nice pieces of antique furniture set out in the decaying rooms and I remarked on a small circular cedar tilt-top dining table with a big turned pedestal. “You can have it,” she said. Ruth and I were a bit shocked and argued that she couldn’t possibly give away such a wonderful thing, but Bessie insisted.

Bessie’s husband Clive was bedridden and obviously not far from death, and the stable’s hayloft had been converted into a bedroom where she spent most of the time when she wasn’t out doing her activist thing. Bessie sat by Clive’s bed in a magnificent bentwood rocking chair. We talked about politics, art, industrial design and the Vietnam War, probably.

Clive was a painter who had belonged to the Realist Artists’ Group. He’d served in New Guinea during World War II and, unlike Bessie who never joined a political party, was, or had been, a member of the Communist Party. He was also a wharfie and had worked as a painter and decorator.

One day when we visited, we found that the woven cane seat of the chair had collapsed and in gratitude for the gift of the cedar table I rashly insisted on having it repaired.

I somehow jammed it in my Fiat Bambini and found an antique repairer prepared to do the job. It cost a fortune but Bessie and Clive were very touched and she gave me a rare 1920s German modernist furniture design catalogue called Schranke,Tische und Bett (Cabinet, Table and Bed). I later realised it was probably something she’d used in the East Sydney Tech design course she’d completed in 1931.

Ruth and I moved from Glebe to Newtown and I became a member of the newly formed Socialist Labour League. Not long afterwards, we parted ways amicably. Ruth went to live in France and Bessie’s cedar table followed her. It returned to Australia, decades later, and I still have it.

I lost track of Bessie who died at Glebe in December 1977. A year later when I had some business with a feminist publishing group in Chippendale, I noticed a beautiful image of Bessie on a silk-screened poster for a conference on ‘Women and Labour’, hanging in their office. I asked if there were any for sale but alas, there weren’t.

Looking back, Bessie Guthrie’s courageous life of non-sectarian progressive activism makes her perhaps the most remarkable Sydneysider I have known. She was always way ahead of her time and it’s said that she told the young feminists she befriended in the early 1970s: “I’ve been waiting for you women to get here all my life.”