IEU Labour history: Australia’s pioneering undercover social justice journalists

Written By IEU Victoria Tasmania

Some of the world’s first investigative journalists were Australian women, and their groundbreaking work exposed social injustices and drove long-overdue reforms.

Catherine Hay Thomson, centre, with her mother and pupils at their Ballarat school, was a teacher before she became a journalist. Ballarat Grammar Archives/Museum Victoria

Victorian educator Catherine Hay Thomson was among the earliest. In 1886, she began going undercover to produce a series of articles for The Argus newspaper, revealing the appalling conditions endured by women in Melbourne’s public institutions.

Thomson practiced ‘serious undercover investigative journalism for a mainstream newspaper in the nineteenth century, a time when journalism was mostly seen as a disreputable activity for women,’ write academics Kerrie Davies and Willa McDonald in The Routledge Companion to World Literary Journalism.

Her articles were ‘controversial, engaging and empathised with the women about whom she wrote. They also uncovered unacceptable practices that resulted in changes to policies in the institutions in question’.

American journalist Nellie Bly became famous for having herself committed to an asylum to expose the horrific conditions faced by patients. But Thomson’s work predated Bly’s exploits by a year.

While Bly and other women reporters were labelled ‘stunt girls’ for their ‘risky immersions in asylums, hospitals, abortion clinics, and low-wage employment,’ Thomson was more focused on advocacy than notoriety. Thomson did not see herself as a journalist,’ Davies told The Point.

‘She was using The Argus and her investigations to educate people about social justice issues like women’s mental health and hospitals.’ Davies says.

Thomson and her mother ran schools in Ballarat and Melbourne, and she was ‘much more focused on education and social justice than journalism’.

‘Thomson, while writing in the first person in the vein of Bly and her contemporaries, emphasised her subject matter over her undercover ‘exploits’ – she was never the focus of her stories.’

All these women wrote groundbreaking undercover works of journalism long before famous men like George Orwell achieved acclaim for works like Down and Out In Paris and London.

Thomson’s series for The Argus began in March 1886 when she secured work as an assistant nurse at Melbourne Hospital (now The Royal Melbourne Hospital), exposing the reasons behind its ‘abnormally high’ death rate.

‘She observed that the assistant nurses were untrained, worked largely as cleaners for poor pay in unsanitary conditions, slept in overcrowded dormitories and survived on the same food as the patients, which she described in stomach-turning detail’, Davies and McDonald wrote for The Conversation.

‘The hospital linen was dirty, she reported, dinner tins and jugs were washed in the patients’ bathroom where poultices were also made, doctors did not wash their hands between patients.’

An Argus editorial subsequently called for the establishment of a ‘ladies’ committee’ to oversee hospital hygiene. Formal nursing training was introduced in Victoria three years later.

Thomson’s investigations continued at the Kew Lunatic Asylum, an infant asylum, the Victorian (blind) asylum and school, and the Magdalen Asylum (Abbotsford Convent).

At Kew, she witnessed ‘overcrowding, understaffing, a lack of training, and a need for woman physicians’, concluding that many patients ‘suffered from institutionalisation rather than illness’.

She gave evidence to Victoria’s Royal Commission on Asylums for the Insane and Inebriate. ‘Among the Commission’s final recommendations was that a new governing board should supervise appointments and training and appoint ‘lady physicians’ for the female wards,’ write McDonald and Davies.

Thomson’s articles reflect her enduring commitment to ‘education for the betterment of the individual and society, women’s rights, and the independence of the individual, notably from government charity’.

They also show her courage in ‘campaigning for social justice, especially for women and children,’ and her determination ‘to speak truth to power’.

Miles Franklin, Undercover Journalist

Another Australian woman now recognised for her pioneering literary journalism is author Miles Franklin. Kerrie Davies’ new book Miles Franklin Undercover details the year from April 1903 to April 1904, when Franklin wrote When I Was Mary-Anne, A Slavey – an unpublished account of her time as a domestic servant.

She described how she ‘cooked in flammable kitchens, plunged her hands into steaming washing up, and swept the dust that scattered behind her employers’ shoes’.

Franklin had ‘dazzled Australia’ with her debut novel My Brilliant Career in 1901, which became a feminist classic and was adapted into an acclaimed 1979 film. The Miles Franklin Award, established by her will, remains Australia’s most prestigious literary prize.

However, despite her fame, Franklin needed paid work to maintain her independence, in part because of the low royalties she received from her Edinburgh publisher.

Davies writes that examining the ‘servant question’ was timely, exposing Australia’s ‘myth of equality’. Franklin took six live-in domestic positions in Melbourne and Sydney, staying a maximum of two months in each. The hours were ‘brutal’, with often just an afternoon off per week. She endured burns, rapid weight loss, and growing emotional strain, feeling her spirit become ‘suppressed’ by the monotony of the work.

The manuscript was never published, Davies notes that ‘servants’ still exist today – they ‘just answer to an app rather than a bell’, pointing to the Fair Work Commission’s 2024 decision to improve protections for workers in the gig economy, ‘recognising its endemic lack of rights and risks’.

The work of Thomson, Franklin – and the scholarship of Davies and McDonald – reminds us that the history of the least powerful in society often waits to be appreciated.

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IEU Victoria Tasmania
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