This portrait is one of a series of photographs taken while author, journalist and academic Anne Summers AO (b. 1945) was working intensely on her landmark feminist text Damned whores and God’s police (1975). In writing the book, Summers reframed Australian history by centring women’s experiences, arguing that colonisation created a patriarchal order that confined women to the roles of ‘virtuous wives’ or ‘damned whores’. Fifty years after its publication, it remains one of Australia’s best-known feminist histories and a ‘blockbuster’ of its kind. Summers has said that the portraits Jerrems took perfectly capture her anxiety about her partially finished manuscript as well as the steeliness that enabled her to complete it.
Purchased 2012
© The Estate of Carol Jerrems
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Carol Jerrems: Portraits is a major exhibition of one of Australia’s most influential photographers. Jerrems’ intimate portraits of friends, lovers and artistic peers transcend the purely personal and have come to shape Australian visual culture.
Well behaved women seldom make history, as the saying goes, and the National Portrait Gallery, consequently, is full of awesome Australian women who refused to conform to narrow ideas about their place and their worth.
