People Australia

Phyllis Sarah Johnson, née Mather (1917-2009) shorthand typist, gaoled Communist activist and organiser and feminist

Birth: 13 June 1917 at Albany, Western Australia, daughter of native-born parents Washington Henry Mather (1877-1944), coal lumper, wharf labourer, and librarian, and Mildred Mary ‘Millie’, née Stewart (1891-1936). Marriage: 29 September 1939 in the Registrar’s Office, Paddington, New South Wales, to John Godschall Johnson (1912-2003), clerk, violin-maker and Communist, born in Brisbane, Queensland. They had three adopted children. Death: 20 July 2009 at Sydney, NSW. 

• Labor family background included grandfather Robert John Stewart, Australian Labor Party candidate, WA, in 1896 elections. Father was a trade union official. Moved with him to Sydney at the height of the 1930s Depression.
• First job was teaching shorthand and typing, then became a typist. Living in near poverty she joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1936, campaigning in Woolloomooloo against evictions.
• Arrested for campaigning against conscription at the start of World War II she served one month of gaol sentence after free speech campaign assisted her release.
• In 1942 she was arrested for possession of ration books “reasonably suspected of being stolen” being for the purchase of calico for political posters — she was convicted despite statutory declarations from the owners of the ration books.
• Involved in CPA in plethora of major and minor positions, including standing as CPA candidate for Paddington, Sydney, in municipal elections in 1944 and 1948, campaigning on her ability to win rent reductions and combat high prices. Secretary of the CPA Women's Committee and briefly a member of the central committee, her class politics always tinged with concern for feminist issues, prostitution etc. Energetic public speaker.
• Left CPA in the early 1970s. Active in campaign against rising prices, Bankstown Women in the Community and women's refuge movement.
• She was awarded an OAM on 12 June 1989 for services to women’s affairs and consumer rights, and the Centenary Medal on 1 January 2001 for service to feminism and consumer rights.

Sources
Joyce Stevens, Taking the Revolution Home: work among women in the Communist Party of Australia (Fitzroy, Vic, c.1987); Tribune, 28 February 1947; Stephen Gapps, 'Personal and political — Australian women and Indonesian Independence', Australian National Maritime Museum, https://www.sea.museum/2015/08/17/black-armada/personal-and-political--australian-women-and-indonesian-independence