People Australia

Selina Moroney, née Brown (1895-1973) peace activist

Birth: 4 July 1895 at Bowen, Queensland, daughter of Samuel Brown (b.1872), a farmhand, born at Killyneese, Derry, Ireland, and Jane, née Beer (1867-1929), a servant, born at Cadoxton, Glamorgan, Wales, United Kingdom. Marriage: 3 January 1912 at Cairns, Qld, to native-born Martin Francis Moroney (1885-1932), a labourer's ganger, born at Balmain, Sydney. They had six daughters and one son. Death: 11 July 1973 in usual residence at Maley Street, Guildford, New South Wales; forrmely lived at Spruson Street, Neutral Bay, Sydney. 

• Had moved to Sydney with her husband about 1913. They had two children by 1915. Her husband enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force on 29 August 1915 and served as a corporal, then sergeant and later company sergeant major with the 53rd Battalion in France, where he was wounded in action in August 1916 and suffered gas poisoning in April 1918. He returned to Australia, debilitated, in February 1919 and was discharged medically unfit on 23 April 1920.
• Selina had lived in north Queensland while her husband served in World War I. One daughter was born there in May 1916 and died there aged six months. Selina returned to Sydney in February 1919. Four more children were born by 1924.
• The family lived at Thornleigh and her husband was a linesman’s labourer on the tramways. He died in Randwick military hospital on 7 May 1932.
• At some time Selina joined the Socialist Labor Party. She became national women’s organiser for the Movement Against War and Fascism. She was delegate to Paris World Congress of Women Against War and Fascism in 1934 and also visited England where she actively participated in the anti-war conference in Manchester, and travelled to Germany and Russia.
• Attended All Australian Congress Against War and Fascism in Melbourne in November 1934 and addressed Anti-War Week demonstration in Broken Hill in August 1935.
• In July 1941 Moroney and Jessie Street addressed a meeting of Friends of the Soviet Union in Sydney.
• Cause of death: coronary occlusion and generalized arteriosclerosis.

Barrier Daily Truth (Broken Hill), 2 August 1935; Joy Damousi, Socialist Women in Australia, c.1890-c.1918, Ph.D thesis, ANU, 1987 p 157; Labor History, No. 36, May 1979 p 96, No. 44, May 1983 p 4.