People Australia

Emma Willis, née Orford (1846-1923) midwife and political activist 

Birth: 15 May 1846 at St Pancras, London, Middlesex, England, daughter of Jesse Orford (1810-1871), stonemason, and Elizabeth, née Stevens. (1813-1902). Marriages: (1) 28 September 1878 at the Register Office, Westminster, London, to Robert Henry Giles (1846-1888), coachman. They had four daughters and one son. (2) 6 June 1892 at Rockhampton, Queensland, to John Willis (c.1843-1918), engineer. Death: 30 December 1923 at Emu Park, Rockhampton. Religion: Congregational. 

• Emigrated from England with her consumptive husband and children in 1883. Arrived in Rockhampton aboard the Waroonga on 12 January 1884. Widowed in 1888; remarried in 1892 to John Willis, who was secretary of the Rockhampton Wharf Labourers' Union until its collapse later that year. Her occupation at the time of her second marriage was midwife.
• Joined the Rockhampton Workers' Political Organisation, was elected treasurer in 1908. First woman in Queensland to attend a Labour Political Convention when, as the proxy delegate at the Fifth Labour-in-Politics Convention held Rockhampton in 1907, she presented the credentials for Murilla (Surat, Qld) WPO to the cheers of fellow delegates. She moved that the abolition of parliamentary refreshment room be party policy.
• She was president and chief worker for the Rockhampton Eight-Hour Day Celebration Committee Ladies' Auxiliary. A leading member of the Fitzroy branch of the Australian Labor Party, the Early Closing Movement and the local Woman's Christian Temperance Union, she was regarded as “the Grand Old Lady of the Rockhampton Labour movement”.
• A memorial bust proposed after her death from bronchial pneumonia did not transpire due to severe Trades Hall debt during the Depression.

Sources
Queensland Immigration Records IMM/118/p.582, A150, p.3; Northern Daily Argus, 19 August 1890; Queensland Marriages Register 76/1892, Deaths Register 91/1888, 23/1924; Morning Bulletin, (Rockhampton) 31 December 1923, p 8; Barbara Webster, “Fighting in the grand cause”: a history of the trade union movement in Rockhampton, 1907-1957, PhD thesis, CQUniversity, Rockhampton, 1999.