Irene Longman

Irene Longman at a young age

Longman was born on 24 April 1877 in Franklin, Tasmania. She was the daughter of Mary Alice (née Frencham) and James Molineux Bayley; her father was a Congregationalist minister. Her brothers Percy and James also served as members of parliament.[1]

Longman was educated in Sydney, attending Sydney Girls High School and Sydney Church of England Girls' Grammar School.[1] She trained as a kindergarten teacher under Maybanke Wolstenholme, whose private institution Maybanke College taught Friedrich Fröbel's educational theory and also borrowed from theosophy. She boarded with Wolstenholme's friends Cara and Edgeworth David while completing her education; Wolstenholme and Cara David were feminists and leading proponents of educational reform in New South Wales.[2]

In 1895, Longman joined her family in Queensland, where she taught at Rockhampton Girls Grammar School. She married newspaper proprietor and zoologist Heber Longman in Toowoomba in 1904; the couple had no children. They moved to Brisbane in 1911 where her husband joined the staff of the Queensland Museum.[1]

Longman was "interested in a wide range of social issues, including town planning and the preservation of native plants, but her work was principally in the field of the welfare of women and especially children".[1] She "enjoyed her positions of leadership and focused her contribution on addressing meetings and attending functions rather than the more mundane task of fund-raising".[3] Longman was the first secretary of the Playground Association of Queensland and was a supervisor and trainer for the Crèche and Kindergarten Association. She served as president of the National Council of Women of Queensland from 1920 to 1924 and was later made a life member of the organisation.[1] She also held office in the Lyceum Club, the Queensland Women's Peace Movement, and the Association for the Welfare of Mental Deficients. Longman was a pioneer of special education in Queensland, in 1922 leading a deputation to the Department of Public Instruction which brought about the introduction of "opportunity classes" for children with intellectual disabilities.[1] She advocated segregation of people with intellectual disabilities from the rest of the community and sterilisation of those who could not be separated from the community.[3]

Irene Longman's parliamentary career began in the 1929 election. Representing the Country and Progressive National Party, she was elected to the Queensland Legislative Assembly in the electorate of Bulimba, a safe ALP seat, which she held for one term. While in Parliament, she was responsible for the first appointment of a Queensland woman police officer, and spoke about the welfare of children. Being a woman, she was never allowed to use the parliamentary dining room and had to eat her meals on the verandah. As well, there were no female toilets in the parliament building. Longman lost her seat in the 1932 election and did not re-contest it.

Longman had two brothers who were also members of the Queensland Parliament: Percy Bayley represented Pittsworth from 1915 to 1920, and James Bayley was the member for Wynnum from 1933 to 1935.[1]

Longman was the only woman elected to the Parliament of Queensland in her lifetime.[4] The federal electorate of Longman, created in 1996, is named after Irene,[5] as is Longman Street in the Canberra suburb of Chisholm.[6]

Longman in 1950

Irene Longman died on 29 July 1964 in St. Andrew's Hospital in Brisbane and was privately cremated.[7]

Singer/songwriter Kelly Chase released the song "Sticks and Stones" to accompany the History Detective Podcast Episode Season 2, Episode 7: Irene Longman the First Woman in Queensland Parliament.

• Fallon, Patricia (2003). So Hard the Conquering: A Life of Irene Longman (PDF) (Ph.D.). Griffith University. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 February 2015.
• Ferres, Kay (2013). "Reading in Public: Irene Longman and Citizenship". Australian Literary Studies. 27 (3–4): 46–58.
• Ferres, Kay (2014). "The Lyceum Club and the Making of the Modern Woman" (PDF). Queensland Review. 21 (1): 62–71. doi:10.1017/qre.2014.8.

• "Our first and only woman Parliamentarian looks back". The Courier-Mail. Brisbane: National Library of Australia. 21 January 1953. p. 2. — Irene Longman interview in 1953
• Longman, Irene Maud at The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia