Australian women gained a massive victory with the election of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister.

As journalist Alan Ramsey explains:

"A seventh generation Australian, Kevin's paternal grandmother five times removed was [a] London street urchin sentenced, at age 10, to hang for having 'feloniously' stripped an eight-year-old of her clothes in a public lavatory but who dodged the hangman to beget a line of Australian descendants, over the next 200 years, in the "thousands upon thousands", including our about-to-be prime minister."

Ramsey refers to:

"... the remarkable Mary Wade, the child convict who evaded the gallows in London in 1789 when her execution for robbery was commuted to transportation 'for life' and she was shipped to Australia in 1790 in the Second Fleet's Lady Juliana, the so-called 'floating brothel', to become one of the 'founding mothers' of White Australian settlement before she died and was buried in 1859 at what would become Wollongong's Pioneer Rest."

Mary's heritage brings the nation to the brink of genuine equal rights for women with the very real prospect of constitutional reform providing for an Australian Republic governed by women's and men's legislatures presided over by an executive of elders accompanied by courts of women's and men's jurisdiction, overturning centuries of misogynist and misguided male management.

Born into the darkest depths of utter depravation male privilege can descend, Mary's legacy may yet produce the most profound fulfilment of human rights women can achieve, their own legislature and jurisdiction at law.

27 November, 2007