MOTHER Miller' ‘

John Wright uncovers the tale of Chesterfield’s Emma Miller, pioneer trade union organiser and suffragist who helped Australian women be first in the world to win the right to vote

If bystanders thought Queensland’s Police Commissioner William Geoffrey Cahill looked formidable they hadn’t yet spotted ‘Mother Miller’, the 73-year-old protestor who was about to walk past him during the 1912 Brisbane General Strike in support of striking tram workers and who – although evidence of it is a bit thin on the ground – ‘reputedly stuck a hatpin’ into his horse, causing him to be ‘thrown and injured,’ according to Pam Young in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Was this a press ‘beat-up’ somewhere to discredit those with the impudence to question the establishment, mischievously suggesting that a woman of Miller’s character would feel the need to hurt an animal to make a point? After all, Mrs Miller had right on her side, not to mention all the other women in the 10,000-strong crowd who, despite being confronted by policemen with batons, marched alongside her to Parliament House with appeals that had been a long time coming for the right to join a union and equal rights in the workforce.

Emma had always been a fighter. Born on 26th June 1839 in Chesterfield, the eldest of four children of shoemaker Daniel Holmes and Martha, née Hollingworth, as a child she would walk 10 miles with her father to political meetings to rebel against a society heavily balanced in favour of the rich. Emma would one day take up this fight herself, the only difference being that she would extend the precious right to vote to include women. When she was 18 she married a bookkeeper, Jabez Silcock, with whom she’d eloped, and started a family. They had four children, later moving to Manchester where she supported them by sewing for 12 hours a day, six days a week.