Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
More people have now heard about Miranda and how I want to tell her story. ‘Who is Miranda?’, I hope you are wondering. Well, (as I have now told people at a number of academic conferences and today at the Gunnas Masterclass), Miranda Hill was a trade union leader, who beckoned to me from the union records I was reading in the archives. Born at the turn of the last century, Miranda was a confectionery worker who joined the newly formed Female Confectioners Union in 1916. She soon became a shop steward, and in the early 1920s, increased her union involvement by becoming a branch committee member, then vice president, president and assistant secretary. Active in the Trades Hall as a delegate and the Labor Party through its women’s committee (becoming president after 10 years), Miranda was a committed activist for workers’ rights. ‘So why do you want to tell her story?’, I now hope you are asking. The simple answer is that while there are many aspects of Miranda’s story that are in the public domain, much remains a mystery. One is her heritage. Genealogical research revealed her African-American paternal great-grandparents freely living in Philadelphia in the 1830s, and their son who migrated to Victoria in the early 1850s and married a young dressmaker, newly arrived from the UK. How this shaped Miranda’s life is one of those mysteries, as race makes no appearance in the records of her public activities. Another is the female friendships she sustained, and what these tell us about women of her generation who did not marry. Miranda and her friend Ruby shared houses for at least 50 years, initially with Miranda’s family, and then (maybe, it is not clear) on their own. While the nature of their relationship was unclear at first (despite people deciding for me, claiming ‘they must have been in a same- sex relationship’), I now know that Ruby was engaged to one of Miranda’s brothers, Fred, who died of tuberculosis when he was 24 years old. For a number of years, Ruby penned poignant poems that appeared in the Family Notices on the anniversary of Fred’s death. The final two decades of Miranda’s life remain a mystery as her public trail runs cold after 1950. The final public documents are her death certificate and will in 1973 (and yes, Ruby is one of the beneficiaries).
It is for these reasons and more (yes, there is more to what I know of her life), that I want to tell Miranda’s both ordinary and extraordinary story.