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In 1983 we are drawing close to the end of the ten years which the United Nations designated the Decade for Women. Hal f-way through that decade, in 1980, in Australia, the proportion of women in the population involved in some kind of post-secondary education had equalled the proportion of men. Only a year earlier it was possible to claim that 'Women's studies courses are at present offered at most Australian universities ' .1 In 1982 the University of New South Wales established a course-work postgraduate degree (a Master [sic] of Arts) in Women's Studies. In 1983 the University of Adelaide set up a Research Centre in Women's Studies . And related courses have proliferated at other educational institutions , ranging from the Studies in Sexism course offered at the Australian National Capital's School Without Wall s, through a host of units - Modern Women Writers, Social History of Women, Women and Film, The Family (as a ' small social system') - taught at the New South Wales Institute of Technology, to the Graduate Diploma course in Women's Studies at the State College of Victoria and the Graduate Diploma in Teaching (Women's Studies) taught at South Australia's College of Advanced Education., Journal of Educational Thought / Revue de la Pensée Educative, Vol 17 No 2 (1983)

Roma Flinders Mitchell, 1913–2000, AC, DBE, Queen's Counsel, Judge, Founding Chair of the Human Rights Commission, Chancellor of the University of Adelaide, Governor of South Australia, was the first woman in Australia—often also the first in the British Commonwealth—to gain the positions and honours that gild any narrative of her life. How did she do this? What was it like for her? Such questions follow immediately. And then, making it more complicated, what else was there in her life besides achievements and honours? What other doors opened before her as she moved through her days? And what doors closed? How did she choose some doors and not others? These are questions that we are addressing in our biography of Roma Flinders Mitchell. They are not questions that we will consider here, though. Rather, our subject in this article is not our narrative but Roma Mitchell's own story of her life. It develops into a three‐stranded narrative, composed principally of interviews for press and television, predomin...