Shirley Aldythea Marshall Seymour Andrews

This biography is republished from The Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership in Twentieth-Century Australia. Written by Jenny Hibben, The University of Melbourne. See below for full attribution.

Born: 5 November 1915, Australia
Died: 15 September 2001
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: NA

Born in Sandringham, Victoria, in 1915, Shirley Andrews was the only child of a single mother, Doris Andrews nee Gray. She lived with her mother, grandmother and uncle and attended Miss Montfort’s school in Sandringham until the age of 11 when she became a boarder at St Michael’s Grammar School in St Kilda. Completing her secondary education in 1933 she enrolled in a BSc at the University of Melbourne in the following year. At university she began her interest in the left of politics through the Movement Against War and Fascism, and in dance by joining Borovansky’s ballet classes for working girls.
Shirley won a Caroline Kay scholarship at the end of her science studies and worked in the Veterinary School at the university for 6 years. She then joined the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), later, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), as a research officer taking on a variety of scientific roles. However, her membership of the Communist Party, which she had joined towards the end of World War II, caused some difficulties and she resigned in 1951 to go to the International Youth Peace Festival in Berlin.
In 1952, she was appointed Senior Biochemist at the Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital where she remained until her retirement in 1977. Here she worked with the Hospital’s superintendent, Dr John Cade, on the biochemical tests for lithium that he trialled to such success. She was in charge of the hospital’s laboratory and oversaw the general testing and also did research into the effects of bromureide abuse publishing several papers on her work.
In early 1951 Shirley had joined the executive of the Council for Aboriginal Rights (CAR), an organisation seeking to find a federal solution to various State legislation that enshrined racism and prejudice. She resumed this role on her return to Australia in 1952. Activism for political and economic rights for Australian Aborigines provided a political focus for the next two decades, culminating in the creation of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement, later FCAATSI and their successful push for a ‘Yes’ vote in the 1967 referendum. Andrews had worked assiduously, writing letters and papers, speaking to newspapers, individuals and organisations and attending meetings around Australia.
Shirley provided leadership in dance circles drawing both on personal experience and research into the background of how Australians danced from the earliest days of white settlement. The combination made her an expert in this area, acknowledged by people in folk music circles who wanted to learn of the post-World War II. For Communists in the post-war era the revival of dance was linked to a political push for more Australian identified culture in order to counteract the increasing American influence and Shirley became the acknowledged expert in the area. Her Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM), awarded in 1994, recognised her contribution to dance in Australia.
Although independent, Shirley pursued her life interests with the support of various groups of friends and acquaintances. She never married, but did have one significant relationship during the 1940s and early 1950s with Bill Bird, the secretary of the Victorian Seamen’s Union. Her decision to remain single and childless was a major point of difference between Shirley and her peers. She was aware of discrimination against women from her studies at the university and stated that her involvement in seeking rights for Indigenous Australians was due to empathy learned from her position as a woman in a patriarchal society.
Shirley preferred to work in ‘the backroom’ and yet she was a self-confident and able leader, which she showed in her laboratory, in dance circles, at the head of Aboriginal rights committees and in public speaking. She called herself a ‘liberated woman’ and later a feminist and believed strongly in women’s abilities. Shirley understood her own capabilities and she was occasionally scornful of those with whom she came into contact who did not live up to her exacting standards. That she denied seeking positions of leadership was mere modesty, they came to her because she believed in working hard, committing to service positions in organisations that interested and stimulated her and because she knew that she could do them better than most.