Australian Dictionary of Biography

Sally Bowen, n.d.

Sally Bowen (1918–1999), communist, peace activist, community activist, and feminist, was born Sara Elva Gladys Phipps on 9 January 1918 at Gunnedah, New South Wales, youngest of four children, and only daughter, of Victorian-born parents Andrew Phipps, share-farmer, and his wife Margaret, née Porter. Her father pursued itinerant labouring jobs and Sally left school at thirteen, working for a time as a sheep drover. Illness forced Andrew out of work, and they went to Narrabri, where Sally helped her mother run a boarding house. In 1941, the age pension their only income, Sally’s parents moved to Fairy Meadow, near Wollongong. Sally worked as a cook at a nearby hotel. Wollongong’s strong mining and industrial union movement strengthened her socialist leanings. As women replaced men in industry during World War II, she found work at the Port Kembla factory of Lysaght’s Newcastle Works Ltd, making Owen guns. She joined the communist-led Federated Ironworkers’ Association, became a shop steward, and in 1942 joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA).

In 1944 Phipps took work at Berlei Ltd, making women’s underwear. She remained an active unionist, and a member of the CPA’s Fairy Meadow branch. In 1946 she won the Communist Party Popular Girl competition. Appointed South Coast organiser for the party’s Eureka Youth League, she championed anti-imperialism, peace, and an end to racial discrimination. She left Berlei in 1947 to care for her parents, whose health was declining. Reliant on welfare, friends, and the CPA, she took up dressmaking.

During the 1949 coal strike Phipps assisted mining families and strengthened her reputation as a loyal party comrade. Fearing that Communist unions’ bank accounts would be frozen by the Chifley government, the Miners’ Federation and other unions entrusted her with large sums of cash that she hid in her home. In 1951 Eric Aarons, who had been South Coast district CPA secretary since 1947, led a delegation to the People’s Republic of China and suggested that she replace him as secretary. The party agreed and ‘jovial Miss Sally Phipps, Eureka Youth League organiser and indefatigable Peace Council worker’ (‘Insider’ 1951, 1) was appointed. During the campaign against the Menzies’ government’s 1951 referendum to ban the CPA she met Welsh-born David Bowen, a miner, who joined the party. They married in a civil service on 12 March 1954 at the District Registrar’s Office, Wollongong, with three hundred people attending the reception at the Wollongong Agricultural Hall. Ill-health would force Dave to retire in 1966 and he died in 1984.

Bowen suffered a miscarriage in 1955. She resigned the CPA secretaryship but would remain on the district committee until the party was dissolved in 1991. In 1957 she gave birth to a son, David, followed later by a daughter, Margaret. At the 1953, 1962, and 1965 New South Wales State elections she contested Bulli for the CPA, campaigning for nationalisation of monopolies; for the funding of public housing, schools, and hospitals; and for women’s rights. She got 12 per cent of the vote in 1953, 5 per cent in 1962, and 4 per cent in 1965, consistent with the Party’s decline in the Cold War era.

Joining a CPA delegation to the Soviet Union in 1964, Bowen was impressed by the childcare and other facilities that allowed women easier access to employment. For the rest of her life she campaigned for workers, women, peace, Indigenous Australians, and improved community facilities and health care. In the mid-1950s she had joined the Miners’ Women’s Auxiliary, which supported striking miners, serving as South Coast secretary until 1982. She was a member of the South Coast Association for International Co-operation and Disarmament and the Save Our Sons movement that opposed conscription for the Vietnam War. Initially wary, she also embraced the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s. She crusaded for more employment opportunities for women, including a successful fight in 1973 that forced Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd to employ women at its Port Kembla steelworks. In 1980, representing the Women’s Auxiliary, she worked with a coalition of organisations to establish the Wollongong Women’s Centre. Local Aboriginal women Elders honoured her for her advocacy for Indigenous Australians. Her long commitment to improving health care saw her appointed in 1987 as inaugural first chair of the Illawarra Aged Task Force, a Healthy Cities Illawarra initiative funded by the New South Wales government and comprising twenty-two community groups; she represented the Women’s Auxiliary. In 1990 the South Coast Labour Council made her a life member in recognition of her work for industrial and social justice.

Remembered by a friend, Peter Cockcroft, as ‘loyal and committed,’ Bowen was described by Nick Southall as ‘car[ing] so much for working people’ (Failes 1999, 10). In 1994 she published A Garland of Poetry, a collection of poems she had written throughout her life. This returned her to one of her first loves. Her verse traced the social justice causes increasingly important to her. She died on 25 February 1999 at Thirroul, survived by her son and her daughter, and was cremated. Her most touching monument is the Sally Bowen Playground at Pop Errington Park, Towradgi, opposite the Florence Street house she lived in for the last forty-nine years of her life. The playground with its memorial to her is a fitting tribute to the woman, the local community action group she was involved with, and their campaign to have the neighbourhood field turned into a park.