The feminist who made global news when she shackled herself to a bar
By Peter Craven
MERLE THORNTON: 1930 – 2024
In a tribute to feminists and suffragettes, the legendary band U2 projected a huge backscreen image of the moment when Merle Thornton and her fellow conspirator, Ro Bogner, chained themselves to the rail of the public bar at Brisbane’s Regatta Hotel in 1965.
Shackled: Merle Thornton and Rosalie Bognor are chained to the bar at the Regatta Hotel, Brisbane, on 31st March 1965, in a protest for women’s rights. They chained themselves to the bar after being refused a drink.
Their demand that they be served beers in public bars like the blokes was a seminal moment in the fight for equal rights for women and made global news. Merle Thornton was the mother of Harold and Sigrid Thornton (yes, the famous actor), but she was also a feminist and a firebrand stirrer of such note that historian Marilyn Lake has said the famed bar protest “presaged a new phase in the history of feminism”.
The demonstration was all the more striking for the fact that Merle was tiny and crystal-voiced. The press were there to record the show and what a show it was. They had cottoned on to the fact that the law did not prevent the consumption of the beer but just the service.
A week later, a second protest was staged, reinforced by the presence of a much larger group of both male and female feminists. This time the suffragettes brought their own bottles of beer to expose, with no touch of ambiguity, the fact that an anachronistic law was deliberately being broken.
The ABC sent a Four Corners team to this second event. Needless to say, Merle was banned from the Regatta but with the passage of the years the establishment now graciously acknowledges the woman who gave the place its niche in national mythology with her insistence on its ancient blindness to liberty.
Merle Thornton’s eyes were always wide open and that soprano voice would always shout it as she saw it. It was at her daughter’s graduation that Merle decided she would denounce Queensland’s then-premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen. He said something she disapproved of and Merle came straight back at him: “That’s a f—ing lie!” she cried in the old autocrat’s face.
She was born in a Melbourne shadowed by the onset of the Depression but the family soon moved to Sydney where she had no trouble getting into that exclusive, selectively streamed government college, Fort Street Girls High School.
At 18, in 1948, Merle enrolled to study English literature at Sydney University. Most of her fellow students at the time were returned servicemen and many of her lectures were attended by a thousand people.
Merle Thornton, who chained herself to the bar at Brisbane’s Regatta Hotel in 1965, poses with a pint of beer at the same bar 50 years on in 2015.Credit: Photographic
In 1951, Merle met Neil Thornton, who shared her convictions and social engagement and became her lifelong soul mate. They married in 1953.
By now Merle also saw herself with piercing clarity as the victim of a barbarous anti-women law. She was working as a graduate in the office of Sir Charles Moses, the general manager of the ABC, but she was compelled to conceal her marriage until the third trimester of her pregnancy made it uncontestable.
In 1956 a woman’s right to work was terminated upon her marriage and Merle was far from the first woman to deliberately conceal it in order to maintain a job.
Nothing was helped by mother and firstborn baby boy Harold having a lonely time on a housing estate in the Blue Mountains while Neil spent hours commuting to Sydney to support their new family.
A postgraduate research posting from the ANU triggered a move to Canberra, where daughter Sigrid was born. Apartment accommodation provided by the university afforded Merle a more congenial social life with new friends Bob and Hazel Hawke sharing their duplex.
Bob and Hazel Hawke lived in the same Canberra duplex as Merle Thornton.Credit: Rick Stevens
When Neil was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Queensland the family packed their lives into an old Humber for the drive to new digs. The trip was all the more memorable given mechanical breakdowns and both children contracting chicken pox en route.
Merle found work as a researcher to the distinguished historian Geoffrey Bolton but she was never content to be a spectator.
In these early Queensland years Merle joined the Aboriginal Advancement League through which she met and became lifelong friends with poet and activist Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal).
In Brisbane, Merle undertook postgrad research in philosophy. One of Neil’s students was future Labor leader and governor general Bill Hayden, who Merle convinced to introduce a bill that repealed the marriage bar provisions which she considered such an iniquity.
Merle Thornton and actor daughter Sigrid Thornton.
The later Regatta Bar incident, so brilliantly and dramatically staged, was a great gesture but it had behind it Hayden’s private members’ bill which Merle had done so much to bring about.
Heading now for London, she decided in 1966 to study the philosophy of language at University College London.
Merle loved sex and she loved reading. She was a wonderful guide to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and what makes her so impressive in light of this is that she understood that Lessing did not see her own work as a feminist tract.
Merle Thornton had had her intellectual blooding. The public bar partisan and the thoughtful student of the philosophy of language were not separate figures. She was at heart a sane but militant feminist.
Merle Thornton.Credit: Photographic
She campaigned for proper sex education for girls, fought for access to abortions and the necessity of seeing women’s studies as integral to the life of the mind and the idea of the university. She also fought like a lioness against the Vietnam War and was arrested a number of times.
She was made a Member of the Order of Australia and a doctor of letters, but Merle was a born troublemaker. She would not pipe down for anyone.
She was a talented writer of fiction and her play Playing Mothers and Fathers was staged at the Carlton Courthouse in 1990 and she wrote a number of episodes of the famed Australian TV show Prisoner.
She and her beloved Neil, who suffered from a type of post-traumatic stress disorder potentially related to his posting to Hiroshima, would both bubble with enthusiasm at the twist and turn of every new idea, right until the end.
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