Elsie is remembered as the starting point of the women’s refuge movement in Sydney. For the women who lived there, it was a site of survival, solidarity, and a lived feminism more complex than the Women’s Lib movement could conceive at the time.
In 1974, more than 50 women, including Lina Clayton, Christina Gibberson, and Anne Summers, broke into two derelict houses in Glebe and declared them sanctuaries for women escaping domestic violence. The homes, named Elsie and Minnie, became the first 24-hour women’s refuge in Australia and the first in the world to use the term ‘refuge’ as we use it today.
“Elsie women’s refuge was a chaotic and fascinating place,” explains artist Zanny Begg, “which brought together white middle-class feminists alongside working-class, queer, migrant and First Nations women in a steep learning curve of intersectionality, solidarity and care.” Begg’s exhibition, Elsie (and Minnie), now showing at UTS Gallery and Library, returns to this moment to examine the politics forged inside the refuge’s dilapidated walls.
The exhibition comprises two major new works: the single-channel film Elsie (and Minnie) and a three-channel video installation, The Yellow Wallpaper, alongside a parallel archival display.
The single-channel film anchors the exhibition. Begg weaves first-person interviews, archival material, and stylised reenactments into a textured memory of a movement that was improvised, revolutionary, and ultimately unfinished.
Told by the women who lived it, the film shows how Elsie helped transform public understanding of the reality of domestic violence in Australia. Within a decade, more than 160 women’s refuges had opened across Australia. Run by women, for women, they directly challenged the legal, economic and social structures that kept women in violent homes. Domestic violence, once dismissed as private or unspeakable, was forced into public consciousness.
Anne Summers, Elsie’s original founder, recalls: “Back then, there was no one to talk to.” Both she and former residents reflect on how slowly the broader women’s movement came to name violence in the home, and how it often struggled to recognise how class, race, and language shaped women’s experiences of it.
That gap is one of the film’s central tensions. It surfaces not through critique, but through the reflections of those who lived it. “The women’s movement was a bit slow at picking up on all those issues,” says Bobbi Townsend, “whereas we in the refuge lived them day by day, and had to sort them out.”“There were lots of good staff members,”
Townsend continues, “but it was sitting around the table with the other women at Elsie, till three, four in the morning, just talking about everything under the sun. It was the friendship that we all valued, that freedom, and being able to try to unravel what had happened to us. So we didn’t keep wearing the tag of victim. ”
Through archive and testimony, she revisits a pioneering space of solidarity. The refuge was not only a response to crisis, but a model of what feminist politics could look like in practice.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a three-channel video installation is a mediation on the pervasive nature of coercive control and the possibility of liberation from it. Taking its name from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s seminal 1892 short story, Begg’s installation uses storytelling and choreographed movement to examine control, violence, isolation, and power within a domestic setting.
Six women who responded to an open call to collaborate with the artist, share their personal experiences and responses to domestic violence, set against a backdrop of hand-drawn yellow wallpaper. There is no narration, no testimony. In a field where disclosure is often expected as the price of recognition, this choice is deliberate and effective.
The final component of the exhibition is an archival display at UTS Library. Posters, oral histories, and press clippings from collections, including the Mitchell Library and the Jessie Street National Women’s Library, provide context for the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement in Sydney.
Today, domestic and family violence services are formalised, monitored, and increasingly shaped by funding contracts and compliance systems. Some of this has delivered real gains. But Elsie (and Minnie) reminds us that the refuge movement began as an act of refusal and solidarity.
“When we started Elsie,” Summers says in the film, “if I had thought about it at all, I probably hoped the refuge would be closed by now.” Domestic violence is no longer unspeakable. Women do have somewhere to go. But on any given night, more than half of those seeking a bed in a refuge are turned away.
“One of the great collateral benefits of Elsie,” Summers adds, “was that women could meet other women who’d gone through what they’d gone through.” The makeshift house on Westmoreland Street was never the endpoint. It marked the beginning of a movement that remains unfinished and is still urgently needed.
Elsie (and Minnie) is a UTS Gallery commission supported by the Creative Australia’s Visual Art, Craft and Design Framework 2025-2028 and presented in partnership with UTS Library, the UTS Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion, the UTS Business School, and the UTS Media Lab.
If this article has raised issues for you, or someone you know needs support:
NSW Domestic Violence Line – 1800 656 463
1800RESPECT (National counselling service for family and sexual violence) – 1800 737 732
Link2Home (Homelessness services) – 1800 152 152
Child Protection Helpline – 13 21 11
