Born in 1915, Aboriginal activist Shirley Andrews studied science at the University of Melbourne in the 1930s before going onto work for the Council of Scientific Research, the precursor of the CSIRO.

She was a staunch political activist and member of the Communist Party – this caused some tensions and led to her resignation in 1951. A year later she became a senior biochemist at the Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital and remained there until her retirement in 1977. During this time, she was an executive member of the Council for Aboriginal Rights, where she campaigned for Indigenous people to be recognised in the Australia Constitution via the 1967 referendum.

Andrews was also a practitioner and historian of Australian folk dance. She was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in 1994 for her contributions to this field. Andrews died in 2001.

For more information on Andrews, Campus Review would like to point our readers to her Wikipedia page. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t exist. In fact, according to Wikipedia’s own statistics, only 16 per cent of the online encyclopaedia’s articles are about women.