A Loo of One’s Own

A Mostly True Tale of Australia’s First Female Parliamentarians

Written and Illustrated by Eleri Harris

Reviewed by Zewlan Moor

What a treat to read this book!

A Loo of One’s Own is the debut picture book of award-winning cartoonist, Eleri Harris, whose second book, Making Nonfiction Comics: A Guide to Graphic Narrative is out in the US and Australia with Abrams ComicArts in November 2025. As a resident tour guide of Canberra, with a background in non-fiction history, science and reportage comics, she seems the natural choice to create a book about a little known aspect of Australian political history, the embarrassing lack of female toilets in Parliament House until 1974.

The setting is Parliament House, Canberra, 1943. The tone is irreverent, with the first line: “Our story starts eighty years ago in Canberra, where all the cool stuff happens.” Since she lives in Canberra, Eleri is allowed to indulge in some gentle irony. The target audience of primary school children is drawn in immediately with a two-panel page showing two matronly women dressed in tartan school uniforms and backpacks. The accompanying text says, “On the first day of school…” A near mirror image below has the words, “Wait! Parliament!”, and shows the women dressed in their normal clothes. The facing page contains the text, “Two women walked into Australia’s Parliament House.” This is a low-angle shot from the women’s perspective, showing the intimidating steps leading up to a colonial building. A gaggle of reporters waits for them at the top.

For those two women were the first women elected to Federal Parliament! The women were very different, coming from opposite sides of the political and social divide. Labor Party Senator Dorothy Tangney was described as “‘Jolly’”. United Australia Party House of Representatives MP Enid Lyons was described as “‘Wholesome’”. Biographical back matter describes Dame Enid Lyons as the widow of Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, who died while in office in 1939. They had twelve children together and she played a lead role in his campaigns. He acknowledged that she played an important role in his political career. Dame Dorothy Tangney was a career politician, founding the Labor Club at the University of Western Australia and advocating for women, children and First Nations people. The women dressed differently according to their social class: Enid in fur and pearls and Dorothy in a floral frock.

But one thing they did have in common was their shared drama of not being able to find a female toilet in the whole of their workplace. “Enid and Dorothy were not friends, but they had very similar experiences on their first day of Parliament.” Many pages are devoted to the women’s high-and-low search for a women’s latrine. In the end, they devised a system of leaving their shoes outside the men’s room to let them know women were using their toilet. “And thus was one of the twentieth century’s greatest secret codes employed.” They must have sat on the toilet in their stockinged feet, unless they took a spare pair of shoes for that purpose. Sadly, a series of panels shows an increasing pile of shoes outside the men’s rooms, as increasing numbers of women were elected to parliament over the next three decades, but not catered for in the building plans. The government finally built a women’s toilet in 1974.

Harris’s picture book is like a high-visibility version of an extended comic strip or short graphic novel. Each page acts as a comic panel, with some containing a single image and others containing a mix of text and smaller sub-panels. Most pages contain images that can be seen quite clearly from the back of a room, making the book ideal for classroom use. Its landscape format allows some clever artistic decisions by Harris. For example, the end pages are an aerial plan of Parliament House, with the chamber and offices of the House of Representatives on the left and those of the Senate on the right, with the King’s Hall in between. On tours of the new Parliament House, guides talk about how the eucalyptus green of the former and ochre red of the latter were consciously chosen, to differentiate the colony from the British parliament, with its deep bottle greens and rich heritage reds. Similarly, the textures inside the building are more rough and “natural” than the formal high polished oak and leather of the British Houses of Lords and Commons. In this regard, the textured matte paper is a perfect choice.

A toilet is an interesting lens to explore history and feminism.  Older readers interested in intertextuality could explore the film “Hidden Figures”, which also highlights the mundane obstacles faced by the female “computers” who, while integral to landing the moon mission, had to walk a ridiculous distance to access more earthly facilities. They might also delve into Virginia Woolf’s seminal feminist text, A Room of One’s Own, to reflect on Harris’s choice of title.

This picture book is a true delight, and its relevance and potential for interesting discussions and/or lesson plans is limited only by the imagination!

Allen & Unwin 2025

Eleri Harris

Zewlan Moor is the author of Nothing Alike and The Bill Dup