We’ve heard about the glass ceiling – but for Australia’s first female MPs, there was also the porcelain barrier.
When Enid Lyons and Dorothy Tangney entered Parliament in 1943, they were confronted with a basic problem: there was no women’s toilet for MPs. The People’s House had made no provisions for half the people.
Canberra cartoonist Eleri Harris has told their story in A Loo of One’s Own, which won this year’s Children’s Book Council of Australia New Illustrator Award and received an Honour in the Eve Pownall Award for Information Books. The book was also shortlisted for the 2026 NSW Young People’s History Prize.
Ms Harris is an Eisner Award-winning cartoonist and editor who spent a decade as features editor of US comics publication The Nib. Her non-fiction history, science, and reportage comics have been published and exhibited around the world.
“It’s pretty funny to win New Illustrator when you’ve been a cartoonist for 15 years, but it is a really lovely honour given that it’s my first picture book or my first work for children,” Ms Harris said.
“The gold sticker on a picture book – that is everything in Australia in the world of picture books. I feel like it’s definitely a symbol that children recognise, and they understand means it’s a really good book. So it’s wonderful to get one of those.”
Ms Harris is one of three Canberra writers to win CBCA awards this year. Stephanie Owen Reeder won the Eve Pownall Award for Peculiar Parents, while Sandy Bigna’s verse novel Little Bones received an Honour in the Younger Readers category.
Australian women gained the right to vote and stand for Federal Parliament in 1902. Old Parliament House opened 25 years later, in 1927, but no woman was elected to Parliament until Lyons and Tangney in 1943.
“When you talk to kids about it, you say, ‘Can you imagine what that feels like? You’re the only person who’s ever looked like you before to enter this building to be a Member of Parliament – and there’s no toilet for you to use. What is that like emotionally?’
“It’s a good gateway for kids to start thinking about empathy and accessibility.”
Exactly where Lyons and Tangney went to the toilet is not known. Ms Harris said women in other Australian parliaments were known to place their high-heeled shoes outside men’s toilets when they were using them, as a secret code that they were inside and warning men not to enter. Ms Harris uses that solution in her book.
But MPs weren’t the only women to face plumbing problems in Parliament. Women were already working there as secretaries, stenographers, Hansard scribes, dining-room workers, and journalists.
“None of them had a toilet to use, except for the visitors’ toilet in the building,” Ms Harris said.
It wasn’t until the 1970s that women had their own toilet in the working areas of Old Parliament House. In 1974, a plywood box was placed around a urinal; it can still be seen at the Museum of Australian Democracy. Canberra Times journalist Gay Davidson “essentially liberated” the toilet closest to the Press Gallery, Harris said, by removing its ‘Gentlemen’ sign so that it simply read ‘Toilet’.
Ms Harris said she wants children thinking about inclusion and exclusion.
“What does it feel like to be excluded? Why isn’t Australia’s democracy built for everybody? How can we think about making spaces that are inclusive and nice for everyone to be in? If you don’t build a space that people can access, then it means you’re saying people like that don’t belong there.”
Even today, Ms Harris said, the door into the Senate chamber is too heavy for Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John to open.
“We’re saying people with a disability don’t belong in the Senate by making it inaccessible for people who are in a wheelchair. That’s the same for so many of the parliament buildings around Australia.”
The book has its genesis in a presentation Ms Harris gave in Sydney. In 2024, she was invited to tell a story to children at Sydney Town Hall, “like a glorified PowerPoint presentation”. She had no work for children ready to perform, and only two weeks to come up with something. She remembered from her work as a tour guide for She Shapes History that the Parliament House toilet story particularly resonated with children. Afterwards, Ms Harris sent the slides to her friend and fellow illustrator Erica Wagner, who had won the CBCA New Illustrator Award in 2024, and asked whether she thought it could become a picture book. Wagner sent it straight to Allen & Unwin.
“I think I’m the only person to have ever pitched Allen & Unwin with a slideshow,” Ms Harris said.
Now Ms Harris is working on several more books.
“I’m definitely going to make more women’s history books,” she said. “Don’t you worry about that!”
Ms Harris will also lead Canberra Writers Festival tours about women writers in the ACT, and occasionally runs Badass Women of Canberra tours. Bookings can be made through the She Shapes History website.
