Elizabeth Ann Symonds (; ''née'' Burley; 12 July 1939 – 15 November 2018) was an Australian politician. She was a

Labor Labour or labor may refer to: * Childbirth, the delivery of a baby * Labour (human activity), or work ** Manual labour, physical work ** Wage labour, a socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer ** Organized labour and the la ...

member of the New South Wales Legislative Council from 1982 to 1998.

Biography

Born in

Murwillumbah Murwillumbah ( ) is a town in far north-eastern New South Wales, Australia, in the Tweed Shire, on the Tweed River. Sitting on the south eastern foothills of the McPherson Range in the Tweed Volcano valley, Murwillumbah is 848 km north-e ...

, Ann Burley trained as a teacher at Armidale Teacher's College and the

University of New South Wales The University of New South Wales (UNSW), also known as UNSW Sydney, is a public research university based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is one of the founding members of Group of Eight, a coalition of Australian research-intensiv ...

. On 16 January 1965 she married Maurice Symonds, with whom she had five children. She joined the Labor Party in 1967. In 1974 she was elected to

Waverley Municipal Council Waverley Council is a Local government area in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. First incorporated on 16 June 1859 as the Municipality of Waverley, it is one of the oldest-surviving local government area ...

, becoming the municipality's first female Deputy Mayor in 1977. In 1982, Symonds was appointed to the New South Wales Legislative Council as a Labor member following the resignation of Peter Baldwin, who was contesting the federal seat of Sydney in the upcoming federal election. She held her seat until 1998, when she resigned; the subsequent vacancy was filled by Carmel Tebbutt. She was a founder of the Australian Parliamentary Group on Drug Law Reform (APGDLR), a cross party group of 100 MPs from State and Commonwealth parliaments. The group was set up in 1993 after a meeting in Canberra convened by Symonds and Michael Moore (ACT Assembly). Symonds was Patron of SHINE for Kids, a charity supporting children which family members in the criminal justice system, from 1999 until her death. Symonds died in St Vincent's Private Hospital, Darlinghurst, on 15 November 2018 after a long illness. The notice of her death ended with the epithet, "Well-behaved women rarely make history".

References

1939 births 2018 deaths Members of the New South Wales Legislative Council Members of the Order of Australia University of New South Wales alumni Australian Labor Party members of the Parliament of New South Wales Women members of the New South Wales Legislative Council {{Australia-Labor-NewSouthWales-MP-stub