These photos by Jean Taylor are of the Archives room in the Women's Liberation Building situated at 295 Victoria Street West Melbourne during the 1980s.
Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives Inc Association Incorporation Act 1981 no A0040374W ABN 61 138 628 062 PO Box 168, Brunswick East Melbourne, Victoria 3057 phone: 03 9387 6610 email: vwllfa@gmail.com	Note regarding use of text on this website.
Who We Are
The Victorian Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives Inc was set up in 1983 and has the following aims and objectives:
Aims and Objectives
To collect any and all of the material relating to feminist issues, lesbian and womyn-only collectives, actions, groups, conferences, meetings, demonstrations, marches and gatherings that came under the umbrella of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Victoria from 1969 onwards. To store this material as an Archive of Women’s Liberation and Lesbian Feminist activism for the womyn of Victoria. To preserve this material for posterity. To archive this material in order to make it accessible for research and other purposes. To utilise the material for educative purposes in the broader community.
This invaluable and substantial Archive includes assorted material from several activist collectives from the 1970s, bound volumes of the Melbourne Women’s Liberation Newsletter (1972 - 1984), Victorian Women’s Liberation Newsletter (1986 - 1994), Vashti’s Voice (1972 - 1981), Scarlet Woman (1975 - 1990), Lesbian Newsletter (1976 - 1983), Lesbian News (1983 - 1990), Labrys (1990 - 1992) and Lesbiana (1992 - 2004) and early records of the Women’s Liberation Halfway House Collective, the first womyn’s refuge in Victoria.
To maintain the herstorical integrity of the material all donations have been archived either under the individual or the group donor’s name. This makes for a unique record in itself of the enormous amount of political work that radical feminist and lesbian activists have done both personally and collectively over these past four decades.
The VWLLFA inlso includes material such as:
magazines, journals, booklets, newsletters and newspapers, both monograms and periodicals, and some books conference papers and articles leaflets, handouts, flyers, pamphlets posters photos T-shirts memorabilia banners badges newspaper clippings minutes of meetings logbooks videos, films and cassettes
Appropriately enough, the material was stored for many years in the Women’s Liberation Building where many womyn utilised the material from 1985 till the Building closed down in 1992. For the next eight years it was held at a private house where it was still accessible to students and others and during a research project in conjunction with La Trobe University in 1997 a comprehensive listing of most the material was made. Towards the end of 2000, the Archives moved the University of Melbourne Archives and is now accessible through the Baillieu Library for research and other purposes.
From the late 1960s onwards, some feminists began reclaiming and rearranging the English language to better suit our own purposes and to make a political point about the patriarchal use of language to keep womyn oppressed. Words such as womyn and herstory have been used in the website text to reflect this particular view.

The copyright for all material on this site is held by the Victorian Womens' Liberation and Lesbian Feminist Archives Inc. (2009 - 2015)