Kate Jennings, the Australian poet, author and "pioneering feminist," died on May 1, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. She was 72.
In 1970, Jennings gave a rousing speech at a Vietnam moratorium rally held at Sydney University which was "credited with helping spark the start of the second wave of feminism in Australia." That speech, along with her work as an activist, which included helping set up Australia's first refuge for victims of domestic violence, made her a prominent figure. In a 2010 profile, Jennings described that speech as a "shot across the bow" that helped women's lib meetings "spread like wildfire" throughout the country.
Writing in The Age, author Elliot Perlman said Jennings "occupied an important position in Australian writing." Whether she was writing essays, novels or poems, her work was "sharp, piercing, intellectually rigorous and scrupulously honest." She championed women's writing "at a time when this was a pretty courageous undertaking," and fought for many social causes along with women's rights.
Jennings moved to New York in 1979, where she wrote for magazines and newspapers. In 1987, she married photographer and graphic designer Bob Cato, who created album cover art for artists like Bob Dylan and Miles Davis. In 1996, she published the novel Snake, based on her upbringing in rural New South Wales in the 1950s.
She published Moral Hazard, a novel about a woman forced to take a job as a corporate speech writer after her husband is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, in 2002. This book, too, was autobiographical--Jennings became a speech writer for a Wall Street firm to pay for the increasingly immense costs of her husband's medical treatment. Perlman called Moral Hazard "perhaps the pinnacle of her career" and one of the greatest Australian novels of the last 50 years.