Kathleen Muriel Butler

Early promise

Kathleen Butler was born in Lithgow in 1891, one of seven children.

She began her working life as a clerk and typist to Mr WF Burrow, chief officer of the New South Wales Government testing office at Lithgow Ironworks. Kathleen developed important technical skills in this role. ‘I found delight in specifications and calculations,’ she said in a 1925 interview with the Brisbane Courier. In 1910, at the age of 19, Kathleen was transferred to the Department of Public Works in Sydney.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge project

The NSW Government had begun planning a bridge to connect the southern and northern shores of Sydney Harbour at the turn of the 20th century. In 1903, JJC Bradfield was appointed secretary to an advisory board set up to review entries in a worldwide bridge design competition. By 1912, Bradfield had been appointed as chief engineer of the Sydney Harbour and City Transit branch in the Department of Public Works. Kathleen was Bradfield’s first staff pick. Although she had no formal engineering qualifications, Bradfield respected her great aptitude for organisation, mathematics, stenography and contract management.

‘The Godmother of the Sydney Harbour Bridge’

Bradfield would come to describe Kathleen as his ‘right-hand man’. In her role as his confidential secretary, Kathleen worked closely with Bradfield on specifications and other elements of the bridge tender. In 1922, while Bradfield was in New York, he relied on Kathleen to not only deal with enquiries about tenders for the bridge, but to shepherd the legislation through the NSW Parliament.

In 1924, Kathleen travelled to England after Dorman Long & Co won the contract for the bridge. She led a team of young male engineers supervising the project in Dorman Long’s London office.

Kathleen wrote 29 articles for the Sydney Mail about the bridge plan, and in 1925, the London Evening Standard reported on the significance of Kathleen being the only woman in the room when the minister opened the tenders.

Kathleen was also highly visible in Sydney, appearing at publicity events and at significant moments such as the opening of tenders, signing contracts, and joining the first rivet on the structure.

Beginning a new chapter

In 1927, Kathleen married pastoralist Maurice Hagarty. At that time, female public servants were required to resign from their jobs under the so-called ‘marriage bar’, and she and Maurice moved to Queensland.

She maintained a close relationship with Bradfield and his wife, attending the Sydney Harbour Bridge’s official opening in 1932 with her young daughter Anne.

In 1936, she again took Anne to visit Bradfield and his wife in Sydney. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, she said she ‘hates to be out of it all’ and was very interested in the Story Bridge (Brisbane) project for which Bradfield was the consulting engineer.

The legacy continues

Kathleen died in 1972, aged 81. She is remembered as an icon for the Women's Engineering Society and for women in STEM more broadly. As part of the Sydney Metro project the 130-metre tunnel boring machine being used to dig a new rail tunnel under Sydney Harbour has been named Kathleen in honour of her work.

References

"Women and That Bridge! The Feminine Influence Behind the Great Builders", The Australian woman's mirror Sydney: The Bulletin Newspaper, 1924. Web. 20 June 2023 http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-42711153

Alex Gooding, ‘Bradfield, 75 years on – part 2: “the only woman present” – Kathleen Butler and the Bridge’, The Strategic Week (blog), 9 August 2018, https://thestrategicweek.com/2018/08/09/bradfield-75-years-on-part-2-the-only-woman-present-kathleen-butler-and-the-bridge/