Trailblazing mining engineer remembered as pioneering transgender woman
Rebecca Norton was a female mining engineer and gender affirmation surgery patient. (Supplied: the Blee family)
Cory Williams was working as a geologist in the 1980s when he stumbled across two unique discoveries; a lead zinc deposit in the Kimberley and a mining engineer by the name of Rebecca Norton.
Back then, women were extremely scarce in the mining industry, and especially in specialised roles like engineering.
Rebecca Norton worked to expose dinosaur fossils in Victoria's Cape Otway in the late 1980s. (Supplied: the Blee family)
"She knew what she was doing as an engineer, that was pretty clear — even to a geologist," Mr Williams said.
As a transgender woman, Ms Norton was well ahead of the curve.
Her trailblazing story is only now coming to light.
Cory Williams works at Lake Lefroy, WA, in 1970. (Supplied: Cory Williams)
Engineer at heart
Rebecca Norton was born in 1940 in the regional Victorian gold rush city of Ballarat.
She studied engineering at the specialised Ballarat School of Mines, before landing a job in Mt Isa in Queensland.
Jill Blee (left) and Rebecca Norton were raised in a Catholic household. (Supplied: the Blee family)
Her sister and historian, Jill Blee said Ms Norton was passionate about the Mt Isa posting.
"She revelled in it, it was exciting, it was the most up-to-date mining venture in the world at that time," Dr Blee said.
"She dreamed mining, she dreamed rocks."
But Ms Norton also had to dream of being treated fairly in the industry she loved.
Rebecca Norton worked in Mt Isa in the 1960s, before she transitioned gender. (ABC News: Harriet Tatham)
A struggle against stigma
Dr Blee said her sister's employment was cut short in 1966 when she attended the mine manager's ball in a "pretty pink number" and used the women's toilets.
Later, she lost another job, when a company director spotted her on an interstate holiday.
"She was kicked out of places left, right and centre," Dr Blee said.
"She'd turn up at the races wearing a dress and then she'd run into one of the directors and out she'd go."
Ms Norton's career took her all over Australia, including Stradbroke Island's sand mine. (ABC News: Giulio Saggin)
Ms Norton's personal life was also marred by prejudice.
When she came out to her family as transgender, her mother cut ties.
"Anyone who was at all different was labelled a pervert," Dr Blee said.
"It's very difficult to explain just how gender-biased the world was until quite recently."
Underground mining operations staff were mostly men in the early 1980s. (ABC Archives)
Ms Norton would continue to work in various mining roles until the 1990s, but suffered mental illness, alcohol addiction and bankruptcy.
Dr Blee reconnected with her older sister in her later years, and assisted in her care until Ms Norton's death in 2017.
This year, Dr Blee published her sister's memoir, after investigating her career and obtaining her medical records.
"She meant a lot to me," Dr Blee said.
"I think also I had a bit of a guilty conscience … that she'd been left to deal with all of this on her own because she'd been abandoned by the family."
Jill Blee said her sister "could talk the leg off an iron pot." (Supplied: the Blee family)
One of a kind, one of many
Dr Blee discovered her sister was one of the first in Melbourne to receive gender affirmation surgery in 1975, in the early days of care provided by the Parkville Psychiatric Unit.
The Queen Victoria Hospital's Gender Dysphoria Clinic, now the Monash Health Gender Clinic, also offered the surgery from 1976 but did so in semi-secrecy.
Rebecca Norton in the early 1990s. (Supplied: the Blee family)
Julie Peters, who has studied transgender issues in public health, also studied engineering a decade after Ms Norton.
But she switched pathways due to what she saw as the "misogynistic and homophobic" culture of her peers.
Dr Peters said it was unusual for transgender women to keep working in the industry where they had been known by the gender assigned to them at birth.
"You had to be able to 'pass' so well that nobody realised you were trans, but that also meant you had to totally hide your past," she said.
Julie Peters says professional competence provides a frame of reference to build relationships outside gender. (ABC News: Natasha Johnson)
"[I transitioned] when I felt that society had moved on enough so that I could actually cope with the pressures."
She said Ms Norton's story was exceptional and representative of the issues many transgender women faced.
"It's ordinary in that trans women basically have to learn to deal with their transness, and some people deal with it by denial and high levels of alcohol and tobacco use," she said.
"But it's very extraordinary in that she was so determined … that she did what she had to do in terms of being herself, and that had consequences because the society that she lived in didn't want her to do that."