CARMELITA MALLEA STEINKE

NOV. 19, 1932 - SEPT. 9, 2007

Top Left Carmelita in her early 20's; top right Carmelita in 1978; bottom left Carmelita and John Steinke on their wedding day 1957; top middle Carmelita with her grand daughter Lina. (Photos courtesy of the Steinke family)

My Tribute to Carmelita Mallea Steinke 

It was only in September this year when I spoke to my friend Carmelita Steinke, asking her what she would like for her birthday in November, thinking that she would probably love another book as I knew she was an avid reader. So how does one find oneself writing an obituary for this dear woman some weeks later? Not long after I spoke to her, Carmelita travelled to Modesto, California to visit her family and be there for her mother’s memorial as her mother had just died at the age of one hundred and three. Whilst in the States, Carmelita suffered a brain hemorrhage and died on 9 September 2007. 

In honour of her and more importantly to share with you what I know about this extraordinary lady, I write this with a sense of profound sadness and loss of a mentor, a friend and a warm and loving woman who could make people feel valued. I have also included many of the reflections of her daughters’, Eve and Nicole in this writing as they shared with me their thoughts of their mother to whom they were very close to. Eve recalls, “Mama was definitely the heart of the family - we are a close family, and a lot of it is rooted in her little rituals - coffee together on Saturdays, family get togethers for all our birthdays, care packages when we were away.” 

What one found most admirable about Carmelita was that she lived very much in the present and until the last couple of years, did not like to look back.  Life was always for doing: doing with enthusiasm as it happened; doing with no fear of being unpopular or different when speaking out or working for things she believed in, or even wearing whatever appealed to her. She was as Nicole describes her, “a woman of fire and fun and more passionate enthusiasms than most people would dream of trying to squeeze into a life - from keeping the community radio station running to her grandchildren to her basketball team to women's rights to her interest in health and living forever... a bizarre collection, but that was mama.” Carmelita in fact wanted everyone to have choices and to be able to live to their full potential. 

Carmelita was a marvelous friend – loyal and supportive. All of her close friends say that they could tell her anything. “She was a person who never sat around feeling sorry for herself, yet she had a great deal of compassion for other people in trouble or pain,” Nicole commented.  

Carmelita’s brand of feminism was about being who you are and always being supportive of women. According to Nicole, “Mama was always interested in equality, although not female domination. She simply believed in supporting women; giving them a fair go and more, to enable them to achieve the things society had been withholding. She constantly put that into practice in her personal and professional life. She didn't only mentor women who fitted her political goals or ambitions; she mentored anyone who needed help.  She always had a special interest though in creative people and people with unusual minds who might find themselves marginalised.” 

Carmelita was most proud of her time with the New Opportunities for Women Committee (NOW) job agency for women which she founded in 1965 in Wollongong in the Illawarra, in NSW.  Through NOW she felt she really helped women to find opportunities for employment. She also worked for the Department of Social Security (DSS) where she was greatly admired. Eve recalls, “When I started at the DSS office in Wollongong, everyone there knew her and clearly admired her in Social Security, so I know she was a good person to work with.” 

When she was younger, Carmelita was passionate about social justice issues - the Vietnam War, women’s rights and creating opportunities for women. Most of her jobs related to this - the NOW job agency, the Smith Family, the Department of Social Security. Tied to this was a passionately partisan political life. She remained a member of the Australian Labor Party all her life, but became progressively less active, attending only enough meetings to give her voting rights in the last few years. 

In later years, her focus was more personal - for example at the DSS it was very important to get information out to people about what they were entitled to, but it was equally important to support her staff. For the last ten or twelve years, VOX, a community radio station in the Illawarra in NSW, was her passion where she worked hard to make the station open to everyone who wanted to be involved, no matter how difficult they were to work with.  

She could also be immensely difficult at times, because as Nicole points out, “if she didn't want to talk about something or do something, she would block with an obstinacy that was infuriating - and effective.” Not wanting to fit other people's preconceptions or rules did not always make her life easy in the early days in Wollongong, but as the years went by, she found her place in the world and she came to be appreciated by more and more people. 

Carmelita immigrated to Wollongong in 1964 with her husband John Steinke, who later became the Dean of Commerce at the University of Wollongong.. Eve explained, “They had only been seeing each other for a few weeks when she was offered a position which would have taken her overseas, so Daddy proposed, and that was that for her formal career ambitions if she had any - I'm not sure that she did though, she was not a person to spend too much time projecting ahead, so having a serious career plan would have been out of character. Nicole came fairly soon in the marriage. Daddy was still studying and I think those years were quite hard. Aden followed (planned) three years later, and then another two years later I came along (unplanned). At around that point it had become clear to them that my father could not progress further in the US public service because of his history of political activism, and they looked around for opportunities overseas.” 

So what did this young and very fashionable lady, a Journalism graduate with honours from the University of California, who had done a stint at Mademoiselle Magazine in New York, think of her new place of residence? Eve surmises that for her mother, “It was a beautiful spot, but it was also a terrible shock for Mama - no supermarkets, no laundromat, almost no rental housing, and the salary was not good. She could not get a professional position in Wollongong, initially I think because she was a woman, but being American probably didn't help. As they settled in they became very active politically, and she became more unemployable. Her early jobs (NOW, for example) she really created herself.”

“Being Mama she had not been sitting at home even when she wasn't working. She started a writers group through the WEA - she was an active member of the film club; she campaigned for women’s rights and against the Vietnam War and probably for other things I don’t remember, and was active in the ALP. They had a very active social life - they used to throw the most amazing parties. And at one point they had a printing press in their bedroom to produce ALP campaign fliers (which I'm sure she wrote). We spent a lot of years letterboxing and handing out how to vote papers on election days. When she went to work for the Smith family we added standing on streets with collection buckets to our family activities.”

According to Eve, “by the time she went to work for the DSS (around the mid seventies) that phase had pretty much finished. It was tied very much to my father’s political ambitions, and he had given them up by then.  They were still social, but in a quieter way. She became part of the commuter mafia, and had a lot of 'train friends'. Once she started working for DSS they had more money, and Mama's other passion came to the fore - shopping. If you've ever wondered who waits outside DJs at 7am on the first day of the sales, now you know. She also started going to the theatre more - she was a huge fan of the Sydney Dance Company for many years.” 

It was seven years ago, when I first met Carmelita, at the Illawarra radio station, VOX where I was producing a radio program about women leaders.  I found Carmelita to be incredibly supportive of the radio program and later on, of my vision of establishing the Australian virtual Centre for Leadership for Women (CLW). She proudly became one of the founding judges of the Leadership Achievement Award for Women which was launched through CLW in 2005. As a Judge of these Awards, she was passionate about recognizing and financially assisting women who had developed a project for the benefit of others, mostly on their own.

Over the years, as my professional friendship with Carmelita became personal, I often asked this beautiful Native American looking lady of her origins and tried to delve more into the glimpses she gave me of how she had helped women in her life, only to be diverted with a smile and a laugh as she chose not to reminisce.    

I have now learnt from her family that Carmelita’s mother was Mexican, immigrating to California when she was thirteen or fourteen to earn money to help support her brothers and sisters in Mexico as their parents had both died. Her father was a Basque from Spain. He left Spain when he was about thirteen to avoid being conscripted into the Spanish army. They settled in Hughson, a small farming settlement in the Central Valley in California where they had a small farm with peach trees and almonds, and enough animals and vegetables for their own needs. Her father worked at the local abattoirs.

Carmelita’s early years were very much a typical small farming family. She had two sisters, Alice, four years older and Joan, eight years younger. The family was an active part of the Basque community in the area, and strictly Catholic. They moved into Modesto before her teens and from the very beginning, her daughter Eve says, “she loved school, and excelled at it (always the first with her hand up). Her mother, Aurora was a strong believer in education for women (she did her HSC equivalent in her 60's), and all the girls went to College.”  

There are many things I miss about Carmelita, being able to ring her any time, but not after five pm, when she would be cooking for her whole family, asking her for advice about anything, having great debates about politics and women’s issues, and laughing and sharing the rough times of remembering my mother’s passing. When I asked her younger daughter Eve what would she miss most, she said, “Mama was a big part of my daily life, it is hard to say what I will miss most. We did a lot of shopping together - groceries, sales, whatever. I will miss her companionship and her real happiness in finding something special, usually for someone else - she especially loved buying things for the children. I guess it is her enthusiasm and enjoyment of things.”

Her older daughter, Nicole said, “I'll miss her and do miss her every day just because she added so much vibrancy and joy and frivolousness to my life. She never took herself too seriously and the knowledge that she was there gave a warmth to the world. I met a young woman at breakfast in my Bangkok guesthouse today; she was full of enthusiasm for life and difference and was wearing a huge string of turquoise beads. She made me remember my mother who had that sort of energy (and many strings of huge turquoise beads) right up until I last saw her, dancing around the lounge room, only a few weeks before her death.” 

A warm, loving and generous Grandmother to Max and Lina, Carmelita will be deeply missed by many. In Nicole’s words Carmelita’s legacy will be:

“That we should live our lives to the fullest; that we should work for human rights; that we should enjoy giving and getting presents (particularly large, brilliantly coloured ones); that we should strive to be ourselves; that the world should become a more just place - and I almost forgot - that we shouldn't exercise too much!”  

“She was convinced exercise wasn't good for a person, although I love the memory of her pedaling slowly on her exercycle each morning in recent years, glasses perched on her nose, reading a mystery. She realised a little, very little, exercise was necessary,” Nicole clarifies. 

My only comfort in accepting Carmelita’s passing is in believing that her spirit will continue to shine through CLW and in what it embodies for women. And in emulating from her life that there is great strength in just being who we are. “I hope that I can one day be half as much myself as she, so unflinchingly was herself every day,” says Nicole Steinke.

Diann Rodgers-Healey

Obituary for Carmelita by her family 

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