Joan Rosanove

Joan Mavis Rosanove (née Lazarus; 11 May 1896 – 8 April 1974) was an Australian lawyer and advocate for the rights of women to practice law, and the first woman in Australia to take silk.

Joan Rosanove was born in Ballarat, Australia. Her mother was Ruth Lazarus née Braham, and her was father Mark Aaron Lazarus, a barrister and solicitor; both her parents were non-practicing Jews.^[1] In 1920 she married Emmanuel ('Mannie') Rosanove, a dermatologist, and they had two daughters.

She attended the Loreto convent school and Clarendon Ladies' College. In 1917, she was articled to her father and began to attend the University of Melbourne to study law. On 2 June 1919, she was admitted as a barrister.

In 1923 the family moved to Melbourne, and in September that year she was the first woman in Victoria to sign the Victorian Bar roll. She could not obtain room in the Selborne Chambers, but established a successful practice nonetheless, acting mainly in criminal and divorce cases.

In November 1934 Rosanove represented Egon Kisch in Melbourne when he defied his immigration exclusion order and leapt five metres on to the deck of Station Pier breaking his right leg.

In 1967 she took her struggle for the rights of women lawyers to New South Wales.

Woman in a wig: Joan Rosanove, QC, a biography written by Isabel Ray Carter, was published in 1970. In 1999 the Victorian Bar named their Melbourne offices the Joan Rosanove Chambers in her honour.

Rosanove was posthumously inducted onto the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2001.^[2]

• First women lawyers around the world