Merle Thornton speaking about the protest in 1965. I am sad to hear of the death of Merle Thornton, Queensland feminist activist and academic, who died last year, aged 93. I never met her, but she appears in a book I am currently writing on wine and women. She achieved so many things in her life, but she came to my attention as one of the ‘bar suffragettes’.   In March 1965, Thornton (a philosophy postgraduate at the University of Queensland) and Rosalie ‘Ro’ Bognor (who was