A story to be told and retold: ANU building renamed in honour of IT trailblazer

Job advertisements were a little different in the 1950s.

When IBM introduced a new data processing unit to the Australian National University (ANU), the company advertised for a team to oversee it.

The unit had been designed to deal with everything from student results to payroll and employee records. To be considered for the role of assistant supervisor, prospective candidates had to pass an exam of sorts.

Skaidrite Darius was curious. The only problem was the job ad was marked with a small ‘m’ – a sign that only men may apply.

Her boss at the John Curtin School of Medical Research told her that 35 men had already tried and failed the test. He encouraged her to apply. And so she did – wondering if the test was really that hard.

She got the job.

Darius was the first woman employed to develop and manage the electronic processing systems at ANU. But the very systems she was in charge of could not compute her gender.

The technical fix was to allow her own payslips to be marked with the same small ‘m’ meant to preclude her from even applying to the role.

“So, for the next 30 years, I was a male,” Darius told The Canberra Times. “Everywhere on my record, I was Mr S Darius.”

Getting inside the room

As a teenager, Darius fled Latvia following Soviet occupation in the Second World War. Separated from her family, she worked in tuberculosis wards and factories producing rayon and ammunitions, all so that she could support herself and find her way back to her loved ones.

She was reunited with her family, and they came to Australia as refugees. But their reunion was short-lived. After arriving at Bonegilla migrant camp, a centre where ‘post-war arrivals’ lived while the Australian government processed documentation, she was one of 20 Latvians seconded to work at the Department of Works in Canberra. Her relatives were sent elsewhere.

Darius was eventually able to arrange for her family members to join her – one at a time – in Canberra.

At the ANU data processing unit, she took a similarly methodical approach to bringing her male co-workers around – one by one – to the importance of gender equality, even learning all she could about sport so that she could connect with them in the tearoom.

“Back in that day, there was no ICT service desk or ICT support team. It was called Skaidrite Darius.”

Darius was convinced that we should all be “judged on our ability not our gender”.

She knew firsthand what it was like to face sexism.

When attending her IBM training courses, the lecturer did not believe she was in the right place and told her to join the punch operators downstairs – a largely female cohort.

Even being in the room for meetings held pubs was a challenge. At the time, there were separate ladies’ rooms. But her supportive male colleagues made sure she was present, refusing to enter if Darius could not.

When she became pregnant with her first child, there was an expectation she would give up her job. Maternity leave did not exist at that time. The University eventually agreed to five months’ leave without pay – Darius later learnt her team had lobbied for her to be able to return to work.

Her dedication to the job even saw her rushing to campus in the middle of the night – still in her pyjamas.

The first computer at ANU was reserved for academics during the day, and ran its data processing between midnight and four in the morning. While data could be prepared in more reasonable hours, any mistake – even a single, accidental misspelling – would cause the computations to go awry.

Darius’s daughter, Maruta Walsh, remembered her late mother’s visits to the data processing unit, and the excitement of seeing Darius solve complex problems among the flashing lights and whirring discs of the computer room.

“The nights, early mornings, weekends; the phone would ring and off she’d go. Something had to be resolved,” Maruta said.

“Back in that day, there was no ICT service desk or ICT support team. It was called Skaidrite Darius.”

Honouring an ANU icon

In 2019, when Darius was 92, ANU awarded her an honorary doctorate for her exceptional contribution to the University, computer science and gender equality. In her citation, she was described as “an icon of ANU…a humble trailblazer”.

Now, Darius is being recognised through the renaming of a building on the ANU campus.

This is part of a wider effort to see more buildings honouring women who have significantly contributed to the University. Currently, only six of the 242 buildings at ANU are named after women.

At the official opening of the Skaidrite Darius Building – formerly the computer science and information technology building – friends, family and representatives from the Latvian community and embassy honoured Darius’s trailblazing spirit.

At the renaming celebration, Darius’ grandson, Tomas Walsh, recalled asking ANU for a payslip marked with an ‘m’ as a commemorative gift to mark his grandmother’s 90th birthday.

He said that having a campus building named after his grandmother honoured her legacy.

“She was always wanting to share stories and experiences about her life,” Tomas said.

“One of the biggest takeaways was for me, for this building being commemorated, was that it’s in sharing these stories – talking about the pay slip – and reaching out that now [her story is] out there, it’s real, and it’s a story for others to learn and be inspired by.”

ANU Vice-Chancellor and President Genevieve Bell shared her own personal connection to the Skaidrite Darius building.

“This is the building that I first called home, so it’s special to me that we get to think about imagining it differently,” Professor Bell said.

“The thing I know about working in big tech companies is who’s there and who isn’t – and the importance of singing the names of every woman that came before you and everyone that made possible the position you’re in.”

Darius’s story, she said, was one about perseverance, determination and “how to be fierce in the face of people having grand assumptions about who you were and what you might do”.

“The way we keep names alive is the same as the way we tell stories.”