Our goal: 10,000 Australian women with a registered maker identity by 2030.
The Southern Cross is formally known as The Crux — the Latin word for cross, and for the essential point of a matter. The crux of our work is this:
Our goal
10,000 Australian women — weavers, jewellers, ceramicists, glass artists, leatherworkers, cultural makers, fashion designers, painters, cultural educators — each with a permanent, verified identity in the Southern Cross Registry.
Young and old. City and country. Every cultural background. Every making tradition. What they share is this: they make things with their hands, and those things are worth something. We are building the infrastructure that proves it.
Live — Southern Cross Registry
47
Makers registered
10,000
Our goal by 2030
47 of 10,000 · 9,953 places remaining · Registration is free for the first six months
Two ways to get started today
✦ Step one
Become a Registered Provenance Practitioner
Join CWA as a Practitioner Member. Receive your Unique Provenance Identifier — your permanent maker number in the Southern Cross Registry. Your work becomes certified, protected, and eligible for international trade. First six months free.
Become a Registered Practitioner →✦ Step two
Open Your Storefront in the Southern Cross Marketplace
Your verified practitioner storefront — visible to individual buyers, galleries, tourist centres, fashion designers, institutions, and international buyers. Your name. Your work. Your verified provenance. Sell from anywhere in Australia to the world.
Enter the Marketplace →What we mean by Women in Culture
Women in Culture is not a program for one kind of woman, one kind of making, or one cultural tradition. It is the recognition that cultural production — the act of making things by hand, with skill, with intention, and with a body of knowledge behind it — is something women have always done, in every community, in every corner of this country.
The weaver who learned from her grandmother. The ceramicist who trained at a design school. The jeweller who migrated and brought her technique with her. The young woman who is learning to blow glass in a community studio. The woman who has been making at the market for thirty years for less than her time is worth.
All of them. That is who we are building this for.
The eight categories
Textiles & Fashion
Jewellery & Adornment
Leather Works
Industrial Crafts
Heritage & Home
Cultural Objects & Crafts
Creative & Cultural Works
Cultural Education & Leadership
If you make it with your hands and your knowledge, you belong here.
Three ways to be part of this
✦ Register
Become a registered Australian maker
Join the Southern Cross Registry. Get your Unique Provenance Identifier. Open your Marketplace storefront. List in the Australian Geographical Indications Directory for Crafts, Industrial Products, and Cultural Works. First six months free.
Get Your UPI →✦ Lead
Cultural Leadership & Practice
Women who lead cultural organisations, teach heritage skills, build community practice, or advocate for the sector. The Cultural Leadership & Practice program supports, connects, and recognises them.
Cultural Leadership →✦ Be recognised
The Women in Culture Awards
Australia’s only national awards for women in cultural production. Eight categories. Three pillars. One Laureate. Held annually on the International Day of Intangible Cultural Heritage — 17 October. Targeting the Sydney Opera House.
The Awards →The global context
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals — specifically SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) — explicitly include cultural production as a domain where women’s economic participation requires active infrastructure. Naming it is not enough. Building it is the work.
The UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage recognises that cultural transmission — the passing of skills, techniques, and knowledge from one generation to the next — is a form of heritage that requires active protection. CWA has applied for UNESCO NGO accreditation and is building Australia’s first provenance registry aligned with that framework.
Women Deliver — the global advocacy platform for gender equity — has confirmed the importance of economic infrastructure for women in the creative and cultural sector as a foundation for broader gender equality outcomes.
“
Cultural production is not separate from economic production. For women, it has always been the same work.
Creative Women’s Association · CWA Position Paper 2026
CWA & UNESCO
CWA has applied for NGO accreditation with UNESCO’s Living Heritage Entity. Australia has not ratified the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. CWA’s provenance registry is building the evidentiary record that a future ratification would require.
“
Craftsmanship and mastery stand among women’s greatest strengths — telling the story of our diversity, identity, and shared memory through the hands of skilled artisans. When we protect that knowledge, and give it legal and commercial weight, we protect both our cultural heritage and our economic future.
Creative Women’s Association
In the spirit of EU Regulation 2023/2411 — Geographical Indications for Crafts and Industrial Products — which entered into force 1 December 2025.
“Culture is not what happens after everything else is taken care of.”
Creative Women’s Association
It is the system through which knowledge is transmitted, skills are sustained, communities are held together, and societies reproduce themselves across generations.
That work — the teaching, the making, the caring, the designing, the knowledge passed hand to hand across generations — has always been done predominantly by women.
It has also been the least paid, least recognised, and least protected work in the economy. CWA exists to change that.
Seventy years behind
When women’s cultural work is described as creative, it becomes an adjective — expressive, supplementary, celebrated symbolically. When it is named as cultural work, it becomes a noun. It becomes infrastructure. It becomes a field with standards, credentials, recognition, and economic value.
Creative Women’s Association · Position Paper 2026
Japan has formally recognised and remunerated cultural practitioners since 1955. Under its Agency for Cultural Affairs, practitioners of traditional crafts, performing arts, and intangible knowledge are designated as bearers of living heritage — assessed, recorded, and supported as holders of irreplaceable national knowledge. That framework is now seventy years old.
Australia has not yet built the equivalent. That means this country is not simply behind — it is operating without the architecture that 178 of its peer nations have understood to be necessary for the survival of living cultural knowledge.
Teaching has a professional qualification, a national award wage, a defined career classification, and an employment framework that reflects the value of what a teacher carries. Nobody suggests that teachers should fund their own classrooms through grant applications. Cultural practitioners carry knowledge of the same order. The weaver who holds the pattern. The maker whose practice is the living record of how a thing is produced and what it means. When that knowledge is gone, it cannot be reconstructed.
$122B
Annual contribution of Australia’s creative industries to GDP. The majority of that workforce is women.
31%
Less than their counterparts — what women performing cultural work are paid in equivalent industries.
0
National standards frameworks recognising, certifying, or protecting cultural work by women in Australia. CWA is building the first.
CWA is building the infrastructure that reflects that reality: credentials, standards, provenance, classification, and a permanent national record that ensures the knowledge — and the woman who carries it — is properly known.
Women in Culture Awards 2026
Founding partnerships for the Women in Culture Awards 2026 are open. The Awards will be held on 17 October 2026 — the International Day of Intangible Cultural Heritage — and represent Australia’s first national celebration of women’s contribution to cultural production.
The Case for Support is available on request.
Women in Culture Awards 2026
Australia’s first national awards for women in cultural production. Eight categories. Three pillars. One Laureate. Targeting the Sydney Opera House.
Creative Women’s Association · ABN 54 693 315 043
Designed with WordPress
