Elizabeth Reid AO (b. 1942), adviser on women's and public health policy, lived from her teens in Canberra, where she gained a pioneering public service cadetship in 1960. She studied at the Australian National University, where she became involved in student politics and was an editor of the student newspaper, Woroni. Overcoming a severe injury in a train accident, she gained first class honours and a scholarship to Oxford, where she studied philosophy. Returning to teach at the ANU in the early 1970s, she was active in the Women's Liberation Movement and the Women''s Electoral Lobby, becoming increasingly fluent in issues around abortion, homosexuality, rape and divorce. Against a field of some 400 applicants, she was appointed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam's adviser on women's affairs – the first such position created in the world. She pressed for spending on all areas of women's advancement, from employment to housing, with the government allocating $3.3 million over two years for activities relating to International Women's Year. Leaving Australia shortly before the Whitlam Government's dismissal in 1975, she advised Princess Ashraf Pahlavi of Iran on establishing the Asian and Pacific Centre for Women and Development and worked in Africa for the United Nations, the Peace Corps and USAID. Reid's husband, Bill Pruitt, was diagnosed HIV positive in 1985. Widowed the following year, she shifted her focus to include development policy around the HIV epidemic. From 1986 to 2000, she worked internationally with the UN Development Program in New York and throughout the Pacific, Middle East, Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Central America and Eastern Europe. After returning to Canberra and the ANU, she continued to advise on HIV policy and developing the HIV charity program funded by tenor Andrea Bocelli in Papua New Guinea.
