Boroondara’s Trailblazing Women: A Hidden History

Meet the local women who built businesses, ran hospitals, wrote poetry, sculpted, organised and governed.

Aileen Palmer 

The volunteer who kept showing up 

Aileen Palmer grew up in the Kew household of her mother, writer Nettie Palmer, then went to Spain in 1936, joining the first British medical unit sent into the war. She worked near the front for two years — first as a translator, then running the unit's paperwork, including writing to the families of the dead. Back in London, she drove ambulances through the Blitz.

Did you know? When she came home in 1945, her own family started treating what had made her so remarkable as a problem — she was hospitalised at 33, and one relative burned some of her papers, calling them "drivel." She kept writing anyway. 

Connected to: Nettie Palmer (her mother)

Alice Anderson

The pioneer who wouldn't wait for permission

In 1919, Alice Anderson opened her own garage on Cotham Road, Kew — funded by money she'd earned driving a dangerous mail route through the hills, a job she'd had to fight to be allowed to drive herself. Miss Anderson's Motor Service ran driving lessons, a 24-hour chauffeur service and eight-hour mechanical overhauls so good they were the talk of Melbourne, staffed entirely by women she'd trained. By 1925, fifty women were applying for a single apprenticeship. She died in Kew in 1926, aged 29 — officially from an accidental gunshot while cleaning a gun, though family accounts later revealed a young apprentice had fired it by accident, and the family let the story stand to protect the teenager. 

Did you know? Alice's garage opening party guest list included Dame Nellie Melba, Sir John Monash — and a young barrister named Robert Menzies, who'd later represent her in court after a rather unfortunate incident involving a horse.

Connected to: Jessie McBeth (closest friend) | Evelyn Conyers (co-founder of the hospital she died in)

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Ann Bon

The ally who never let up

Ann Bon, a Scottish-born pastoralist, was the only woman on the 1881 parliamentary inquiry into Coranderrk, using the role to keep the Aboriginal station under Aboriginal self-management. Her house on Charles Street, Kew, was where that fight got organised — sheltering Coranderrk's leaders overnight, including 22 men who walked to Melbourne to make their case.

Did you know? Years later, she had her own family's memorial stone re-carved in honour of William Barak, the Aboriginal leader she'd fought alongside for decades. It still stands in the Coranderrk cemetery.

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Aunty Dot Peters

The Elder who refused to let a sacrifice go unmarked 

Aunty Dot Peters, a Yarra Yarra and Yorta Yorta Elder whose mother was born on the Coranderrk mission, established Victoria's first Aboriginal Remembrance Service in 2007 after her own father's wartime death went unrecognised. She spent decades afterwards teaching Swinburne University what it meant to sit on land that was never ceded. 

Did you know? Swinburne now honours her with the Aunty Dot Peters AM Flowering Grasslands on campus — the "AM" recognises the Order of Australia she was awarded.

Enid Derham 

The overlooked local voice

Enid Derham, a contemporary of poet Lesbia Harford, lived across Kew and Hawthorn and never had the recognition in her own lifetime that her talent deserved.

Did you know? Her short poem "The Suburbs" captures the feeling of these streets perfectly: "Miles and miles of quiet houses, every house a harbour. Each for some unquiet soul a haven and a home."

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Esther Freda Rofe 

The composer who refused to be hemmed in

Esther Rofe played in the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra by fourteen, but felt "hemmed in" by a Melbourne where, in her words, "nobody was interested in a woman learning composition" — so she sailed for London and trained at the Royal College of Music. Back home during the war, she ran a 70-woman fire service unit through the Blitz, then became the ABC's first female musical balance officer. In 1946 she wrote the score for Terra Australis — which newspapers called "the first real Australian ballet" — performed more than 250 times across three countries.

Did you know? With her works rediscovered in the late 1980s, she was named City of Boroondara's Citizen of the Year in 1998.

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Ethel Swinburne 

The forgotten founder of Swinburne University

In 1908, Ethel Swinburne matched her husband George's founding gift pound for pound to establish Swinburne Technical College, then personally secured the land for Victoria's first Junior Technical School for Girls. Between the university, the TAFE and the school, her patronage helped educate more than 250,000 students over the following century, and she kept working with Swinburne for 32 years after George died — alongside 44 years as president of the Victorian Children's Aid Society and a term as president of the Queen Victoria Hospital.

Did you know? When her own student centre was demolished in 2008, its replacement was built under George's name alone — Swinburne's official history now credits only him as "the original founder."

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Evelyn Conyers 

A leader who went from war to wards

Evelyn Conyers co-founded Lancewood, a private hospital in Kew, in 1907, then became Matron-in-Chief of the entire Australian Army Nursing Service in WWI, running the war's medical logistics from London.

Did you know? She came home more decorated than almost any nurse of her generation, including receiving the Florence Nightingale Medal — nursing's highest honour — and chose to return to the small Kew hospital she'd started.

Connected to: Jessie McBeth (co-founder of Lancewood) | Alice Anderson (treated at Lancewood after her accident)

Helen Reddy

A voice from Hawthorn to Hollywood

Helen Reddy, who attended Stratherne Presbyterian Girls' Grammar in Hawthorn, went to America chasing a recording contract that fell through the moment she landed. She signed with a label anyway, and in 1972 released "I Am Woman" — a number one anthem that made her the first Australian ever to win a Grammy.

Did you know? Her Grammy speech is almost as famous as the song — she thanked God "because She makes everything possible."

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Henrietta Dugdale 

The suffragist who wouldn't be told no

Henrietta Dugdale, who lived on Riversdale Road, became — as far as the record shows — the first Australian woman to argue publicly for women's emancipation, in 1869. She co-founded Victoria's first suffrage organisation in 1884, casting her own federal vote in 1902, aged 75.

Did you know? She once said: "my greatest work was paving the way, cutting a track through a dense scrub of ignorance and prejudice."

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Hyllus Noel Maris 

An advocate who refused to stay quiet

Hyllus Noel Maris, a Yorta Yorta and Wurundjeri woman, trained as a hospital dietician, then chose Aboriginal rights work instead — helping found the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service and Legal Service in the early 1970s, chairing a council for Aboriginal culture out of a small house in Fitzroy, and building Victoria's first independent Aboriginal school, now Worawa College. She later went on to co-write Women of the Sun with Sonia Borg, winning a UN media peace prize.

Did you know? Hyllus died in Kew in 1986 but wasn't buried here — her body was taken back to Cummeragunja, the community her family had been forced from generations earlier.

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Ina Higgins 

A pioneer who never stopped organising

Ina Higgins, one of the first women trained at Burnley College, became — by one account — Victoria's first female landscape architect. She designed the garden at Ardmore (her niece Nettie Palmer's Kew home) while organising, committee by committee, for the vote and for peace.

Did you know? Ina is buried at St Kilda Cemetery, nowhere near Boroondara — the Ardmore garden is the only physical trace of her anywhere in this area.

Connected to: Nettie Palmer (her niece)

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Jessie McBeth

The co-founder who stayed for decades

Jessie McBeth co-founded Lancewood with Evelyn Conyers, a private hospital in Kew, in 1907. She spent much of her life partnered with Kate Griffiths, running the hospital alongside her — and was also Alice Anderson's closest friend, nursing her through her final hours in 1926. 

Did you know? Alice named Jessie, not her own family, as her executor and "lifelong friend." When Jessie died in 1939, she was buried with Alice, not with Kate.

Connected to: Alice Anderson (closest friend) | Evelyn Conyers (co-founder of Lancewood)

Leopoldine "Poldi" Mimovich

The sculptor who carved her way out of Bonegilla

Poldi Mimovich, widowed at 19 in Austria, trained in wood sculpture before arriving in Melbourne in 1948 as a "displaced person" — she hated the Bonegilla migrant camp so much she traded one of her own carved masks to an official just to get an early transfer out. She went on to build a sculpture career spanning 5 continents — a Deepdene church, Antarctica's Mawson chapel, the UN building in New York — and won an OAM in 1985.

Did you know? At 93, a house fire nearly killed her — she survived and lived to 99.

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Lesbia Harford

The writer who wasn't in a hurry to be read

Lesbia Harford graduated in law in 1916 and never practised, choosing factory work and union organising instead. She lived with a heart condition from birth that doctors never expected to let her see thirty, and later tuberculosis on top of it — largely ignoring both, at one point discharging herself from hospital against doctors' orders just to get back to organising. She wrote frankly about desire and her own body, at a time almost none of that could be said in public, but barely published any of it, telling one anthologist she was "in no hurry to be read."

Did you know? She died in 1927, aged 36. Her poetry sat unpublished for fourteen years until her friend Nettie Palmer brought out the first collection in 1941; today she's considered one of the finest poets Australia has produced.

Her poem "The Electric Tram to Kew" (1915), about a real tram ride to see a woman she loved, Katie Lush, who lived nearby:

Through the swift night I go to my love. Tram bells are joy bells, bidding us move. On a golden path beneath balls of fire. Up hill and down dale, to o'ertake desire. Past the old shops that my childhood knew. Past hidden houses and fields of dew. Lovely and secret as thou, my friend. Who art all heaven at journey's end.

Connected to: Nettie Palmer (rescued her poetry from obscurity)

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Ma Dalley

The mayor who kept her boots in the scrap yard

Marie "Ma" Dalley built one of Australia's largest scrap-metal businesses almost single-handedly — buying fire-damaged furniture to repair and resell, and melting down fire-damaged mouth organs for the lead inside them — eventually owning a 3-acre site in North Melbourne worth a fortune. At 74, she became Kew's first woman councillor, then its first female mayor in 1954, still running her scrap yard every morning beforehand, driven to council along Cotham Road by her ward at half past 7, 6 days a week, always in a fur coat.

Did you know? She redirected her own mayoral gift to St George's Hospital and sent on the money raised at a ball thrown in her own honour, too.

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Nettie Palmer 

The writer who made room for other people's stories

Nettie Palmer, living at 13 Chrystobel Crescent and later Ardmore in Kew, wrote the case for taking Australian literature seriously — at her peak, 3 or 4 long articles a week. In Spain when the Civil War broke out in 1936, she came home and translated for refugee writers for free, saying: "let it be my contribution to the fight against the Nazis."

Did you know? In 1921 she was stopped in her tracks by poems signed only "L.V.H." Fourteen years later, she edited the first published collection of that poet's work — Lesbia Harford.

Connected to: Ina Higgins (her aunt) | Aileen Palmer (her daughter) | Lesbia Harford (brought her poetry into print)

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