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- OPENING
UP THE TOWN (Stuart, later Alice
Springs)
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- Along
with the Indigenous women living in the area,
there would have been very few white women
– the wives of business owners - when the
township of Stuart was established in 1888. By
c1900 Stuart town consisted of 1 hotel, 2 stores
and 3 homes with a population of around a dozen
Europeans. Of these around 2 or 3 were women.
The town’s first pub, the Stuart Arms
provided beer to the mainly male population
although it became home to a number of women in
the early years. Wife of its founder, Mrs
Tryphena Benstead gave birth to possibly the
first white child to be born and survive in
Alice Springs. Born in 1891, daughter
“Lulu” grew up to become a
world-renowned professional singer with the
stage name “Lucille”. Other
hoteliers’ wives prior to 1925 included
Luna South, Mabel Lampe and May
Laver.
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- Governed
by South Australia until 1911 when the Northern Territory was
taken over by the Commonwealth government, the town gradually
expanded requiring its first schoolteacher and nursing sister
by 1914. The expansion of the railway line from Oodnadatta to
Stuart in 1929 leading ultimately to the town being gazetted as
Alice Springs in 1933 brought many women to the centre. They were
the wives of railway men, labourers, builders, storekeepers and
government employees or as workers in the hospitality industry,
running tearooms and boarding houses such as Mrs McGowan and Mrs
Annie Meyers.
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- Policemen’s
wives such as Dolly Brookes in c1900 had a
lonely existence when the Police station was
situated outside Heavitree Gap. Agnes Stott,
wife of the renowned Edinburgh-born Sergeant
Robert Stott who was originally employed in 1911
as keeper of the new Stuart Town Gaol, was
unofficially in charge of women prisoners as
well as bringing up 6 children. The spiritual
needs of the population brought missionaries and
ministers and their wives such as Mrs Euphemia
Kramer while new businesses encouraged typists
and shop assistants to move to the
Centre.
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- World
War II and the subsequent bombing of Darwin in
1942 led to Alice Springs becoming the
army’s railhead, central troop reserve,
arsenal and supply base. The town was taken over
by the military and although largely male troops
(up to 8000 at a time) there was a small female
presence. This was in the form of army nursing
sisters, assisted by the Voluntary Aide
Detachment as well as a small number of AWAS
(Australian Women's Army Service), being
signallers and truck drivers.
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- The
war years provided much of the infrastructure
for the town, and the post-war years saw the
arrival of some of the first professional women
in Alice Springs such as Helen Phillips,
town’s first female doctor who worked at
the Alice Springs Hospital during the
1950’s. In many cases women did not begin
breaking into the "man's world" till much later.
1970 saw the first policewomen being employed
(although they were not in uniform until 1978)
while Valerie Fann became the town's first
female bank teller, at the Commonwealth Bank.
Marlene Brown, who previously had been the only
woman to be elected to the Town Management
Board, topped the poll of aldermen at the first
Town Council's elections in 1971. Leslie
Oldfield became the town’s first female
mayor in 1983 while a decade later Loraine
Braham MLA became the first female politician
elected from Alice Springs when made Member for
Braitling.
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 - Hazel
Golder and guests outside her guesthouse, Todd
Street. Hazel is 5th from the
left.
- Courtesy:
National Trust (NT)
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- MISS
GOLDER’S STORY
- Hazel
Golder’s weatherboard 5-roomed guesthouse
was at the top end of Todd Street. During the
1930’s she provided accommodation and meals
for both visiting station owners as well as the
increasing number of travellers due to the
expansion of the railway to Alice Springs in
1929. She sometimes catered for up to 40 at a
time with people sleeping in the yard on summer
nights.
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- Prior
to Alice she had worked for a Mrs Bailes serving
meals to travellers up the track at Oodnadatta,
Innamincka and Bloods Creek. She had later
worked at Mrs Meyers’ boarding house in
Alice before a station owner had built a house
and offered Hazel the chance to run it as a
guesthouse and tearooms.
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 - Photo:
Ida Standley (2nd from right) and her daughter
Mrs Brown with pupils of The Bungalow, for part
aboriginal children. Topsy Smith stands 2nd from
left.
- Courtesy:
National Trust (NT)
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- MRS
STANDLEY’S STORY
- Ida
Standley was the township of Stuart’s first
schoolteacher from 1914-1928. Previously a
governess before marriage and then schoolteacher
in South Australia, she travelled by train to
Oodnadatta where the policeman, Sonny Kunoth
drove her by horse and buggy to the town. The
schoolroom was a small building behind the
police station. She taught the European children
in the morning and the part Aboriginal children
in the afternoon.
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- Also
the non-resident Matron of the Bungalow for part
Aboriginal children, then a tin shed in Parsons
Street, she was awarded an MBE for child welfare
in Central Australia on her retirement to
Adelaide.
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- TOPSY
SMITH’S STORY
- Aged
about 40 Topsy Smith had been recently widowed
in this photograph. With a horse and dray, and a
herd of goats, she had left Arltunga where her
late husband had been a miner, to drive into
town with her 11 children aged from 21 to 1 year
old. Billy Goat Hill is thus named because this
was where her goats were herded. She lived at
the Bungalow and worked as an assistant to Mrs
Standley, looking after the children in her care
24 hours a day. Like other Aboriginal women her
story is hard to research. Only white women for
example appear on early Census
returns.
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 - Gloria
Hong, known as Siew Yoke Kwan, photographed in
China during the
1920’s.
- Courtesy:
Mrs Olive Veverbrandts
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- MRS
LEE’S STORY
- Gloria
was born in the creek under a tree in Alice
Springs (then Stuart) in 1908, the daughter of a
Western Arrente woman Ranjika, who died when
Gloria was 6 years old, and Chinese market
gardener, Ah Hong. Taught with other half-caste
children by Ida Standley, the township’s
first schoolteacher, she left for a long journey
to China with her family in 1919. For almost a
decade, she stayed at her father’s village
Khonshan on the Pearl River (in Canton, near
Hong Kong) during Sun Yatsen’s Republic of
China of the 1920's. She learnt to read and
write Cantonese and upon leaving school, did
household chores as typical of young Chinese
women of the day. Gloria struggled to find her
identity on her return to Australia. She married
Englishman Fred “Lofty“ Purdy and
lived in a simple home on the site of the
Memorial Club on Gap Road with dirt floors and
no running water or electricity. Here she
brought up her 4 daughters Valencia, Olive, Jean
(Peg) and Sarah (Joyce). She left for Brisbane
in 1953 following the break up of her marriage,
eventually marrying William Lee, who much to her
father’s approval was Chinese.
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 - Mabel
Jones in fancy dress.
- Courtesy:
National Trust (NT)
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- MRS
JONES’ STORY
- Originally
arriving in Stuart in 1911 as Mrs Jeffrey Lampe,
Mabel and her husband took over the license of
the Stuart Arms which within a few months she
was running alone after the tragic death of her
husband. In 1913 she married her neighbour,
Norman Jones, manager of the Wallis Fogarty
store (site of Ansett Corner now Traveland),
living in the house next door. In the
1920’s the population of the town was
around 90. Mabel loved fancy dress parties and
would decorate the garden with paper lanterns
and streamers, bringing out a wind up gramophone
and tarpaulin as a makeshift dance floor. She
also pioneered the town’s Christmas
festivities for the local children. Usually
referred to as Mrs Norman Jones and occasionally
as Mabel – she was actually christened the
more exotic Eugeneta Mabel
McPherson.
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 - Olive
Pink in later years. She lived in a tin army hut
in Gregory Terrace (later the site of the Infant
Welfare Clinic and where CATIA's Visitor Centre
now stands) before the hut was re-erected on her
Flora Reserve of which she was Honorary Curator.
- Courtesy:
Reg Harris
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- MISS
PINK'S STORY
- Olive
Pink was one of Australia's pioneering women
anthropologists and the founder of what is now
the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens on Tuncks Road,
Alice Springs. She was also a fierce fighter for
Aboriginal rights and a strong critic of
missionaries, Federal and State governments, and
many anthropologists and bureaucrats. She gained
a reputation for being quite an eccentric in
later years. Always immaculately dressed in a
white pith helmet, a cream high-necked blouse,
long brown or cream skirt and white gloves, she
is remembered for her long letters of complaint
to those who had wronged her. Her other
memorable act was naming trees at her flora
reserve after prominent officials and then if
they failed to please her she would stop
watering their particular tree. She died in her
91st year in 1975 and is buried with a headstone
facing her beloved Mt Gillen, and contrary to
the end, in the opposite direction to all the
other graves.
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 - The
2 nursing sisters outside the AIM
hostel.
- Courtesy:
National Trust (NT)
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- MISSES
POPE AND SMALL’S STORY
- The
Australian Inland Mission (AIM) Hostel, Alice
Spring’s first hospital (now Adelaide
House) was opened in 1926 in the hands of
Isabella (Ina) Pope and Eileen Small. If they
needed a doctor’s advice, one of them had
to ride or go by horse and buggy to the
Telegraph Station where the telegraphist would
send their message to Adelaide by Morse code.
Sister Finlayson had begun the nursing service
of the AIM in the township of Stuart in 1914 but
she stayed only a year, boarding at “Myrtle
Villa” a wooden slab hut on what is now
Mobil Palms Service Station, Wills
Terrace.
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