By Callum Ludwig
A historian and author are coming to Yarra Junction Library to talk about the extraordinary achievements of an early Australian pioneer of women’s rights.
Loretta Smith will be giving a presentation of her book ‘A Spanner in the Works: The Extraordinary Story of Alice Anderson and Australia’s only all-girl garage’ on Monday 19 June at 2pm.
Ms Smith said Alice Anderson was born in 1897 when cars were coming into the Australian culture to a father who worked in all areas of engineering, including mechanical engineering.
“Alice was a forthright young girl, middle of six children, and from a very young age, she was very clear about what she wanted in her life, and she just went ahead as if feminism had already achieved all these things,” she said.
“She lived between the two world wars, where there was an opportunity for opportunities for women, where there hadn’t been in the past, and she took advantage of that time in history.”
Ms Smith came across Alice Anderson’s story in another historical biography: ‘The Unusual Life of Edna Walling’ by Sara Hardy, an influential landscape designer who designed Bickleigh Vale in Mooroolbark.
Ms Smith said she turned in up in the book when it was mentioned that Alice had opened up her own garage by the time she was in her early 20s.
“I was just fascinated from there on in and wondered why I haven’t heard about her, so I started googling her and it took a long enough time to get the information for a biography but no one had pulled together the full story so I went for it,” she said.
“Alice, over the ten years or so that she ran the garage, she had about nine female staff because it was an all-women garage, that was the uniqueness of it and the risk that she took which caused a lot of friction as you can imagine all the garage proprietors were male, most of them didn’t like the competition, put them down and tried to undermine the business.”
The Alice Anderson Motor Service was born in 1919, performing vehicle repairs, chauffeuring, touring trips, driving lessons and a petrol station from the workshop in Kew.
Ms Smith said the book took about three years of research before its release in 2019.
“The significance is what pushed me, there are so many women in history that we don’t know anything about or much about, because men have been traditionally responsible for writing the histories, or the victors have always been responsible, which have mainly been men,” she said.
“There are so many women to uncover out there that did extraordinary things that just haven’t really been properly acknowledged, my idea was to write Alice back into the history books, which this book has done, and that’s been marvellous.”
Ms Smith used the National Library of Australia’s Trove service, the Public Record Office Victoria, historical organisations, other historians who had written about Alice Anderson such as Dr Georgine Clarsen and Dr Mimi Colligan and relatives of some of the ‘garage girls’ Alice Anderson had trained.
Bookings can be made for Ms Smith’s free appearance event here: https://events.yourlibrary.com.au/flyer?id=42659.
