Clara Murray (1859-1948)

Teacher. Early HSV member.

Clara Murray and her mother Elizabeth were foundation members of the Historical Society of Victoria. They lived in Malvern where Clara ran her own school, Malvern Ladies’ College.

One of the Society’s first woman volunteers, as early as August 1909 Clara wrote offering to ‘work’ for the newly established Society and several months later she had recorded the reminiscences of pioneer John Waugh. A year later she recorded and transcribed the reminiscences of grazier and politician Allan McLean and of pioneer of the Lower Murray, Mitchell Kilgour Beveridge. Others were to follow.

After her mother’s death in 1914, Clara was less active, although she retained her HSV membership until 1945, by which time she was living with her sister in Perth, WA. She had a strong sense of her own family history in Scotland and in Tasmania’s Midlands and had kept a collection of family diaries and documents which formed the basis of some of her own writing. Several articles on the Murray family appeared in the press in the 1920s, facilitated by Clara.

Clara died in Perth in 1948 aged 89. Like Annie Hope Campbell, featured elsewhere in this online dictionary, she was one of a small group of early HSV women who enabled the stories of early colonists to come into the Society’s collection.

Kaleidoscope exhibition text by Cheryl Griffin, February 2022. Full entry to follow.