Eleanor Yelland (1910-1997)

Historian. Early HSV member.

Born in Carlton on 30 December 1910, Eleanor Yelland was the daughter of chemist Charles Yelland and his wife Lilian Clark. She was a cousin of RHSV Fellow Lena (Maisie) Fornari.

Educated at the Hermitage School and a graduate of the University of Melbourne’s Conservatorium of Music, she worked as a music teacher before World War Two. During the war she was an aide at the Heidelberg Military Hospital and later worked at London’s St Dunstan’s Hospital, a rehabilitation and training centre for blinded servicemen.

An RHSV member from 1964, her published output, including Colonists, copper and corn in the Colony of South Australia 1850-1 and Baron of the frontier – Robert Roland Leak, is represented in the RHSV’s collection, as is a brief profile of her by her historian husband Keith T. Borrow, whom she married in 1973. Her long-held interest in genealogy led to extensive research into the Yelland family, both in Cornwall and Australia. Two unpublished books resulted, one a history of the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn and the other on the introduction of wool breeding to Australia.

She made a generous annual donation to the Friends of the La Trobe Library and was made a Patron of that Society in 1984. RHSV Fellow Dianne Reilly wrote in her obituary that Eleanor Borrow was a ‘thoughful, sensitive and generous benefactor patron, a true Friend.’ She was also a benefactor of the National Gallery of Victoria.

After her marriage to historian Keith T. Borrow, she moved to Adelaide where she died in March 1997. The Flinders University’s Borrow Collection holds an extensive range of historical material bequeathed by Borrow on his death in 2005 and includes Eleanor Borrow’s personal collection.

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