Emeline Landles Agnew (1877-1967)

Early HSV member

Emeline Agnew was the daughter of merchant Andrew Agnew and his wife Jane Landles who married in Melbourne in 1864. She was born at St Kilda in 1877, one of eight children born between 1865 and 1881.

She joined the Historical Society of Victoria in 1934, the Victorian Centenary year. She was 57 years old and her mother had just died. Although her motives for joining the Society are not known, it is possible that it was a way of paying tribute to her parents, particularly her mother, who had been born in Melbourne in 1841, just a few years after the settlement was established. Both parents had been HSV members. Emeline remained a member until 1947, the year she turned 70.

Like her mother Jane, featured elsewhere in this online biographical dictionary, Emeline did not lead a public life. Like her sisters, she was educated at Presbyterian Ladies’ College. She matriculated in 1893 when she was 16, but did not go on to further study. Little else is known of her, except that she was well-off enough not to work and along with the rest of her family she was a parishioner of Scots Church, Melbourne.

RHSV membership records show that she was still living in the family home, ‘Braeside’, 96 Walpole Street, Kew, when she joined the Society, but after her parents’ deaths she moved from place to place in Kew and Hawthorn, sometimes giving her address as the RACV Club in Queen Street. Hers was a quiet life, unrecorded in the contemporary press.

Her sister Marion, three years her senior, led a much more public life. Like her sisters Lily and Emeline she was educated at Presbyterian Ladies College. Like them she matriculated but did not go on to further study. Unlike them, she chose to join the paid workforce, living independently for much of her life and working as a clerk. A member of the President of the Business and Professional Women’s Club and its President in 1929 and 1930, she spoke publicly on a diverse range of issues such as clothes allowances for wives and the White Australia Policy. She was also a member and office bearer of the Australian Literary Society and the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom as well as a member of the Victorian Aboriginal Group, established in 1933. And in 1935, aged 61, she embarked on a three month road trip through Central Australia to Darwin, returning to Melbourne by sea.

In the 1950s, after years of living separate lives, Marion and Emeline Agnew lived together at 43 Ramsay Avenue, Kew, Emeline’s address for the previous decade. Marion died there in 1963, Emeline in August 1967. She was 90 years old and had outlived her parents and all of her siblings.

Cheryl Griffin, 3 November 2023

Sources:
RHSV membership records
Victorian birth, death, marriage indexes
Victorian electoral rolls
TROVE newspapers online