Jane Agnew (1841-1934)

Early HSV member

Jane Agnew, born in Melbourne in 1841, was the daughter of Scottish immigrants James Landles and his wife Lilias Notman. She married Irishman Andrew Agnew in 1864 and gave birth to eight children between 1865 and 1881. Six lived to adulthood, five girls and a boy. Only one girl and the youngest child, a boy, married, so this was a female-dominated household.

The family was Presbyterian and the girls were educated at Presbyterian Ladies College, where three of them successfully sat for the matriculation exam in the 1880s and 1890s. Their son, William, a law student at Ormond College, attended the University of Melbourne then went on to manage a station in Queensland before serving as a Lieutenant during World War One.

Andrew Agnew was a merchant with a business based in LaTrobe Street in Melbourne’s CBD. He lived at ‘Lara’, Burwood Road, Hawthorn and was a local JP. A member of the Royal Geographical Society, he joined the Historical Society of Victoria in February 1913 and was a member until his death in 1925.

In 1920, Andrew Agnew retired and sold ‘Lara’, his Burwood Road property, which was bought by the Church of England and became a boys’ home. The family (Andrew, Jane and three of their daughters) then moved to ‘Braeside’, 96 Walpole Street, Kew. After Andrew’s death in 1925, Jane and her daughters Emeline and Marion remained in the family home.

Jane Agnew was a well off widow, her husband Andrew’s estate being worth more than £28,000 (about $2.4 million today). Her absence from the newspapers suggests she did not lead a public life and when she joined the HSV in 1929 she was already in her late 80s. She died in 1934 aged 92. This was the year of the Victorian Centenary celebrations and the year in which a biographical entry of the former Jane Landles appeared in the Records of the Pioneer Women of Victoria. This seems fitting, as her parents married in the fledgling Port Phillip settlement almost a century before and she had been raised in a pre-goldrush Melbourne that had transformed itself many times over before she died.

Jane Agnew, her husband, children and other members of the family, as well as her parents and members of the Landles family, are buried in a family enclave in the Presbyterian section of Melbourne General Cemetery.

Of her daughters Marion and Emeline more can be said, and Emeline, also an HSV member, is featured elsewhere in this online dictionary of biography.

Cheryl Griffin, 3 November 2023

Sources:
RHSV membership records
Victorian birth, death, marriage indexes
Victorian electoral rolls
Records of the Pioneer Women of Victoria
Melbourne General Cemetery records
TROVE newspapers online