Jane Campbell McKellar (1852-1936)

Jane Campbell McKellar (1852-1936)

Early HSV member

Jane Campbell McKellar, aunt of Nesta McKellar, was a life member of the HSV. She joined the Society in December 1916, two years before her brother Ernest’s daughter Nesta and became a life member in 1922.

The portrait you see here is of a young Jane McKellar, taken in 1866 when she was about 14 years old. It is one of a collection of family portraits donated to the State Library of Victoria by her niece Nesta. Jane was born at Balmoral in Victoria’s Western District to Thomas McKellar and his wife Catherine McColl.

Jane McKellar was the oldest of four daughters, Her family owned a number of pastoral properties in Victoria, South Australia and Queensland, including Raglan Station where her niece Nesta was born in 1893.

In December 1915 aged 63, Jane McKellar travelled to England where her niece Nesta McKellar was living and possibly working as a driver for the Red Cross. (She had gained her drivers’ licence while living at the Staghunters Inn, Brendon, Devon in April 1915.) Visa stamps on the back of the document indicate that Jane travelled throughout Europe and visited Germany in 1924.

She had an imposing demeanour: she was 5’ 7” with square facial features, a large mouth and retroussé nose, according to her 1915 travel documents in which she looks out beyond the cameraman with a direct, ‘don’t mess with me’ stare.

Jane did not marry and lived much of her adult life at various addresses in Melbourne’s CBD and the Melbourne suburb of South Yarra. She was a member of the Alexandra Club and at the time she joined the HSV she was living at the newly completed Lister House, 61 Collins Street (on the corner of Exhibition Street) – in the ‘Paris end’ of Collins Street. The lower levels were occupied by medical suites, but the upper three levels were made up of 21 residential flats with dining and lounge areas on the roof and an ‘American Roof Garden’.

Her later South Yarra addresses are all in the vicinity of the Botanic Gardens and it seems that Jane McKellar had an affinity with the botanical world. The Australian National Herbarium holds 23 specimens donated by a Miss McKellar in 1886, collected at Raglan Creek, the Queensland family property. It is likely that this is Jane, although it could be one of her then unmarried sisters – Rachel, Catherine or Mary. This Miss McKellar was one of 225 women now identified as female collectors who worked on behalf of Ferdinand Mueller, the Gardens’ first director and Government Botanist. These collectors made an outstanding (and until recently largely anonymous) contribution to Australian botany at a time when women were rarely involved in the sciences.

Jane Campbell McKellar died at South Yarra in 1936 aged 84 and is buried in the Presbyterian section of Hamilton Cemetery.

Cheryl Griffin, February 2023

Sources:
RHSV archives, including membership records
Victorian Birth, Death, Marriage indexes
Victorian electoral rolls 1908 to 1936
Scottish 1891 census
English 1911 census
Victorian inward and outward shipping records
Fremantle inward shipping records
UK outward shipping records
Ferdinand Mueller’s female plant collectors: a biographical register Sara Maroske and Alison Vaughan, Muelleria 32:92–172 (2014) https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/70771/2/01_Maroske_Ferdinand_Mueller’s_female_2014.pdf