Marie Charlotte Bage (nee Lange) (1862-1931)

Early HSV member. Community activist.

Marie Bage, or Mrs Edward Bage as she is referred to in most publications of her day, was a foundation member of the Historical Society of Victoria (HSV).

Widowed in 1891, she led an active public life and was involved in a wide range of organisations. She belonged to the National Council of Women (NCW), serving as honorary treasurer for several decades. She also represented the Victorian branch of that organisation at international assemblies in Toronto and Geneva. She was a foundation committee member of the Women’s Citizen’s Movement and belonged to the Victoria League, the City Newsboys’ Society, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Australian Health Society and was on the committee of the Convalescent Home for Women in Carlton. She also joined the Field Naturalists Club, the Arts and Crafts Society and the Forest League.

Marie had links to a youthful intellectual network through her daughters’ membership of the Catalyst Club and the later Lyceum Club, of which she, too, was a member. Her daughter Freda was the first principal of the University of Queensland Women’s College and Ethel, a mathematician with an MA, set up a ground-breaking all-women’s garage with Alice Anderson and took it over after Alice’s untimely death in 1926. Her son Robert, a civil engineer, survived a difficult Antarctic expedition only to die at Gallipoli. In his honour, Marie founded an engineering scholarship at the University of Melbourne in 1917.

Aware of the importance of leaving a tangible family legacy, she and her brother-in-law, Dr Charles Bage, also a foundation member of the HSV, donated the Bage family papers to the Society. In the Bage collection are diaries, personal letters, postcards, photographs as well as newspaper clippings, pamphlets and other printed material, some of it relating to her daughter Freda.

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