Vida Lenox (1884-1956)

Writer. HSV member.

Vida Lenox was born in Carlton, the daughter of James Martin and his wife Sarah Garth. The family lived in Fitzroy until her father’s death when she was fifteen. She and her mother then moved to Malvern.

From an early age, Vida, an accomplished violinist, performed at concerts to great acclaim. For most of the 20th century’s first two decades Vida worked as a musician, giving this as her occupation on electoral rolls.

In 1910 she became involved in Alfred Deakin’s Commonwealth Liberal Party (CLP), speaking at a Toorak Branch meeting alongside Deakin’s wife Sarah and his daughter Ivy Brookes. A year later, after the CLP merged with the People’s Party to become the People’s Liberal Party, she became its Victorian organiser.

Hers was a short-lived political career. In January 1912 she disappeared from the political sphere and from Victoria. Four months later her only child Miriam was born in Launceston. At this time, Vida assumed the surname Lenox.

Vida, her mother and daughter, remained in Launceston until the end of World War One when they returned to Melbourne to live in Adeney Avenue, East Kew where her mother died in 1925.

From that time, Vida’s public output revolved around supporting Australian literature and culture. She wrote letters to the editor, including one that deplored the lack of Australian musical compositions based on national stories and aboriginal music. A member of the Australian Literature Society, she gave papers on Australian poets and on ‘Forming Young Australia’s Taste‘. She joined the Australian Literature Society and later was the vice president and press correspondent of the Australian Reading Union,

Vida’s interest in the development of an Australian cultural identity is evident, too, in her membership (from 1924) of the Historical Society of Victoria. Hers was not a huge literary output but much of her writing revolves around life in the Australian bush, as is evidenced in her contributions to the 1934 Centenary Gift Book featuring the lives of early pioneering women and their families. The place of indigenous people in that life is also evident in her writing.

In the early 1940s Vida moved to Sydney where her daughter Miriam was working as Sydney Hospital’s first dietician. Her active years as a published writer were over, although in 1949 Meanjin published her short story ‘Postmaster, San Francisco’ to great acclaim. This is her last known published piece.

Vida Lenox died at Wharoonga, Sydney in June 1956 aged 72 and his buried at French’s Forest Cemetery.

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