Cardell-Oliver, Dame Annie Florence Gillies (1876–1965).
Several weeks ago the Subiaco City Council put together a list of names for new roads in Subiaco that would be created around a new development near the Subiaco Oval.
The names of 10 women were put forward and included Subiaco-born Adelaide Ilya Chugg and Nancy Russell. Both Adelaide and Nancy became teachers. Dame Annie Florence Gillies Cardell-Oliver, was a Member of Parliament for Subiaco in 1936 who went on to become the first woman in Australia to become a government cabinet minister.
There are many biographies written about Dame Cardell-Oliver on various sites on the Internet. This biography was written for the 'Proposed New Road Names For Subi East Development Area...from the Subiaco Council Agenda Briefing Forum (12 April, 2023). (No copyright infringement intended).
"Dame Cardell-Oliver was born in Stawell, Victoria, the fifth child of an Irish-born storekeeper. Florence met and married her second husband Arthur Cardell Oliver, a British Army veteran and doctor by whom she had two sons, in London.
They migrated to Western Australia in 1912 where they settled at York and then at Albany. Florence was President of the Western Australian Nationalist Women's Movement and travelled across Australia during World War I addressing the recruitment meetings.
On her husband’s death she returned to Western Australia and became vice-president of the State branch of the Nationalist Party. Florence travelled widely as a spokesperson against the spread of communism including the 1935 congress in Istanbul of the International Suffrage Alliance of Women as a delegate from the Australian Federation of Women Voters.
Cardell-Oliver returned to the Western Australian Legislative Assembly in February 1936 as the Nationalist member for Subiaco. She was appointed honorary minister in 1947, minister for supply and shipping in 1948 and then minister for health in 1949, when she became the first woman in Australia and the oldest person in WA to obtain full cabinet rank.
In office she sponsored the Free Milk and Nutritional Council, and introduced a free-milk scheme for Western Australian schoolchildren. She brought the State to the forefront of anti-tuberculosis campaigns by legislating for compulsory chest X-ray examinations. She was a member of the Victoria League, the Royal Institute of Great Britain, and the Karrakatta and Perth clubs, was president of the Women Painters' Society of Western Australia and of the Western Australian Women's Hockey Association, and represented her Subiaco parish on the Anglican diocesan synod.
In 1951 she was appointed D.B.E. Dame Cardell-Oliver died on 12 January 1965 in Subiaco."
The photograph is from the National Portrait Gallery of Australia. No copyright infringement intended.
