Beaconsfield History – Alice Henry
By Penny Harris Jennings
On arrival in Melbourne from Scotland in the early 1850’s, Charles Ferguson Henry married Margaret Walker and they had two, children Alice and Alfred. Charles Henry found work as an accountant with the importing firm Andrew and Walter Ferguson and resided in Richmond. In 1858, with the slump of trade due to the end of the gold boom, the importing firm closed, so Charles decided to try farming and purchased 150 acres in Beaconsfield under the scheme of time payment. This land was considered of poor quality and mostly uncleared.
Charles, Margaret and their two children Alice and Alfred lived in “a tiny timber cottage with bare earth floors, surrounded by magnificent eucalypts.
Extracts from Alice Henry; The Power of Pen and Voice. The Life of an Australian-American Labour Reformer by Dianne Kirkby.
“her [Alice] greatest joy in this period appears to have been the freedom she enjoyed of an outdoors life, the small pleasure of bringing cows in to be milked, or of tracking down the eggs carefully hidden by her mother’s prized fowls. Her brother was a constant playmate during these years. They enjoyed a closeness that in later life can probably be traced to this time in the bush when they only had each other for company and Alice could enjoy the freedom her brother did. “No sex division, still less sex inferiority, obstructed itself on my mental picture”, she later said. There were no neighbours close by and as a result of their isolation from other children, “the distinction between qualities and standing between boys and girls were literally unknown to me”, she wrote: “I was a person”. Alice was an active little person, interested in farming activities of those around her, the animal life of the Australian bush and the vegetation itself.
Alice retained a love for them all her life”
Three years later Charles gave up farming, leasing out the farm and returning to live in Richmond. He later sold the land to the Railways department and they subsequently built the Beaconsfield Railway Station.
In 1874 Alice graduated with credit from Richard Hale Budd’s Educational Institute. She wanted to teach but illness changed her vocation to journalism. She wrote for the Argus and Australasian newspapers.
“Alice Henry went on to become a journalist and suffragist in Melbourne, where she witnessed the growth and upheavals of the Australian labour movement and subsequent experiments in state regulation of industrial relations. During her 28 years in America she became a prominent figure in the Women’s Trade Union League and was committed to improving the political and economic rights of wage-earning women, using her powers of “pen and voice” as a writer and lecturer, although she herself struggled to retain economic self-sufficiency as a single woman”.
She wrote two books; The Trade Union Woman, (1915), and Women and the Labour Movement, (1923). Alice wrote many articles and contributed to publications throughout the world. In 1937 she compiled a bibliography of Australian women writers.
Alice died in Malvern on 14 February 1943 and her remains are scattered at Fawkner cemetery.
