Dame Florence Cardell-Oliver DBE

Dame Annie Florence Cardell-Oliver (1876-1965), politician, grew up in Melbourne before marrying a wool buyer and returning with him to England. Seven years into their marriage, in London, he died of an overdose of sleeping tonic; some six weeks later she married a doctor, Arthur Cardell Oliver (later, she was to hyphenate his name). They had two sons. He agreed to migrate to Western Australia and they settled in Albany, where Florence, as she preferred to be known, became president of the Western Australian Nationalist Women’s Movement and the Albany branch of the Women’s Service Guilds. During the First World War, in which Arthur served for a year, Florence travelled to speak at recruitment drives. After Arthur died in 1929, Florence became vice-president of the WA branch of the Nationalist Party; she published Empire Unity or Red Asiatic Domination in 1934. Between 1933 and 1936 she travelled overseas, including to the Soviet Union and the Baltic States, and attended the congress in Istanbul of the International Suffrage Alliance of Women as a delegate from the Australian Federation of Women Voters. In 1934 she ran for the seat of Fremantle but was defeated by John Curtin. Two years later she became the Nationalist member for Subiaco in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly. Not one to toe the party line, she opposed the death penalty but in 1939 she organized a campaign to oppose the establishment of free birth-control clinics. On 1 April 1947 Cardell-Oliver was appointed an honorary minister with no portfolio in the McLarty-Watts Liberal-Country Party government; early the next year she became honorary minister for supply and shipping. When made minister for health on 7 October 1949, she became the first woman in Australia and - at seventy - the oldest person in Western Australia to attain full cabinet rank.She retained her portfolios until the government was defeated in February 1953. She sponsored the Free Milk and Nutritional Council, and, as health minister, introduced a free-milk scheme for Western Australian schoolchildren; she was a pioneer in the fight against tuberculosis by legislating for compulsory chest X-ray examinations. A member of the Karakatta Club (the first women’s club in Australia), she was president of the Women Painters’ Society of Western Australia and of the Western Australian Women’s Hockey Association, and represented the Subiaco parish on the Anglican diocesan synod. She was appointed DBE in 1951 and retired in 1956, aged eighty. She was interred in England next to Arthur Cardell Oliver.