Ellinor Walker active force in women’s political association/ League of Women Voters for 65 years

Ellinor Walker (centre of front row, with striped scarf) with other delegates at the 1933 Australian Federation of Women Voters conference in Adelaide. 
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia

Ellinor Walker was an active driving force for 65 years of the South Australian Women’s Non-Party Political Association that she joined in 1914 through to 1970s in its second form (from 1939) as the League of Women Voters.

Melbourne-born Walker came to Adelaide in 1902 as a child with her parents and attended Wilderness School before Miss Derrington’s progressive Norwood High School. In 1908, she won the Tennyson medal for English literature.

With a strong sense of duty, Walker helped in  the Young Women’s Christian Association from 1909, learned housekeeping at home and studied psychology for three years through the Workers’ Educational Association. Knowing her mother had no vote until she lived in South Australia, Walker and a friend began a society for girls to study politics. In 1914, she joined the Women’s Non-Party Political Association founded by Lucy Morice and Catherine Helen Spence. The association’s aims— removing legal, economic and other inequalities between men and women—remained Walker’s lifework. She began 10 years as assistant secretary and was active on its parliamentary committee.

She also joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

In 1917, Walker entered Adelaide Kindergarten Training College under principal Lillian de Lissa, who introduced Montessori methods. On graduating she was appointed director of Halifax Street Free Kindergarten. She taught, supervised students, and did social work with poor mothers.

During the 1919 influenza pandemic, Walker was quarantined for a long convalescence. Her concerned parents moved to a house with ample grounds in suburban Fullarton where she  later opened her own Montessori school, Greenways, teaching up to 20 children, for the next 24 years. In school holidays, she explored the new South Australian Archives and wrote short history plays, performed by her pupils. In the 1920s, she gave weekly psychology lectures at Adelaide Kindergarten Training College.

On weekdays afternoons, Walker was devoted to working for women’s emancipation and children’s wellbeing. She attended parliamentary debates on women and children and often lobbied politicians and journalists. She occasionally wrote plays and pageants including The Springs of Power on women’s emancipation, performed at the 1933 Australian Federation of Women Voters conference in Adelaide.

For the state centenary, she wrote Heritage: A Pageant of South Australia, presented with Heather Gell’s eurhythmics and for 10 nights to capacity audiences. In 1939, her The Silver Wing and Other Poems was published. Walker was still an active foundation member of the Australian Local Government Women’s Association (South Australian branch) in 1965.