Lilias Needham funds Hawker House for St Mark's College, North Adelaide, in memory of her brother Charles
Lilias Hawker at her wedding to Richard Needham at Church of the Ascension, Aldgate, in the Adelaide hills in 1933. Also pictured (from left) are her father Michael Hawker, cousin Nancy Newland, mother Bessie Hawker and brother Charles Hawker. Inset: Lilian Hawker's devotion to the memory of Charles Hawker including helping to fund the purchase of Hawker House at St Mark's College, North Adelaide. An article in The Advertiser in 1974 highlighted her work in perpetuating Charles Hawker.
Images courtsy St Mark's College, North Adelaide
St Mark’s College at North Adelaide benefited from the determined efforts of (Kathleen) Lilias Needham to perpetuate the memory of her brother Charles Allan Seymour Hawker.
Hawker, a highly-regarded South Australian federal member of parliament, widely considered a possible prime minister, was killed in the Kyeema air crash in 1938. Hawker also was a founder and benefactor of St Mark’s College, the Anglican residential college for university students, from 1925.
Lilias Needham became deeply interested in a way to memorialise her brother and support the college. She confidentially communicated with college council chairman Gavin Walkley, offering $10,000 plus a $20,000 bequest in her will to enable it to expand by buying in 1969 the building on Pennington Terrace, North Adelaide, used by the South Australian education department for its correspondence school.
Needham, anonymous until she died in 1975, only requested that the building be renamed Charles Hawker House. The college found that, added to the $20,000 for Hawker House, she also left it funds from the sale of a North Adelaide house. Needham was integral to creating of the C.A.S. Hawker Scholarship trust fund for college residences and to ensure that his qualities of “compassion for the less fortunate, his sincerity, generosity and natural common touch as well as his outstanding sense of integrity” were imbued in future leaders.
Needham also gave $150,000 to construct the Charles Hawker Conference Centre at Adelaide University’s Waite campus and donated to Burgmann College at the Australian National University for its Hawker Room. Needham worked in the 1960s to ensure that a definitive account of her brother’s life, described by commentators as an “epic of courage and determination”, was published.
When other arrangements fell through, she embarked years of combing the national archives and writing to senior members of the Commonwealth Government, to produce Charles Hawker: Soldier, Pastoralist, Statesman, in 1969. The book sold so well that it went into a second edition. But Needham remained modest, with one publication referring to “the self-effacing way she has kept herself out of the limelight” as “a study in itself”. St Mark’s College recognised her life with its Lilias Needham Medal for service.
Born in 1900, Lilias Hawker had an idyllic upbringing at the Hawker residence, Pirralilla, at Aldgate in the Adelaide Hills. While, with her brother and sister, Lilias had a privileged childhood from the wealth generated by her pastoralist grandfather George, her parents Michael and Elizabeth “Bessie” Hawker instilled a strong sense of service and patriotism into their children.
In 1913, Lilias’s brother Charles went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study history, and Lilias and her family went to England as he settled in. During their stay, World War I started. Lilias and her siblings were educated in England during the war while Charles joined the British Army. Charles Hawker’s courage on the battlefield left him badly injured. He returned from war service with one glass eye and paralysed from the waist down. As he battled his war injuries and learnt to walk with metal braces, Lilias’s respect for her brother increased.
From the 1930s, Lilias became a generous philanthropist, supporting many of South Australia’s service organisations such as the Red Cross, Helping Hand, the Synod of the Church of England, St Barnabas Theological College, Meals on Wheels, Elderly Citizens Homes of SA, Royal Flying Doctor Service, Royal District and Bush Nursing Society, and Bedford Industries Vocational Rehabilitation Association.
Supporting education also was a priority. Lilias Needham’s niece, Mary van Dissel, observed that she regreted, due to her gender and class, not being able to attend university.
