The Lyceum Club got the last laugh at its neighbour, the men-only Melbourne Club.Credit: Wayne Taylor
Across the laneway from a men-only club’s walled garden sits the private women’s club, the Lyceum Club.
Dismissed by some as “a club for the wives of the Melbourne Club’s members”, the Lyceum promotes itself as a place for women to forge friendships and pursue intellectual and cultural pursuits.
Members describe the Lyceum Club as “a relaxed feminist space for women” and “a place to relax and not be ‘on’ all the time while also being mentally and intellectually stimulated”.
But the club guards its privacy carefully, with one guest describing it as “like Fight Club” in that what happens at the Lyceum Club, stays at the Lyceum Club.
The Age’s request to visit the club and interview its president, Ileana Guizzo, were politely refused and most members contacted by this masthead said they could not speak to the media about the club.
The club’s 1400-strong membership list is a closely held secret, but current members include documentary maker and former Venice Biennale chair Kerry Gardner, Lonely Planet and Wheeler Centre co-founder Maureen Wheeler and corporate board member and investor Ariane Barker. Former members include Elizabeth Deakin – wife of former prime minister Alfred Deakin – and former governor-general Dame Quentin Bryce.
What happens at The Lyceum Club stays at The Lyceum Club. Credit: Wayne Taylor
Gardner, 63, has been a member of the Lyceum Club for 30 years after she was introduced to it by her mother-in-law. It’s a place she attends alone or takes interstate or international guests when they visit Melbourne.
“I say: ‘Well let’s meet at the Lyceum Club,’” she said. “I might do a walk-through and look at the art hang, which changes every month. And then I’ll either have a coffee meeting in the lounge area, or I’ll take them to lunch. You always run into other members who are doing great things, and then your guest meets them, so it’s very convivial without being too social.”
Prospective members must be nominated by two current members to join the club and membership fees are about $1500 a year.
The club operates a series of “circles” on different topics, ranging from books, science, law, current affairs, French, wine, women in finance, art, choir and even a flower arranging circle, where women bring flowers from their gardens and create arrangements together to decorate the club.
Regular events include guest speakers ranging from Tony Elwood, the director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Paule Ignatio, the newly appointed consul-general of France in Melbourne to contemporary artist Patricia Piccinini.
“One of the joys for me is I can walk into the place, and I can sit down to hear a lecture about, say, 19th-century art or DNA, and I can sit down next to someone I’ve never met before, and I’ll think, ‘oh, she looks like a sweet little old lady’,” Gardener said.
“Then I’ll get chatting to her, and I’ll find out she’s written eight books on anatomy, she’s 93 and she did medicine when she was 17 at Melbourne Uni. Where else am I going to meet that woman?”
Founded on March 21, 1912, by a group of 25 women, the Lyceum Club was modelled on its namesake in London.
Kerry Gardner, former chair of Australia at the Venice Biennale, is a member of The Lyceum Club. Credit: Simon Schluter
“All were concerned with philanthropic and community service, with education, medicine or science, with writing, music or the arts,” A History of The Lyceum Club states. “No woman was there purely because of social standing or wealth”.
The club moved into its current location – a modernist building designed by Ellison Harvie – in 1957. Decades later, Kerstin Thompson Architects designed a new $9 million rooftop extension that opened in 2018.
The ground floor comprises the entrance, car parking and a space that members have debated turning into a gym for several years. The first floor is a “club area” where members can read the newspapers and have coffee, along with meeting rooms and accommodation for members. A new restaurant and dining room space is on the top storey.
Professor of History at La Trobe University, Clare Wright, is not a member of the Lyceum Club but has spoken there about her work on several occasions. She said there was some irony to the top floor’s expansive views over the Melbourne Club.
“When you are upstairs, you can see over the top of the brick wall into the back of Melbourne Club so it is like having a view of the hallowed ground that your feet are not allowed to touch,” she said.
However, Wright compares the Lyceum Club to the old ladies lounges in pubs, which was the focus of her research in Beyond The Ladies Lounge.
Historian professor Clare Wright has spoken at The Lyceum Club about her work on several occasions. Credit: Scott McNaughton
“When I am in there, I feel a little bit about how they felt in the ladies lounge – they didn’t feel it was a place of apartheid or that they were forced into it,” she said. “It was their own place of belonging and community and solidarity not a secondary place or a ‘this will have to do’ space.”
Wright said the club is a relic of white Australia in terms of the era that it was born out, of but it has become a space for professional women to come together.
“Obviously, it is not a democratic space as it is a members-only club so it is exclusive and elitist to that extent, but it does not feel imperial or imperious or harking back to an old colonial world – it feels quite modern,” she said.
Members said there have been “conversations” over the years about admitting men as members of the Lyceum Club, which have not progressed.
However, there has been a bigger focus on increasing the racial and cultural diversity of members, which they said has “improved enormously” – but still has a way to go, with no targets in place.
The Lyceum came under public scrutiny in 2019 when its former general manager, Peter Stratton, defrauded the club of more than $500,000 to fund a cocaine habit, and a board shakeup followed over questions about how the misappropriation occurred.
“I think all organisations with 115-year histories have moments of instability and it was dealt with pretty quickly,” Gardner said. “More modern management protocols were put in place and to my knowledge, things are pretty stable.”
Many of Melbourne’s most powerful and well-connected women are not members of the Lyceum Club, leading to questions of its relevance.
Premier Jacinta Allan declined an invitation to become a member, Supreme Court Chief Justice Anne Ferguson is not a member and Reserve Bank of Australia board member Carole Schwartz says she has not been invited to join and has no interest in being a member.
“It’s crazy that women want to emulate the same anachronistic practices as men’s clubs,” Schwartz said. “I thought they would have been superseded by fabulous clubs like Soho House in the UK [which has male and female members]. They are clubs for the 21st century, not clubs we have inherited from the 19th century.”
A view of the hidden entrance to the Lyceum Club, and its newly renovated rooms upstairs.Credit: Wayne Taylor
But members staunchly defend the continued relevance of a private women-only club in 2025.
“There’s never been a more important time for women to be able to come together without men in the room,” Gardner said.
The Lyceum Club
- Address: Ridgway Place, Melbourne
- Founded: 1912
- Number of members: About 1400
- Annual membership fee: About $1500
- What’s inside: Award-winning renovated dining room, cafe, function rooms
- Rules: Women-only, code of silence to outsiders
- Open to: Tertiary-educated women who have distinguished themselves in fields such as the arts, drama, music, literature, journalism, science, technology, education, community service, philanthropy, business management and public or private administration
- How to join: Via introduction and nomination by two existing club members, or by enquiring with the club’s executive general manager
She pointed to continuing inequities across society for women, ranging from domestic violence and the number of women being murdered, to pay inequality and the low number of women chief executives at Australia’s top companies.
“You look at some of those statistics and we’ve got a long way to go,” Gardner said. “If a little corner of Melbourne down a little bluestone alleyway has 1000 or so members of pretty great women getting together, then what’s the big deal?”
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