The extraordinary story of Alice Anderson: Melbourne’s first garage girl

She was an automotive pioneer in an age when women weren’t expected to drive. But tales of Alice Anderson’s adventures were matched by the mystery of her death.

Alice Anderson was an automotive pioneer.

AT the time Alice Anderson was making her name as a motoring pioneer and adventurer, some men were questioning whether women should even be behind the wheel.

As a 20-year-old, Ms Anderson started Australia’s first “all-girl” garage, in Cotham Rd, Kew, just as the arrival of the automobile was revolutionising Melbourne’s roads in the early 1900s.

Her inspiring life — and her mysterious death at age 29 from a gunshot wound to the forehead — is the subject of the fourth episode of the In Black and White podcast series.

The 90-year mystery of her death has finally been solved in a recently released book by Melbourne author Loretta Smith called A Spanner in the Works.

It was 1916 when Ms Anderson became the first woman to drive over the notoriously dangerous Black Spur.

Yet in that same year, the book points out, the Australian Motorist quoted Automobile Club Victoria’s solicitor Mr Fay’s opinion suggesting women and driving were a dangerous mix.

“Women drivers lack the nerve and judgment of the stronger sex,” he opined.

“They are not so alert as men, and become confused in a crisis.

“They are all right on an empty country road, but when quick action is necessary women have not the decision or strength to manoeuvre the car properly.”

Ms Anderson was determined to defy attitudes like those, and became a trailblazing mechanic and motoring entrepreneur.

According to Smith’s book, Ms Anderson’s Motor Service prospered during World War I and the 1920s, with the all-female staff working as mechanics, chauffeurs, tour operators and driving instructors.

A Spanner In The Works by Loretta Smith.

Pioneering female motor mechanic Alice Anderson, who ran an all-women garage in Melbourne in the 1920s. Picture: courtesy of national Motor Museum, Birdwood

In one extraordinary story from her childhood growing up in the bush, teenage Alice saved the life of a man whose throat was slashed by sewing him up with horse hair.

“A very drunk woodcutter came to the door,” Smith says.

“She got Winnie her horse … and they were taken to this cabin in the woods.

“(One man’s) throat had been cut more or less ear to ear with a broken beer bottle.

“She told her sister to boil up the billy and pull a piece of hair from the horse’s tail.

“She got the four other men to hold this man down, and she sewed up his neck with horse hair.

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“He went to the doctor the next day and the doctor said she’d done quite a good job. He wouldn’t have lived if it wasn’t for Alice.”

Ms Anderson’s life story is dotted with appearances from some of the most notable names in 20th century Australian history.

Ms Anderson learnt the motoring business from her father, a brilliant engineer who ran a business with another young engineer who went on to become one of Australia’s best military commanders — General Sir John Monash.

She was also represented — unsuccessfully — in a court case by a young Melbourne lawyer called Robert Menzies, long before he became Australia’s longest-running prime minister.

Alice Anderson’s garage girls in 1925. Picture: Loretta Smith

And Ms Anderson’s father was friends with famed American architect Walter Burley Griffin, who designed Canberra, and his architect wife Marion.

The Griffins even stayed with the Andersons at their tumbledown cottage in the Victorian bush.

The most remarkable part of Ms Anderson’s story is the mystery that has always surrounded her death in 1926 at age 29.

She was cleaning guns in the back of her garage a few days after returning from a celebrated road trip in a Baby Austin on and off road from Melbourne to Alice Springs when a shot rang out.

Friends of Boroondara Cemetery's Tony Michael at the Alice Anderson gravesite. Picture: Glenn Daniels

A coronial inquest concluded Ms Anderson accidentally fired the fatal shot herself.

But meticulous research by Smith has unravelled a web of false testimony, cover-ups and lies, which has led the author to an entirely different conclusion.

Find out what she discovered and listen to the full interview, available today on the latest episode of the new free In Black and White podcast series.

And tune in to previous episodes on Black Elsie, the singer-turned-jailbird who befriended footy great Jack Dyer, Navajo wrestler and showman Chief Little Wolf, and Edward Oxford, the first of seven people to try to assassinate Queen Victoria, before starting a remarkable new life in the heart of Melbourne society.