The life of one of Australia’s pioneering women in the automotive industry is being remembered in an original stage show.
“Probably no woman in Melbourne was better known,” newspaper The Herald wrote when Alice Anderson’s death was announced on 18 September 1926.
She was 29, and questions about her untimely death remain to this day.
Mechanic, driving instructor, and businesswoman Alice Anderson was the driving force behind Melbourne’s first all-female mechanical garage in Melbourne – and now an original stage show delves into her life.
Garage Girls is a theatrical production inspired by Ms Anderson’s famous workshop, located at 88 Cotham Road, Kew, in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs.
The original building was demolished decades ago. According to images on Google Maps, a nondescript low-rise office building is now on the site.
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After earning her stripes as a qualified mechanic, ‘Miss Anderson’s Motor Service’ opened in 1919 when she was just 22 years old, selling fuel and repairing motor vehicles.
But Ms Anderson also used the Kew Garage to provide driver training to young women – sent by their trusting mothers from all parts of Australia – along with motor vehicle touring trips to Alice Springs, as well as offering a 24-hour chauffeur service for Melbourne’s elite.
If that wasn’t enough, she has also been credited as an inventor.
While the first patent for a ‘mechanic’s creeper’ was filed in the US in 1937, Ms Anderson had already created a trolley for rolling under a car on one’s back in 1918, which she called the Get-Out-And-Get-Under – likely named after a popular song from 1913 about repairing cars.
“She pioneered the way to motor garages for women, and made a greater success of it than most men could,” The Herald wrote in 1926.
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“Her untimely end at (the age of) 29 cuts short a career full of romance and rare achievement. Many men have watched her repair a car or even change a wheel where they had failed and marvelled at her resource and initiative in driving.”
Garage Girls is a collaboration between The Shift Theatre and Three Birds Theatre, starring Anna Rodway, Carolyn Block, Madi Nunn, Helen Hopkins, and Candace Miles.
The show will run at Melbourne’s La Mama Courthouse theatre in July 2023 – with exact dates to be announced – but is also available to tour to car clubs, schools, and regional theatres.
For more information, visit Three Birds Theatre website by clicking here or La Mama’s website found here.
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