Australia almost missed out on making Olympic history 111 years ago because of the barriers faced by our first two female medallists, swimmers Mina Wylie and Fanny Durack, a new book claims.
Australia almost missed out on making Olympic history 111 years ago because of the barriers faced by our first two female medallists, swimmers Mina Wylie and Fanny Durack, a new book to be launched on International Women’s Day claims.Just getting aboard the ship taking the Australian athletes to the 1912 Stockholm games had been a challenge for Wylie and Durack because of an archaic rule of the NSW Ladies’ Amateur Swimming Association which prevented women from competing in the presence of men.
Programs, posters, autographs, medals, newspaper cuttings and photographs which she methodically packed into 13 individual boxes in an airtight metal chest and placed underneath her family home in Neptune Street, Coogee. She locked it with a key which she kept and told no one. When she died in 1984 at the age of 93, the unmarried but worldly Wylie’s secrets could have gone to her grave in Randwick Cemetery with her. But for Meredith Clark, who bought the house that had been the Wylie home for over 50 years, broke open the chest and donated this treasure trove of swimming history to the State Library of NSW’s Mitchell Library.
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