In 1914, South Australia’s new vice-regal consort arrived in Adelaide carrying a secret that could have destroyed her position: she was the daughter of a German mother, in a state about to go to war with Germany.
Lady Marie Galway — twice married, German by blood, Catholic by upbringing, cosmopolitan by nature — would spend the next four years building the state’s wartime charitable infrastructure from Government House, while anti-German sentiment turned neighbour against neighbour around her. Her husband, the Governor, struggled to win the trust of the colony he’d been sent to serve. She succeeded where he failed.
This is her story: overlooked by history, and startlingly relevant to conversations about identity, loyalty and belonging today.
The Last Resort of Foreigners
In August 1913, in a quiet London chapel once described by Charles Dickens as “the last resort of foreigners,” Marie Blennerhassett — a widow, daughter of an Anglo-Irish father and a German mother — married Sir Henry Galway. It was her second marriage; it was his first. Henry, a colonial soldier whose career had stalled — a knighthood earned on the remote island of St Helena, a governorship of Gambia that lasted barely eighteen months — had, by his own account, reached an age at which bachelorhood was becoming a professional liability. Marie, widowed some fifteen years and settled into an independent life among London’s diplomats, artists and writers, brought her own reasons to the match.
A week after the wedding, an announcement appeared in The Times: King George V had appointed Sir Henry Galway to succeed Admiral Sir Day Bosanquet as the seventeenth Governor of South Australia. It was the following March that the Galways left London, and on 18 April 1914, Marie stepped onto Australian soil as the colony’s new vice-regal consort.
A Delicate Position
What Marie carried with her to Adelaide was not simply a new title. Born to a German mother, raised Catholic, educated on the continent, she arrived with the impeccable credentials of a “daughter of Empire.”
But only months after Marie’s arrival, what had served her well in cosmopolitan London sat less comfortably.
Australia was at war. For the new vice-regal consort, the timing could scarcely be more consequential.
Navigating a Contradiction
Over the four years that followed, Marie occupied a position with, in her own words, “no official status whatsoever,” and yet one that placed her at the centre of South Australia’s wartime life. She established the South Australian Division of the Red Cross, supported hospitals, and edited a publication in aid of occupied Belgium — practical, unglamorous work, undertaken from Government House while anti-German sentiment swept the state around her.
Interior of Government House, Adelaide, showing parcels ready for dispatch. [SRG 770/40/295]
It was a contradiction she never fully escaped: a woman of German heritage leading South Australia’s efforts to sustain the war effort against Germany. She did not campaign against the suspicion directed at the state’s German community, nor speak publicly in its defence. She simply went on with the work in front of her, and let the record of that work speak for itself.
Her husband, meanwhile, struggled. Sir Henry’s manner — described by one historian as that of “a veritable Colonel Blimp” — grated against South Australian sensibilities he neither understood nor much respected. Where he complained of a colonial “want of respect for authority,” Marie found in Adelaide a society she came, genuinely, to admire. It fell to her, in the end, to do what her husband could not: earn the trust of the people of South Australia.
That story — the story of a marriage and of a woman whose complicated origins became the very grounds of her acceptance — is the subject of A Woman in a Thousand: Lady Marie Galway, South Australia and the Great War.
It is the story of an extraordinary woman, largely overlooked by history. And a story of legacy, loyalty and multiculturalism in times of conflict that resonates today.
Praise for ‘A Woman in a Thousand’
‘Lady Galway’s legacy is a voice from the past that echoes today.’
Her Excellency, the Honourable Frances Adamson AC, Governor of South Australia
‘Susan Neuhaus has given us a great gift – understanding the quiet, resolute, selfless determination of a woman who wielded not power, but influence in the service of others.’
Dr Brendan Nelson AO, Former Director and Chairman Australian War Memorial
‘A superb, richly evocative portrait of Lady Marie Galway, South Australia’s wartime vice-regal consort, illuminating the quiet strength of women so often ignored by history, and the unjust persecution of German-Australians during World War I. Susan Neuhaus had me captivated from start to finish.’
Dr Lainie Anderson OAM, Author of Long Flight Home and Petticoat Police Mysteries
Dr Susan J. Neuhaus AM CSC is a surgeon, former Colonel in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps, and Member of Council of the Australian War Memorial. She is the co-author of “Not for Glory: A Century of Service by Medical Women to the Australian Army and Its Allies” and the author of “The Surgeon of Royaumont.”