Name Agnes Goode | ||
Agnes Knight Goode, née Fleming (31 January 1872 – 20 February 1947), best known as Mrs. A. K. Goode, was an Australian social and political activist. A contemporary report called her "... a vigorous speaker, with a keen, logical mind and experience backed with sound commonsense, Mrs. Goode was until her later years frequently called on to take the public platform in support of social welfare movements."
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History
Born at Strathalbyn, South Australia, to storekeeper James Fleming (died 10 March 1913) and Charlotte, née Knight (died 22 January 1919), she won, in 1884, a bursary to attend Port Adelaide Model School and by 1893 had qualified as a teacher and was sent to Caltowie (between Gladstone and Jamestown) as a Provisional Teacher on Probation. In 1892, as part of her qualification, she completed a First Aid course conducted by the St. John Ambulance Association. She married sheep-farmer William Edward Goode (see below) at Port Lincoln on 11 July 1896; they had a daughter and two sons. She and the children moved to Adelaide in 1915. Agnes was founding vice-president of the Women's State Recruiting Committee during World War I and conceived the establishment of the advisory committee of soldiers' dependants. She was secretary (1916–1921) and president (1921–1922) of the Liberal Women's Educational Association. She was one of the first South Australian female Justices of the Peace from 1916, and the first to take her seat on the bench with the Stipendiary Magistrate. Her period presiding over the State Children's Court from 1919 gave her a reputation for severity; she famously made a 12-year-old boy who was convicted of stealing six bicycle chains a state ward for six years.
Goode edited the women's page of the Liberal Leader from 1918 to 1924 and supported equal guardianship for mothers, women police, women in juries, equal pay, probation and the National Council for Women. In 1923 she was selected by the Liberal Federation in SA to stand for the Adelaide district seat in the House of Assembly, but was unsuccessful. In 1924 she was appointed "Official Visitor" to the Parkside Mental Asylum. In 1925 she was the first woman in South Australia to win a contest for election to a municipal council when she became a councillor of Hackney ward in the St. Peters Council, and was re-elected unopposed at the next election in 1929. A perennial opponent of politician and publican A. A. Edwards, she unsuccessfully stood against him as a Liberal in 1924 for both the state and council elections:
Albert Augustine "Bert" Edwards (ca.1891–1963) was the antithesis of Mrs Goode; publican of the Brunswick Hotel, the Newmarket Hotel on North Terrace, the Hotel Victor at Victor Harbor, and stalwart of the West Adelaide Football Club. He was a member of the Labor Party. He served on the State Children's Council from 1924. A flamboyant dresser and acknowledged homosexual, he was an effective champion of poor and dispossessed men.After being overlooked for the new Liberal Council in 1926 she left party politics and stood as a Non-Party Association candidate for Adelaide, contesting it again for the Liberal Federation in 1927. As President of the Liberal Federation's Adelaide women's branch, she contested the mayoralty in 1935, having continued her disputes with Edwards in the intervening years. Following her husband's death from cancer on 14 November 1929, Goode continued to be active in the community, contributing to societies for poetry, theatre, Aborigines (at their White's River station they employed a number of aboriginal workers, and were known as good employers), housewives (Mrs. Goode was closely associated over a long period with the Housewives' Association, of which she was one of the early presidents, holding office again in 1930), unemployed women, travellers, local industries and kindergartens (she was a member of the executive committee and the organising committee of the Lady Gowrie Pre-School Centre, president of the Stepney Pre-School Nursery committee, and a delegate to the Australian Association for Pre-School Child Development).
She died at Toorak Gardens in 1947 of coronary occlusion and was cremated.
Recognition
Family
Agnes Knight Fleming married William Edward Goode on 11 July 1896.
William Edward Goode (ca.1857 – November 1929), husband of Mrs. A. K. Goode, was a well-known pastoralist of the West Coast of South Australia. His parents Mr W. and Mrs. Jane Nicol Goode (ca.1817 – 22 March 1901) (nee Hill; her brother was Captain Hill of the Buffalo) came to South Australia on the Asia in 1839. Their only child, he was born in Adelaide and educated at John L. Young's Adelaide Educational Institution, where he won prizes in 1866 and 1868. His father died when he was young, so he was brought up by an uncle, James Anderson, at White's River station, near Louth Bay, between Port Lincoln and Tumby Bay. Anderson and John Tennant were noted for bringing overland the first sheep to the area. Anderson returned to Scotland around 1895 (his wife had died there three years previously) and William managed the station for him, and at his uncle's death became owner of the property of around 10,000 accres, which he subdivided in 1907. Mr. Goode was involved in sheep breeding and bee farming, and it was through his advocacy that the first bee farms in the Port Lincoln district were started. He leased the farm to Mr. de Rose in 1908 then sold it around 1922 to George Proude. He died at his home in Payneham road, Stepney.Their first child, a daughter, was named Katanya, an aboriginal term for "first born". Their children were: