Person

Higgins, Frances Georgina Watts (Ina) (1860 - 1948)

Born
1860
County Cork, Ireland
Died
1948
Malvern, Victoria, Australia
Occupation
Landscape gardener

Summary

Ina Higgins was one of the first women to enrol at the Burnley Horticultural College in Melbourne in 1899, receiving her Certificate of Competency in 1900. She subsequently had a lengthy career as a distinguished landscape gardener. The gardens that she designed include "Heronswood" (Dromana), the Royal Talbot Epileptic Colony (Clayton), and "Hethersett" (Burwood), all in Victoria. Higgins advocated limiting large expanses of grass because maintenance took too much water. In 1914 she was invited by New South Wales Commission for Irrigation to assist in planning two model towns in Murrumbidgee irrigation region, a project that never eventuated. The same year she participated in the initiation of the Women's Rural Industries Co. Ltd, a co-operative women's farm in Mordialloc, Victoria. Higgins was a committed feminist and heavily involved in the campaign for women's suffrage. In 1917 she became Patroness of the Women's Horticultural Association.

Details

Chronology

1870
Life event - Migrated to Australia with her family
1879 - 1890
Career position - Worked as a governess in New South Wales
1899
Career event - Elected to Malvern City Council Board of Advice
1900
Education - Certificate of Competency, Burnley Horticultural College
1914 - 1919
Career position - Horticultural Instructor, Women's Rural Industries Co. Ltd

Related Corporate Bodies

Published resources

Journal Articles

  • Pullman, Sandra, 'Women gardeners without chaperones: the role of Ina Higgins in advancing women in horticulture in Victoria', La Trobe Library Journal, 99 (2017), 71-81. Details
  • Pullman, Sandra, 'Burnley's first feminist gardener [Ina Higgins]', Australian Garden History, 29 (3) (2018), 6-8. Details

Helen Cohn

EOAS ID: biogs/P006520b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P006520b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260