Barbara Savill (1907-1993) was born at Broadford, the daughter of James Sutherland and his wife Jane Robertson.

She joined the Education Department as a primary school teacher in 1924 and after several years working at Preston West State School in Melbourne’s north, she was transferred to Bulga Tank near Swan Hill in Victoria’s Mallee in June 1929. Six months later she resigned, as she was about to marry.

She married 38 year old Thomas Herbert Savill on 4 January 1930. She was 16 years younger than her husband, an Englishman who had arrived in Australia in 1914, just before the outbreak of war and who on arrival worked as a coal miner at Kilcunda near Wonthaggi on Victoria’s Bass Coast.

After Savill’s return to Australia in July 1919 he was employed by the PMG (Post Master General’s Department) as a telephone linesman, so perhaps that is how the couple met each other. Their only child Richard John (known as Jack) was born in 1932 and soon after they were living in Violet Town where Savill ran a bakery. Thomas Savill died on 31 October 1946 at Benalla and was buried at Broadford.

After her husband’s death Barbara moved to Melbourne with her son and settled in the eastern suburb of Canterbury. Seven years after her husband’s death and the year her son turned twenty-one, she resumed her career with the Education Department as an infant teacher at SS1026 Balwyn. Although she was praised by Inspector Robinson as ‘busy, interested and capable’ and she gained her Infant Teachers Certificate in January 1960, she was confined by the status of temporary teacher. Just four years earlier, the Victorian Parliament had passed the Teaching Service (Married Women) Act, so removing a marriage bar in the Victorian Education Department that dated back to 1889.The marriage bar meant that married women were excluded from the permanent teaching staff.

It is not known whether Barbara Savill ever regained her position as a permanent teacher, but electoral rolls suggest that soon after she gained her Infant Teachers qualification, she left teaching altogether and from the 1960s worked as a clerk.

In 1975, having retired from the workforce, she began volunteering at the RHSV. Several days a week she worked on sorting and classifying photographs and glass slides, as well as answering research enquiries. She had an absolute dedication to her work, Mimi Colligan remembering that in her own early days as a volunteer those helping in the photographic collection ‘were not permitted by curator Barbara Savill to handle photographs’.

From 1990 to 1991 Barbara served as the Society’s Research Officer, her many daily notebooks in the RHSV Archives a testimony to her prodigious output. She spoke at occasional meetings and was known to all as a thorough and reliable researcher. In 1974 she published a brief history of her home town, Broadford: A history of the shire.

Barbara died in November 1993, her ‘renowned encyclopaedic knowledge of the collection’ admired by those who knew her.

Cheryl Griffin

20 July 2022