Portrait of Deborah Vernon Hackett

Deborah Vernon Hackett (née Drake-Brockman, 1887–1965), was a mining company director and welfare worker. Growing up in Western Australia, she early developed a number of unconventional interests. In 1905, when she was seventeen, she married fifty-eight year old John Winthrop Hackett, newspaper proprietor and legislative councillor, and together they had five notable children. By 1916, the year she was first widowed, Lady Hackett had produced a copious manual of home hints. In 1918 she married Frank Moulden, who was made Mayor of Adelaide a few years later. As Lady Mayoress, she raised enormous sums for Adelaide’s charities. Over the course of the 1920s Lady Moulden became convinced of the potential of a rare mineral, tantalite, found in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Intrepidly visiting sites in the outback, she formulated export plans and travelled to the US to pursue a contract to supply ore; when she moved to London in 1927 to launch her daughters on society, she continued to emphasise the merits of Australian tantalite. In 1936, by which time she had been awarded an honorary doctorate, she married again; henceforth known as Dr Buller Murphy, she lived in Victoria, and worked vigorously on behalf of various good causes, notably British war orphans. In 1958 she published an account of the Dordenup Indigenous people she had encountered as a girl. Her third husband, considerably her junior although he, too, was to predecease her, wrote a short encomium to her, A Woman of Rare Metal (1949) in which she was described as Australia’s leading ‘Woman-in-her-own-right’.

Florence Fuller (1867–1946) became well-regarded for her portraits in Melbourne in the 1880s. After spending ten years abroad, between 1904 and 1909 she worked in Perth. Fuller was a Theosophist, and spent some time in Calcutta; her striking Portrait of the Lord Buddha, dating from around 1910, was said to have been painted from memory of their direct encounters.