There’s a particular kind of courage it takes to be first. To walk into a trade that has no place for you, pick up the tools anyway, and build something that outlasts the doubters. In 1919, in a modest garage on Cotham Road in Kew, Victoria, a 22-year-old woman named Alice Anderson did exactly that, quietly rewiring what was possible for women in the automotive industry.
More than a century later, her story is finally getting the recognition it deserves. The City of Boroondara and the Alice Anderson Memorial Project have joined forces to commission a full-sized bronze statue of Alice, to be placed in Petrie Square on Cotham Road, just steps from where her garage once stood. It’s a fitting tribute to a woman whose name disappeared from public memory for decades, but whose legacy never really left.
A Garage Like No Other
Born in 1897, Alice Anderson grew up in an era when the automobile itself was still a novelty, let alone the idea of a woman running her hands over an engine block. Mechanics’ institutes across the country barred women from entry. The trade was, by design and by custom, a men’s world.
Alice didn’t ask for permission. In 1919, she opened the Alice Anderson Motor Service, Australia’s first all-women’s garage. It wasn’t a novelty act or a sideline business. It was a full-service operation: repairs, servicing, vehicle sales, chauffeuring, and chauffeured touring across Victoria and interstate. She also founded the Alice Anderson Driving School, teaching a new generation of Australians, many of them women, how to get behind the wheel with confidence.
What made her garage truly extraordinary was who was doing the work. Alice employed and trained at least 30 women as mechanics, at a time when there was simply no other pathway for a woman to learn the trade. She built that pathway herself, from nothing, because it didn’t exist.
An Inventor’s Mind
Alice wasn’t just a skilled mechanic and a canny businesswoman. She was an inventor. Her best-known creation, the “Anderson Get Out and Get Under,” was a rolling trolley that let mechanics slide beneath a car to work rather than lying flat on the ground. It was a precursor to the car creeper still used in workshops around the world today. It’s a small thing, perhaps, until you consider that she engineered a solution to a problem the entire industry had simply accepted as unsolvable.
She brought that same resourcefulness to the road. Alice drove a Baby Austin from Victoria to Alice Springs across rough, unforgiving dirt tracks, becoming the first woman to make that journey. True to form, she wasn’t content to simply take the trip; she first built and customised the car’s body herself to withstand it.
A Life Cut Short, A Legacy That Endured
Alice Anderson died at just 29 years old. Her death made front-page news across the country, a measure of just how significant her presence had become in Australian public life. As The Herald reported on 18 September 1926, “Probably no woman in Melbourne was better known.”
Her garage in Kew kept running until World War II. Remarkably, her driving school carried on her name and her mission all the way through to the 1980s, a living legacy that stretched more than sixty years beyond its founder’s death.
And then, for a long stretch of time, Alice’s story simply vanished from public memory. It wasn’t until 2019, nearly a century after she opened her garage, that author Loretta Smith brought her back into the light with the biography A Spanner in the Works. The recognition has been building ever since:
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2020: Alice was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in the Trailblazer category.
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2021: Launch Victoria established The Alice Anderson Fund, a sidecar investment fund backing female-founded startups, carrying her spirit of enterprise into a new generation of women.
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2023: Her story inspired Garage Girls, a theatre production from The Shift Theatre and Three Birds Theatre.
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2023: Two Kew residents, Tina Russo and Samantha Lovrich, joined with Loretta Smith to form the Alice Anderson Memorial Project, now a ten-strong volunteer team working to secure Alice’s place in public memory, permanently.
Bringing Alice Home
The Alice Anderson Memorial Project’s current mission is its most ambitious yet: a full-sized bronze statue of Alice, to stand in Petrie Square on Cotham Road, Kew, within sight of where the Alice Anderson Motor Service once operated. The City of Boroondara has provided the site and the Victorian Automotive Chamber of Commerce has provided a large chunk of funding, grounding the tribute in the very streets Alice once walked to work every day.
It’s a memorial designed to do more than mark the past. It’s meant to inform and inspire, to make sure that any young woman who walks past Petrie Square, whether she’s curious about cars, business, engineering, or simply making her own way in a field that doesn’t expect her, sees proof that it’s been done before, and done brilliantly.
Why Alice Anderson Still Matters
For women working in automotive today, Alice Anderson’s story reads differently from a typical history lesson. She wasn’t waiting for the industry to open its doors. She built her own, then trained the workforce to walk through it.
Her garage wasn’t a statement piece. It was a real, functioning business that served real customers for over two decades, staffed by women she’d trained herself, at a moment when the very idea was considered radical. Her inventions solved real problems. Her Alice Springs journey proved that ambition wasn’t bound by the roads that existed. Sometimes you had to build the car that could handle the ones that didn’t.
More than a hundred years on, as the automotive industry continues its own conversations about who belongs in the workshop, on the showroom floor, and in the boardroom, Alice Anderson’s story is a reminder that this conversation didn’t start today. It started in 1919, in a garage in Kew, with a 22-year-old woman who simply got on with the work.
Soon, she’ll stand there again, this time in bronze, watching over the street she helped shape, ready to inspire the next hundred years.
The Alice Anderson Memorial Project is a volunteer-led initiative working in partnership with the City of Boroondara to commission a bronze statue of Alice Anderson in Petrie Square, Kew.
