She was a Bavarian baroness, a childhood playmate of Bavarian royalty, fluent in seven languages, and widowed with two children by her early twenties. Somehow she ended up, more than a decade later, presiding over Government House in Adelaide for the entirety of the First World War, married to a man a historian later called the most pernicious governor South Australia ever had. In episode 439, Susan Neuhaus, author of A Woman in a Thousand: Lady Marie Galway, South Australia, and the Great War, sits down with fellow author Lainie Anderson at the Mortlock Library launch to unpack a story that folds together German suspicion, Catholic prejudice, secret concentration camps, peacock-hunting governors and a genuinely radical stand for equal pay.

Paul Burnett, the man behind Galway Pipe’s fortified wines, joins Steve Davis to pour the rare 25-year-old tawny that carries Sir Henry Galway’s name, for the South Australian Drink of the Week.

Steve rounds out the episode with the Musical Pilgrimage, previewing his own composition And Drink to Us, a modern-day Greek folk song imagining an uprising against a tyrant laying waste to a beloved town, inspired partly by Lady Marie’s story and partly by Steve’s own frustrations with short-termism in South Australian leadership.

You can navigate episodes using chapter markers in your podcast app. Not a fan of one segment? You can click next to jump to the next chapter in the show. We’re here to serve!

The Adelaide Show Podcast: Awarded Silver for Best Interview Podcast in Australia at the 2021 Australian Podcast Awards and named as Finalist for Best News and Current Affairs Podcast in the 2018 Australian Podcast Awards.

And please consider becoming part of our podcast by joining our Inner Circle. It’s an email list. Join it and you might get an email on a Sunday or Monday seeking question ideas, guest ideas and requests for other bits of feedback about YOUR podcast, The Adelaide Show. Email us directly and we’ll add you to the list: podcast@theadelaideshow.com.au

If you enjoy the show, please leave us a 5-star review in iTunes or other podcast sites, or buy some great merch from our Red Bubble store – The Adelaide Show Shop. We’d greatly appreciate it.

And please talk about us and share our episodes on social media, it really helps build our community. Oh, and here’s our index of all episode in one concise
page.

Running Sheet: Lady Marie Galway And Her Husband’s Pipe

00:00:00 Intro

Introduction

00:05:37 SA Drink Of The Week

Steve Davis welcomed regular guest Paul Burnett, who steers the fortified wine program behind Galway Pipe, to pour a genuine rarity: the 25-year-old Rare Tawny, presented in a gift box dripping with the kind of heraldic livery Sir Henry Galway himself would have approved of. Burnett explained that a “pipe” is simply a large barrel, roughly 500 litres, which Sir Henry would personally select to serve visiting dignitaries at Government House. Fittingly, Burnett’s own team once repeated the ritual for a modern-day governor, presenting six base tawnies to Government House and letting the current occupants choose their favourite for a bespoke blend.

Tasting notes ran from cathedral organ tones and rancio to fruitcake, nutmeg and dried orange peel, with Steve reaching for an unlikely comparison: a luxury car’s suspension, so smooth and integrated you barely notice the road beneath you. At roughly $100 a bottle and 18.5 per cent alcohol, Burnett’s advice was blunt: don’t save it for a special occasion, because opening it is the special occasion, since all the ageing has already been done. Refrigerate after opening, he suggested, and gather six or seven friends, because at 7.3 standard drinks a bottle, this is one built for sharing rather than saving.

00:25:30 Susan Neuhaus and Lainie Anderson

Lady Marie Galway arrived in Adelaide in April 1914 as the new governor’s wife, greeted with what Susan Neuhaus called a celebrity welcome: Outer Harbor decked in flags, bands playing, crowds packing the town hall for a glimpse of her and Sir Henry. Lainie Anderson put it more bluntly on the night: they arrived like the Beatles of their day. Nobody in that crowd could have known that within four months the world would be at war, and that this elegant, seven-language-speaking baroness, half Bavarian, half Anglo-Irish, and a practising Catholic in an overwhelmingly Protestant colony, would spend the next four years quietly running the state’s entire volunteer war effort out of the stables at Government House.

The contrast with her husband could not have been starker. Sir Henry Galway, twenty years her senior and a career colonial administrator, married Marie in England in August 1913, and it was only a week after the wedding that the announcement came that he was to be South Australia’s seventeenth governor. Neuhaus is clear that this was, by all accounts, an arranged marriage, though she admits she isn’t certain why. He was, in Neuhaus’s telling, a man whose idea of a good afternoon was hunting peacocks, who opposed votes for women, dismissed returned soldiers as lazy, and drew so many complaints to the Colonial Office that a historian later described him as the most disliked governor the state ever had. Marie, ever discreet, left no recorded complaint about him. The closest anyone got was a Broken Hill mayor warning her that angry locals might throw Sir Henry out a window, to which she reportedly replied that the mayor had better tell him that himself.

While Henry postured, Marie built institutions that still stand today. Within days of war breaking out she received a telegram asking her to establish South Australia’s first Red Cross, and did, turning the Government House stables into a sorting depot for socks, knitting and parcels bound for the front. She founded the Lady Galway Convalescent Home at Glenelg, backed the Cheer Up Society, edited a fundraising book for Belgian relief that roped in contributors from Douglas Mawson to C.J. Dennis, and, most strikingly for 1914, stood before the Chamber of Commerce and insisted that women moving into clerical and bookkeeping roles be paid the same rate as men.

That last point matters more than it might first appear, given the world she was navigating. As the war ground on, anti-German hysteria swept South Australia: German-owned shops on Rundle Street had rocks thrown through their windows, the German language was banned outright, churches at Angaston and Edithburgh were burned down, and a concentration camp operated on Torrens Island, just twelve miles from her front door. Neuhaus admits she still doesn’t know how much Marie knew of what was happening there, but the enigma at the centre of the book is really Marie herself: a woman of German and Catholic heritage who somehow escaped the press scrutiny and public suspicion that consumed almost everyone else who shared her background, and who left South Australia so beloved that the Catholic Archbishop credited her with inspiring a generation of women to believe in their own capabilities.

Additional Resources
A Woman in a Thousand: Lady Marie Galway, South Australia, and the Great War by Susan Neuhaus is available now, with the launch hosted by the State Library of South Australia at the Mortlock Library.

Murder Mystery Writer, Lainie Anderson.

The Virtual War Memorial Australia, of which Susan Neuhaus is patron, holds further resources on South Australians’ First World War history.

01:12:52 Musical Pilgrimage

In the Musical Pilgrimage this week we listen to And Drink To Us by Steve Davis & The Virtualosos.

Steve closed the episode with And Drink to Us, a new track from Steve Davis and The Virtuosos. Reflecting on Lady Marie Galway’s willingness to put her position and Government House’s resources to work for people who genuinely needed help, Steve found himself thinking about agitation and resistance against destructive leadership throughout history, sharpened by a recent re-read of The Iliad and viewing of The Odyssey. The result is a modern-day Greek folk song, cast as a flight of fancy, following a narrator preparing to fight a tyrant who is destroying their town: a haunting, olive-tree-and-candlelight ballad of farewell, defiance and shared wine while there’s still time. Steve floated the hope that a Greek performer might one day breathe further life into the track.