Grace Vale

Grace Vale (1860–1933) was a pioneer Australian female doctor and suffragist who devoted much of her career to improvement of health services for women and children in Victoria and New South Wales in the late 1800s and early 1900s, especially in rural areas.

[5] She passed her matriculation examination in 1882,[6] and had been studying biology at Melbourne University in 1887[7] when she became one of seven members of a group who, despite some strong opposition, were admitted as its first female medical school students.

The election came at the annual meeting of the League, held in the rooms of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, another organisation in which Vale would play a prominent part.

[13][14] She would also be vice-president of a Working Girls' Recreation and Improvement Club in the inner suburb of Collingwood,[15][16] which her father had once represented in the Victorian Legislative Assembly, and where he had died from Bright's disease a few months earlier.

[17] However, despite her early activities in Melbourne, Vale was destined to become the only pioneer female medical graduate not to spend the majority of her career in an Australian capital city.

In April 1896, Vale left Melbourne to set up a new private practice in the Victorian gold mining city of Ballarat,[18][19] which her father had also represented in the Legislative Assembly.

[32][33][34] At its annual conference in Bendigo in 1908, she moved a successful motion calling for the regular fumigation of all Victorian state schools "and not by the burning of a cake of sulphur in the building, as is now generally done".

[35] She successfully raised the issue again at the Association's conference the following year in Ballarat, but was defeated in a move to have first aid lessons substituted for the preliminary artistic skill of "brush work" in government schools.

[46][47] In May 1910, soon after he had lost a federal election, former Liberal Prime Minister and now Opposition Leader Alfred Deakin accepted an invitation to address a meeting of the Ballarat women's branch, chaired by Vale.

[48] Thirty years earlier, before Vale's father briefly served as Victoria's Attorney-General, he and Deakin had shared a room in Melbourne as young barristers.