Sylvia Jessie Catherine Birdseye (née Merrill) (1902–1962) was the first woman to hold a commercial bus driving licence in South Australia.
She moved to Adelaide in 1921 to work in the office of family friend Alfred Birdseye, who had established South Australia's first motor transport, the Adelaide–Mannum bus.
Three years later she obtained a licence to drive a passenger vehicle, the first woman in South Australia to do so.
On 23 October 1923, she married Alfred's son Sydney Alick Birdseye, her first dancing partner in Port Augusta.
[3] Roads on the Eyre Peninsula were little more than horse tracks before World War II, not particularly suited to a motor bus of the time.