Walking Tour | History Behind the Hedges: The Women of Boroondara

Everyone thinks they know the suburbs Kew and Hawthorn. We guarantee you don't.

A woman who ran a scrap yard, bought a shipwreck, and became Kew’s first female mayor.

A garage where every mechanic, driver and apprentice was a woman, run by a 22-year-old with nothing to prove and everything to lose.

A suffragist who wrote science fiction and got scandalous for refusing to wear a corset.

A poet who never showed anyone her four hundred poems, and the woman down the road who found them, and made sure we could read them anyway.

History Behind the Hedges takes you through gardens, back streets, tramlines and civic buildings to meet the women who built this suburb, and mostly got left out of it.

Expect scandal, grief, glamour, romance, poetry, at least one story involving a shipwreck, and so much more.

Distance: 3.5km, in 2.5 hours

This walking tour of Kew and Hawthorn is presented by She Shapes History in partnership with Boroondara Arts. This is Boroondara like you’ve never seen it before.

Boroondara, but unexpected

A garage filled with women mechanics. A poet writing dangerously from the suburbs. Artists claiming space in home studios. Civic rebels making themselves impossible to ignore.

Behind the hedges is a history of women in motion, women making mischief and women refusing to stay where history put them.