Australian Dictionary of Biography

Shelagh Garland, January 1996

Courtesy of Liz Field

Dorothy Shelagh Leighton Garland (1913–1999), Quaker and activist, was born on 6 September 1913 at Newport, Wales, youngest of four children of Welsh-born parents Arthur Leighton Stevens, mechanical engineer and Freemason, and his wife Dorothy, née Jones. When Shelagh was young, the family moved to London, where they settled at Battersea in the city’s south-west. In 1920 she joined her sisters, Beatrice and Grace, at Kensington High School as a day student. Although they would finish their schooling in London, she went abroad in 1926 to study at a convent school in Belgium. On her return, she became involved in amateur theatre, performing in a popular production of Berkeley Square (1932) at Felixstowe in East Suffolk, and later at Hayling Island, Hampshire, where her parents lived until their deaths in the early 1950s.

Stevens travelled to India in 1938 as a nanny and to visit her sisters, who were both living there with their husbands. During this trip, she met the Englishman Edward Andrew Garland, who had moved to Bombay (Mumbai) to work for the Imperial Forest Service. They married in 1939 at Mussoorie, a hill station in the Himalayan foothills. The following year, she gave birth to a son, Roger, at Srinagar; in 1943 they welcomed a daughter, Bridget, at Karachi.

A few years later, during the final period of British Indian rule, the family returned to England and lived at the Manor Farm House at Brancaster, Norfolk, where Edward worked as an estate agent for a parliamentarian. In the early 1950s Shelagh became involved in the Brancaster Conservative Association (president 1954–55) and served as a member (1954–55) of the local parish council, where her husband was clerk. Tragedy struck in April 1955 when Edward died. Shelagh moved to the nearby town of Holme-next-the-Sea where she lived frugally on the money left in her husband’s estate while raising their children. In April 1956 she was elected to represent the Brancaster Ward for the Docking Rural Council; she decided not to stand at the 1959 elections.

Following her son’s migration to Australia in 1960, Garland and her daughter relocated to Sydney in March 1963. Though Bridget eventually returned to England, Garland would spend the rest of her life in the city’s eastern suburbs, first at Elizabeth Bay and later at Woollahra. She continued to be socially and politically active. In May 1977 she joined the Devonshire Street meeting of the Religious Society of Friends at Surry Hills, for whom she subsequently took on a range of roles, including clerk and registering officer for marriages, as well as clerk of the Sydney regional meeting (1992). She had a special interest in interfaith cooperation and represented the Quakers on the New South Wales Ecumenical Council, the Australian Council of Christians and Jews, and the World Conference on Religion and Peace.

As Garland aged, she became increasingly active in her adopted community, advocating for causes about which she felt passionately, and devoting much of her time to helping others. She was a long-time volunteer with Meals on Wheels and often made deliveries to the more disreputable parts of the city such as King’s Cross. Similarly, as part of a Community Restorative Centre justice support group, she visited prisons to look after the children of inmates during family visits. Amid the human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV-AIDS) crisis, when she was in her seventies, she joined Ankali, a Sydney-based program established in 1985 to support people living with the disease as well as their friends and family. She approached the role with grace and kindness; one of the those she helped remembered her as an ‘angel’ (Garland 1999, 16).

A member of the Australian Democrats, Garland also publicly expressed her views on political issues. In 1984 she wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald criticising the ANZUS treaty, and in 1991, as part of the Network for Peace, she endorsed a statement opposing the Gulf War and supporting United Nations sanctions. Aboriginal rights was another issue that concerned her. To that end, she became involved with Action for World Development and the Eastern Suburbs Organisation for Reconciling Australia, which she joined in 1996. In August 1988 she attended the National Churches Conference on Immigration; in a co-authored report with the Quaker and peace activist Nancy Shelley, she reminded her fellow Friends that ‘people are more than cogs in the economic machine’ (Shelley and Garland 1988, 14).

Slight, smartly dressed, and often wrapped in her signature burgundy Burberry overcoat, Garland usually wore her white hair in a neat bun and had a contagious grin. She possessed ‘a great gift for friendship’ (Garland 1999, 16) and valued social and family life. Her trustworthiness and compassion were renowned, as were her organisational skills, adventurous spirit, and cheeky sense of humour. In 1999, after suffering a stroke earlier in the year, she died on 19 July at Waverley and was buried in the Quaker section of Rookwood cemetery. At a memorial service at the Devonshire Street meeting house, she was remembered as ‘an energetic and insightful Sydney Friend’ (The Australian Friend 1999, 2).