Diamantina di Roma

Women often find themselves in supporting roles, mothers supporting their kids, wives their husbands, the examples are everywhere around us. Yet that has never stopped them, diminished their energy, commitment and fervour or their empathy. It is just that we don't hear so much about them. They are often in the shadows or not courting attention or simply too busy to be cultivating their public image.  Lady Diamantina di Roma - wife of the first Governor of Brisbane was one such doer. I spent about two hours in her company today though she was born in 1832  and I am here today. 

I was transported through the good offices of Natalie Cowling in her marvellous outfit and researched stories to relive her life, her arrival by steamship to Brisbane, feeling seasick, and three days late, in blistering 35 C heat on a December day in 1859. I walked up the steps she did all those years ago to her new home of Brisbane.  

Lady Diamantina was of Venetian heritage. She was born and raised on the island of Zakynthos in the Ionian Islands where she met her husband George Bowen. She was from aristocratic stock, a contessa and she married Bowen who was a colonial administrator and their first posting was Brisbane in Queensland which had just separated from NSW.

They built Old Government House and moved there with her family. It's a splendid building with some greek columns to remind her of her heritage and then, extensive open spaces, which she busied herself organising into market gardens, flower gardens and small orchards, introducing, with the help of Walter Hill, (the architect and founder of the Botanic Gardens,) exotic fruits such as mango and papaya and even macadamia trees.They planted the wonderful bunya pine which is still there. 

More importantly however she bonded with the people of Queensland and looked after the poorest and less fortunate, so in her eight years here, while her husband was attending to matters of state and poetry (he had the reputation of being rather short tempered and pompous) she was finding ways to raise money to build a lying-in maternity hospital for young women, giving young women skills as they arrived in the colony and funding and building a home for orphans, even sewing their clothes. In short she was remarkable, warm and generous, an organiser and giver, a supporter of women and children and a persuasive advocate for the training and independence of young women. 

I was the only Greek apart from Diamantina there today and I know she would have wanted me to write about her. She was a very special woman and her bonds with Queensland are still very much in evidence. What she began with such foresight and compassion others carry on today. 

The event was organised by https://blhn.org