Marie Byles

Marie Beuzeville Byles (8 April 1900 – 21 November 1979) was an Australian conservationist, pacifist, the first practising female solicitor in New South Wales (NSW), mountaineer, explorer and avid bushwalker, feminist, journalist, and an original member of the Buddhist Society in New South Wales.

She was also a travel and non-fiction writer.

The eldest of three children, Byles was born in 1900 in Ashton upon Mersey in what was then Cheshire, England, to progressive-minded parents.

Although Ada Evans had graduated in law in 1902, it had been illegal for a woman to practise law in Australia until 1918.

Her younger brothers were David John Byles and Baldur Unwin Byles (1904–1975).

Her parents were Unitarian Universalists, Fabian socialists and pacifists.

Her mother Ida Margaret, née Unwin, was a suffragette and had studied at The Slade School of Fine Art, until "her artistic talents were lost to the drudgery of housekeeping", and who impressed upon her daughter the necessity of being financially independent of men.

Her father, Cyril Beuzeville Byles was a railway signal engineer.

In England he involved his children in campaigns against fences that prevented public access for recreational walks.

The family moved to Australia in 1911 because Cyril Byles was appointed Chief Signals Engineer with the New South Wales Government Railways, to design the signal system for electrifying the railway system.

They found a block of land in Beecroft and in 1913 built a house there which they named 'Chilworth'.

The family spent summers by the sea, and in 1913 they also built a small cottage at Palm Beach, on Sunrise Hill facing the lighthouse.

Byles was educated at Beecroft Primary School, and at the Presbyterian Ladies' College, Sydney at Croydon from 1914 to 1915, and in 1916 and 1917 at the new second campus of the school at Pymble (now known as Pymble Ladies' College).

She excelled, and became a prefect and dux of the school in 1916, and Head Prefect and dux the following year.

At matriculation, she won an Exhibition to the University of Sydney.

Byles never married, had no children, and considered it a waste of potential when her friend Dot Butler chose to have children rather than continue with full-time mountaineering.

In 1920 Byles and some of her university friends set out to walk through the bush of Bouddi to Maitland Bay, then known as 'Boat Harbour', where they camped.

It became a favourite spot for them.

The only bushwalking club at the time was The Mountain Trails Club led by Myles Dunphy, which did not admit women.

She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1921 and in 1924 she completed a Bachelor of Laws degree and became the first woman to be admitted as a solicitor in New South Wales.

From 1927 to 1936 she had the position of legal correspondent for the Australian Women's Mirror.

She wrote articles against women changing their name on marriage, so as to protect their financial assets.

As legal correspondent she brought attention to laws and court practices that discriminated against women.

She gave lectures for the Australian League of Nations Union and wrote pamphlets for The United Associations of Women.

As a teenager at her family's holiday retreat at Palm Beach, Byles would look through her telescope across Broken Bay to the bushland beyond on the Central Coast.

The area was marked on maps as Bouddi, an aboriginal name meaning nose.

It was a coal reserve visited only by fishermen.

After clerking for four years, in 1929 Byles set up a legal practice, the first woman to do so in New South Wales.

Byles operated two law practices – one in Eastwood and the other in the central Sydney.

She gave young women opportunities to participate in the profession.

'The business in Eastwood built up because she had the reputation of getting things done so quickly and that was almost unknown in a legal office, she was notorious.' (Employee, Ruth Milton).

She worked mainly on conveyancing and probate, and also to ensure just divorce settlements for female clients.

By 1929, there was an increasing focus on organised recreation for the city and suburban population and Marie joined the two-year-old Sydney Bush Walkers Club.

In 1930, a new name for Boat Harbour was proposed by the club; bushwalker Dorothy Lawry suggested "Maitland Bay" after the steamer that was wrecked at the northern end of the beach in 1889.

Over the next five years, with the support of the Federation of Sydney Bushwalkers Clubs, Byles successfully campaigned in the press for the area to be placed under public ownership.

In 1932 she joined The Women's Club, which was created in Sydney in 1901 to provide a place where women "interested in public, professional, scientific and artistic work" could meet.

Byles was raised as a strict vegetarian by her mother, and in 1957 commented that she had never eaten meat.

Byles was one of a small number of women to attend the University of Sydney.

She retired and handed over the legal practice to a partner in 1970.

As a student, Byles wrote and published articles on legal, political, and environmental subjects.