Ku-ring-gai

Distinguished and Famous people from Ku-ring-gai

📚 Ethel Turner

Ethel Turner wrote Seven Little Australians at Woodlands in what is now Killara after her family moved there in 1891. The bush roads, birds and relative quiet gave her both time and material for writing. She worked inside the house and completed finishing touches while sitting on a low apple-tree branch in the garden—a pleasantly informal literary office. Her novel’s unruly Woolcot children helped establish an Australian family, rather than an imported British model, at the centre of a children’s classic. Woodlands supplies a particularly strong local connection: it was a home and an actual workplace for the book.

🌟 Grace Cossington Smith

Grace Cossington Smith made her Turramurra home, Cossington, a recurring subject of her painting. Rooms and domestic objects became studies in colour and light, as memorable in their own way as her images of the developing Sydney Harbour Bridge. A pioneer of Australian modernism, she was interested in expressing form through colour rather than merely recording an accurate inventory of furniture. Her Ku-ring-gai connection is therefore visible in the work itself: an ordinary home became the setting for sustained artistic experiment. Turramurra was a place where she lived and worked, not simply a later memorial address.

📚 Jean Fleming Arnot

Librarian and women’s rights advocate Jean Fleming Arnot was born at Pymble in 1903. Family circumstances prevented university study, and she entered the Public Library of New South Wales as a junior assistant in 1921. Cataloguing became a particular strength. When readers could not find an item, she added entries and adjusted the rules—a refreshingly practical approach to a system meant to help people find things. She taught library staff, compiled newspaper holdings and chaired a wartime appeal collecting books for Australian troops. Arnot also worked through unions and women’s organisations, combining professional knowledge with a sustained interest in fair treatment and opportunity.

🎓 Jessie Cooper

Jessie Cooper became secretary at Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Pymble in 1936 and worked closely with principal Dorothy Knox for eight years. Their friendship continued throughout their lives. Cooper later moved to Adelaide, developed an interest in politics and became one of the first two women elected to South Australia’s parliament in 1959. She served twenty years in the Legislative Council and supported measures including women’s jury service and more equal superannuation entitlements. The Pymble connection is sustained professional work in a school, before the networks and public responsibilities of her parliamentary career.