Molly Brennan, Anna’s niece, shares her memories of Anna
Anna Theresa Brennan was the thirteenth child of Irish migrants, Michael and Mary Brennan, of Mary Vale, Sedgwick, where Michael had bought a modest amount of land in 1856, land that is still owned by and occupied by descendents.
Eleven of the thirteen children lived to maturity, making useful contributions to their young country in farming, law, journalism, politics and local government. None of the four girls married, as did none of their nieces in the next generation, giving lie to the feminists of the latter half of the 20th century who falsely claim that women had no choice but to marry or be dependant in some way on some man. As Anna's life demonstrates, they did have a choice though, in choosing, they were, as human beings always are, influenced by the mores of their society and of their family.
Anna Brennan was born in 1879. Her primary schooling was in a bark roofed weatherboard primitive building that the local parents had built on land given by the Government in 1865. But, as now seems to have been forgotten, the standard of a school building has little to do with the quality of the education. It is the teacher who makes the difference and all the Brennan children had the good fortune to be taught by an Oxford scholar who reinforced the values of their home—the enjoyment of exploring ideas, the value of language and the exchanges of logical argument.
Anna then chose to continue her formal education. Those girls who did not choose to continue with their formal education did not do so because they were debarred from doing so, but because they choose not to overcome whatever difficulties there were. Anna overcame the problem of a 10 mile drive in a horse drawn vehicle from Sedgwick to St Andrews, a non-denominational co-educational secondary college. Exercising a choice that was available to all young women, she then enrolled at Melbourne University in the Faculty of Medicine but soon changed to law. In this, she was encouraged by her brothers, several of whom were by this time established in Melbourne.
In 1909, Anna graduated with a Bachelor of Law (L.L.B.) having completed her articles with her brother, Frank, and having had another brother, Thomas, move her admission to the Bar. Late in life, she claimed never to have encountered discrimination, the same claim being made by one of her nieces in the next generation though she worked in local government in an entirely male field.
Anna spent her professional life in partnership with her brother, Frank, at Frank Brennan and Co, Queen St, Melbourne. Frank was more interested in politics than law so Anna did most of the legal work supported by her sister, May, the Legal Clerk of the firm. Anna was chiefly interested in law that affected women. Much of her work was connected with matrimonial issues such as divorce.
Throughout her life, Anna was a club woman—a member of the Princess Ida Club at University, a founding member of the Lyceum Club, the Legal Adviser to the National Council of Women and President of the Legal Women's Association. A Bendigo historian described her as "...singularly articulate and forceful as a public speaker, a witty conversationalist and one whose intellectual curiosity roved over many fields and never dimmed." Anna was, aged 83, at Melbourne University to hear a lecture on nuclear fission when she fell down the stairs to her death on 11th October 1962.
Anna was a deeply religious woman, a committed Catholic, loyal to the Church in which she played an active part through its women's organisations. She was also a devoted family member who never established a home of her own. When she left Mary Vale, Sedgwick, to go to University, she joined her single brothers and sisters who had established a family home in Melbourne—in Royal Parade and then in Banool Avenue, Kew—and there she remained for the rest of her life, so attached to her sister May that in their eighties, they were still sharing a bedroom.
