“Stand clear – here comes Mrs Gilmour!”

Annie Gilmour, photographed at Cape Paterson, where Gilmour Track was recently named in her honour.

By Catherine Watson

ANNIE Gilmour, as usual, hadn’t noticed the car she’d just run off the road and onto the nature strip, so naturally she had no idea that it was a police car. So she was confused when she got out of her car at the Cape Paterson car park and saw a policeman waving his arms and shouting at her.
 
And that’s when the campers got involved. They didn’t know the policeman but they did know Mrs Gilmour. She was the one who taught their kids to swim in the shallows of the bay, and fired up the boilers at the surf club so they could have a hot shower after their swim. Five pence a shower, with the funds going into the club’s coffers. Annie Gilmour was a legend at Cape.

​As the policeman pulled out his notebook and pen, the campers started booing and hissing. More campers arrived to see what it was about and joined in. “Oh, forget it!” the copper said, and stormed away.

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“Mum was a terrible driver,” recalls her son, Ron Gilmour. “She only learned to drive after Dad died and she never quite got the hang of it. She never stopped and she didn’t look left or right. She always looked straight ahead when she was backing. In the end, people got to know the little white Anglia and they avoided it.”
 
All the same, he says, the driving did her the world of good because it gave her her independence and meant she could continue to live at her beloved Cape.

Annie Gilmour loved dancing and swimming, but the Wonthaggi Life Saving Club at Cape Paterson was her passion. In 1988 she was awarded the Service Cross for her services to the club and lifesaving.

​Cape runs deep in the soul of many local families, but no more so than the Gilmour families. “I was conceived in the sandhills of Cape,” Ron Gilmour says proudly.
 
It was Annie’s father, James Legg, a Wonthaggi miner, who marked out the track through the heath from Wonthaggi to Cape in the 1920s.
 
The Legg family bought a hut at Cape, down in the gully where the surf club is now. Most of the huts had been built out of whatever could be pinched from the mines but this one was built out of timber collected along the beaches between the Powlett and Cape.
 
Annie spent much of her childhood there with her family: weekends and long summer holidays when they took the house cow and tethered it in the scrub to provide a steady supply of fresh milk.

​Later, Annie scandalised the family by marrying Joe Gilmour, a Catholic, and her father refused to let them build their hut on the foreshore with the rest of the family. Instead they had to build on the bluff.
 
The standoff passed and Ron can remember wonderful family holidays at Cape with the large extended Legg family. “There were no roads, no lights, no TV and no water. And you enjoyed it all.”

Mrs Gilmour is one of two local women recently commemorated by street names as part of a new council policy to recognise diversity in the community. The other is Ruby May Davidson, who supplied produce from her farm, Mayfield, on the outskirts of Wonthaggi, from 1935. Davidson Place has now been named in her honour.
The #puthernameonit campaign, spearheaded by Women in Gippsland, is aimed at honouring and recognising the women who have helped shape Gippsland.
Bass Coast Shire CEO Ali Wastie said the council was working with local historical societies and community groups to identify local, notable women. A gender audit will assess 1500 road names and other named features such as parks and playgrounds.
“The majority of places, buildings, ovals and pavilions are named after men, and while this project is not about undoing history, it is about taking the opportunity when we can, to acknowledge the women who helped make Bass Coast what it is today,” Ms Wastie said.
“It is a lengthy and difficult process to re-name existing streets or places, so we are taking the approach of naming new streets and new places after women as part of this campaign.
“The research we are doing is great, but the most important thing is to start seeing the names of women in the community for all to recognise. “

In the 1950s, when the huts were cleared, the owners were offered first option on blocks at the Cape.  

​Ron remembers his mother battling his father because she wanted to buy one. In the end she got her block, and they built a house there. “Dad went crook at her, but later he said it was the best thing she ever did.”
 
The family moved from Wonthaggi to Cape, amongst the first permanent residents. Later Ron and two of his sons also built houses at Cape.
 
Annie Gilmour, meanwhile, continued to make the roads dangerous and to swim at 11am every day, seven or eight months a year, until the depths of winter.
 
She was swimming until a fortnight before she died at the age of 85.
 
This article was first published in The Current community newspaper in 2004.

A day at the Cape: the extended Legg family. Annie Gilmour is in the centre
in her signature black swimsuit.