Showing results for "Remarkable Women" in Professionals & Academics

As a teenage orphan in England in 1791, Mary Reibey was sentenced to death for stealing a horse. When police cornered her, she was dressed as a boy, and she maintained that disguise until she was unmasked at her trial. Due to her 'tender age', Reibey was spared the hangman's noose and sentenced to seven years' transportation to the colony of New South Wales. With the odds stacked against her, Reibey went on to become Australia's first female business tycoon and the richest woman in the colony, founding the Bank of New South Wales, now one of the nation's biggest financial institutions.

Few that know Mary Grothe today would guess that her childhood was traumatic. That she was raised by an alcoholic mother and abusive father in a filthy house, where tar dripped down the walls from the profusion of cigarette smoke. That at fourteen she watched her childhood auctioned off beneath a big top before fleeing town as a result of her parents’ criminal mistakes. Or that dance, her original love and ticket to freedom, would be taken from her in an instant