Marie Bjelke Petersen - Life

Life

Marie Bjelke Petersen was the only daughter and second child of Georg Peter Bjelke-Petersen, a gardener and then master builder, and his wife Caroline Vilhelmine, née Hansen. (Originally plain "Petersen" Georg hyphenated his name for unknown reasons sometime in the 1860s.) Marie went to school in Denmark, Germany and England but lived most of her life in Tasmania after emigrating with her parents and four brothers in 1891. She was naturalised in 1915.

Marie Bjelke Petersen was trained as a painter in Denmark. She continued to paint for many years in Australia, mostly oil landscapes. She often wintered in Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne where she would take a flat and hold religious meetings. She attracted a large following of young women as was common with female romantic novelists of her time.

While she enjoyed mythology and would write notes to fairies in her garden, she was a committed Christian who "never overlooked the poor and needy". A conservative herself, she numbered among her friends Marie Pitt the poet and socialist activist who lived openly and indeed notoriously with her married lover. Gardening and reading were interests that Marie Bjelke Petersen continued into her nineties.

By the late 20th century, Bjelke Petersen had become a gay and lesbian icon. She lived in an intimate relationship with Sylvia Mills, whom she met in 1898, for thirty years. It has been argued that her book The Captive Singer is about Mills. She was not necessarily a lesbian however, or at least not seen as such in her own time; close sentimental women's friendships were still not assumed to be sexual in 1920s Australia.