Dame Annie Florence Cardell-Oliver DBE (1876–1965), politician, grew up in Melbourne before marrying David Sykes Boyd, a wool buyer, and returning with him to England. Seven years into their marriage, in London, he died of an overdose of sleeping tonic; six weeks later she married a doctor, Arthur Cardell Oliver (later, she was to hyphenate his name). They had two sons and migrated to Australia. After settling in Albany Florence, as she preferred to be known, became president of the Western Australian Nationalist Women’s Movement and the Albany branch of the Women's Service Guilds. During the First World War, in which Arthur served for a year, Florence travelled to speak at recruitment drives. After Arthur died in 1929, Florence became vice-president of the WA branch of the Nationalist Party; she published Empire Unity or Red Asiatic Domination? in 1934. Between 1933 and 1936 she travelled overseas, including to the Soviet Union and the Baltic States, and attended the congress in Istanbul of the International Suffrage Alliance of Women. In 1934 she ran for the seat of Fremantle but was defeated by John Curtin. Two years later she became the Nationalist member for Subiaco in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly. Not one to toe the party line, she opposed the death penalty but in 1939 organised a campaign to oppose the establishment of free birth-control clinics. Appointed an honorary minister with no portfolio in the McLarty-Watts Liberal-Country Party government in 1947, early the next year she became honorary minister for supply and shipping. As minister for health from 1949 to 1953, she was the first woman in Australia and, at 70, the oldest person in Western Australia to attain full cabinet rank. As health minister, she introduced a free-milk scheme for schoolchildren in Western Australia and was a pioneer in the fight against tuberculosis by legislating for compulsory chest x-rays. A member of the Karakatta Club (the first women's club in Australia), she was president of the Women Painters' Society of Western Australia and of the Western Australian Women's Hockey Association. She retired in 1956, aged 80.
