MacKINNON, ELEANOR VOKES IRBY (1871-1936), Red Cross leader, was born on 8 February 1871 at Tenterfield, New South Wales, only daughter and sixth of thirteen children of Glentworth Walsh Fraser Addison, police magistrate, and his Sydney-born wife Ellen, née Campbell. Her father, from Manchester, England, was directly descended from Joseph Addison, the essayist. The family moved to Sydney in 1882 and Eleanor attended the Clergy Daughters' School, Waverley, and Sydney Girls' High School with Louise Mack and Ethel Turner. On 16 September 1896 at Paddington she married with Presbyterian forms Roger Robert Steel MacKinnon (d.1935), physician. They lived at Warialda where their two sons were born.

Settling at North Sydney in 1903, Eleanor studied painting under Lister Lister and wrote verse, but soon became involved in charitable and political activities. A life-member of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, she was first president of King ...

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Australian Dictionary of Biography