The Story of Georgette Everingham

We have many notable residents at RSL LifeCare, and trailblazer Georgette Everingham is one of them! Always community-minded, Georgette started a nursing career in April 1959 at the Lismore Base Hospital and stayed there until 1963. Following her marriage, the following year, she continued as a nurse for a further 30 years. Her extensive knowledge was captured alongside others in a book that she collated, and which is still for sale: Nurses of the LBH 1879 – 1987.

Georgette lived at The Channon in Northern NSW for 52 years, 48 years of them on a farm – dairy farming, grazing cattle, growing bananas, avocados and mangoes, to name a few, and it was this rural connection that saw Georgette move into a completely different space: agribusiness.

It was here that she truly excelled and broke down long-standing gender barriers.

In 1992 she became a Director on the Board of the Banana Growers Federation and the NSW Banana Industry Committee, and one of the first, if not the first, woman in Australia to break into what had previously been the domain of men.

She also spent two years as an active member of the Australian Bananas Growers Committee (ABGC). In 1994, she was in the Inaugural ABC Far North Coast Rural Woman of the Year and attended the first Women in Agriculture Conference held in Melbourne and four years later journeyed to Washington DC for the second Women in Agriculture Conference.

Georgette’s hard work over many years and her role as a mentor to other women in the competitive and male-dominated agribusiness sector really paved the way and she remains a greatly admired figure in the sector and in the community.