Mrs. A. K. Goode

Agnes Knight Goode, née Fleming (31 January 1872 – 20 February 1947), best known as Mrs. A. K. Goode, was an Australian social and political activist. A contemporary report called her "... a vigorous speaker, with a keen, logical mind and experience backed with sound commonsense, Mrs. Goode was until her later years frequently called on to take the public platform in support of social welfare movements."

Born at Strathalbyn, South Australia, to storekeeper James Fleming (died 10 March 1913) and Charlotte, née Knight (died 22 January 1919), she won, in 1884, a bursary to attend Port Adelaide Model School and by 1893 had qualified as a teacher and was sent to Caltowie (between Gladstone and Jamestown) as a Provisional Teacher on Probation. In 1892, as part of her qualification, she completed a First Aid course conducted by the St. John Ambulance Association. She married sheep-farmer William Edward Goode (see below) at Port Lincoln on 11 July 1896; they had a daughter and two sons. She and the children moved to Adelaide in 1915. Agnes was founding vice-president of the Women's State Recruiting Committee during World War I and conceived the establishment of the advisory committee of soldiers' dependants. She was secretary (1916–1921) and president (1921–1922) of the Liberal Women's Educational Association. She was one of the first South Australian female Justices of the Peace from 1916, and the first to take her seat on the bench with the Stipendiary Magistrate. Her period presiding over the State Children's Court from 1919 gave her a reputation for severity; she famously made a 12-year-old boy who was convicted of stealing six bicycle chains a state ward for six years.

Goode edited the women's page of the Liberal Leader from 1918 to 1924 and supported equal guardianship for mothers, women police, women in juries, equal pay, probation and the National Council for Women. In 1923 she was selected by the Liberal Federation in SA to stand for the Adelaide district seat in the House of Assembly, but was unsuccessful. In 1924 she was appointed "Official Visitor" to the Parkside Mental Asylum. In 1925 she was the first woman in South Australia to win a contest for election to a municipal council when she became a councillor of Hackney ward in the St. Peters Council, and was re-elected unopposed at the next election in 1929. A perennial opponent of politician and publican A. A. Edwards, she unsuccessfully stood against him as a Liberal in 1924 for both the state and council elections:

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