MOLONY (HENKE), Gweneth

BORN JUNE 17TH 1932 in Melbourne, Molony grew up in Brighton, the youngest daughter of Ted and Maffie, and sister of Patricia. She is the 1949, 1950 and 1951 Australian Ladies Champion, and the 1950 Australian Figure Skating Pairs Champion representing Victoria with Adrian Swan. She competed at the 1952 World Championships (19th /22), and she and Nancy Hallam became the first Australian Winter Olympic ladies individual competitors, and Olympic Games representatives, at Oslo (1952, 21st /25).

Molony's sister Patricia is the 1947 Australian Ladies Champion, and Australia's first female competitor at the World Championships in Stockholm Sweden that year (12th/19). At Davos Switzerland she became the only Australian skater to compete at the European championships (16th /20).

Gweneth married Melbourne-born ice hockey player, Geoffrey J Henke AO, one of the those who missed out when the AOC ignored Australia's first ice hockey team bid for the 1956 Games. They met at Melbourne Glaciarum where Gweneth practised at lunchtime. "By the time Geoff and I married," she says "I'd had enough of skating. I'd been on the ice since I was 18 months old, and had won the Australian Figure Skating Championships three times. I was also the first Australian woman to compete in the Winter Olympics. Skating was all I knew".

Her parents were the first husband and wife to win intertstate ice hockey titles in the Goodall and Gower Cups during the 1920s. The Henkes took over the Molony family skating and ski business, and Geoff became a vice-president of the Australian Olympic Committee, and later chairman of the Olympic Winter Institute of Australia, established in 1999, the year the National Ice Sports Centre was conceived at the tail-end of the Kennett government. It opened in Melbourne's Docklands about 10 years later.

Their daughter, Joanne Patricia Henke (McDougall), who was born November 5th 1958 at Falls Creek in Victoria, represented Australia in three alpine skiing events in the 1976 Games at Innsbruck, Austria. Gweneth, Pat and Ted Molony were foundation inductees of the Ice Skating Australia Hall of Fame in 2004.