Wallach, Ettie

BORN HENRIETTA WALLACH IN 1886, one of eleven children of Henry Wallach and Mary Ann Carelton of 31 Ocean Street, Bondi. Her father emigrated to Australia from Hamburg in Germany with his father, Adolph. Ettie and her sisters Florence and Stella attended Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School (SCEGGS Darlinghurst), where Ettie won prizes for general proficiency and passed the Junior Public Examinations of the University of Sydney with two A's, three B's and a C. She graduated from Sydney University with an Arts Degree, then from Sydney Teacher's College in the University grounds. She represented her state in ice hockey from 1922 when the Gower Cup began, and pursued her passion for the game over nearly three decades on field and ice.

Women played field hockey in Sydney at the Cambridge School in Hunter's Hill as early as 1903, and the organised women's game began with the Wandah club in 1905. Organised field hockey here was led by young Australian women who attended the hockey-playing schools of English universities, such as the Clubbe sisters, Florence Hooper, headmistress of the Cambridge School, and Jessie Lillington's mother. [1]

A first-year Arts student at the University of Sydney in 1905, Wallach became Honorary Treasurer of the Dramatic Society in 1908, the year Jesse Lillington (Street) enrolled in the same degree course and coached the university's first ladies' hockey team. Wallach may have been a player on the first Sydney University Women's teams from 1908, because she played Right Inside for the Cooeyanna Hockey Club from the time it began in 1907.

Cooeyanna was one of six foundation clubs of the NSW Ladies' Hockey Association, and in 1910 they defeated Sydney University, 8-2; Wallach and Street both scoring for their respective clubs. Wallach was captain and coach of Woniora HC against the Kookaburras in 1910, then returned to Cooeyanna to play Woniora. [3] Cooeyanna won again in 1911, and so on, becoming the strongest women's team of the State hockey association by 1913, and probably earlier.

Women's ice hockey began in Sydney soon after the Glaciarium opened in 1907, but there is no record that it was organised until the 1920s. A foundation player of the first New South Wales Ladies' Ice Hockey Club, Wallach represented her State in Gower Cup ice hockey in 1922, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1928, and quite possibly the years in-between. Like the earlier men's interstate tournament, the Goodall Cup, the first women's interstate tournament was a best-of-three series contested by New South Wales and Victoria. There was no local women's club competition in the early years, the local Ladies' Ice Hockey Club instead splitting into teams, Whites versus Greens. Wallach was best player for Whites in 1924, with Mirey Reid in net. She was captain of New South Wales that year.

In 1914, Wallach represented New South Wales on the right wing against the touring English XI field hockey team at Rushcutters Bay. She scored against England in the interstate tournament in which the tourists were not contestants for final honours. The English XI also played the Hockeyroos that year in their first ever international, and at least one newspaper expected Wallach to be selected. She was a committee-member of the Women's Hockey Association in 1915, her club's last season, when the effects of the war and the consequent general depression really began to bite.

Wallach belonged to a celebrated sporting family, an Eastern Suburbs surfing dynasty, [16] with eight brothers evenly spread between Bondi and Maroubra surf clubs. Her younger sister, Stella, also played field hockey for Cooeyanna HC and represented New South Wales between 1910 and 1914. Her niece, Muriel Florence Wallach, the daughter of her brother Bernard, also played Gower Cup ice hockey for New South Wales. Two brothers, Clarrie and Neville, were rugby union players and decorated Anzacs.

Ettie Wallach was a pioneer of women's hockey in Australia, both on the field and on the ice. In 1931, she still played field hockey for the Bohemians. [5] She represented New South Wales in the Gower Cup from its inception in 1922, and she was still playing ice hockey in 1934 after the first state women's ice hockey clubs had formed. [4]

Ettie Wallach died unmarried in Sydney in 1963 at the age of 77, the same year as her sister, Stella, and brother, Arthur.