Dame Beryl Beaurepaire was the first woman to chair the Memorial’s Council, the only woman to hold that position. She spoke simply, but movingly. On Remembrance Day 1993, she pledged that the council, and its successors, would care for, and respect, the unknown soldier for as long as the memorial should exist. Beryl always took the long view.

Beryl Beaurepaire, pioneer at the Australian War Memorial, was also a pioneer in so many other aspects of Australian life. Relaxing over a cup of tea with the governor of South Australia, at Government House in Adelaide, Dame Roma Mitchell, the two dames surveyed their "firsts", Mitchell in the law, Beaurepaire in politics, broadly conceived.

Beaurepaire was a Liberal all her life but constantly asserted that "we are a liberal party not a party of conservatives". However, she worked with leaders from both major parties and made friends of all of them because her causes took precedence over any personal, party or political gain. She could fight hard when she thought the occasion warranted it.

When John Elliott, a leading businessman and a heavyweight in the Liberal Party, decided he would enter Parliament, with the intention of leading his party as prime minister he targeted the Victorian federal seat of Higgins. Beaurepaire would have none of it. Higgins was already held for the Liberals by a worthy representative, Roger Shipton. She worked tirelessly for Shipton, who against the odds, retained the preselection and then the seat.

When Malcolm Fraser was leader of the opposition, Beaurepaire persuaded him to take an interest in the emerging women’s movement. In September 1974 she was elected chairman (a term with which she was not entirely comfortable) of the Federal Women’s Section of the Liberal Party and encouraged Liberal women to attend the "Women and Politics" conference in Canberra organised by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s women’s adviser, Elizabeth Reid.

Portrayed in the hostile media as a radical "women’s libber", Reid became a friend of Beaurepaire’s and was pleased that 16 Liberal women attended the Canberra conference, the government’s major response to the International Women’s Year.

Beaurepaire confirmed that she got on well with Whitlam’s principal female adviser, "indeed I made it my business to", she said. "I thought I could learn a lot from her." Once in government Fraser agreed with Beaurepaire’s proposal to create a National Women’s Advisory Council and she took the chair.

It was Beaurepaire's view that the council must be broadly based and inclusive if it was to appeal to the many Australian women who were, on the whole, suspicious of the government’s feminist credentials. Appointed to the first NWAC were Wendy McCarthy, a leading member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby, Jan Marsh of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and Quentin Bryce, a prominent feminist working at the University of Queensland.

Beaurepaire became a mentor to these women, and the other members of the council, drawn from all over Australia, from community groups and advocacy organisations, joined the legion of her lifelong friends.

Never a person not to say what she thought, Beaurepaire told a journalist, once the composition of the council had been announced, that she had been worried that it would be "all nice Liberal ladies – that would have been hopeless".

"We have a huge responsibility," she continued, "to get to the heart of many problems that face women in Australia." She pledged "to give [the new appointment] everything I have".

Bryce, the sole council representative from Queensland, said "my telephone [has become] a counselling service for women throughout the state". But she said she was enjoying the work "despite the unexpected workload". Imagine the workload that Beaurepaire shouldered.

Within a short period of time NWAC had convinced the government to fund 23 women’s refuges across Australia, had sponsored research into women in the home, had arranged for 22 Australian delegates to attend a United Nations Women’s Conference in Copenhagen and had extracted a promise from the Minister, Bob Ellicott, to lead the deputation. Beaurepaire was deputy leader. NWAC produced a number of important reports, including Migrant Women Speak and on domestic violence.

She was disappointed that Prime Minister Bob Hawke disbanded NWAC on achieving government but she worked closely with Hawke and his successor, Paul Keating, throughout the life of the Labor governments. They both became good friends of hers and she was particularly close to Hawke’s first wife, Hazel.

Born on September 24, 1923, Beryl Bedggood was the elder daughter of Edward ("Ted") Bedggood and his wife Vera (Craigie). A respected, wealthy and extended family of Melbourne shoe manufacturers, the Bedggood’s were prominent and successful.

Beryl’s home in Kew shared a back fence with Robert Menzies and his wife Pattie and she benefited from Menzies’ continuing interest in her life. Happily schooled at Fintona (a leading independent girls’ school), Beryl assumed she would enter the family business after school, but her uncle, the managing director, who had taken all male members of the family into the business, put his foot down and would not find a place for his talented niece.

Instead she enrolled at the University of Melbourne in 1941, soon leaving her studies to enter the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force to become a meteorologist. "We felt both proud and humble to be wearing the uniform," she said, and she learnt a great deal of the lives of women much less well-off than she. This was to be another source of her passionate interest in the causes of women.

Beryl had met Ian Beaurepaire as a child but it was in the Air Force that their attachment grew. They married in March 1946, now both demobbed. Twin sons, Donald and John, were born in January 1947. Ian died in June 1996, just after their 50th wedding anniversary.

Beaurepaire was an intrepid person, standing strongly for her beliefs and fighting for them. She was intensely interested in all whom she met. She had a prodigious memory and delighted in quizzing her friends about the details of their lives and families. Sadly her memory failed in the last years of her life.

She raised impressive amounts of money for the Australian War Memorial in the years when it was poor, and for a great variety of other interests too, including the Young Women’s Christian Association. She and Ian were remarkable philanthropists, the one aspect of their lives that I was, unfortunately, forbidden to write about in her biography.

A private person, though so much in the public eye, Beryl instructed that she was to be cremated privately and there was to be no memorial service. She was survived by her sons, Donald and John, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. She will be honoured in the minds of the thousands who knew her and were touched by her. Beryl Beaurepaire was a force for so much good in Australian public life that her memory will live.

Michael McKernan, historian, wrote Beryl Beaurepaire, Brisbane, 1999.

Dame Beryl Beaurepaire; September 24, 1923 – October 24, 2018