Sarah Maddock

Sarah Porter was born near Wolumla in October 1860, was raised on her parent’s dairy farm, and was educated locally. A childhood accident had left her blind in one eye but, nevertheless, she became a competent horsewoman.

In 1886, she married Ernest Alfred Maddock, a solicitor's clerk. By 1890 they had a son and three daughters.

Encouraged by her husband, who had begun cycling in England before migrating to Australia, Sarah Maddock began riding a bicycle in 1893. This was at a time when women riding bicycles was still contentious (with common claims, for example, that cycling would harm reproductive organs, embolden sexual permissiveness and lead to the destruction of the family), and women’s dress of the day was not entirely suited to cycling.

Sarah was to markedly change attitudes in Australia to women's cycling, and she has been credited with having created ‘a radically new understanding of femininity’.

In 1893 Sarah and Ernest rode 300-miles (483 km) from Sydney to Bega, averaging 60 miles (97 km) a day. This trip was reported to have been the first long-distance cycle ride by an Australian woman.

The next year, Sarah became the first woman to ride from Sydney to Melbourne, a distance of 924 km. The trip took nine days and was monitored by local cycling clubs along the route. Sarah was escorted into Melbourne by members of the Melbourne Bicycle Club and she was given honorary member of the Club – a club that did not normally accept women members.

Then Sarah completed a 1,575 km round trip from Sydney to Brisbane in 1895, riding an imported bicycle that she collected the day before leaving on the ride. On returning to Sydney, she was presented with a gold medal by the Sydney Bicycle Club. That same year, she became Captain of the newly formed Sydney Ladies' Bicycle Club.

Inspired by Sarah Maddock's example, many women in Victoria and New South Wales took up bicycle riding. By 1896 there were an estimated 1,000 women cyclists in New South Wales.
Sarah was an active advocate for equality in women’s sport. However, to reassure those who worried about the effect of riding on women, she took great care to conform to then-acceptable ideas about middle-class femininity. For example, she suggested the most suitable cycling costume for a woman was a skirt which would ‘fall gracefully into place after each stroke of the knee’, thereby never exposing the rider’s leg.

Sarah died in 1955.