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Image Not Available for Muriel Binney
Muriel Binney
Image Not Available for Muriel Binney

Muriel Binney

Australian, 1873 - 1949
BiographyMuriel Mary Sutherland Binney was an amateur painter, etcher, illustrator and inventor. She married Dr Edward Binney in 1898 in Melbourne, by 1907 they were living in Elizabeth Bay, Sydney. Her surgeon husband Edward had a medical practice in Macquarie Street. They had two sons John Warren Binney (1904-1968) and Richard Warren Binney (1910-1989).

In 1913 the Binneys moved out of their Greenknowe Avenue cottage in Elizabeth Bay. Around this time they moved to England to get treatment for Edward's multiple sclerosis.

Back in Sydney they lived at Vaucluse. Edward, a specialist in children’s diseases, died of multiple sclerosis in 1927 at the age of 59.

After this, as her granddaughter’s recollect, Muriel frequently travelled overseas, presumably in connection with her inventions. Edward reportedly had disapproved of his wife’s passion for inventing things, which did not find full expression until 1929 when she presented her inventions to the British Society of Inventors and showed some at the International Exhibition of Inventions.

Muriel Binney lived at Watsons Bay in the 1930s but continued to travel while her sons looked after her affairs. In 1934 she went to Russia. She became more eccentric in the 1940s, clothing herself in reportably elaborate outfits bought in Paris many years earlier. She was later committed to the Parramatta Mental Asylum where she died of heart disease and chronic bronchitis on 11 May 1949, aged 74. Her body was cremated at Rookwood Crematorium.

John Warren Binney (1904-1968) married "Cyde" Henriette Antill De Warren in 1929 and had two daughters Anne and Elizabeth. John became solicitor in 1930 but was declared bankrupt in 1948 (he claimed due to dealing with illness in the family).

Richard Warren Binney (1910-1989) married Doris Frost, Doris died in January 1989 predeceasing her husband by nine months.
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