The Google Doodle for the Australian region on Sunday, June 27th depicts swimmer Mina Wylie on what would have been her 130th birthday.
Wylie was a part of the first Australian (then Australasian) women’s swimming team to compete at the Olympic Games when she joined her countrymate Fanny Durack in Stockholm. The pair, after racing each other at the Australian and New South Wales Swimming Championships in the 1910/1911 season, persuaded Australian officials to allow them to travel to compete at the Olympic Games.
In the women’s 100 free, the marquee event of those Games, Durack won gold and Wylie silver. That made Wylie the first Australian woman to win a silver medal in swimming at the Olympic Games.
Durack was featured herself in a Google Doodle in 2018.
During her swimming career, Wylie won 115 state and national championships and set World Records in freestyle, breaststroke, and backstroke events. In 1911, 1922, and 1924, she won every Australian and New South Wales championship event on offer in freestyle, backstroke, and breaststroke She was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1975 and died in 1984 when she was 93 years old.
Wylie was born in Australia at a time when only about 50,000 people were being born in the country every year. In 1907, her father Henry Wylie built Wylie’s Baths, which are the oldest surviving communal sea baths in Australia. The baths played host to the first Australian Swimming Championships and were one of the first swimming baths for mixed gender swimming in Australia.
The Doodle was contributed by guest artist Alice Lindstrom, an Australian woman who works primarily in paper collage, cutting and pasting paper together to create art.
Wylie is one of several swimmers who have been featured in Google Doodles, including recently Indian long distance swimmer Arati Saha.
Love this! Great idea.