Mount Evelyn

Distinguished and Famous people from Mount Evelyn

📚 Anthony McAleer

Anthony James McAleer received the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2018 for service to the community and to military history. His Mount Evelyn work included service with the local RSL sub-branch and membership of the Mount Evelyn History Group. By the time of the honour, he had written more than seventeen books on local and military history, including accounts of a young First World War soldier, a stretcher-bearer and a Light Horse veteran. His research gives individual lives a place within much larger events. It also shows why distinguished local people need not be household names: sometimes they are the people preserving everyone else’s stories.

🌳 James Lindsay Low

James Lindsay Low combined a Mount Evelyn greengrocer’s business with a lasting contribution to local recreation. He served on the inaugural committee of the recreation reserve and became the football club’s founding president. In 1929, Low and his family planted chestnut trees beside the oval, one for each of his seven children. That gives a familiar piece of the town’s landscape a surprisingly personal history. When one surviving tree was affected by termites many decades later, the history group recorded the family story behind it. His legacy is rooted in the community in a fairly literal sense.