Grace and Strength - athlete Joan Morrison of Coburg Harriers Club

              Joan Morrison of Coburg at the Women's Athletics Championships at Royal Park, 

Argus, 4 March 1946

Sporting Globe, 11 January 1947

The caption reads 'Joan Morrison of Coburg in the junior discus throw at today's women's athletics meeting.'

Age, Monday 6 January 1947

The Age newspaper provides a different photograph of Joan Morrison and adds that the event was the Victorian Women's Athletic Association Meeting at Royal Park held on Saturday 4 January 1947 and that Joan was second off scratch.

Argus, 8 January 1951

Four years later and Joan Morrison is still competing at elite level. The Argus tells us that this is Women's Athletics, held at Royal Park. Joan is limbering up before competing in the high jump. She won - jumped 4 foot 11 1/4 inches - her best jump to date. Two weeks later and the same newspaper reported that she jumped 5 foot 0 1/2 inches in a 'graceful leap' at Prahran Cricket Ground.

Not long afterwards, in a feature on Victorian women in sport, the Argus newspaper (23 February 1951) featured Joan. The headline read 'Three Inches from Helsinki' and the subheading was 'Joan Morrison, like all every good high jumper, thinks of the next Olympics in terms of inches.'

We are told that she's from West Coburg and that her father, W.G. (Billy) Morrison, formerly a member of the Footscray Harriers, is her coach. Her life revolves around sport. She even works for the sports manufacturers A.G. Spalding & Bros, we are told.

By then she had represented Australia overseas in the 1950 Empire Games in Auckland, New Zealand (as a 19 year old alongside eight other women including Marjorie Jackson and Shirley Strickland). 

Joan Morrison was a shot putter, threw discus and excelled at the high jump. 

In 1952 she competed at the Helskinki Olympic Games. 

And as Mrs Maurice Brophy, she appeared in a Herald newspaper article dated 19 July 1952 modelling the team uniform.

With marriage, her athletics career ended. Maurice and Joan Brophy brought up their family in the northern suburbs. Maurice, a solicitor, died in 2012 and Joan, the former champion athlete, died in 2016. They are buried at Northern Memorial Park.