Clare Josephine Cascarret

Clare Josephine Cascarret (c.1902 – 1977) was an Australian scrap metal dealer and the first woman city councillor in Melbourne.

Life Cascarret was born in about 1902 in the town of Minyip in the state of Victoria. Her biological mother was Marie (Ma) Dalley who, in time, traded as a scrap metal dealer. Her mother had been born Minnie Mary Fimmel and she had married John Thomas Francis Moroney in 1897. Her widowed mother reinvented herself as Marie Dalley Her mother was a workaholic entrepreneur who went from unskilled work to owning a hardware business by 1914.

Cascarret went to school and then she went to work with her mother. In 1925 her mother started, M. Dalley & Co. Pty Ltd, one of Australia's largest dealers in scrap metal. She and her mother would provide accommodation for visiting sailors and they would buy food and give it away in Melbourne. Four years later Cascarret married a garage manager named Alfred Percy Withers at the Congregational church in Bourke Street in February 1929 in Sydney. She tried three times to be elected to Kew City Council She became the first woman councillor in the 125 year history of Melbourne's council. The election was said to have cost her over half a million pounds. In 1968 some of her supporters were convicted of election fraud, but she survived the scandal.

Cascarret died in the Melbourne suburb of Mount Eliza in 1977.