Jane Fryer

Jane Fryer born Jane Trump (14 October 1832 – 16 June 1917) was an Australian political and religious radical. She was one of the first women to be married in the register offices in Bristol before she emigrated to the Australian State of Victoria. There she supported Methodists, Quakers and the Australasian Secular Association.

Early life Jane Fryer was born in south-west England in 1832 in the Somerset town of Taunton. Her mother was Ruth (born Dwelly) and her controlling father was Leonard Trump. Mr Trump came from a Dutch family and he worked as a baker.

She stayed with a Chartist family and attended Sunday School where there were intense debates about the morality of the Opium wars between Britain and China. That debate led to her not becoming a member of that church. and they were in Victoria by the following year, where Jethro was living in Ballarat. She and her husband were strongly involved and she was a leader of the Melbourne Progressive Lyceum's Sunday school. He led the organisation's campaigns for art galleries to open on Sundays and took on the resulting prosecutions. Symes was wilful and demanding.

In 1889 Bernard O'Dowd married her daughter, Evangeline Mina Fryer (11 May 1865 – 7 Apr 1956) although the couple later separated. The O'Dowds and Jane and John Fryer lived in the same house for three years in North Melbourne. O'Dowd thought Jane Fryer was "a fine woman" "free of society's shackles" but the two-family household was unhappy and Jane was the prime cause.

Fryer died in 1917 in the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds.