Stella Hume

Stella Hume (4 October 1882 – 3 January 1954) was an Australian radio announcer who was an early figure in radio in South Australia.

Biography Stella Hume was born in Victoria. Not much is known of her life until she married Ernest James Hume (1869–1929), in Mosman, a suburb of Sydney in 1905 and moved with him to Adelaide, South Australia where Ernest Hume was developing a business with his brother Walter Reginald Hume, manufacturing steel and pipes, and eventually inventing patented products.

Hume worked in several cultural industries in Adelaide while raising her four children, including teaching elocution lessons. She was art director of the Adelaide Repertory Theatre, and accomplished music, singing, dancing, sculpture and flower arranging. She was an actress in silent films under the name Leonora Starr.

Stella Hume was active in volunteer work in Adelaide, including driving disabled children to and from the hospital, and with the Liberal Union.

Hume's husband, Ernest James Hume, died in 1929 and Stella Hume moved to Neutral Bay, Sydney. She continued to give occasional radio talks there and patented a four-valve wireless receiver. She became involved in Spiritualism. She moved back to Adelaide in 1939 and then to Goulburn, New South Wales in the early 1950s and died at Kenmore Mental Hospital in 1954.