Maisie had returned from England where she learned to play tennis and she then taught her young cousin Lillian, 11 years her junior, to play. The rivalry began.
In March of 1890, Maisie Parr became SA’s first female tennis champion. Over the next two decades, she enjoyed a long rivalry against her first cousin Lillian Payne.
It was Maisie, 11 years older than Lillian, who taught her young cousin to play the game.
Returning from England in 1881, where she learned to play tennis, Maisie joined the Adelaide Tennis Club and won the club championship in 1883.
She won her first SA singles championship aged 27 in 1890, and her last aged 34.
Parr was serious about her fitness, breaking with traditions for women of the time, and running several miles each day and cycling regularly for endurance.
It meant that even at age 46 she was still fit enough to be the SA runner-up. Remarkably in 1931, as a 66-year-old, she played in the SA championships but restricted herself to handicap doubles.
In 1909, when she was well past her best, a critic wrote: “Miss Parr is a fine example of strong, active women. Her play, though she is a veteran in years, is a marvel of vigour and dash; and though beaten by safer methods, her game is the most attractive to watch. Like Miss Payten, she goes for winning strokes but, unlike her, she misses many.“
Maisie and Lillian’s final State doubles victory came when Maisie was 42 and Lillian 31.
Maisie contested her last SA singles title in 1911, at 46, and although Pearl Stewart defeated her 6-0, 6-0, it was reported as a ‘very fine effort’.
The Advertiser described Maisie Parr: “When State Champion (she won the women’s singles title in 1892, 1893, 1894, 1897, 1898, 1899), she was Australia’s outstanding woman exponent, being one of the first to show what a woman could do in smashing and volleying the hardest drives.
For many years Miss Lilian Payne, a cousin, held the State title, and during those years Miss Parr was runner-up. Those two between them held the State title for fourteen [fifteen] years.”
In another case of breaking with traditions of the time, neither Maisie nor Lillian would marry.
In tennis, Lillian Payne generally overshadowed her older cousin, winning triple titles in the South Australian Championships – the women’s singles, doubles and mixed doubles – five times from the late 1800s to 1907.
Interestingly, both Maisie and Lillian entered the Victorian State titles in different years, but both came runners-up in 1894 and 1901 respectively.
Lillian began competing in the state tournament in the early 1890s. Her first title came in 1894 when she and Wynnie Brown, won the women’s doubles, defeating Lillian’s cousins Maisie and Ella Parr, 9-7, 6-1.
This was the first of 28 titles that Lillian Payne would win at the SA Championships in the years 1894 to 1907 – nine women’s singles titles, 12 women’s doubles and 7 in the mixed doubles.
