The Australian Women's Register

Leontine Cooper was the eldest child born to Frenchman Jean Francois Buisson and his English wife Dorothea (nee Smithers). She spent her early life living in the inner-London precinct of Battersea, and then at seaside Brighton, and married her husband, Edward Cooper (a surveyor), in London in 1866. She arrived in Brisbane on the ‘Royal Dane’ in November 1871, and during the 1870s worked briefly as a school teacher at Chinaman’s Creek (now Albany Creek), and subsequently Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School, where she taught French.

During the 1880s and 1890s Cooper became a prominent Brisbane literary figure, serving on the influential Brisbane School of Arts committee, and playing an active role within the Brisbane Literary Circle, where she mixed with a number of leading social and political figures within colonial society. It was also during this period that Cooper emerged as a social justice and women’s suffrage advocate. She was, for many years, a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty, and in 1891 served as Queensland Government appointee to the Shops and Factories Royal Commission.

Leontine Cooper does not appear to have been related to pioneering medical practitioner Lilian Cooper who arrived in Brisbane in 1891, and who was also a significant 19th and early 20th century Queensland feminist figure.