A local author is highlighting the life of Aloha Wanderwell, a rebel and history-maker who attended Victoria's St. Anne's Academy who you've probably never heard of.

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Aloha Wanderwell. She was a rebel, she was brave, she was a history-maker, she attended school at Victoria’s St. Anne’s Academy, and you’ve probably never heard of her. “Aloha Wanderwell, what kind of a name is that?” says Victoria author Laurel Corona. She hadn’t heard of her until she was given a pamphlet about Vancouver Island women in history. “I read a little blurb on her and I was hooked,” she says. And so began the historic novel, _Aloha Wanderwell Takes the Wheel_. Aloha was born in Winnipeg but came to Qualicum Beach when he was young. **Watch the full story in the video below:** Loading the player... She was born Idris Welsh and was at a finishing school in France when she saw an advertisement from Walter Wanderwell looking for a secretary to join him on a driving expedition around the world. It was 1922, she was 16 years old and had absolutely no secretarial skills, and she got the job. “He didn’t speak French,” says Laurel of Aloha. “Why don’t you come with me and be my French translator while I’m in France? Her mother said it was OK for her to do that but she couldn’t leave France. Well, Aloha just never came home.” Over the next five years, in a 1918 Model T Ford, she became the first woman to drive around the globe, travelling more than 800,000 kilometres through 80 different countries. “She drove almost the entire length of Africa and then across South America and across the Andes, where their three very big expeditions that they did were,” says Laurel. In learning about her, Laurel was struck by Aloha’s courage, her nerve and her struggle. “It’s still a story about a teenager and so you have all of the teenaged angst that goes with it too, which is complicated by the fact that she falls in love with Walter and they end up getting married,” says Laurel. Aloha travelled with Walter and helped create, promote and present the films they made of their trips until 1932. Her relationship with Walter ended with his murder. Aloha and Walter Wanderwell are pictured. “It was a huge scandal in Los Angeles,” says Laurel. “And she’s just raked through the coals, and this scandal that she had nothing to do with, the person who did it was acquitted so it was never really resolved.” Aloha remarried fairly quickly, and though she was with her second husband for 60 years, she wanted to be with her first love when she died in 1996, at the age of 89. “When she died her will specified that she wanted her ashes spread at sea where Walter’s had been spread,” says Laurel. This is Laurel’s fifth novel about history’s forgotten women. She says those pieces of our past are largely missing because the history-tellers were men. “So they tell stories that are of interest to them, battles and things like that,” says the author. “What the women are up to is of no interest to them, and so when they’re telling the stories orally they just leave out that part.” Laurel wants to change that. “I have so many people I’d like to write about. There are so many forgotten women, misunderstood women and it’s just a shame that our history just doesn’t include that,” she says. Her sixth book is about a woman tasked with assessing the mental capacity of Ellis Island immigrants. It will be released next year. > **Find more Inspiring Island Women stories here** Editorial Policies Report an Error Share an Opinion