Delvena Women’s Refuge Turns 50: Lane Cove Throws a Birthday Party for Its Quiet Achiever

This story discusses domestic and family violence. If it raises anything for you, support details are at the end of this article.

Somewhere in Lane Cove, behind a front door most of us will never see, is a house that has been quietly keeping women and children safe for half a century. Delvena Women’s Refuge turns 50 this year, and on Thursday 22 October Lane Cove Council and Women & Children First are throwing it a birthday party in the Plaza. Everyone is invited.

Delvena has always kept a low profile for good reason. Its address is not published, and the women and children who stay there are escaping domestic and family violence. But the refuge has never been invisible to Lane Cove. For more than a decade, every time Delvena has needed something, this community has turned up. We thought the 50th was a good moment to tell that story.

Half a century of safe beds

Delvena opened in 1976, in the first wave of women’s refuges in NSW. Australia’s first, Elsie Refuge in Glebe, had opened only two years earlier, and the movement that followed set up refuges “wherever a building could be located at no or little cost”. Delvena was one of them, a house on the Lower North Shore for women and children with nowhere safe to go.

For many years Delvena was one of 11 refuges run by Domestic Violence NSW Service Management. In 2014, as part of the NSW Government’s Going Home Staying Home reforms, it was tendered out to the Manly Warringah Women’s Resource Centre, which had been running Bringa Women’s Refuge in Dee Why since the mid-1970s. In its final year under the old arrangement, 2013-14, Delvena housed 51 women and 65 children.

The Manly Warringah Women’s Resource Centre is now known as Women & Children First (W&CF), a specialist domestic, family and sexual violence service working across the Lower North Shore and Northern Beaches. Delvena is one of its two refuges.

The refuge itself is run on a boarding house model of communal living. Families have their own bedrooms and share kitchens, bathrooms, a living area and a backyard with a playground. Women & Children First describe the local community’s connection with Delvena as something that “reaffirms for women and children staying at Delvena that they are valued”.

How Lane Cove has had Delvena’s back

Our own archive is a pretty good record of that connection. In September 2015, Delvena contacted In the Cove for the first time and asked if we could let readers know what the refuge needed. We ran the list, set up a dedicated page on the then brand-new ITC website, and Lane Cove delivered. A pattern was set.

Since then we have put the call out more times than we can count, usually for supermarket and Kmart gift vouchers, because the staff at Delvena never know who is going to walk through the door or whether they will need nappies for a newborn or school shoes for a teenager. The refuge has almost no storage space, so vouchers and cash have always done more good than bags of clothes.

A few of the moments that stuck with us:

• 2018, the $140 that came home. We put a call out for $140 lost by a 90-year-old local. An ITC reader suggested a $2 GoFundMe, Lane Cove gave $300, and then another reader found the cash in an ATM and returned it. The 90-year-old and her daughter asked that every dollar go to Delvena. It went into our “first six weeks” programme, which paid for groceries, petrol and school supplies for families setting up a new home after leaving the refuge. Woolworths chipped in too.
• The painters. In early 2024 Delvena asked ITC if we could find a painter to help out. We knew exactly who to call. Darren Simpson and Evan from Lane Cove’s Multistyle Painting & Decorating donated their time to repaint a room at the refuge that had been out of action for clients, so it could be used again. After the December 2023 appeal, a local business owner and two of his staff also assembled a mountain of flat packs, then came back to paint and do handyman jobs around the house. ITC told Lane Cove Council in July 2024 they were now “on speed dial”.

• Christmas, every year. Lane Cove Council’s Trees of Joy have collected gifts for Delvena families for years, and ITC readers have filled hampers and voucher drives every December. In 2023 Women & Children First told us the refuge was funded for only a quarter of the women and children it was supporting.
• The marmalade kids. In August 2024 three Riverview siblings, Mimi, Michael and Matt, turned a neighbour’s Seville oranges into a marmalade stand and donated the proceeds to Delvena.

• A roof over more heads. In 2023 ITC approached local real estate agents about rental accommodation that Women & Children First could pay for, and families leaving Delvena have lived in the result. In December 2024 Lane Cove Council announced two additional homes for temporary accommodation through the refuge, on top of the home it had already been providing, at the first of its community roundtables on support for women and families. ITC was at the table.
• Catwalk for a Cause. In April this year, locals Emma Rogers and Rowena Gupta, with Lane Cove Rotary, sold out The Alcott and raised $22,000 for Delvena. Lane Cove Rotary has also funded the refuge’s Tree of Joy and a training room upgrade, and Delvena remains one of the Rotary Fair’s beneficiaries.

Add to that the Mosman Rotary and federal grants that rebuilt the backyard, the free childcare a local centre has offered a Delvena mum, and the hundreds of readers who have quietly dropped vouchers at Sydney Community Services over the years, and you get a picture of a town that has adopted a refuge it cannot even visit.

We have also tried to keep readers informed about why the need keeps growing, from the 2024 coercive control laws to one family’s story of what support from Women & Children First actually looks like.

Where Delvena is at today

The need has not gone away. Women & Children First told ITC this month that it is currently supporting 14 different families in Lane Cove escape violence and abuse, including 20 children and young people. Some are in the refuge, which is full with six families, and the rest are being supported in the community through safety planning and casework.

That community outreach is the part that is now at risk. Hannah Mayjor, Communications and Advocacy Officer at Women & Children First, says the organisation’s outreach funding “was cut significantly”, so support for women who are not in the refuge “is now entirely reliant on donations”. For the past few years W&CF says it has supported three to four times the number of families it is funded by government to assist.

Which is why the 50th birthday comes with a gentle ask. If Lane Cove wants to give Delvena a present, the refuge would like it to be the ability to keep saying yes to the next family who calls.

The party

The ITC team will be there. Come and say hello.

How to help

To mark the 50th, In the Cove has set up a dedicated Delvena fundraising page on Women & Children First’s community platform, so you can see exactly what Lane Cove raises together. Every dollar goes to Women & Children First and is tracked to Delvena.

Prefer to give directly? You can donate to Women & Children First at wacf.org.au/donate, or set up your own community fundraiser at fundraise.wacf.org.au. Either way you can choose whether your gift goes to W&CF’s services across the region (community outreach, transitional accommodation, court advocacy and parenting programs) or to Delvena Women’s Refuge in Lane Cove specifically.

If you would prefer to give goods, please do not drop anything at the refuge. Email [email protected] first to ask what is needed right now, or keep an eye on our Charity page, where we post Delvena’s current wish list.

Where to find support

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic or family violence, help is available.

• In immediate danger, call 000
• NSW Domestic Violence Line: 1800 65 64 63, 24 hours, interpreters available
• 1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732, 24 hours
• Women & Children First: 02 9971 4499, business hours Monday to Friday
• Full Stop Australia specialist trauma counselling: 1800 385 578, 24 hours
• MensLine Australia: 1300 78 99 78, 24 hours
• If you are Deaf or have a hearing or speech impairment, contact the National Relay Service on 133 677

Delvena has been part of Lane Cove for 50 years. Happy birthday, and thank you.