VIRGINIA EDWARDS, AM
Animal advocate
After 50 years of volunteer work for Lort Smith Animal Hospital, Virginia Edwards has come to realise the North Melbourne institution is as much about helping people as animals. She says its prime role might be providing vet care to the needy, "but caring for the animals makes the owners happy and their quality of life improves, as well as the animals'. It's a two-way street." 
Today, pet therapy is widespread, but in the mid-1980s, she joined a pioneering service run by her late friend Joan Sturzaker, taking strays from Lort Smith into hospitals and schools. They watched clients drawing comfort and joy from having a pat, and a chat about their own pets.
Mrs Edwards remembers taking a rooster to a nursing home, where two elderly men, both originally from rural areas, were beguiled.
"They almost fought over this jolly bird. They wanted to have it on their wheelchair."
When she was a child in the 1940s, her parents weren't into pets. But her grandmother, Vivien Clapp, had a beautiful black cat, which she was allowed to dress up and wheel around Toorak in a pram.
In 1929, Mrs Clapp had been vice-president of the fledgling Animal Welfare League, and in the 1930s staged amateur plays to raise money for institutions, including Lort Smith.
In turn, Mrs Edwards was on the Lort Smith board for 35 years, until last year. Apart from years of pet therapy visits, she has manned festival stalls, staffed the hospital's Collingwood op shop, and staged many fundraising events. She chaired the fundraising committee for the hospital building, opened in 2000.
Much of her work is informal: she enjoys talking about the Lort Smith to strangers in shops and trams. She once befriended a man walking his dogs in Armadale and when he died, he left $10,000 to the hospital.
Mrs Edwards said she was "totally and utterly overwhelmed" to be honoured.