Charities finally get cash

Will sorted 10 years on

A FORMER Tasmanian woman who left nearly half a million dollars to Hobart charities that no longer exist has had her will varied posthumously.

Betty Crosby died in South Australia in 2009, but had not updated her will since 1962, so the charities she’d bequeathed money to no longer existed.

Her husband Charles died 39 years earlier, and no children or relatives had come forward to make a claim on her estate, leaving the Public Trustee with her $414,507.89 estate as of last year.

Mrs Crosby’s will, which was written in pounds, left sums of money to Mother Superior at the Calvary Hospital’s Little Company of Mary and the Royal Hobart Hospital’s Good Samaritan Fund.

Mrs Crosby also left 100 pounds to Rosicrucian AMORC to build a lodge in Hobart. The remainder of Mrs Crosby’s estate was to be divided among the Kennerly Boys’ Home, the Salvation Army Girls’ Home, the Salvation Army Boys’ Home, the Tasmanian Society for the Care of Crippled Children, the Spastics Children’s Treatment Fund, the Tasmanian Institute for the Blind and Deaf, the Retarded Children’s Welfare Association of Tasmania, the Clarendon Children’s Home at Kingston, the Convent of the Good Shepherd at Sandy Bay and the Bethany Home for Boys at Lindisfarne.

Supreme Court of South Australia judge Katrina Bochner this week found close alternatives for each of the charities Mrs Crosby had bequeathed to – either by their successor charities or applied by “cypres” – as close to Mrs Crosby’s intentions as possible.

She determined the existing organisations of Kennerley Children’s Home, the Salvation Army Property Trust, TADTAS, Uniting Victoria and Tasmania, the Royal Tasmanian Society for the Blind and Deaf, Li-Ve Tasmania, the Clarendon Children’s Home, Churches of Christ in Victoria and Tasmania and Southern Cross Care, be listed as Mrs Crosby’s beneficiaries instead.

Calvary and Royal Hobart hospitals will also receive sums.