Week after week. Quietly. Unconditionally. Stasia Dabrowski changed our city.
Canberrans who remember her simply called her the Soup Lady. Stasia spent close to four decades feeding people in the heart of our city. Not because she had to. Because she couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
Now, Canberra has honoured her in the most permanent way possible. A life-sized bronze sculpture, created by artist Louise Skačej, stands in Garema Place, near the very spot where Stasia once ladled out soup on cold Friday nights. It is a tribute not just to one woman, but to the belief that love, freely given, holds a community together.
Stasia Dabrowski was born in 1926 in a small mountain village in southwest Poland, just a few kilometres from the Czechoslovakian border. Her childhood was shaped by hardship that most of us cannot imagine. When she was still a girl, her family fled ethnic cleansing campaigns in the region. Then came World War II, and with it the successive occupations of Nazi and Soviet forces. Wood, food, clean water. None of it was guaranteed.
No pen could write what I saw in my life,
she said years later.
After the war, she worked as a nurse and eventually came to Canberra in 1964 with her husband and young family. Life here brought its own quiet heartbreaks. Her husband left. One of her sons struggled with heroin addiction, which drew her into the orbit of the people no one else seemed to be looking out for.
Where many might have turned inward, Stasia turned outward.
She began running a mobile soup kitchen in Garema Place in 1979, and she kept going until 2018, well into her 90s. Every Thursday night she peeled and cooked up to 180 kilograms of vegetables. Every Friday, a line of people formed, some in business clothes, some in the same clothes they had slept in, all of them welcome at her folding table under the trees.
More than a hundred people lined up each week, well into her 90s.
Stasia did not distinguish between who deserved her kindness and who did not. That was never the point. Her grandson Josh Kenworthy, who stood beside her at the soup kitchen for 22 years, described it simply: “She could get punched in the face when she was running the soup kitchen and abused and she’d still love everybody. She’s just someone who cares and loves absolutely everybody.”
Her own words were even simpler:
Everything in life I share. Just like you are hungry, I can give you something. Love in action. Do something. Take something. Move something.
I had the privilege of meeting Stasia when she was honoured as the 2017 ACT Local Hero of the Year. I was the ACT Young Australian of the Year for the ACT that same year. I remember the weight of what she said to me: that the most important thing in life is love. Love for others and love for our community, no matter who they are and what they are going through.
It was not a speech. It was not a prepared remark. It was just what she believed, said plainly, the way she did everything.
I have thought about those words many times since.
Stasia never sought recognition. When artist Jenny Blake painted her portrait in 2017, having chosen her as the local person who inspired her most, Stasia brushed it off. “I never keep photos because I am not proud,” she said. “The soup kitchen is a simple thing, people cooking veggies, nothing special. I am the servant of poor people, I am nothing.”
And yet Canberra kept finding ways to say: you are everything.
She was the 1996 Canberra Citizen of the Year. She carried the Olympic torch. She was named the 2017 ACT Local Hero of the Year. A song was written in her honour. And now, a sculpture stands in the city centre in her likeness.
She passed away in 2020 at the age of 94, but her presence in Canberra never really left.
Artist Louise Skačej has captured something quietly remarkable. A life-sized figure, warm and grounded, placed close to where Stasia actually stood. The sculpture is not elevated on a plinth. It does not place her at a distance. It puts her right there, at eye level, as if she has simply not left.
“I wanted to capture not only Stasia’s physical presence, but the warmth and humanity that defined her life and the connections she built with so many people in Garema Place and across Canberra,” Skačej said. “I hope the sculpture will inspire generations to come to remember her story and reflect on the power of compassion in everyday life.”
Arts Minister Michael Pettersson described it as an affirmation of the values Canberra wants to carry forward.
“By immortalising Stasia in one of our city’s most important public spaces, we affirm that her compassion and generosity are the values we want to see in our community.”
The installation is part of a broader commitment by the ACT Government to recognise significant women through public art, as well as celebrating Ngunnawal Country through a series of new cultural artworks in the same space, including illuminated light poles and laser-cut totems.
There is something particular about the way some people move through the world. Stasia carried decades of real suffering, the kind that could justify bitterness, withdrawal, self-protection. Instead, she chose the opposite. She decided that because she had known hunger, she would make sure no one in her city went hungry. Because she had known loneliness, she would make sure no one stood in a public square without someone greeting them with warmth.
She showed up at Garema Place every single Friday for nearly 40 years. And that is a person who decided what mattered and never stopped acting on it.
Next time you are in Garema Place, take a moment to stop at the sculpture. Bring your kids. Tell someone who she was. Stasia would not have wanted a fuss, but she would have appreciated knowing her story is still being told.
If you would like to share your own memory of Stasia, or nominate someone in our community who shows up for others quietly and consistently, we would love to hear from you. Reach out through our story nominations page.
Article by Heidi Prowse OAM
