AustLit

Doreen Goodchild was an artist and ceramicist. She attended St Peter's Girls College, Adelaide. She won an award for drawing, and after her schooling she studied at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts, and later at the school of Dattilo Rubbo in Sydney. She was secretary of the original Adelaide Sketch Club of the Society of Arts.

In 1926 she married the South Australian artist John Goodchild. They studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London for two years. Her ceramic work, mostly figures or animals in art nouveau style, is represented in the National Gallery, Canberra, and the Art Gallery of South Australia, and she was also well considered as a painter in oils (mainly landscape and portraiture). Black and white printmaking by Goodchild is also represented in the National Gallery.

Goodchild began writing poetry in the 1940s while she was raising her three children, writing about her own personal life bringing up a family in suburban Adelaide. In 1953 her husband printed 240 copies of her book of poetry, Pattern of the Years, on a small offset printing press in his studio. He learned the art of binding and covering books specially so he could undertake the binding and covering himself. Goodchild wrote a children's play with sketches included, but this was never published.

Goodchild returned to painting in the 1950s.