AustLit

Helen Palmer was the daughter of Vance and Nettie Palmer, both Australian writers. She was educated at home in the Dandenongs for five years, encouraged to invent stories and songs as well as learning English, Latin, Greek and Music. She then attended a small school at Caloundra, Queensland, and the Presbyterian Ladies College, Melbourne, where she graduated as dux in 1934. Winning a scholarship to attend the University of Melbourne, she gained a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in 1939 and a Bachelor of Education in 1952. She also co-edited and wrote for the Melboune University

Magazine.

While a student, Palmer responded to the rise of fascism in Europe and the impending war by joining the Communist Party and remained a member for two decades. She was in Spain with her family in 1936 and her sister, Aileen, became an interpreter with the Republican forces. After graduation, she taught at Port Fairy and Terang before joining the Women's Australian Auxiliary Air Force (WAAAF) in 1942. She eventually moved to the WAAAF education service which she was in charge of when discharged in 1946. Returning to civilian life in Sydney, Palmer worked at a printery for some time before joining the Commonwealth Office of Education.

In 1948 she moved to Melbourne where she found work as a teacher, but returned to Sydney in 1952 to work as a casual teacher for the NSW Department of Education. She represented the Department at the Peace Conference of the Asian and Pacific Regions in Beijing in 1952 despite the strong opposition of the Australian government, a trip that consolidated her belief in the advantages of socialism. On her return she wrote Australian Teacher in

China (1953) and the Department refused to re-employ her for eighteen months. In 1955 she began teaching languages and literature at the Fort Street Girls High School, holding that position for the rest of her life. Palmer displayed a strong commitment to the child's educational needs and freedom of inquiry as opposed to the demands of the state and elitest education. She was an active member of the N.S.W. Teachers' Federation and campaigned for equal pay and improved working conditions.

Palmer remained an active member of the Communist Party until 1957 when she was expelled for proposing to publish discussion on Kruschev's controversial 'secret speech'. In response to her expulsion, she established the magazine Outlook: An Australian Socialist Review and fulfilled the role of editor

(1957-1970). Palmer was expelled from the South African Defence and Aid Fund in 1963 for refusing to state whether she was a communist.

As an educator, Palmer wrote with Jessie McLeod a number of history texts for schoolchildren. She also wrote for children a history of the sugar industry, Sugar (1949), a biography, 'Banjo' Paterson (1966) and Beneath the Southern Cross (1954), a story about Eureka, which was later serialised on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio's children's sessions. Palmer had been an occasional poet from the age of eleven and wrote 'The Ballad of 1891' (1951) for the musical, Reedy River with Doreen Bridges (q.v.) who composed the music. It has often been mistaken for an anonymous work written at the time of the shearers' strike.

In the 1970s, Helen Palmer was diagnosed with cancer from which she suffered for a number of years before her death in 1979.

(Source: Robin Gollan, 'Palmer, Helen Gwynneth (1917 - 1979)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 15, MUP, 2000, pp 562-563; The Oxford Companion to

Australian Literature ed. William H. Wilde (1994).