Vance Palmer was born in Bundaberg, Queensland. He was educated at several schools at which his father was schoolmaster and at Ipswich Grammar School. An interest in literature, instilled by his father, was temporarily replaced by a passion for sport at Ipswich. But a recurring desire to become a writer saw him leave for England in 1905. After little literary success, Palmer returned to Australia in 1907 via Finland, Russia, Siberia and Japan and worked for a time as tutor on a remote Queensland property. Palmer returned to England in 1910 and travelled through North America, Mexico and the Pacific. Palmer was now a well-known member of literary circles, and with the encouragement of A. R. Orage, editor of the New Age, he developed his writing and his social philosophy with many articles for various periodicals. This experience consolidated Palmer's view that Australia's national consciousness originated in the bush, an idea which he would further develop in his criticism and creative writing. In 1914 he married Janet (Nettie) HigginsYi) with whom he forged one of the most productive partnerships in Australian literary history.

After serving in World War I, Palmer returned to Australia and wrote a combination of popular and serious literature during the 1920s. In the late 1920s Nettie Palmer's growing income from journalism enabled Vance to concentrate on his serious writing and he twice won the Bulletin Novel Competition. In the following decades he continued to write and became a widely-known literary critic through his regular talks and reviews for the ABC. With this profile Palmer promoted the works of Australian writers such as Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy and encouraged many young writers. His ideas about the formation of a national literature found their most influential form in The Legend of the Nineties (1955). His novels include The Passage (1930), Daybreak (1932), The Swayne Family (1934) and Legend for Sanderson (1937). His short stories first appeared in The World of Men (1915) and later Separate Lives (1931) and Sea and Spinifex (1934).

When Palmer died in 1959, a special edition of Meanjin was being prepared to honour his and Nettie's contribution to Australian literature, the conferral of an honorary doctorate at the University of Melbourne was being planned and his novel The Big Fellow was in the press. That novel would later win the Miles Franklin Award.

According to Palmer's entry (in his own hand) in A. G. Stephens's 'Australian Autobiographies' vol.2, he published two works in the UK in 1913. These were National Proverbs: China and National Proverbs: Japan in the series published by Frank Palmer in 1913.

Thomas Gurr grew up in India before migrating first to New Zealand and later to Australia. He wrote for stage and radio, worked as a journalist, and served as general manager of the Sydney Sunday Times. For the twenty years prior to his death, he held the position of Secretary of the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The author of several stage and radio plays, his most successful theatrical collaboration was with Varney Monk on the musical Collits' Inn (1932).

Edmund Barclay was, according to an interview in Wireless Weekly, 'born in India, taken to England, educated, and sent to the War' ('He Has Written', p.11). He left the Flying Corps in 1919, and began reporting for the Daily Mail. He founded his own newspaper, Brighter London, in 1921, but it lasted only nine months: to recoup costs, he 'began to avenge himself upon a cruel world by writing Sexton Blake stories, short splays, and articles on the South Coast in Summer' (ibid). He arrived in Australia in 1925, intending to stay for a year.

Barclay's career in Australian theatre was primarily in the area of radio, for which he wrote numerous plays and serials. The Australian Broadcasting Commission employed Barclay as a writer in 1933 under Lawrence H. Cecil, the head of drama production. The following year, while still at the ABC, Barclay and composer Varney Monk had their romantic musical, The Cedar Tree, staged in Melbourne under the auspices of F. W. Thring's EFFTEE productions. It played in Sydney the following year. Also involved in the creation of The Cedar Tree was Helen Barclay, who, along with Jock McLeod (and Varney Monk), provided the lyrics the music.

Throughout 1933, he wrote radio revues for the ABC Revue Company, sometimes in collaboration with other authors and almost always with music by Alf J. Lawrance.

In 1934 Barclay co-wrote the screenplay (with Gayne Dexter) for Ken G. Hall's motion picture adaptation of The Silence of Dean Maitland. Three years later Barclay provided the story for Hall's Lovers And Luggers (1937), having adapted the narrative from the novel by Gurney Slade.

Barclay's contribution to Australian radio drama includes Murder In The Silo, Job (adapted from the bible story), Spoiled Darlings, The Man Who Liked Eclairs (with Joy Harper), His Excellency Governor Shirtsleeves, The Ridge and The River (adapted from T. A. G. Hungerford's novel) and As Ye Sow. Barclay also adapted into radio dramas many novels, including The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, The Idiot and Les Miserables. Among his collaborations, too, was the song 'Night in the Bush' (1933), with music by Alfred J Lawrence.

Sources include:

'He Has Written 14 Radio Revues Since March', Wireless Weekly, 8 September 1933, pp.11-12.

Queensland playwright and radio/television script-writer. He worked professionally as a draftsman for Brisbane City Council throughout his playwriting career.

Born and raised in the Sandgate area of Brisbane, Dann was educated at Brisbane Grammar School, and began training as a draftsman at the age of sixteen. He began writing not long afterwards, noting in an early interview that he had written his first play, a one-act comedy, when he was eighteen ('New Playwright').

George Landen Dann began writing with plays for the local amateur dramatics society. One of these works, Beauty It Is Kept Secret, won the Brisbane Repertory Society's Prize in 1931, which brought the then twenty-six-year-old Dann some measure of attention and some notoriety, as a small flurry of complaints arose around the play's depiction of a love affair between a white Australian girl and a fisherman described by the play as 'half-caste' ('Why Prize Play Was Cut'). He returned to the question of Aboriginal-white relations in Fountains Beyond (1942) and Rainbows Die at Sunset (1975).

Dann's work won a number of prizes during this career, both at repertory level and beyond: his radio plays were well represented in ABC radio competitions during the 1940s, and Fountains Beyond even won a Welsh eisteddfod, when performed by a Cardiff-based repertory company. Although he was never as prolific a writer as some of his contemporaries, his success has led him to be called Queensland's first significant playwright.

For further reading, see the Wikipedia entry compiled by University of Queensland students from primary sources in 2012.

Sources:

'New Playwright', Telegraph, 16 May 1931, p.9.

'Why Prize Play Was Cut', Telegraph, 14 July 1931, p.1.

Catherine Shepherd, playwright, was the only child of Edgar David Shepherd, an Anglican clergyman from England, and his wife Margaret. Her father died when she was an infant, leaving her mother in financial difficulties. They moved back to England and lived with relations in Yorkshire. Shepherd was educated in Yorkshire and in North Wales at Howell's School, Denbigh. She won a scholarship to the University College, London, where she graduated with a B.A.(Honours) in English in 1923 and then a Diploma of Education. Shepherd always wanted to be a writer. One of her close friends at the university, Frances Mary Heaton, was the future wife of Nevil Shute.

After graduation, Shepherd taught in a school for two years and travelled. She and her mother then decided to emigrate to Australia where they had relatives in Sydney. After a short time in Sydney, they settled permanently in Hobart. They were certainly there by 1926 when Shepherd was one of a group of interested people who formed the Hobart Repertory Theatre Society. Giordano and Norman claim her plays were among the first to be performed by the new society (163).

An article in a West Australian newspaper in 1936 (by which time Shepherd was a recognised contributor of short fiction to magazines including The Australian Journal), suggested:

she has contrived not only to get an Honours Degree at London University, but to travel over a great deal of the world and to try her hand at a score of different jobs in order to gain material for the writing she knew she would be doing one day. For a while she was a waitress at a tea-room in France. Later she came to Australia, and sold books in a shop in Adelaide. Tiring of that, she spent a season splitting apricots on the Murray River. When fruit palled, she dug her University degrees out of her cabin trunk, became a teacher in a girl's school in New South Wales, and set herself to saving enough money to go back to Europe, where she travelled extensively and saw nearly all there is to see of France, Germany and Switzerland. ('A Rising Authoress', Northern Times, 2 December 1936)

She certainly set fiction of this period in places such as Heidelberg in Germany.

She was writing scripts for the Australian Broadcasting Commission by 1936 and taught at the Collegiate School for Girls in the late 1930s. Shepherd later joined the Education Department and taught at the Correspondence School.

Olive Wilton of the Hobart Repertory Theatre Society produced Shepherd's three-act play, Daybreak, in 1938 and it won a competition run by the Australian National Theatre Movement. The play was performed on stage around Australia and broadcast on the ABC in 1938 during the first ABC Australian Drama Week. Shepherd was alert to the potential of radio, writing, 'I think that radio drama is a new and vital form of dramatic art which may in the near future develop beyond all present imagining.' (Lane, 113-114). Lane asserts, 'it is probably fair to say that Alexander Turner and Catherine Shepherd were the first two writers to come to prominence as significant radio playwrights after Leslie Rees' appointment as ABC Federal Play Editor.' Both wrote only for the ABC, which paid up to fourteen guineas an hour in 1937 for plays (Inglis, 54). Shepherd remained in Tasmania, where she wrote radio plays and adapted many novels and plays for ABC radio throughout the 1940s and 1950s.

Shepherd wrote several psychological dramas for radio including Lethe Wharf, Sea Piece, and Exit Socrates (1930s). Other radio plays included I Saw the New Moon... (1940), a study of student life; Sabotage (1940), 'a dramatic story of fifth-columnists'; The Heroic Journey (1944), a account of Sturt's journey into the interior, written for the centenary; Arthur of Van Diemen's Land (1940s), whose broadcast details have not been traced; The Hayfield (1949), the reminiscences of an English childhood from a man based in South Africa; and The Judas Sheep (1953), the story of an elderly woman coming to terms with the criminality of her son and brother-in-law.

She also wrote hour-long radio plays based on the literary biography of famous writers including The Flying Swan (Hans Christian Andersen, 1930s), A Citizen of the World (Oliver Goldsmith, 1930s), The Valiant Tinker (John Bunyan, 1930s), Three Mile Cross (Mary Mitford, 1940), and The Golden Cockerel (Alexander Pushkin, 1940s). She also wrote short biographical sketches of famous explorers and the like, aimed at children. Her educational radio work included history lessons on aspects of Australia's colonial history, with titles such as 'Highlights of Australian History' and 'In the Time of Governor Macquarie', and social studies lessons such as 'Australia and Her Nearer Neighbours", including both Hawaii and Timor. Shepherd continued to be active in repertory theatre.

Shepherd's output slowed from the mid-1950s, although she still produced occasional radio plays and short works into the 1960s, and released the historical children's adventure story Tasmanian Adventure.

Leslie Rees argues Shepherd 'made a sustained and important though never spectacular contribution to stage and radio drama' and that she wrote with 'probing thoughtfulness' about the human condition, self-realization and 'the need for freedom in a wide social sense.' Kerry Kilner comments: 'The unifying principle in all of Shepherd's plays is a deep humanitarianism,...The quest for home and security is a recurrent theme and in Delphiniums we have the story of Queenie and Ed Burton, two pensioners slowly ground deeper into poverty and powerlessness by their lack of secure housing.' (xii). Kilner said that Shepherd's work had been undervalued and ignored, leading to much of it being lost (xiii). Her papers - apart from two scrapbooks held in the University of Tasmania archives - and all but nine of her unpublished plays are missing.

Sources:

'Catherine Shepherd (1902-1976)' in Margaret Giordano and Don Norman, Tasmanian Literary Landmarks (1984): 161-165.

Kilner, Kerry. 'Introduction', Playing the Past: Three Plays by Australian Women (1995): xi-xiii.

Rees, Leslie. 'Catherine Shepherd' in Companion to Theatre in Australia, ed. Philip Parsons (1995): 528.

---. The Making of Australian Drama: a Historical and Critical Survey from the 1830s to the 1970s (1973): 189-191.

'Shepherd, Catherine' in Richard Lane, The Golden Age of Australian Radio Drama 1923-1960 : A History Through Biography (1994): 113-114.

Winter, Gillian. 'Shepherd, Catherine (1901 - 1976)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 16, MUP, (2002): 231.

Australian public servant and occasional radio-play writer.

In 1934, Trevor Heath was appointed secretary to the Minister for Public Affairs, at which point newspapers published the following biographical information:

Mr. Heath received his early education at Queen's College, North Adelaide. Later he attended St. Peter's College, and subsequently went to England and entered Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied law for three and a half years. He gained his MJL degree there, and on returning to Adelaide gained his LL.B. degree at the University of Adelaide. He was admitted to the bar, being first articled to the late Mr. Harry Thomson, K.C. Until his appointment as secretary to Sir George Pearce, Mr. Heath was with Mr. J. R Kearnan, solicitor. Mr. Heath left yesterday by the ex press for Melbourne, where he will meet Sir George Pearce and accompany him to Canberra. Early next year Mr. and Mrs. Heath will take up permanent residence in. Melbourne. (Source: 'Mr. Trevor Heath Secretary to Sir George Pearce', The Advertiser, 7 December 1934, p.26.)

By the late 1940s, Trevor Heath was the secretary of the Antarctic division of the Department of External Affairs (Source: 'Australian Play for the BBC', The Age, 15 October 1949, p.4.). By 1950, he was officer-in-charge of the Heard and Macquarie Islands operations (Source: 'Ukrainian Doctor for Antarctic Party', West Australian, 31 January 1950, p.10).

Heath appears to have abandoned script-writing after Spinney under the Rain, perhaps in consequence of the increasing demands of his other profession.

As John Christopher, Charles Porter was a popular announcer with Brisbane radio station 4BH, from its inception in 1932, until he left to start a school for radio announcing and acting in 1935. He wrote numerous radio plays (nearly one hundred half-hour pieces by 1935) as well as being a drama producer, continuity and publicity writer for the station.

In 1937 Brisbane's Sunday Mail columnist L. Fitzhenry said of Porter's career as a playwright to that time:

[He ] is rapidly proving himself one of the most striking of a small group of experimental dramatists who have lately had works accepted and presented by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. His Play Without a Name excited special interest when produced bv Dion Wheeler from 4QG a few months ago ('News About Radio,' p. 28).

Two years later he was being described as one of Australia's most internationally famous script-writers:

One of Australia's most successful playwrights is Charles Porter, of Brisbane, who has explored radio fields far and wide. He has sold plays to such stations as Statsradlofonlen (Denmark) and Polskie Radio (Poland). The New Zealand National Broadcasting Service has produced The Footsteps After, Go Back, Napoleon, and The Outer Darkness. The South African Broadcasting Corporation produced Prelude to Death, The Footsteps After, Play Without a Name, Secret Places, Fire Below, and others. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation also has taken some of these. A high compliment to Mr. Porter was the 'staging' of his radio play, Play Without a Name, by the Circle Theatre, London ('Australian Playwrights,' p.7).

Porter was a prolific freelance journalist and children's fairy story writer, with many of his works being published in Teleradio magazine throughout the early years of the 1930s. He also contributed a regular column, 'Microphone Murmurs', for this journal, as 'The Radio Rambler,' and wrote dogerrel as 'The 4BH Tame Poet'.

After his radio career, Porter became a politician. He was a State Liberal member of the Queensland Parliament and served for many years as the Liberal Party's General Secretary (Queensland Division).

Max Afford was born in Adelaide in 1906. He began his career as a journalist, but in the following decades he would go on to write some of the most popular radio and stage plays in Australia. Full of clever schemes and witty dialogue, Afford’s detective stories were extremely popular. He also wrote dramas with political overtones, which ranged from examinations of Australian life after the Second World War to the founding of his home town, Adelaide. In 1938 he married teacher, actor, and costume designer, Thelma Thomas, who later designed costumes for some of his stage plays.

Max Afford worked as a reporter and feature writer at the Adelaide News and Mail from 1929-1934. In 1935 he joined Radio 5DN as a producer and continuity manager. In the early days of his radio career, when Afford was writing thrillers for Adelaide broadcaster 5CL at the rate of at least two a month (c.1934), his works were sometimes only listed in radio guides as 'a radio thriller by Max Afford', with no title or other distinguishing information.

In 1936 his play William Light - the Founder won the South Australian Centenary Drama Competition. The same year saw him move to Sydney (leaving Adelaide on 27 September 1936, according to the Adelaide News of 18 September 1936), where he worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for five years before becoming a freelance and prolific writer of fiction and radio plays, gaining enormous popularity as a serial writer. Hagen's Circus (1941), for example, ran for 800 episodes.

In 1939 the Canberra Times reported that Afford was ‘probably the only Australian radio playwright to have sold a serial to the B.B.C.’ His plays sold to the B.B.C. were reported to include Fly By Night, Labours of Hercules, Oh, Whistle When You're Happy, The Four Specialists, and For Fear of Little Men. The same article claims that in South Africa Afford reportedly sold Mr. Allchurch Comes to Stay (this title has not been traced anywhere outside this article), Merry-Go-Round, and Two Hundred Thousand Witnesses. Cairo also reportedly bought some of these plays, and Polskie Radio, in Poland, is said to have asked for The Four Specialists, which was also sold to Canada, where he sold For Fear of Little Men ('Australian Radio Plays: Success of A.B.C. Playwrights Abroad', Canberra Times, 14 August 1939, p.2.).

None of these productions have been traced so far, though his Queer Affair at Kettering was produced twice by the BBC in the 1940s. Afford's stage play Lady in Danger, was the first Australian play produced on Broadway (1945), although it was not well received there.

Afford’s success as a radio play writer has been attributed to his mastery of radio drama techniques as well as to his exciting plots and realistic characterisation. As well as the plays he also published six detective novels. Their central character, the detective Jeffery Blackburn, also featured in a number of his radio plays.

A chain smoker, Afford died of cancer at the age of 48.

Sources: 

"AUSTRALIAN RADIO PLAYS" The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 - 1995) 14 August 1939: 2. Web. 30 Jan 2018 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article2509535>.

"PERSONAL PARAGRAPHS" News (Adelaide, SA : 1923 - 1954) 18 September 1936: 5. Web. 30 Jan 2018 <http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article132026897>.

Additional Sources:

Max Afford's Playwright's Award

Australian Dictionary of Biography - Max Afford

Project Gutenberg - The Vanishing Trick (contains a brief biography)

After emigrating to Australia Alexander Turner spent much of his working life as a bank officer in rural Western Australian towns - notably Geraldton, Meekatharka, Pingelly and Carnamah. He also lived for a time in Perth. During his time in Geraldton he began sending verse to the Western Mail (Perth) and became involved in amateur theatre, eventually writing a number of plays. He later founded repertory societies in Meekatharra and Pingelly. His plays were staged in all three towns. Turner describes his association with the Carnamah Repertory Club in the 'Dedication' to Royal Mail and Other Plays. Some of his plays were also produced by amateur companies in Perth. In his Foreword to Hester Siding and Other Plays and Verse, Paul Hasluck notes that Turner acknowledged the support given him by various drama competitions, for which some of his plays won prizes, and also the encouragement from the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), particularly the advice given by Frank Clewlow, drama director at the ABC, and Leslie Rees, then the ABC's play editor.

Turner enlisted at Geraldton during the Second World War and served in the Australian Imperial Forces (A.I.F.) between 1942 and 1946. After war service he worked for the ABC as a drama and feature producer. Writing of Turner as a dramatist Hasluck records:

His first stage plays ranged away from Australia in mood and subject. He was turning to his background to satisfy his feeling for deeper and warmer colours and more delicate shadows than he had yet found in Australia. His four stage plays printed [in Hester Siding and Other Plays] might be called English plays in the sense that his Australian surroundings had apparently little influence on their composition. In his radio plays he moves , at first rather uncertainly, away from the past. In Hester Siding the poet of his early verse again speaks. Listening to this play we feel the breath and hear the sounds of the countryside again ("Foreword").

Alexander Turner's career as a playwright for radio extended to thirty years; however, Paul Hasluck further notes that his ability as a poet was equally admirable. Hasluck praised the poetry as 'true songs of our countryside.'

Educated at Knox Grammar School in Wahroonga, New South Wales, Richard Lane went on to establish a career as one of Australia's most prodigious and experienced scriptwriters for television and radio. Lane displayed an early ability to write, and soon after leaving school he had several short stories published in magazines. He began writing plays for radio during the 1930s and one of his best-known scripts, 'The Remittance Man' (1937), was a product of this period.

From 1942 to 1950 he worked as a (chief) writer and producer with Macquarie Broadcasting. The years with Macquarie proved to be 'rewarding', providing Lane with many scriptwriting opportunities which included (co-)writing numerous (serialised) plays and book adaptations. Lane began freelancing in 1951, and working as a writer, producer and director he subsequently established connections with 'most of Sydney's radio production units'. Throughout Lane's early career scripted adaptations of classic novels were an important component of radio broadcasts. Lane was 'widely known' for his work as an adaptor having serialised such works as Rebecca and Goodbye, Mr Chips, as well as iconic Australian novels such as The Shiralee, Robbery Under Arms and On the Beach.

Writing the script for Autumn Affair in 1958, Lane was credited with being the author of Australia's 'first locally-written and produced television serial'. From this point he continued to gain experience as a scriptwriter/editor for television. In 1967 he wrote the serialised television adaptation of Jon Cleary's (q.v.) 1947 novel, You Can't See Round Corners; Lane later reworked the original script to produce the feature film's screenplay. His extensive output during the 1960s-1970s included writing episodes of Homicide and The Sullivans for Crawford Productions, working on the ATN7 serial Motel, scriptwriting/editing for ABC Television's Bellbird and Twenty Good Years, as well as the Grundy Organisation's The Young Doctors.

Lane was one of the founders of the Australian Writers Guild and in 1988 he received a special award 'for long-standing service and dedication to the Guild'. This ongoing award has since been known as the Richard Lane Award.

Lorna Bingham, actress and writer, was a long-time member of the George Edwards Players, where she performed and wrote several radio serials, most famously 'Dad and Dave', which she wrote from 1940 until it finished in 1953. She was also renowned in the radio industry for her ability to imitate the voices of children. When the George Edwards Players was sold, Bingham's writing career ended; she found herself unable to adapt to the new medium of television. Bingham committed suicide.

Arthur Horner wrote and illustrated children's fiction. He worked as a cartoonist for the Tribune, the News Chronicle, the New Statesman and the Age. He lived in Britain for a time and returned to Melbourne in the late 1960s. In addition to his books, Horner also contributed work to numerous Australian and international newspapers and journals, including the Bulletin, Smith's Weekly, the Daily Mail, Private Eye and Punch.

While living in Britain, Horner created the 'Colonel Pewter' comic-strip. The strip appeared in various papers for almost twenty years from 1952 and spawned two books, Colonel Pewter in Ironicus (1957) and Penguin Colonel Pewter (1978).

Horner returned to Melbourne in the late 1960s. His work spanned the genres of children's literature, satire, politics and social commentary.

Codrington Ball was born in Donegal, Ireland – the great-great grandson of Henry Lidgebird Ball, who commanded H.M.S. Supply in the First Fleet.

Ball was an actor, scenic artist, and theatre manager in Britain, under the name 'Scott King Alexander'. In Australia, he continued his theatrical career (under the stage name 'Scott Alexander'), managing the Turret Theatre, Sydney, and writing for radio.

Ball's stage plays were usually vehicles for his stage persona: throughout the 1920s, for example, he wrote short one-act plays (usually comedies and farces) for 2FC (later Radio National) under the name 'Codrington Ball' and acted in them under the name 'Scott Alexander'. The plays were invariably two-character pieces, in which Ball repeatedly appeared opposite actress Nellie Ferguson; by late 1925, Nellie Ferguson was touring for the Carroll Brothers with 'a specially selected metropolitan company', and her role in the short plays was taken by a rotating roster of other actresses, primarily Myra Leard.

Among Ball's other radio productions were 'Martin Meeks Topical Comedy Radio Dissertations', written by Ball and performed as Scott Alexander, on such topics as 'The Danger of Telling the Truth'.

Sources:

'Codrington Ball radio scripts, 1925-1929 and miscellaneous papers, 1894-1929', State Library of NSW. (Sighted: 04/05/2017)

Various advertisements (see individual plays for details).

Walter Brooksbank wrote mainly short stories and radio plays. During World War I he served in the AIF at Gallipoli and later in Western Europe. He was awarded the Military Medal for gallantry at Ypres, in 1917. After the war he wrote a number of short stories which were loosely based on his wartime experiences. From the late 1930s through to the early 1950s his radio plays were broadcast at intervals on ABC Radio. During World War II he served as an intelligence officer with the Royal Australian Navy.

Rex Rienits worked on various Australian newspapers until 1949, when he moved to London. He then became a full-time freelance writer, writing radio and television plays for the BBC and film scripts for various production companies. He wrote his first radio play when he was 22 years old, in 1931. He co-wrote (with second wife Thea Rienits) Early Artists of Australia (1963), The Voyages of Captain Cook (1968), Discovery of Australia (1969), A Pictorial History of Australia (1969) and The Voyages of Columbus (1970). He was editor-in-chief of Australia's Heritage : The Making of a Nation, a series of weekly educational magazines (1970-1976).

Reinits first wife, Josephine (Balfe) Reinets, was the daughter of Oscar Balfe, editor of the Tasmanian Courier (an illustrated weekly published by The Examiner): her brothers Harold Balfe and Eric Balfe were also both journalists. According to her obituary, she was 'a talented pianiste and elocutionist and was highly appreciated in Australian musical circles, taking part in repertory theatre work while in Sydney' (Cairns Post, 29 January 1954, p.5). She died in London on 25 January 1954.

Actor, character vocalist (baritone), society entertainer, writer, troupe leader.

The eldest son of long-time D'Oyley Carte Opera Company baritone Helier le Maistre (1866-1915) and his wife, contralto Nellie Wyatt, Eric Masters started out his career at age 14 in pantomime. He later joined the March Hares Concert Party before establishing himself in London as a musical comedy and revue actor in the 1910s (notably with George Edwardes). He made his Australian debut with the Tivoli Frolics (Brisbane) in October 1922, having spent three years touring the East for Maurice Bandmann. Masters later worked for the Fullers' Theatres, J. C. Williamson's, Hugh J. Ward, the Tivoli circuit and Frank Neil among other firms.

While on the Fullers circuit Masters was associated with such revue/revusical companies as The Frivolities (Perth, 1925), The Snap Company (Brisbane, 1925-26), Con Moreni's Ideals (Perth, 1927), Stud Foley's Follies (Adelaide, 1927), and Roy Rene's troupe - Mo's Merrymakers (Sydney, 1929). He also operated his own companies - notably the Merry Whirl Revue Co (1928, aka The Maxims), appeared regularly on radio as a singer and actor from 1925, and was given a role in Roy Rene's 1934 film, Strike Me Lucky.

During the 1930s Masters was largely associated with the Australian Broadcasting Commission as a member of its dramatic staff. In 1931 his "pierrotic phantasy," Motley, was produced by the ABC Players. Masters died in a private hospital in Springwood, Sydney, on 1 March 1939. He was survived by his wife, Decima.

[Source: Australian Variety Theatre Archive]

Variety entertainer, radio actor, writer, director, teacher.

The daughter of George Edwards and Rosie Parkes, Chandra Parkes was immersed in the world of theatre from birth. While studying at Sydney University (1927-1930) she was actively involved in its dramatic society productions theatre, but turned to radio industry after graduating with Arts degree. A specialist monologue and sketch actor (sometimes working opposite her father) she turned to writing, finding success in 1934 with The Filbert Family series (2UE). She later wrote radio plays and appeared regularly in sketches opposite her husband Lionel Lunn for 2FC and later 2GB. Parkes and Lunn co-founded the Radio Institute of Australia, which became the Chandra Parkes Australian Radio Institute after their divorce.

[Source: Australian Variety Theatre Archive]

Actor, dancer, writer and radio producer.

Trafford Whitelock was born in Brisbane but raised in Sydney from the age five after his mother relocated there. He was educated at Barker College and also took classes in dance and theatre. At age 15 he started his first job, working in the advertising and publicity department of Fox Films. Whitelock later joined the Junior Theatre League and in 1933 completed the libretto for a one-act operetta Haydee, with the music composed by David Arnott. The following year he wrote, acted in and produced five one-act plays at Emerson Hall, Liverpool Street, Sydney, and in 1935 won the first heat of Radio 2SM's Amateur Night programme, writing, producing and acting in a short play Marie Antoinette. He also wrote a melodrama Death in the Triangle, produced by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC).

Inspired by watching ballet Whitelock furthered his dance training and eventually went on to work with Mischa Burlakov and Louise Lightfoot's First Australian Ballet and with Helene Kirsova's Kirsova Ballet. In 1936 with the First Australian Ballet he danced the role of Petrouchka in the first production of that ballet in Australia. At the same time he continued to work in film advertising, radio and writing. In 1939 he also published and edited the short-lived Australian Theatre News Monthly (ca. 19139).

During World War II Whitelock produced Department of Information programs for Macquarie Broadcasting and joined the ABC's light entertainment department in Adelaide. He arrived in England in the late 1940s as part of an ABC producer exchange with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In 1950 he resigned from the ABC and freelanced with the BBC as a light entertainment producer until his retirement to Australia in 1987. He then lived in Woollahra, Sydney, until his death.

Betty McLean left school at sixteen to pursue a career in journalism and worked for at both Table Talk and Sun News-Pictorial. In 1923 she married Ellis Harvey Davies and over the next ten years wrote a number of works under the name Betty M. Davies. One of her best known works, and also her first play, was The Touch of Silk. Produced by the Melbourne Repertory Theatre in 1928, it was later performed by several repertory companies and published by Melbourne University Press in 1942 (under the name Betty Roland). It was revised in 1955 and published by Currency Press in 1988, demonstrating its continuing appeal. Another early play, the one act drama, Morning was written in the late 1920s but was not staged until 1932. As such it was one of the first Australian plays to be produced by the Melbourne Little Theatre. It too was credited to Betty M. Davies.

While overseas Davies adopted the personal and professional name Betty Roland. After returning from Russia in 1935, she wrote a number of political plays under her new name. These were often performed as street theatre. She also delivered talks on both the stage and on radio during the mid-1930s, with the topics including the state of theatre in Russia, and her recollections of the country and other places she visited during her time abroad.

In 1939, disillusioned with the Communist Party and separated from the well-known communist Guido Baracchi, she began writing for radio. One of her serials, A Woman Scorned (broadcast in the 1950s), was the inspiration for the television series Return to Eden (1985). She also has the distinction of scripting Australia's first talking feature film, The Spur of the Moment (1931). During the 1940s, she lived for some time at an artistic community at Montsalvat, Victoria, before working as a freelance writer in London for most of the 1950s. After returning to Australia in 1961, she wrote a number of highly regarded children's novels. She was a founding member of the Australian Society of Authors in 1963. In 1972, she was invited back to Montsalvat to write its history, published in 1984 as The Eye of the Beholder.

Roland also wrote a number of novels during the 1970s, but she is most-admired for the three volumes of autobiography that begin with Caviar for Breakfast (1979). She published the third volume, The Devious Being, in 1990. The year before she died, Roland saw one of her early plays, 'Feet of Clay' (1928), published in the selected work, Playing the Past: Three Plays by Australian Women (1995).

Kester Baruch was the professional/writing name used by Frank Perkins between ca. 1927 and 1939. Perkins was inspired to take the name "Baruch" from Baruch ben Neriah (meaning "Blessed, son of My Candle is God" in Hebrew), a sixth century B.C. scribe, disciple, and devoted friend of the Biblical prophet Jeremiah. Baruch ben Neriah is traditionally credited with authoring the deuterocanonical Book of Baruch.

Perkins adopted the name Kester Berwich while teaching in Austria in 1939.

Lionel Shave was the son of Charles O. Shave of Colchester, England. He was educated at Scotch College and became a Melbourne advertising executive. Shave was a manager of Meyers Bros. Ltd. in Queensland 1916-1918 and opened his own advertising agency, Griffin, Shave & Russell Pty. Ltd. in Melbourne in 1920. Later he was a director of George Patterson Pty. Ltd. which incorporated his company. Parsons comments: 'Lionel Shave's plays were widely popular with amateur groups. Their content, in the manner of the lightweight commercial playwriting of the day, was unremarkable but their adept, strong craftsmanship testifies to a real flair for the theatre.' He wrote plays for stage and radio; some were broadcast overseas.

'His first play was The Parallelogram, which appeared in Adam and Eve in August, 1926,' although its form as a play was solely for literary purposes. He then began writing plays In earnestly for the Amateur Theatre In 1931, and has had two full-length productions, That's Different and Gigolo Husband. In addition, he has written about a dozen one-act plays. In 1937 he won the Bryant Playhouse play competition with That's Murder. His radio plays have been numerous, including The Resignation of Mr. Bagsworth and The Dumbles, a series of 13 episodes, for the Australian Broadcasting Commission' ('Radio Drama Week : Plays and Their Writers,' p. 2).

[Additional sources: Philip Parsons, 'Lionel Shave' in Companion to Theatre in Australia 91995), p. 526; Who's Who in Australia (1950), p. 644]

'Born In Melbourne In 1900, Mr. Peters was educated at preparatory schools, Melbourne Grammar School, and finally under private tuition. He became a teacher of physics and chemistry on the staff of the Berwick Grammar School and has specialised in child psychology. Leaving school for journalism, he held a post on the staff of the "Evening Sun" and also contributed articles to the "Age." the "Herald," and other newspapers. From 1925 to 1928 he turned his attention to other forms of literature and wrote a number of short stories which were published in English and Australian journals. He then Joined C. Alston Pearl and others in the production of a magazine of "highbrow" matter called "Stream." in 1929, through the influence of the Federal Controller of Drama for the Commission (Mr. F. Clewlow), he resumed play writing, and since then has had a number of his works produced.'

Source:

'Radio Drama Week', The Mercury, 11 May 1938, p.14.

Henrietta Drake-Brockman spent many years in the Western Australian outback with her husband, Geoffrey Drake-Brockman. She played a major role in the WA literary scene and was a Foundation Member (1938), and later President of the WA Branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. She served as a long-term committee member of Westerly magazine.

A prolific author of novels, short stories and drama, Drake-Brockman also edited several collections of fiction, and wrote in the field of literary criticism.

Her fiction had a historical focus, and explored such subjects as the pearling industry in Broome, the struggles of colonial development, the effects of World War II on Australian society, the nature of the Australian landscape and the challenges of living in the outback

George Farwell was born and educated in England. Dissatisfied with clerical work, he joined an expedition to the South Pacific in search of buried treasure. Arriving in Sydney in 1935 after the expedition failed to find treasure, Farwell took on a variety of jobs, including deckhand, casual wharf labourer and gold miner. He also began writing adventure stories for the Sydney Mail and acting in radio serials, initiating his career in the creative arts.

Farwell wrote for magazines, newspapers and radio, producing many stories, talks and documentaries for the ABC. He wrote more than twenty books, the first, Down Argent Street (1948), centred on Broken Hill, demonstrating his deep affection for the outback most apparent in Land of Mirage (1950) an account of his travels on the Birdsville Track.

Farwell was an active member of the Federation of Australian Writers and was President for one term in 1944. He also edited a number of periodicals, including New Australian Writing (1943-46), Australasian Book News and Library Journal (1946-48) and Air Travel (1949-51). During the 1950s he wrote for the Commonwealth News and Information Bureau and the Adelaide Advertiser. While in Adelaide he was the Public Relations Officer for the Adelaide Festival of Arts (1959-64).

George Farwell died in 1976, the same year that his autobiographical Rejoice in Freedom was published. His ashes were scattered on the Birdsville Track. A collection of his essays, Farwell Country, was published in 1977.

Doris Louise Waraker was the only daughter of Ernest M. Waraker, at one time the Deputy Surveyor of Queensland. She had two brothers and attended the Brisbane Grammar School. One of the school's major annual poetry prizes is the Doris Waraker (Townsend) prize, a bursary awarded for a folio of original verse by a student.

In an interview with Bernice May, Waraker revealed that she began writing while she was at school. There were no other writers in her family, but she paid tribute to her mother, who she said always helped and encouraged her. Obsessed with sport, she wrote verses about her school tennis teams and the football and cricket teams to which her brothers belonged.

After her father's death in 1916 Waraker worked in a bank until the end of World War I, at the same time contributing written pieces to newspapers. Both of her brothers had signed up and one was killed in France in 1917. While Waraker was not a war poet, the war deeply affected her and May says of her that she wrote 'some of the most poignant verse influenced by that sorrow'.

The Australasian encouraged and supported Waraker's writing from the start and eventually she was contributing articles, short stories and poetry to a wide range of publications, including The Daily Telegraph, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Mail, Smith's Weekly, Woman's World, The Bulletin and The Australian Woman's Mirror. She often relieved the editors of women's pages, sometimes for months at a time. Waraker stated she even enjoyed writing the social pages, but the one assignment she avoided was interviewing celebrities. She wrote several plays and was the drama critic for The Brisbane Telegraph until 1935 and again in the 1950s. She also freelanced for a number of papers and sometimes at the theatre would be asked who she was that night: The Courier, The Telegraph, or The Daily Mail.

On 13 December, 1926 Waraker married William Lewis Charles Townsend. The marriage did not last and Townsend married again in 1933. She appears not to have ever written under her married name.

Waraker won awards in two literary competitions. May described her as a lyric poet and one of the 'most natural' Australian writers. Hadgraft said of her that she was a poet to whom 'nature is a source of truth', as well as an 'acute and responsive' film and drama critic. Waraker herself stated that she enjoyed any kind of writing, but that her poetry was 'the best loved of my mind babies'.

Kenneth Mackenzie was the grandson of George Paterson, a member of Alexander Forrest's [1879] Kimberley expedition. He was named Kenneth Ivo Brownley Langwell by his overbearing father, Hugh. His mother Marguerite Christina Pryde Paterson (Daisy), after her divorce from Hugh, shortened the name to Kenneth Ivo. Daisy and her two children lived with her parents in South Perth until 1922 when her father bought 'The Cottage' at Pinjarra and the family moved there. Mackenzie loved the surrounding bushland and showed early promise as a musician. After the small state school at Pinjarra, he attended Guildford Grammar School and, in 1930, Muresk Agricultural College where he disliked the coursework but wrote The Young Desire It (published in 1937), with scenes reminiscent of his experiences at Guildford Grammar. He studied arts/law at the University of Western Australia for a short time.

After journalistic work for the West Australian, Mackenzie left Perth in December 1933 for Melbourne where he was lonely and unable to find employment. He moved to Sydney, on the advice of Norman Lindsay. In 1934, he married art teacher Kathleen Bartlett and they had two children, Elizabeth and Hugh. Mackenzie worked in radio and as a journalist with Smith's Weekly and ABC Weekly, before being drafted into the army in 1942. He served as an orderly room corporal in Cowra, overseeing captives in a prisoner of war camp, and later spent time in Concord army hospital. Mackenzie witnessed the mass outbreak of Japanese prisoners from Cowra - written about in his novel Dead Men Rising - withdrawn from circulation soon after its publication.

Douglas Stewart wrote in the Foreword to Selected Poems of Kenneth Mackenzie (1961): '...those of us who knew him in Sydney - I am sure I can speak for Hugh McCrae, Kenneth Slessor, Robert D. Fitzgerald, Ronald McCuaig, as well as myself; anyone who was writing verse in the forties - never doubted for a moment that he [Kenneth Mackenzie] was a poet of the first quality'. Stewart commented on the fastidiousness of form and phrase and the exceptional command of technique in Mackenzie's poetry.

Mackenzie was the recipient of a succession of Commonwealth Literary Fund fellowships. According to sources including the Bulletin (17 May 1939, p.18 ), he used the name Seaforth MacKenzie for his fiction because his publisher, Jonathan Cape, 'already had a Kenneth MacKenzie writing for him.' The Bulletin (23 August 1950) recorded : 'He signs them [his novels] Seaforth Mackenzie, keeping Kenneth Mackenzie for his poems', because he wanted to keep his two reputations, as a poet and as a novelist, separate. In the last years of his life, troubled by ongoing employment problems and alcoholism, he lived at Kurrajong, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, attempted subsistence farming, gardened and wrote. 'In his last novel the farm cited as the retreat for the fated one was undoubtedly his own domicile' (The Bulletin, Red Page, 23 March 1955). He died by drowning at Tallong Creek near Goulburn, in an incident foreshadowed in a poem, 'Heat', first published in the Bulletin in February 1939. He left behind unpublished manuscripts of short stories, radio plays and two novels. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature asserts that his later poetry achieved 'a controlled tranquility and compassion'.

Melbourne-based radio script-writer, Katherine Burns died in mid-1938. Little else is  known of her life. Her final play was Ani's Mountain, which received praise from critics and was revived later in 1938.

Dallas George Stivens was the son of Francis Harold Stivens, an accountant and later a bank manager, and Jane Stivens nee Abbott. He grew up in the central west of New South Wales. The Depression prevented his parents affording a university education, therefore Stivens left school for employment in a bank in 1928. From 1934 on, some of his early writings appeared in Australian newspapers and journals. After the publication of his first book, The Tramp and Other Stories, by Macmillan (London) in 1936, Stivens became a freelance journalist. His social realist stories were largely triggered by his childhood experience of the bush and his father's stories of the shearing sheds and itinerant workers. An experimental novel, Well Anyway, about life in country towns during the Depression, was completed in 1939 but was not published until 2012. From 1939 to 1942 Stivens worked for the Sydney Daily Telegraph.

Stivens joined the Australian army in 1942 and served in the Army Education Service, editing and writing pamphlets, until his discharge in 1944. Later that year he joined the Department of Information, writing about sport and literature and producing an Australiana column. While with the Department Stivens was seconded as press officer to the federal Labor minister, Arthur Calwell, writing the text of the book How Many Australians Tomorrow? In 1949 Stivens took up the position of press officer at Australia House in London, but resigned in 1950 to pursue a career as a fulltime writer. A Commonwealth Literary Fund grant in 1951 enabled Stivens to work on a collection of short stories, published later as The Gambling Ghost and Other Tales. Stivens remained in England until 1958 and published many short stories in magazines such as the Times Literary Supplement and the Observer. While in London Stivens began writing special interest articles on natural history and travel for American and European magazines.

His connection with the British Society of Authors led Stivens to lobby for a similar organisation in Australia. In 1963 he became the foundation president of the Australian Society of Authors, writing its first book on publishing contracts and campaigning for the establishment of Public Lending Rights. This was not his only political campaign as he went on to oppose conscription and the Vietnam War as well as being active on conservation issues.

Stivens's fiction is widely admired for its humour and descriptions of the bush, especially his tall tales and cricketing stories. He also employed the genre of the adult animal fable to explore issues relating to human inadequacies and failure. In the 1970s Stivens also built a reputation as a painter.

(Principal source: Harry Heseltine, 'Dal Stivens 1911-1997' Australian Writers, 1915-1950)

Dymphna Cusack was a courageous social reformer in mid-twentieth century Australia and an activist for world peace from 1949 until her death in 1981. Her books and plays dealt with the dominant political issues of the times as they were refracted through the lives of ordinary people.

A 1925 Sydney University Arts graduate with honours in History and the new discipline of Psychology, Cusack taught in high schools across NSW for almost two decades. In 1936 she was appointed one of the first Vocational Guidance Counsellors at Sydney Girls' High School; from 1928 her plays (and poems) won prizes and were broadcast on radio; her first novel Jungfrau was published in 1936. Her "tall poppy" status inevitably brought detractors and in December 1939, following her victory in a groundbreaking Workers' Compensation case against the NSW Department of Education, Cusack was transferred to a supernumerary position at Bathurst High School. Her collaborator (Pioneers on Parade, 1939) and mentor Miles Franklin advised her to look at it as "a grand chance to turn the tables", which she did with her classic female staff-room bitchiness play Morning Sacrifice.

In 1944 Cusack's fragile health collapsed and she was pensioned out of the Education Department. She retreated to the Blue Mountains with her friend of undergraduate days, Florence James, visiting home after a decade in Europe. They did a test-run collaboration with a children's book before launching into their expose of Sydney during WWII, the thousand pound prizewinning novel Come In Spinner. In 1947 James returned to London; Cusack revised the manuscript, extracted the prize-money from the Daily Telegraph and in June 1949 departed for Europe. That September financial journalist and leading CPA member Norman Freehill joined her in London and they began a peripatetic lifestyle, writing, publishing and living on their royalties in England, France, Asia and Eastern Europe.

In 1954 Cusack's anti-bomb play Pacific Paradise caught the zeitgeist and was played internationally. In 1956 it took them to China where Freehill ran the Foreign Languages Press in Peking for three years. They returned to Australia to live in 1972 and in 1973 Cusack was awarded a life literary pension. In 1975 she founded the Manly branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. The autobiographical travelogue Dymphna by Norman Freehill with Dymphna Cusack was published in 1976, the same year Cusack refused an OBE. Increasingly disabled with multiple sclerosis symptoms she continued to travel to Asia and the Pacific, and to South America in 1980.

Manning Clark wrote to Cusack on 23 June 1980: "I hope by now a whole host of people has told you of their debt to you. I am one of your debtors, and you can think of the work in Australian History as being in part the product of your example." Cusack was awarded the Order of Australia just prior to her death on 19 October 1981.

Educated at De La Salle College, Armidale (New South Wales) and the Marist Brothers' College, Darlinghurst (Sydney), Richard Barry was said to have been inspired by ambition to become a writer from an early age. His works began to appear in various newspapers and periodicals from his early twenties.

Barry died in July 1937, shortly after completing his only play, The Jackaroo. It was was soon afterwards purchased by the Australian Broadcasting Commission and given its first broadcast in early January 1938. The play's popularity saw it revived a few months later as part of the ABC's 1938 Radio Drama Week.

[Source: 'Radio Drama Week : Untimely Death of Young Playwright.' The Mercury 12 May 1938, 3.

Born in Queensland, E. V. Timms moved to Western Australia with his family where he was educated at Fremantle Boys School under the future Lieutentant General Thomas Blamey. He completed his education in Sydney and studied electrical engineering before enlisting in the AIF. He was promoted to lieutenant on 15 March 1915 but was wounded during the Gallipoli landing and invalided home. He married in 1916 and took up a soldier-settler block. Farming life was not successful for Timms, and so he moved to Sydney to become a businessman. Encouraged by his wife, he took up writing and published his first short story in Smith's Weekly. Soon after, he completed his first novel, The Blue Pool Mystery (1924), and published a number of books of adventure and humour in the late 1920s. Timms was a very competent writer of popular romance and collaborated with the film producer Charles Chauvel on a number of scripts during the 1930s, including Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940). He also produced many short stories and radioplays and a number of very popular historical romances set in seventeenth century Europe.

Timms re-enlisted for World War II, attaining the rank of major by 1943. He served in Australian Garrison batallions and was a commandant at the Cowra prisoner of war compound during the Japanese breakout in August 1944. His order to fire on the prisoners was closely scrutinised at a military court of inquiry. He gave an account of his decision in 'Bloodbath at Cowra', published in As You Were (1946).

After the war, Timms began writing his Great South Land Saga, completing Forever to Remain in 1948. In the tradition of his seventeenth century historical romances, this series of novels told the story of early Australian settlement up to the mid nineteenth century. Timms had completed ten novels by the late 1950s, but poor health made completing the planned twelve volumes very difficult. He died in June 1960, leaving The Big Country incomplete. His wife, Alma, took on the job of completing the novel. It was published in 1962 and her novel Time and Chance (1971) served to complete the Great South Land Saga. Timms's novels have recently attracted cultural critics exploring the representation of race in Australian fiction, but his reputation as a writer of fiction has not endured. Nevertheless, in 1975 the mass-market publisher Pyramid Books reissued most of the books in Timms's Saga for American readers and a British mini-series, Luke's Kingdom (1976), directed by Peter Weir, was inspired by these books.

Lynn Foster wrote for radio and television in both Australia and Britain. She was the first Australian woman radio producer and serial writer.

Foster said in a 1937 interview that she had submitted her first novel to a publisher when she was 16; asked to re-write and re-submit it in six months' time, she instead burnt it on a re-read ('Radio Stars ... and Their Ambitions'), and moved towards drama.

By the age of 22, Foster was one of three permanent dramatists employed by 2GB to write for their in-house B.S.A. Players: the others were John Appleton and Eric Mason Wood ('New Radio Plays'). At that stage, she told Australian Women's Weekly, she had 'already written hundreds of dramas', and her current roles meant she might 'write three or four plays day by day' ('Every Day Brings Another Play'). In the same interview, Foster mentioned beginning her career by working as assistant stage manager, in props, and as a prompter, as a means of learning to be a playwright. For her early work with 2GB, she adapted overseas works (including the Professor Fordney stories by American writer Austin Ripley) and wrote original scripts (for example, 1937's Life Stories of the Stars, a series of short biographies of actors).

In the late 1930s, Foster moved to stage production, beginning with Keith Winter's Worse Things Happen at Sea, which she produced for the Sydney Players' Club at St James Hall in November 1937 ('"Art-Arties" Satirised'). She retained a strong interest in drama, writing for the stage and winning drama awards, although her radio work far outstripped her stagework in terms of overall quantity. She was also involved with Doris Fitton's Independent Theatre from c.1936, writing one-act plays alongside such dramatists as Sumner Locke Elliott. Her radio work influenced her stage work. In 1938, for example, the Independent Theatre produced, on the same night, two one-act plays by Foster: the domestic drama Tension and the comedy Radio Ex-Tension; the latter depicted, on stage, attempts to produce a radio version of Tension.

She also worked as a script-writer for 2GB's sister station 2UE in Sydney (beginning with the serial Nothing Ever Happens in 1938), as a freelancer, and, for four years, as a writer for Lux Radio Theatre, for which she largely adapted American plays to Australian settings ('Visitor from Sydney').

In 1938, Foster wrote the twice-weekly series Sacrifice, based on stories of sacrifice by people such as Captain Lawrence Oates, Marie Curie, Father Damien, Edith Cavell, and Cecil Rhodes ('New Series').

During World War II, Foster served on the entertainments committee of the Australian Women's Weekly Club for Servicewomen, alongside chair Mrs A. Shelton Smith and fellow members Lorna Alford (of the ABC) and Sylvia Tree ('Our Club'). She also wrote propaganda for local radio, including Adolf in Blunderland (based on a BBC play of the same name) and The Radio that Hitler Fears.

By the 1940s, Foster was working more heavily in production than in writing. In 1946, Foster wrote and produced the serial Crossroads of Life, a drama that attracted attention for its focus on social issues (rather than that melodramatic and emotional plots that contemporary critics of daytime radio serials–designed for women audiences–deplored). In an interview, Foster noted:

'Cross- roads' itself is important in the lives of thousands of women listeners all over Australia, and consequently it can be assumed that the serial and my message it may have to convey would have quite a considerable effect on Its listeners. Therefore, my attitude is that it should do some good In the community as well as entertain listeners. For this reason I have always retained my main interest in some important social problem, which is worked out on the air through the 'Crossroads' characters.' ('Crossroads of Life')

In this sense, Crossroads of Life was a forerunner to Foster's later television work in Divorce Court and The Unloved.

Foster's output as a writer and producer was prodigious. In 1947 alone, the radio programs she produced included Mr and Mrs North, Doctors Courageous (which she also wrote) and the sequel Drama of Medicine, Big Sister (a serial that she also adapted), the Nyal Radio Playhouse, and A Case for Cleveland ('Visitor from Sydney'). A Grace Gibson Productions show, the Nyal Radio Playhouse was based on American anthology radio series The First Nighter, and largely produced American plays that had not been previously produced in Australia ('Nyal Radio Playhouse').

Foster relocated to London in 1948, settling in the popular Dolphin Square flats (also home to other Australian expatriate writers, including Rex Rienits ('Talented Australians'). Her work in London included radio and television scripts for the BBC: she adapted work by British writers (including Ronald Gow's Ma's Bit o' Brass) and fellow expat Australians (including Dorothy Blewett's Quiet Night, and wrote original scripts, including radio play Mine Own Vineyard, standalone television play A Perfect Stranger, and the television-play cycle The Exiles.

Australian newspapers reported in 1949 that Doris Fitton (with whom Foster had worked at the Independent Theatre) might follow her successful London run of Australian Bill Gates' The Earth Remains with a play by Foster, but no such production eventuated ('Film News from Overseas').

Sources:

'"Art-Arties" Satirised', Sydney Morning Herald, 1 December 1937, p.12.

'Crossroads of Life', National Advocate, 6 September 1947, p.3.

'Every Day Brings Another Play : Sydney Girl's High-speed Job', Australian Women's Weekly, 31 October 1936, p.38.

'Film News from Overseas', Sunday Times, 4 December 1949, p.20.

'New Radio Plays', Sunday Mail, 30 August 1936, p.8.

'New Series of Stirring Radio Drama of Sacrifice', Australian Women's Weekly, 10 September 1938, p.26.

'"Nyal Radio Playhouse" Brings Brilliant Drama to 2CH', Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate, 17 January 1945, p.11.

'Our Club for Servicewomen Opens This Week', Australian Women's Weekly, 16 January 1943, p.12.

'Radio Stars ... and Their Ambitions', Australian Women's Weekly, 11 September 1937, p.46.

'Talented Australians in London', Sun, 31 August 1948, p.11.

'Visitor from Sydney – Writes and Produces Plays for Radio', Examiner, 7 January 1947, p.5.

Composer, librettist, music director, musician.

The son of Harry Whaite, one of Australia's leading scenic artists during the late 1890s and early twentieth century, Fred Whaite established himself in the Australian variety industry as a music director and composer. He studied piano as a youth under Henri Kowalski and gained his orchestral training with Gustave Slapoffski. Showing an early liking for operatic composition, he was encouraged and assisted by J. C. Williamson's music director Andrew MacCunn and Thomas A. Ricketts. Two of his earliest compositions to be published were 'The Coronation: Grand Galop de Concert' (1907) and 'Golden Wattle Schottische' (ca. 1909). Between 1906 and 1909 Whaite was largely associated with the British Pianoforte Depot in Sydney, being engaged as the society's pianist for its series of regular Apollo recitals.

After moving to Maitland NSW for a few years to lead a local orchestra, Whaite began his association with the variety industry, working initially for Edward Branscombe (as pianist for his Orange Dandies troupe), and then Fullers Theatres. His first opera, Carmelita (based on a Spanish story), was staged in Melbourne in 1918 under the auspices of the Fullers and J. and N. Tait. The works is said to have been praised by Fritz Hart, then director of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (ctd. Brisbane Courier 4 June 1920, p.12).

Whaite's name is next identified with Walter Johnson's Town Topics, which began an extended season under John N. McCallum at the Cremorne Theatre, Brisbane, from 16 August 1919. In addition to his duties as pianist/music director and arranger, he also regularly contributed songs and ballet music. During his time in Brisbane (1919 - ca. 1922), Whaite played a significant role in disseminating the jazz music craze, which the Brisbane Courier records had recently reached the Queensland capital after finding much popularity in England and America. 'The orchestra, under Mr Fred Whaite,' writes the paper's theatre critic, 'will take a most important part, as the members not only play the jazz music but will also sway their bodies to the rhythm of the music, and the drum and other special features are most startling' (27 September 1919, p.12).

Whaite also wrote the music for a number of burlesques, musical comedies, musical scenas, and sketches, including Punchinello (1919, musical comedy), Robinson Crusoe (pantomime, 1919, with Elton Black), In Amsterdam (comic opera, 1920), Lavender Time (musical comedy, 1920), The Girl of Seville (comic opera, 1921, co-written with Walter Johnson), and The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe (pantomime, 1921, co-written with Billy Maloney).

Whaite and his family left Brisbane in 1923, returning to Melbourne to work as music director for the Fullers. While there he also director the music for Hugh J. Ward's 1924 Christmas pantomime Cinderella, which was staged at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne, beginning 20 December. Brought direct from the London Hippodrome, and produced in association with Fullers' Theatres, Cinderella featured among its Australian cast members such performers as Moon and Morris, Dinks Paterson, Trixie Ireland, and Clivalli's Miniature Circus.

Although much of Whaite's career during the remainder of the 1920s is still to be determined, it is believed that he remained with the Fullers until 1929, at which time he joined the ABC as a music arranger and performer. Between 1930 and 1934, for example, he regularly appeared as a novelty pianist on Sydney stations 2FC and 2BL, with these often being relayed around the country on the ABC network. The 1930s also him write and direct the music for a number of radio dramas - notably The Tin Soldier (1931, musical comedy) and Waratah (1931, pantomime) - as well as leading his own radio vaudeville company and orchestra. In addition to this he collaborated (as composer) on the Clipper and Brown comedy detective radio series with author John 'Jock' Macleod.

Fred Whaite remained with the ABC until his retirement in 1962. He died in 1964. Known to have written countless songs throughout his career, at least twenty-five songs are known to have been published, including 'Rose of My Dreams' (1924), 'My Wollondilly Home' (1925, with John Moore), 'Into the Barrel' (1940, which he dedicated to the Red Cross), 'In-doo-roo-pilly' (1940, with Billy Maloney), 'I'm Cutting up the Rainbow' (ca. 1947), and 'The Little Green Wood' (1953, with John Wheeler). Whaite also reportedly wrote two radio plays in collaboration with S. D. Douglas - Kabula Love Song and Moon

Over Mexico. No production or broadcast details have yet been located for either work.

Barclay was the author of several radio plays. She wrote the lyrics of 'There's Going To Be Good News,' music by Varney Monk (1942). She also collaborated with her husband Edmund Barclay in the writing of the musical play The Cedar Tree and other works.

Born in India, Joan Harvey was the daughter of Colonel Alexander Cox and Georgina Kate Butler, both of Tasmania. She spent her early years in Hobart but completed her education in Switzerland and England during 1898 and 1901. On returning to Hobart, she developed her talents for writing and for painting in water colours.

In 1914 she again sailed for England where she married Adelaide engineer Ronald Harvey. She moved with her husband to Melbourne in 1919, and as well as bringing up a family of five children she continued to paint and to write stories, poems and plays. Her greatest love was writing plays, many of which were produced by repertory groups in Melbourne. Two were broadcast by the ABC. Most of her plays have been deposited in manuscript form with the State Library of Victoria.

In the 1960s, when nearly blind with glaucoma, she began writing her memoirs. These were subsequently published for family distribution under her chosen title, The Shadow of the Guns.

Her son Jim Y. Harvey has also published several books.

Occasional playwright.

Leonore Drexler's play, Beauty's Lure, was one of the scripts retained by the ABC after their 1934 competition for original plays by Australian writers: it did not win one of the prizes, but was retained for production, and broadcast in conjunction with a play by George Landen Dann.

It is not clear whether Drexler wrote any other plays.

According to occasional notes in contemporary newspapers, her primary work was with the Victorian Tourism Bureau.

See 'Listening Post' (Barrier Daily Truth, 14 May 1941, p.5) for information on Fuller's use of the name.