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)

Born in Melbourne in 1944, Damien Broderick attended Monash University where he co-edited the student newspaper Lot's Wife. He holds a PhD from Deakin University in the comparative semiotics of science and literature, with particular attention to science fiction. He had a brief career in journalism before becoming a full-time writer, mainly of science fiction. Broderick's strong Catholic upbringing and his hunger for SF were the two major influences in his early life that propelled him into a career as a fiction writer. He has become one of the leading writers of Australian SF, which can stand for science fiction or Broderick's preferred term, speculative fiction. His work has been widely anthologised in Australian and overseas publications.

Among Broderick's many published works are the novels Sorcerer's World (1970), The Dreaming Dragons (1980), The Judas Mandala (1982), Transmitters (1984), The Dark Between the Stars (1991) and The Book of Revelation (1999). His novels depend on complex plots involving several forms of time travel and parallel or altered realities. The Dreaming Dragons was runner-up in the worldwide John W Campbell Memorial Prize for science fiction. The White Abacus (1997) is a futuristic version of Shakespeare's Hamlet. He has collaborated with Rory Barnes, a colleague from Monash student days, on several publications including Valencies (1983) and Zones (1997).

His non-fiction includes The Architecture of Babel (1994), which gives his view of post-structuralist literary and cultural theory, finding it to be in tension with the philosophy of scientific realism. A stronger critique of this theory can be found in Theory and Its Discontents (1997). He has also written The Spike : Accelerating into the Unimaginable Future (1997), a closely argued exposition about how our lives are being changed by rapidly advancing technologies and The Last Mortal Generation (1999).

Broderick, who has been awarded many fellowships and writing grants has been described as 'the enfant terrible' of Australian SF, taking the genre to the boundaries of its imaginative potential.

Broderick has lived in San Antonio, Texas.

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.

Radio script-writer.

In 1943, she co-wrote a radio play with Edmund Barclay. His first marriage having collapsed, Hollyer moved with Barclay to Woy Woy, where they collaborated on several radio works; Hollyer continued to write for the ABC after Barclay's productivity fell away.

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.

Alec Coppel was born Alexander Coppel in Melbourne, the son of Maurice Coppel, a Melbourne-born financier, and Elizabeth Coppell, nee Affleck. He had a brother Albert and a sister Sarah Amelia.

He attended Wesley College, where he was involved in the Wesley College Dramatic Society: a newspaper report from 1925 notes,

'Special praise is due to those boys who took the parts of female characters in the plays presented by the Wesley College Dramatic Society, in the Playhouse. There was a large attendance, and the clever handling of the different situations was enjoyed by the audience. In "Help, Help," by Mr. Sewell Collins, the principal parts were played by Alec Coppel and Grant McIntyre, supported by James Blake and John Busat, who also took a leading part in Miss Gertrude Jennings's piece, "In the Cellar." The chief characters in Mr. A.A. Milne's "Wurzel-Flummery" were portrayed by Alec Coppel and Walter Scott.'

Source: 'Wesley Dramatic Society', The Argus, 26 August 1925, p.15.

In 1927, he went to England, intending to study medicine at Cambridge, but did not complete his studies, and instead began to write.

From the earliest days of his professional writing career, Coppel worked across multiple formats: his earliest produced play (Short Circuit) appeared onstage in 1935, and his first screenplay was filmed in 1937. This prepared the way for a career that exploited the possibilities of the many formats available to writers, as Coppel turned novels into plays, plays into radio scripts and films, films into novels, and short stories into television.

His first major success was the comic thriller I Killed the Count (1937), which was a West End success and played extended seasons in Australia and the United States. The play is typical of the textual intricacies that mark Coppel's career. Coppel novelised it in 1939, and adapted it for film twice himself (in 1948 and 1956). It was also adapted twice more by other writers: once for film (in 1939) and once as part of the anthology television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents (in 1957).

Between 1937 and 1940, Coppel had a number of other plays staged in London and on the English provincial theatre circuits, as well as writing films.

Coppel returned to Australia in 1940, to work as a theatrical director in Melbourne (directing Marie Ney in a series of pieces for J.C. Williamson Theatres). In Australia, he struck up a friendship and business partnership with actor Kathleen Robinson: the two co-founded Whitehall Theatrical Productions, which staged their plays in the Minerva Theatre, Sydney.

Coppel worked as director and producer for Whitehall Productions for three years, from 1941, staging a wide range of plays (see Stephen Vagg for more details). He also continued to write: one of the plays he staged was his own Mr Smart Guy (1941)–which, in his typical fashion, he adapted for the screen (in 1951) after he returned to the UK. He also produced works on a smaller scale during this period: the radio drama A Rum Affair, for example, was broadcast on the ABC in 1940.

His other involvements with Australian radio in this period included contributions to the long-running Macquarie Radio Theatre (which aired Sunday nights, 8pm, on 2GB): he was appointed to the position of producer for the series in late 1941, and newspaper articles announcing his appointment described him as 'the man who as dramatist and producer has been responsible for the rebirth of the Australian theatre over the past 12 months' (Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate, 17 December 1941, p.12).

Coppel severed his ties with Whitehall Theatrical Productions in April 1944, and shortly thereafter returned to England, where he returned to writing playscripts and novels, but also increased his involvement with the film industry.

He wrote a succession of thrillers and crime-comedies for British film producers and the burgeoning television industry, many of them based on his own plays (as with Two on the Tiles, filmed in 1951 and adapted from a 1939 play Believe It or Not) and novels (as with Mr Denning Drives North, filmed in 1952 from a 1950 novel).

His most successful film (or, at least, his most successful film unaccompanied by controversy) came in 1953: the Alec Guiness vehicle The Captain's Paradise, which made Coppel the first Australian writer to be nominated for an Oscar (for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story). Typically of Coppel, he later turned the story into a play.

In 1958, while Coppel was working in the United States, came the biggest film with which he was associated: Vertigo. But Coppel was the middle of three script-writers (all playwrights, and the other two American writers) to work on that project, and he had to lodge a protest with the Screen Writers Guild to gain a writing credit for the script, which would otherwise have been credited solely to Samuel A. Taylor.

Hollywood was also the site of Coppel's biggest success since I Killed the Count: the humourous thriller The Gazebo had been first produced onstage in New York, and was to enjoy an extended run in London in 1960. In the interim, it was filmed as a successful comedy starring Glenn Ford and Debbie Reynolds. (So successful was The Gazebo that it was later to be filmed once in West Germany and twice in France.)

Coppel's final credits were for the so-called 'sex comedies' The Bliss of Mrs Blossom (1968) and The Statue (1971).

He died in early 1972.

Writer and journalist Erle Cox was best-known for his 1925 novel, Out of the Silence, which has been described as 'a classic work of science fiction. Set in rural Australia, it tells the story of a young vigneron who discovers, buried beneath his land, a huge sphere containing the culture and technology of a past civilization. Cox began to write the book about 1916 but had shaped the idea for it earlier - "pacing up and down the St Kilda sands". At first he was unable to find a publisher but in 1919 the Argus printed the story in weekly instalments between 19 April and 25 October'. Heralding 'its appearance in Melbourne in book form', the Australasian declared: '"No more successful serial story has been published in Australia"'.

For over twenty years, he worked extensively as a film critic, primarily for the Argus and the Australasian. When he died in 1950, his obituary in the Argus noted that 'For 32 years he was a leading figure in Melbourne journalism, and for 17 of those years he wrote, in a style he made his own, pungent criticisms of motion pictures for The Argus and The Australasian.'

Sources:

Australian Dictionary of Biography entry for Erle Cox.

'Death of "The Chiel",' The Argus, 21 November 1950, p.6.

Name under which Striped Holes was originally broadcast on Australian radio, according to contemporary newspaper radio guides.

Born in England, G.K. Saunders graduated from New Zealand's University of Canterbury, before going to work with radio station 3ZD Christchurch.

In 1939, Saunders and his wife emigrated to Australia, where he was introduced to ABC Federal Controller of Productions Frank Clewlow. Clewlow was, at that time, recruiting staff for the ABC's Argonauts Club and the companion program, Children's Session. Begun in Melbourne in 1933, the Argonauts Club ran on ABC radio in Melbourne until 1934, when its creator, Nina Murdoch, moved to Adelaide. It was revived in 1941 as a segment of the nationally broadcast (excluding Western Australia) Children's Session (which would be re-named Children's Hour in 1954, and run under that name until 1972).

Saunders wrote scripts regularly for the Children's Session and for the Macquarie Radio Network's Lux Radio Theatre, until he was recruited into the CSIRO with Australia's entry into World War II. He continued to write scripts during the war years, but in far smaller quantities.

After the war, he was able to concentrate on radio scripts again, including a succession of science-fiction serials for the Children's Hour in the 1950s. The names of these serials are difficult to locate, but his output certainly included 1953's The Moon Flower, which science-fiction writer Bruce Gillespie decribes as follows:

'A radio serial begins. It is called The Moon Flower, and is written by G. K. Saunders. In that serial, a group of what sound like fairly ordinary people take off in a rocket and travel to the moon. After much exploring, they find, at the very bottom of the deepest cave on the Moon, one tiny flower. We know now that that is unlikely; but in 1952 scientists still thought there might be some form of life on the Moon.

It is hard to describe the impact that that serial had on me. For a start, it was presented as being based on 'real science'. The serial was often slowed down for little lectures on travelling in free fall in space, or the extreme temperatures on the Moon, and stuff like that. It was all new to me. And then it offered at its end that thrill of discovering a tiny piece of life on the Moon - in an era when few people expected humans to travel in space until the year 2000'. ('The Pleasures of Reading Science Fiction').

Of Saunders's other serials, Gillespie only says:

'I could find almost nothing in print that gave me the same thrill except for further G. K. Saunders serials on the ABC during the 1950s. In one of them, its main characters make the first trip to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, and there find a planet filled with people much like ourselves - who have never invented music. I've never met this idea in any other SF story. Again I felt the thrill of coming across ideas that nobody around me would ever have considered - that the world, our civilisation, might be entirely different from the way we expect it to be. ('The Pleasures of Reading Science Fiction)'.

There is also some suggestion that Saunders's successful television serial The Stranger began as a radio serial on the Children's Hour.

In 1957, Saunders and his wife moved to England, where he worked as a television script-writer for the BBC. He continued to write for the ABC, however, including the 400-episode serial The Nomads, about a family travelling around Europe by caravan. Successful as the program was, politician Sir Wilfred Kent Hughes openly derided it (in a speech to the Ballarat Young Liberals) as Communist propaganda.

Little is known of the extent of Saunders' writing for the BBC, though he is credited with the radio plays 'A Touch of the Sun' (1962), 'Blood Test' (1965), 'The Nightwatchman' (1965), and 'The Man for the Job' (1972) (see 'Lost Radio Plays'). It is unclear whether or not these are speculative fiction.

He also wrote the television serials The Stranger (1964-1966) and Wandjina! (1966) for the ABC.

Further Reference

'From Mickey Mouse Directly to Drug-taking: The Wreck of the ABC's Argonauts Club'. Interview with John Appleton, former producer of the Argonauts Club and former Director of Children's Programming, ABC. MidstLifeCrisis (http://midstlifecrisis.blogspot.com.au/2010/08/from-mickey-mouse-directly-to-drugs.html). (Sighted: 10/10/2012)

Gillespie, Bruce. 'The Pleasures of Reading Science Fiction'. Originally given as a talk to the Spaced Out meeting, Sat. 15 Feb. 2003. Spaced Out (http://spacedoutinc.org/DU-15/PleasuresOfReadingSF.html). (Sighted: 10/10/2012)

'G.K. Saunders'. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_K_Saunders). (Sighted: 10/10/2012)

'Lost Radio Plays'. Radio Plays and Radio Drama (http://www.suttonelms.org.uk/RADIO1.HTML). (Sighted: 10/10/2012)

Linda Neil is a Brisbane writer, musician, and script writer. She has taught Creative Writing at The University of Queensland.

Neil is the author of two memoirs: Learning to Breathe (2009) and All is Given (2016). She has also written highly awarded radio documentaries, including The Asylum Seekers (2004: shortlisted for the United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Awards), The Sound of Blue (2008: awarded a Bronze Medal at the New York Festival), and The Long Walk of Brother Benedict (2011: awarded a Gold medal at the New York Festival and nominated for best documentary script at the 2011 AWGIEs).

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]

Marien Oulton Dreyer was the daughter of New Zealand-born surveyor-turned-journalist Joseph Dreyer and his second wife wife Mary Oulton.

Joseph Dreyer married Mary Oulton sometime between 1906 (when his first wife died) and 1911 (when Marien was born), and after his move from Northam, Western Australia, to Mornington, Victoria, where he took up farming and agricultural reporting. Some (but it seems not all) of his eight children from his first marriage accompanied him in the move; two of his sons drowned in the farm's dam in 1915, and Joseph Dreyer himself died unexpectedly of cerebro-spinal meningitis in 1916, during an outbreak in the area.

Marien Dreyer and her mother remained in the Mornington area until at least 1919, when Marien's younger brother John Joseph Oulton Dreyer died aged four ('In Memoriam', The Argus, 7 October 1922, p.11). By 1921, Marien and her mother were living in Melbourne, where Mary Dreyer was working as a housekeeper at the Exford Hotel; it was here that Marien suffered the injury that led to the amputation of her leg (see note below). She was at this time ten years old.

At some point, Dreyer's mother remarried and had a third child: when she died in February 1952, she was listed as Mary Oulton Connolly, mother of Marien Dreyer, Jack Dreyer (deceased), and Noel Connolly ('Deaths', Argus, 4 February 1952, p.14).

The Australian Dictionary of Biography notes that Dreyer left school at fourteen, worked as a stenographer, and eventually moved to Sydney. She was back in Melbourne by 1940, where she was working as a telephonist at 6th Division AIF Headquarters; in an interview given to the Australian Women's Weekly at this time, she notes that during a two-and-a-half-year period in Sydney, she held sixteen jobs, including telephonist at the Sydney Sesqui-centenary Board ('Young Girl is Guardian of Army H.Q.', Australian Women's Weekly, 17 February 1940, p.30).

One obituary notes that Dreyer published her first story, in Smith's Weekly at age sixteen ('Author and Kings Cross Campaigner', Sydney Morning Herald, 18 January 1980, p.5), but it was during the war that her output really accelerated: her short stories appeared in newspapers in Melbourne and Sydney. She and husband Rodney Beaumont Lovell Cooper returned to Sydney in 1940, where they settled in an apartment in Kings Cross.

Dreyer continued to publish short stories, as well as beginning to write for the stage and for radio. Her best-known play, perhaps, is Bandicoot on a Burnt Ridge, which won first prize in the Sydney Journalists' Club competition in 1964. Among her other plays were the 'adult fairy tale' Wish No More and the three short plays performed as one show in 1959: Charlie Was There, The Power of a Woman, and Two of a Kind. Among her radio plays were Diary of a Lonely Only and The House that Walked by Itself.

Dreyer was also involved in early Australian television: contemporary reports note that is was she who sold production company NLT the idea for The Unloved, which subsequently ran for 210 episodes (see Nan Musgrove's articles in Further Reading below). The National Film and Sound Archive holds correspondence relating to the production of the series, almost all of which is by Marien Dreyer, suggesting that she had an active and ongoing role in the series.

In the 1950s, Dreyer became particularly active in local community matters, especially to do with development around the Kings Cross area: she remained involved with the Kings Cross Protection Society for many years, and became a prolific writer of letters to the newspaper on local matters. For many years, she also wrote a weekly column in New Idea.

Dreyer died in 1980, and one of her obituaries credited her with 'about 4000 short stories and many plays' ('Author and Kings Cross Campaigner', Sydney Morning Herald, 18 January 1980, p.5). Many of her works are still being traced.

More information on Dreyer can be found in the note field below.

Further Reading:

• Musgrove, Nan. 'Like a Bird in a Golden Cage', Australian Women's Weekly, 24 January 1968, p.17.

• Musgrove, Nan. 'TCN9 Seeks Young Talent', Australian Women's Weekly, 10 January 1968, p.17.

• 'Young Girl is Guardian of Army H.Q.', Australian Women's Weekly, 17 February 1940, p.30.

Gina Schien was born to parents from West Germany. She grew up in a migrant hostel in Maroubra, Sydney. Schien studied Professional Writing and Women's Literature as part of a Bachelor of Arts (Communications) degree at the New South Wales Institute of Technology. She has worked as a journalist at the National Times and wrote the text for the photography / travel book Billington's Sydney (2004).

Schien's short fiction has been published in several Australian journals and anthologies, and she interviewed women rock musicians for Missing in Action : Australian Popular Music in Perspective, Volume 1 (1987). Her play, 'Relative Comfort', was first performed at the New Theatre, Sydney, in 1999. Another of her plays, 'Charlie's Window', was performed at the Newtown Theatre, Sydney in 2007.

'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.

Ruth Park spent her childhood in isolated regions of the North Island of New Zealand. Neither her family nor her school provided much access to books but Park read newspapers and other miscellaneous forms of print. She was exposed to extreme poverty during the Great Depression and to the diverse cultures of the Maori and the European settlers. Her education was provided by St. Joseph's nuns in the convents of Te Kuiti and Auckland. Many were Australians who engendered positive feelings in her towards the country. Her first employment was with the Auckland Star and it was in their offices that she met the Australian writer Eve Langley (q.v.) in 1940. In the late 1930s she was corresponding with the young Australian writer D'Arcy Niland (q.v.) and visited him in Sydney in 1940.

After her plans to move to the United States were thwarted by the outbreak of war with Japan, Park departed for Australia in 1942 and married D'Arcy Niland. Determined to make a living from freelance writing, they wrote in many different forms, including short stories, radio plays, westerns, romances and many more. Despite the prolific output, only a fraction of what they wrote was sold. In her survey of Park's work (Ruth Park: A Celebration), Joy Hooton (q.v.) wrote: 'The vast extent of Park's unpublished work (probably 30 to 40 adult plays and 5000 children's scripts) and the ephemeral nature of some of it, as well as her frequent collaborations with Niland before his death in 1967, means that no bibliography can hope to do justice to her output.'

Park and Niland lived for some time in the slum area of Surry Hills in Sydney, providing Park with first-hand experience of extreme poverty, domestic violence and unhealthy surroundings. While visiting her family in New Zealand, Park drew on this experience to write The Harp in the South, submitting it in the 1946 Sydney Morning Herald competition. After winning the £2000 first prize, Park's writing was in much demand and The Harp in the South became a bestseller in Australia and overseas.

Park is also well-known as a children's writer, most notably with the Muddle-Headed Wombat series, first produced on radio, and published regularly in book form between 1962 and 1981. She wrote many more novels, children's books, histories, guides to Sydney, and a biography of Les Darcy. One of her earliest publications was Der Goldene Bumerang (The Golden Boomerang), a descriptive book about Australia translated and published in Germany in 1955. Park's novels continue to reach a wide audience, especially The Witch's Thorn (1951) and Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977). In the 1990s she also published two volumes of an award-winning autobiography, adding to a large collection of other awards and honours, including a Miles Franklin Award, an AM and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of New South Wales. After D'Arcy Niland's death in 1967, Park worked for some time in London, then lived on Norfolk Island between 1973 and 1985, after which she returned to Sydney.

(Source: '(Rosina) Ruth (Lucia) Park,' in Contemporary Authors. New Revision Series. ed. Daniel Jane and John D. Jorgenson 65 (1998): 208-212; Paul Genoni, 'Ruth Park,' in Dictionary of Literary Biography, 260: Australian Writers, 1915-1950. Ed. Selina Samuels (2002): 275-285.)

Songwriter/pianist/singer.

A prolific songwriter and talented pianist, Alf. J. Lawrance wrote a cantata called 'The Mandarin' at 16, and after it was produced by a local amateur dramatic society he began turning his attention to the theatre. That same year he also published his first song, 'Goodnight My Little Daffodil.' It reportedly sold in excess of 40,000 copies in Britain alone. By the mid-1949s Lawrance had published upwards of a thousand more (some in collaboration), mostly for vaudeville, pantomime, revusical, revue and follies, radio and film.

In his early theatre career Lawrance ran his own Saturday concerts at Kingston-on-Thames before turning to fulltime songwriting. By his own count he had by 1915 composed more than a thousand songs (not all were published), with some of the biggest names to perform them being Ada Reeve, Marie Lloyd and Wilkie Bard.

Lawrance and his wife, singer Violet Carmen, first came to Australia as a piano/vocal duo. Billed as Carmen and Lawrance, the pair found engagements in this country and New Zealand through until 1921 with James Brennan, Ted Holland, Dix-Baker, Birch and Carroll, Fullers Theatres and George Willoughby among others. For Willoughby he wrote the book and music for Babes in the Woods (1914) and in 1915 contributed most of the music for Villiars Arnold's Step This Way company. Around 1922/23 Lawrence partnered singer Nell Crane before going solo. He also appeared with a number of revusical and revue companies - notably Claude Dampier's Trump Cards Company.

In the 1930s Lawrance was employed by Ernest C. Rolls as a pianist/songwriter for revues like League of Happiness, while also contributing music for radio and scores for the films The Hayseeds (1933), Splendid Fellows (1934), The Flying Doctor (1936, with Willy Redstone) and Rangle River (1936). His radio career began in the late-1920s with the privately-owned Australian Broadcasting Company (as music director/ conductor). He joined the government-run Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1937. Through the early 1930s, he wrote the music for a number of radio revues by Edmund Barclay.

In late 1946 Lawrance teamed up with 19-year-old songwriter Robyn Teakle. The pair went on to write and published a number of popular songs.

[Source: Australian Variety Theatre Archive]

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.

British script-writer.

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.

Australian variety entertainer, company leader, producer, director, businessman, councillor.

Born in Victoria, Hugh Huxham began his career in the Australian variety theatre industry around 1900, and was initially billed as Hughie Huxham the tenor balladist. After finding solo opportunities with such companies as Verto's Biotint Entertainment and Variety Company and F. M. Clark's New Folly Company (ca. 1905-1906), he eventually gained the attention of Harry Rickards with The Hamonious Huxhams, which included his wife Edith and her brother. The trio remained together for two years (ca. 1909-1911), largely playing the Rickards's and Fullers' Theatres circuits, along with a tour of China and the Far East for Ramos and Ramos. In 1911, Huxham formed the Serenaders, the company with which his name is primarily associated. After its debut season in Brisbane at the Empire Theatre, the troupe toured Australia and New Zealand for the next decade or more, with few breaks. They also returned to the Far East in 1914, with an eighteen-week tour of the Bandmann circuit.

In addition to his on-stage role as singer, comedian, and actor, Huxham managed the Serenaders business affairs, directed the performances, and arranged and scored the vocal harmonies for most of the songs.

Among the other variety organisations to have secured the services of Huxham's Serenaders were Harry Rickards' Tivoli Theatres, Holland and St John (Brisbane), John N. McCallum (Brisbane), Birch Carroll and Coyle (Queensland), Dix and Baker (Newcastle), and Cedric Johnson (St Kilda).

After disbanding the Serenaders in 1926, Huxham returned to Victoria and settled in the Healesville district, sixty kilometres north-east of Melbourne. In 1929 he was appointed to the position of Melbourne producer for the newly-founded and privately-owned Australian Broadcasting Company. In the the 1930s he turned entrepreneurial skills towards a business career and eventually succeeded in becoming a local councillor. A 1939 interview records that he and his wife were also the leaders of an amateur theatrical society in Healesville, which worked to raise funds for the local community ('Old Cremorne Leader in Brisbane Again' Brisbane Courier 17 July 1939, p.2).

Singer (tenor) conductor, music director, composer, choir master, director, producer, radio programme manager.

Born and raised in Sydney George English initially established his reputation in the city as a concert tenor. In the early 1920s he moved to Melbourne and soon afterwards became choir master for the Victorian Choir. He also secured positions as a conductor and music director.

In 1928 English oversaw the first production of George Clutsam's opera Young England (Playhouse Theatre) and the following year collaborated with Hugh Huxham on the burlesque radio pantomime, Little Bo-Peep. First aired nationally from Melbourne radio station 3LO on 28 December, Little Bo-Peep was given a second broadcast in early January 1930. Another collaboration, this time with John Cazabon resulted in the 1934 musical comedy Good Catch.

Two symphonies, Opus 4 (A major) and Opus 5 (D minor) were written in 1932 and 1933 respectively, and given their first public performance in Melbourne during the 1934 Centenary of Victoria celebrations. English conducted on both occasions.

By the mid-1930s English had become more involved in radio, taking up a position as programme director for the B class station 3UZ, while still continuing his music career. In 1936 he was also appointed conductor of the Australian Broadcasting Commission's National Choir. Having become more involved in composition English had a number of his original works performed both in concert and on radio. In 1941 his oratorio, Armageddon was presented to the public at an ABC-sponsored concert in Sydney (9 December).

After moving to Brisbane in the early 1940s English directed the Queensland State and Municipal Choir and established the Brisbane Opera Guild.

New Zealand-born Jennifer Compton first came to Australia in the early 1970s after studying drama and working as an actress and stage manager; she settled permanently in Australia in 1983. Compton attended the Playwrights' Studio at the National Institute of Dramatic Art after her arrival in Sydney. During her year there she wrote her award-winning play Crossfire. In addition to her stage plays Compton has written plays for ABC Radio and for NZBC and has written episodes for the ABC Television series Certain Women.

Compton is also a prize-winning and much-published poet. In 1996 she was the first poet to win a New South Wales Writers' Fellowship. The Fellowship enabled her to complete her collection Speaking with Voices.

Compton has lived for an extended period at Wingello, in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. In 2006 she was the writer-in-residence at the B. R. Whiting Library in Rome.

Jack McLaren was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman. He studied at Scotch College, Melbourne before running away and travelling widely throughout the Pacific. McLaren worked his passage back to Australia around 1901-1902. He spent time in North Queensland as a miner, pearl and beche-der-mer diver and (according to the Bulletin, 11 October 1950) tasted 'the delights and bitter fruits of beachcombing.' McLaren also worked in Malaya, the Solomon Islands and Fiji. He managed copra plantations and acted as an overseer. McLaren returned again to Australia in 1911 and settled on Cape York until 1919 when he moved to Sydney. In 1924 he married novelist Ada Moore (q.v.) before travelling to London in 1925. McLaren remained largely in the U.K. for nearly thirty years. During this time he wrote for and took part in many British Broadcasting Corporation television programmes. The individual pieces from his collection Stories of the South Seas were originally published as a regular feature in the London Evening News, and Isle of Escape was produced as a Hollywood film starring Myrna Loy.

McLaren's 'experiences of life on the outer rim furnished him, like Louis Becke (q.v.) and others, with a seemingly endless supply of plots and characters, which on his return from his wanderings he soon began to turn in to marketable literary products.' McLaren published over 30 books and was a frequent contributor to the Bulletin; he wrote the the regular column 'Abo' and also supplied stories of the South Seas. His non-fiction work, Gentlemen of the Empire : The Colourful and Remarkable Experiences of District Commissioners, Patrol Officers and Other Officials in Some of the British Empire's Tropical Outposts, an account of the work of district commissioners, patrol officers and other officials in some of the British Empire's tropical outposts, was published in 1940. Some of McLaren's books were translated into other languages including French, Spanish, Swedish and German.

(Source: Bulletin, 11 October 1950, p.19 (source of quotations) and Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 10.)

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.

Founded in 1929 as the Australian Broadcasting Company, the ABC became the Australian Broadcasting Commission on 1 July 1932. The introduction of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act of 1983 saw its name again change to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, effective 1 July 1983.

Tom Cho graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree (Professional Writing) from Deakin University in 1995, and completed a PhD in Professional Writing at Deakin in 2009. He has worked in the fields of writing and publishing, including jobs as a technical writer, freelance journalist, freelance editor, and proof-reader. While he continues to do freelance editing, Cho's primary work is in the arts industry, as an artist and artsworker (particularly within the field of community cultural development). He has worked for organisations such as Melbourne Fringe, National Young Writers' Festival and Footscray Community Arts Centre.

Cho has written poetry but now favours short stories. He has been published in Australia, USA, Canada, Japan, France and Italy. He also performs spoken word, makes a zine and has a blog.

Cho previously ran a venture known as Beaker, an organisation for developing and producing text-based art projects.

As a writer, Cho is interested in questions of identity and popular culture. (Source: Tom Cho)