AustLit

Mary Rachel Brown is the recipient of the 2006 Griffin Award and the 2006 Max Afford Award for her play Australian Gothic. Her current work Permission to Spin was read at the hotINK International play reading festival in New York in 2009. Christine Dunstan Productions will tour Inside Out (Winner of the 2008 Rodney Seaborn Award) in 2009. Other works to be staged in 2009 include Peachy for Merrigong Theatre Co and Last Letters for The Australian War Memorial.

Mary's other produced works include National Security and the Art of Taxidermy - the Glynn Nicholas Group and B#; All My Sleep and Waking - Elbow Theatre and La Mama; Clown Empire/Red Nose Rising - Jigsaw Theatre Company; A Street Car Named Datsun 120Y - ABC TV, B# and Elbow Theatre and Die Fledermaus (adaptation) Sydney Conservatorium of music.

(Source: Australian Script Centre, http://www.ozscript.org/)

Jack Sommers, son of the painter John E. Sommers, was initially interested in taxidermy, but turned his attention to art. He studied at the School of Design, National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1896 to 1901. On active service during World War I (August 1914 - February 1918), he painted in Egypt and France. An exhibition of these paintings was held at the Arts and Craft Society rooms in Melbourne in December 1918. Sommers settled in Sydney after the war and was a contributor to the Bulletin and the Lone Hand.

Sommers started the Lux Illustration Company. His paintings are held in Australian regional galleries.

McRae was educated in Lower Hutt before studying design and illustration at the Wellington Polytechnic's School of Design and being awarded a Diploma in Visual Communication Design. He also studied at the City Art Instutute, Sydney. McRae then engaged in television graphics and animation until an Oxford University Press publisher commissioned his illustrations for Joy Cowley's picture book, The Terrible Taniwha of Timberditch (1982). He won a Queen Elizabeth Arts Council grant to travel to the UK to observe illustration techniques. Having studied illustration in London, he worked in Europe, Russia and the United States before settling in Australia. Here he worked in film illustration and did freelance illustrations of books and readers, illustrating over sixty books. During the 1990s he lectured in graphic design at Randwick College of Design and the University of Western Sydney. Subsequently he conducted a course in Design Fundamentals at the Design Centre of the Sydney Institute of Technology and co-owned a shop called Animal Fetish dedicated to taxidermy. He has lived in Redfern, Sydney.

(Source: Walter McVitty Authors & Illustrators of Australian Children's Books (1989); The Source database).