I never planned to write about myself. Instead, I have always crafted narratives of others’ lives, thriving in the detective work and empathy required to understand what it is to be a different person. Until I decided to reflect on my own lived experiences, my writing, whether undertaken alone or with co-authors, was about others. Here you can find links to some of those biographies.
Hilda Rix Nicholas
Hilda Rix Nicholas (1884 – 1961) was an Australian artist whose complex career flowered with early post-impressionism but stalled later in her life as family tragedies and personal artistic choices collided with sexist attitudes within and beyond the art world of Australia between the two World Wars. [read more]
Older Australians
WHEN WE FIRST see Daphne, she is sitting in a pool of sunshine at the edge of her veranda. Bougainvilleas punctuate small patches of open ground between each cluster of rooms, and an unused swimming pool contains slowly disintegrating giant palm fronds, making the place look like an old tropical motel. The sound of a jet taking off from nearby Darwin airport thunders against the tin roof as the plane spirals away over the Arafura Sea. [read more]
Florence Fuller
Florence Ada Fuller (1867 – 1946) was a South African-born Australian artist. Originally from Port Elizabeth, Fuller migrated as a child to Melbourne with her family. There she trained with her uncle Robert Hawker Dowling and teacher Jane Sutherland and took classes at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, becoming a professional artist in the late 1880s. [read more]
Minnie Pwerle
An Australian Aboriginal artist from Utopia, Northern Territory, Minnie Pwerle began painting in 2000 at about the age of 80, and her pictures soon became popular and sought-after works of contemporary Indigenous art. With popularity came pressure from those keen to acquire her work. She was allegedly "kidnapped" by people who wanted her to paint for them, and there have been media reports of her work being forged. Sprightly and outgoing, even in her eighties she could outrun younger women chasing goannas for bushfood, and she continued to create art works until two days before her death. [read more]
Chris Puplick
On 20 September 1978, Chris Puplick, then the youngest Australian senator since World War II, rose to make his first speech in the Senate, and declared that ‘There is no finer tradition in the history of mankind than the Liberal tradition’. In the course of his speech, the formidably erudite new senator quoted Blake and Shakespeare, Australian novelist Steele Rudd, Alfred Deakin, Robert Menzies, Labor MHR Barry Jones—and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. [read more]
Bronwyn Oliver
A skilled and acclaimed sculptor, Bronwyn Oliver's works are admired for their tactile nature, aesthetics, and technical skills demonstrated in their production. In her later career, she created significant public and private commissions, including Vine, a 16.5-metre-high sculpture in the Sydney Hilton, and Magnolia and Palm, in the Sydney Botanical Gardens. Though brilliant, people close to her reported a gradual deterioration in her personality over a period of years; she became "reclusive, obsessive, anxious" prior to her suicide in 2006. [read more]
Irina Dunn
Irina Dunn was born on 17 March 1948 in Shanghai, China. Her mother was of Ukrainian origin while her father Timothy, who was also born in Shanghai, was of mixed Irish, Portuguese and Chinese ancestry. Timothy Dunn worked on the North China Daily News and was aligned with the ruling Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). When the nationalists lost power to the communists in 1949, the family fled to Hong Kong where Timothy built a successful business. In the early 1950s the Dunns moved to Australia, and Irina grew up in Sydney. [read more]
Steve Dodd
Steve Dodd (1928 – 2014) was an Indigenous Australian actor, notable for playing indigenous characters across seven decades of Australian film. After beginning his working life as a stockman and rodeo rider, Dodd was given his first film roles by prominent Australian actor Chips Rafferty. His career was interrupted by six years in the Australian Army during the Korean War and limited by typecasting; nevertheless he performed in several major Australian movies, including Gallipoli and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. [read more]
Robert Wood
Robert Wood was born in England in 1949. His family emigrated to Australia as ‘ten pound Poms’ when Robert was thirteen years old. Like all British subjects permanently residing in Australia and registered on the Commonwealth Electoral Roll prior to 1984, Robert was entitled to vote once he had reached the appropriate age. However, he was not automatically an Australian citizen, and this would cause instant trouble for the brief political career of this longtime peace activist. [read more]
