Dymphna Cusack

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Dymphna Cusack AM
Dymphna Cusack, 1947
Born	(1902-09-21)21 September 1902
Died	19 October 1981(1981-10-19) (aged 79)
Nationality	Australian
Alma mater	University of Sydney
Occupation(s)	Author, playwright & travel writer

Ellen Dymphna Cusack AM (21 September 1902 – 19 October 1981) was an Australian writer and playwright.

Personal life

Born in Wyalong, New South Wales, Cusack was educated at Saint Ursula's College, Armidale, New South Wales and graduated from the University of Sydney with an honours degree in arts and a diploma in Education. She worked as a teacher until she retired in 1944 for health reasons. Her illness was confirmed in 1978 as multiple sclerosis. She died at Manly, New South Wales on 19 October 1981.

Career

Dymphna Cusack memorial plaque in Sydney Writers Walk at Circular Quay

Cusack wrote twelve novels (two of which were collaborations), eleven plays, three travel books, two children's books and one non-fiction book. Her collaborative novels were Pioneers on Parade (1939) with Miles Franklin, and Come In Spinner (1951) with Florence James.

The play Red Sky at Morning was filmed in 1944, starring Peter Finch. The biography Caddie, the Story of a Barmaid, to which Cusack wrote an introduction and helped the author write, was produced as the film Caddie in 1976. The novel Come In Spinner was produced as a television series by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1989, and broadcast in March 1990.

Family

Her younger brother, John, was also an author, writing the war novel They Hosed Them Out under the pseudonym John Beede, which was first published in 1965; an expanded edition under the author's real name, John Bede Cusack, was published in 2012 by Wakefield Press, edited and annotated by Robert Brokenmouth.

Activism

Cusack advocated social reform and described the need for reform in her writings. She contributed to the world peace movement during the Cold War era as an antinuclear activist. She and her husband Norman Freehill were members of the Communist Party and they left their entire estates to the Party in their wills.

However the Cultural Studies and Literary Theory scholar, Tania Peitzker has suggested that Cusack was ambivalent about Communism, if not critical. In her lifetime, the Australian author called herself a humanist and was recognised for her humanism and feminism, rather than her left-wing political views. Dr Peitzker completed her Ph.D. on Dymphna Cusack in the English and Cultural Studies Department, Philosophy Faculty at the University of Potsdam in 2000. Peitzker’s dissertation, which received numerous prizes and awards, is held in the National Libraries of Australia, Germany and France.

The Cusack thesis forms part of the collection “Tania Peitzker Papers” held by the University of Queensland Library. Peitzker's key article on Cusack was published in the peer-reviewed literary journal Southerly : "The Queen of Australian Soap: Deconstructing Dymphna Cusack". The extract from her dissertation and Peitzker's doctoral thesis have been cited regularly, most notably by the famous Australian historian Diane Kirkby who writes about labour, cultural and women's history.

Contribution and recognition

Cusack was a foundation member of the Australian Society of Authors in 1963. She had refused an Order of the British Empire, but was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1981 for her contribution to Australian literature.

The postwar novelist's taboo themes ranged from interracial marriages in postwar Britain and a woman alcoholic in Australia to female spies in East Germany during the Cold War period of building the Berlin Wall in the West.

Cusack's "romantic realistic fiction" and travel writing was mainstream and influential at the time, evident in the serialisation of her work in national French, British and Australian newspapers. In the UK, her stories were serialised on radio. Cusack's fame was such that she was awarded the "Commonwealth Literary Pension" (a writer's scholarship for life); the British "Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal" and, in 1981 the year of her death, the "Award of her Majesty" from Queen Elisabeth of England.

Famous Australian Writers' Walk Inclusion

In 2011, Cusack was one of 11 authors, including Elizabeth Jolley and Manning Clark, to be permanently recognised by the addition of brass plaques at the Writers' Walk, Sydney.

Plays

• Safety First, 1927
• Shallow Cups, 1933
• Anniversary, 1935
• Red Sky at Morning, performed 1935; published 1942
• Morning Sacrifice, 1943
• Comets Soon Pass, 1943
• Call Up Your Ghosts, with Miles Franklin, 1945
• Stand Still Time, 1946
• Pacific Paradise, 1955

Novels

• Jungfrau (1936)
• Pioneers on Parade (1939) with Miles Franklin
• Come In Spinner (1951) with Florence James
• Say No to Death (1951)
• Southern Steel (1953)
• Caddie, the Story of a Barmaid (1953) [Introduction only]
• The Sun in Exile (1955)
• Heatwave in Berlin (1961)
• Picnic Races (1962)
• Black Lightning (1964)
• The Sun is Not Enough (1967)
• The Half-Burnt Tree (1969)
• A Bough in Hell (1971)

Radio plays

• Lure of the Inland Sea (1945)
• Mary Reibey (1947)
• Shoulder the Sky
• Exit
• The Golden Girls

Nonfiction

• Chinese Women Speak. Angus & Robertson. Sydney. 1958.
• Holidays Among the Russians. Heinemann. London. 1964.
• Illyria Reborn. Heinemann. London. 1966.
• Mary Gilmore A Tribute. Australasian Book Society. London. 1965.
• A Window in the Dark. National Library of Australia. Canberra. 1991.

Children's literature

• Kanga-Bee and Kanga-Bo. Botany House. Sydney. 1945.
• Four Winds and a Family with Florence James. Shakespeare Head Press. London. 1947.

References

Sources

• Dymphna Cusack bibliography
• Tania Peitzker (1998). Article published in the peer-reviewed Australian Studies Journal. Held at The Stacks: Library of Anglo-American Culture & History. https://thestacks.libaac.de/handle/11858/1878
• Tania Peitzker (2001). Dissertation published by the University of Potsdam. Digital copy in English, foreword and abstract in German. https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/opus4-ubp/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/12/file/peitzker.pdf
• Tania Peitzker Indian edition of the ebook. (2015) "The Cold War Author & Humanist Dymphna Cusack: The first Doctoral Dissertation on this Australian cultural phenomenon." Kindle Edition. https://www.amazon.in/Cold-Author-Humanist-Dymphna-Cusack-ebook/dp/B015BCLJMO
• North, Marilla. (2007) "Cusack, Ellen Dymphna (Nell) (1902–1981)". Entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press
• Spender, Dale (1988) Writing a New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers, London: Pandora

Further reading

• North, Marilla (2013) Laying the Foundations of a Writer's Life: Dymphna Cusack (1902-81) (essay).
• Tania Peitzker "The Queen of Australian Soap: Deconstructing Dymphna Cusack" (1999). First published in Southerly vol. 59 no. 2 Winter 1999. periodical issue pg. 129-155 https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C222773 (journal article) .