Dymphna Cusack

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

Ellen Dymphna Cusack AM (21 September 1902 – 19 October 1981) was an Australian writer and playwright.^[1]

Born in Wyalong, New South Wales, Cusack was educated at Saint Ursula's College, Armidale, New South Wales^[2] 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.^[1] She died at Manly, New South Wales on 19 October 1981.

Cusack wrote twelve novels (two of which were collaborations), eleven plays,^[3] 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.^[4]

The play Red Sky at Morning was filmed in 1944, starring Peter Finch.^[5] 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.^[6]

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.^[7]

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.^[1] She and her husband Norman Freehill were members of the Communist Party and they left their entire estates to the Party in their wills.^[8]

Cusack was a foundation member of the Australian Society of Authors in 1963. She had refused an Order of the British Empire,^[1] but was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1981 for her contribution to Australian literature.^[9]

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.^[10]

• Safety First, 1927
• Shallow Cups, 1933
• Anniversary, 1935.^[11] The play won first prize for an Anzac Fellowship competition for a play on a war theme. Cusack researched it in part on papers of her uncle who died at Gallipoli.^[12][13] The play premiered at the Sydney Conservatorium.^[14] It was performed again the following year.^[15] In the play, an old digger meets the ghosts of his comrades.
• 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

• 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)

• His Honor Comes to Tea
• Lure of the Inland Sea (1945)
• Mary Reibey (1947)
• Shoulder the Sky
• Exit
• The Golden Girls
• Spartacus

• 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.

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

• Dymphna Cusack bibliography
• 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

• North, Marilla (2013) Laying the Foundations of a Writer's Life: Dymphna Cusack (1902-81) (essay).