The Mirror’s writing women
If ever a magazine was a victim of its success, it was the Australian Woman’s Mirror. Having started out as the Bulletin’s little sister, it was so popular by 1960 that Frank Packer bought it in order to kill it and clear the market for his Australian Women’s Weekly. He acquired the struggling Bulletin as part of the package.1 When the Mirror appears as a footnote to the legend of its older brother, we get no sense of what the magazine achieved or how important it was to readers and contributors.
And if ever an Australian writer has been undeservedly forgotten (although she’s not the only one) it is Zora Cross. Her poetry collection Songs of Love and Life was a publishing sensation for Angus & Robertson in 1917 and she published verse in major journals and newspapers for the rest of her life. In the 1920s she produced popular novels set in her birth state of Queensland, a much anthologised elegy to her younger brother, who died in the First World War, and a great deal of journalism, much of it focused on promoting other women writers. In the late 1920s and early 1930s she interviewed Australian women writers for the Australian Woman’s Mirror. These articles are often the only remaining glimpse of authors whose work was eagerly consumed by the magazine’s many thousands of readers.
The Australian Woman’s Mirror began in November 1924 as an offshoot of the popular Bulletin. The older magazine had been knocking back a ‘large amount of purely feminine writing’, according to the Mirror’s first editorial, and those submissions would now have a home. The Mirror would feature serials, stories, advice and entertainment, and supply women in the city and the bush with conversation material: about theatre, film, music, sport ‘and a little about books and the people who write them’.
The weekly magazine lived up to its promise and was rewarded with impressive sales figures, rising to 165,000 at its peak in 1930 (the equivalent of 600,000 in 2017). With many readers sharing their copy among family and friends, a significant portion of Australia’s population was reading the Mirror.
The 64-page Mirror of the 1920s and 1930s is full of flapper fashions, articles on ‘Women in the World’, short stories with titles like ‘The Indispensable Husband’ and ‘Aren’t Women Cats’, cures for constipation and carbuncles, ads for still-famous brands such as Palmolive and Rexona and defunct ones such as Koko hair preparation, Hypol liver tonic and Symington’s coffee essence. It offers dress patterns, recipes and household hints, but it also includes articles on successful businesswomen and legal tips for readers. It prides itself on providing common ground for all kinds of women, its contributors ranging from aristocrats to ‘women who earn their living by washing’.
When the New Woman appears on the pages of the Mirror—smoking a pipe, shooting a rifle, wearing trousers, sporting a cat mask, flying an aeroplane—she is there to entertain, and perhaps inspire, shop girls and housewives. Along with striking line drawings and glamorous photographs, poetry is everywhere, filling the gaps between articles. Almost every issue from 1924 to 1929 has a poem by Zora Cross or one of her pseudonyms: Bernice May, Rosa Carmen, Daisy M. Other women writers who wrote poetry for the Mirror include Dorothea Mackellar, Mary Gilmore, Nettie Palmer and Katharine Susannah Prichard. Cross’s short stories appear on the feature pages, and increasingly her journalism can be found there too.
One of her first articles, appearing in January 1925, is titled ‘Some Distinguished Women’. She writes of picking up an American encyclopaedia published in 1883 for half a crown in a second-hand bookshop. She notices that women have been allotted two and a half pages while men get 54—‘a striking difference!’ Many notable women are missing from a list that includes ‘the notorious dancer Lola Montez, who came to Australia and caused a sensation less by her dancing than by her daring personality; and Sappho, the Lesbian love-poetess who flourished in 600 B.C.’ There is mention of ‘Nuns, poetesses, martyrs, vocalists, actresses, reformers, one or two lawyers …’ But little is written about any of them: ‘Every woman happening to glance at the list of names will feel a regret that about so many of them we know nothing at all …’
In 1927, Zora Cross began filling some of the gaps by interviewing her fellow women poets, novelists and short-story writers. One or two of these feature articles, published under the pseudonym Bernice May (drawn from her middle names), started to appear every month. The title of each article is simply the writer’s name—or the name she wrote under for the Mirror, which was often not her real name. A professional photograph of the subject, or occasionally a sketch, is at the centre of the page.
In one of the early pieces, Cross profiles Llywelyn Lucas. Having read her poetry, Cross imagines a ‘quiet English girl’, but on meeting her she realises ‘that only an Australian could be so full of verve, light and beauty’.2 Lucas’s ambition to study medicine was thwarted by the war, to which Cross refers as ‘that great crime’. Instead she attended horticultural college, which led to war work as chief gardener on a large property in Melbourne. After the war, Lucas travelled to England with other ‘impecunious’ writers and sent back verse about the birds of Surrey, which was published in the Bulletin. She gave up gardening and moved to Brisbane to work as an assistant in her brother’s veterinary practice. ‘Being an assistant to a vet and writing verse don’t seem to go together,’ she tells Cross, ‘but I make them fit somehow.’ Lucas has a strong literary ambition alongside a belief that women’s primary work is to care for children; this makes her, in Cross’s view, ‘a true Mirrorite’. The way Llywelyn Lucas describes herself is a compelling performance of the woman writer in the late 1920s:
I’m not a bit conventional, but neither am I even a little bit Bohemian. I hate beer and onions and adore soap and water; I hate sham sophistry and the lipstick and the shingle—but I like cigarettes and Charlie Chaplin and Bernard Shaw. I believe in Light, like Victor Hugo, especially for women, and naturally I think the future of mankind is in women’s hands.
Vividly reflecting their time, there is also something modern and compulsively readable about these 38 articles. Zora Cross puts herself into almost all of them; not overshadowing her subjects, but leading the reader into their lives. We meet writers who live into adulthood with their parents, and those who marry and fit their writing in between childbirth and laundry. Some have had breaks from writing and come back to it when their children are grown up. Others are journalists, several of them editing the women’s pages in newspapers across the country. One has worked on the state Hansard staff; another on a farm; another in business, writing her first novel in the office while ‘keeping one eye on the clock and the other on the boss’.3 A few have extravagant leisure time, like a writer from Victoria who spends the summer months at the beach—swimming, smoking and ‘baking brown’.4 Most published their first work in the Bulletin after several failed attempts, and many aspire to write the Great Australian Novel.
The diversity of women profiled, and the fine detail of their various struggles, gives the reader the sense that she too could be a writer, even if she has to cope with ‘every woman’s bane’—a lack of time. ‘How do I work?’ asks poet Kathleen Dalziel:
I scribble at odd times, put it aside and, if what I have written is not lost altogether, I take it out some favourable day, then I work really hard at it, write and re-write, put aside, re-read and alter once more—and very often finish up by destroying it. If it does not seem too bad I send it away; but I am always disappointed when I see my work in print—it always seems so different from what I intended it to be.5
‘Kathleen Dalziel has given all women poets a little lesson in their craft in those few words …’
These articles reveal not only the experience of writers, but also of readers at the time. Bernice May presents herself as another Mirror reader who has her own favourite writers and shares the pleasure of holding the Christmas issue in her hands. ‘I remember the shock I got on opening my Mirror one morning some time ago to be confronted by her portrait,’ Cross writes. ‘I had always imagined that E. Sandery was a man, and not a woman.’
A recurring theme is the difference between how a writer is imagined and how they appear. Cross forms an impression of Dulcie Deamer, based on her stories set in the Stone Age, as ‘a sort of jungle-woman, solemn of face and stolid of form, with wild, red hair and eyes of a strange sky-blue, a forest-calm about her’.6 But the real Deamer is small, dark-eyed, restless and beautiful. She expects Mary Gilmore to be ‘a very brown, very quiet and retiring woman’ but finds her to be ‘one with warm, friendly hands, the strongest face of all our women writers, and all kindness’. And Ethel Turner is not the stooped, wrinkled, slipper-wearing author whom the nine-year-old Zora imagined when she wrote to Turner’s ‘Children’s Corner’ in the Australian Town & Country Journal. Cross recalls how, having moved to Sydney as a teenager, she turned up in Turner’s leafy street and was ‘dumbstruck’ to find her idol with ‘humorous blue-grey eyes’, looking no older than she did.
Cross remembers Ethel Turner advising that women should write about topics close to home, about the world they knew (which for Cross as a child in rural Queensland meant cows). When Turner reads this in the Mirror she questions her earlier instruction, ‘Was I really as short-sighted as that—to give advice to stick to women subjects and the things close at hand, when all the world was calling to be written about?’7 But Cross points out that Turner’s own fame was built on writing from her own experience.
Ethel Turner is mentioned as an influence by C. McEwen, who loves her ‘fresh, simple tales’, and several other writers. McEwen also praises the New Zealand–born author Katherine Mansfield, ‘whose untimely death’, Cross tells readers in a later article, ‘the literary world is now grieving without, perhaps, realising what a marvellous contribution to feminine psychology she has left in her Journal’. Mansfield receives several mentions across the articles, as does the English novelist and critic Rebecca West. Cross calls West’s 1922 novel The Judge ‘surely the most garrulous book ever written’, while suggesting that every woman should read it. (I followed this advice and found The Judge a fascinating story about the plight of unmarried mothers, but ‘garrulous’ is a good word for it.) Cross has an imaginary bookcase in which every book is by a woman, and Mary Gilmore’s The Passionate Heart, ‘so full of thought and feeling, is pretty nearly in the right place when it is first on
the shelf’.8
The Mirror articles suggest that women—albeit white women with some education—can transcend social constraints to some extent if they do so with subtlety and humour. Cross is keen to meet Jean Devanny, the notorious author of a banned book, The Butcher Shop.9 They arrange to meet at the cinema when Cross is in the company of her mother and a group of female friends who are also writers. Devanny tells her to look out for a woman with a big nose, but appears ‘in black crepe-de-chine’ looking not unlike Cross herself. The two writers recognise each other immediately. At Cross’s suggestion they all walk ‘down into one of those lovely coffee dives in Sydney where men smoke and drink coffee and women usually are not’. Cross’s mother is ‘scandalised’ but appreciates the cheap prices.
Cross writes about the characterisation of mothers in Devanny’s fiction, and about the group’s conversation during the interview. Her friends dissect the major novels of the day while Devanny offers advice about London publishers. All but one of the women are mothers. Having had children young, Devanny lost a daughter in infancy and ‘began to write, as so many women do, through sorrow’. Cross is impressed that Devanny has achieved so much after starting to write at the age of 28: ‘It’s a story that should be an inspiration to every woman who wants to write, for Jean Devanny did her woman’s work, married and mothered and reared her family before she took up her pen.’
An author who combines motherhood with writing is Elizabeth Powell, better known by her pen-name of E. Sandery.10 Powell, who reads her own fairytales to her young son and writes late at night when he is asleep, had been an adventurous traveller. ‘A restlessness suddenly came over me,’ she tells Cross, ‘when I was writing the children’s column of the Register in Adelaide.’ She prepared seven months work for the paper—including stories she both wrote and illustrated—and set out to see Australia. Her travels then took her to New Guinea, where she was not frightened to find herself among cannibals, although she was ‘appalled by the extreme primitiveness of the life’. Later, as ‘social editress of a city paper’, she realised that country papers could not afford syndicated material from overseas. So she bought a car and drove through New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland to meet as many editors as she could. She then formed a service to supply country papers with illustrated short stories, poetry and articles on domestic topics ‘from making puff-pastry to curing a crocodile of the measles’. If she had more time she would ‘write and write—oh, everything!—that usual womanly feeling that one can reach the moon’.
Another impressive interview subject is the elegant Iris Norton, publicity manager for Hoyt’s Pictures Ltd and ‘one of the busiest young women in Sydney’.11 As a 15-year-old, Norton turned up at the Sunday Times office and talked her way into editing the comics. She edited Photoplay and began writing for Smith’s Weekly before becoming ‘the youngest publicity manager of a huge motion-picture firm in the world’:
Iris Norton is just twenty-one, yet she carries on her splendid young shoulders the responsibilities usually allotted to two or three men. Her face is matured; dreams so firm and strong and full of grip, are the youthful hands of the flapper. But what a flapper! What a wonderful young thing!—not bothering to hold up the feminine torch, neither conceited nor proud of what she has achieved; just maintaining a big position over the heads of men by sheer brains and that which is born with one—power.
Cross visits Norton at her office while she is planning her imminent weekday wedding. When one of her staff assumes she will be away from work that day she informs him she will be working until 2 pm. Norton believes that ‘women are ideally suited to publicity work … because of their innate sense of the artistic, their understanding of little things that usually escape men, and their ability in making the most of a good thing or a bad thing’. ‘Yes, I’ve got ambitions,’ she tells Cross. ‘Oh, millions! I want a chateau on the Mediterranean. I want to write great novels and plays there and return with a band.’ Cross concludes by telling Mirror readers, ‘After meeting Iris Norton, I cannot help adding that I feel prouder than ever of my own sex.’12
Not much older than Norton, Eleanor Dark is a quiet gardener rather than a flapper.13 When Cross meets Dark, who would go on to write acclaimed novels such as The Little Company and A Timeless Land, she is the young wife of a country doctor and writes poetry under the pen-name Patricia O’Rane. The garden at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, where Dark continues to dig and plant during the interview, is a romantic setting of perfumed violets and flowering lucerne trees. ‘Life had not, as yet, brought a great mass of experiences her young way, but she had been given a garden.’ Dark wants to make her own way as an author and writes a small amount each day. She writes because she feels driven and thinks ‘all women have to be driven to write’. She doubts her ability to judge her own work, but won’t let anyone see it until she is satisfied.
The friendship between Zora Cross and Eleanor Dark appears again when Cross interviews Dark’s neighbour, short-story writer Nina Lowe, by the fire at the Darks’ house.14 Dark calls them to lunch and her husband, Eric, carves the roast while their black cat perches on his shoulder. The Darks’ baby, Michael, plays with a book Cross has returned after a ‘long loan’. When Bulletin writers Eric Lowe (Nina’s husband) and Osmar White turn up for lunch, the conversation turns to the standard of writing in Australia and how hard it is to keep up. White says he is planning to spend the summer in a cave writing a novel. ‘What luck to be a man!’ someone responds (but Cross stresses that it wasn’t her). ‘Anyone going off anywhere to write a novel at any price,’ she assures the reader, ‘has nothing but my sympathies.’
After accepting some of the Darks’ mountain violets and tucking them into her coat, Cross takes the train back to Glenbrook in the lower Blue Mountains. She sits down to write the article, but her daughters remind her to water the zinnias. As she stands ‘merrily hosing’, she thinks of Nina Lowe, another garden-lover, before she hears the voice of ‘Mrs Next-door’.
‘Hard at it?’ the neighbour asks, and Cross tells her she is trying to write an article.
‘An article! What on?’
‘Nina Lowe. Any wiser?’
Mrs Next-door recalls one of Lowe’s titles and says, ‘I always look for her stories.’
‘You must take the Mirror?’
‘Don’t we all?’
The articles are full of anecdotes like this from Cross’s life. A bank teller recognises her name and gives her a book of poetry by his cousin Grace Ethel Martyr, the subject of an interview in August 1927.15 She recalls a ‘musical friend’ in Brisbane in 1916 taking her for a coffee at an ‘enchanted place’ run by the poet E. Coungeau.16 At first she thinks it looks like a wine bar and tells her friend, ‘I don’t like wine, it makes me bilious,’ but he assures her he brought her there to taste the best coffee she’s ever had. Even though she disguises her identity as Bernice May, she mentions being in the company of her partner David McKee Wright, literary editor of the Bulletin, when she met Nora McAuliffe, editor of the Bulletin’s women’s page. Wright called McAuliffe ‘the truest singer of them all’ and Cross ‘pouted jealously and replied, “But I don’t want to be a poetess, of course. I am much more interested in prose.”’17
There is a sense of joyful correspondence between Cross and her fellow poets. While many of the letters would have been written for the purpose of the article, they are presented as a natural camaraderie between writers. Cross’s children appear occasionally. She gives a book of stories for young girls by Hilda Bridges to her daughter, who reads a few pages and announces ‘Oh, this book is good! It’s worth eightpence anyway.’18 She takes her three children by train ‘up the flower-haunted North Shore line’ to interview E. Beaufils Lamb, an older woman with the ‘presence of a poet’. The writer is amazed that the journalist has travelled so far to interview her, exclaiming ‘All these riches coming to me so late in life!’19
After Wright’s death in February 1928, this connection with other writers and the activity of interviewing them was a solace as well as a source of income for Cross. In an interview with writer and librarian Gertrude Hart, she writes of a long-distance friendship formed through letter writing.20 Hart operates a roadside library in a remote part of Victoria, stocking up on romantic fiction because ‘A woman’s life is more monotonous than a man’s’ and she wants to offer an escape from drudgery. Being a librarian, for Hart, is a matter of empathy—of ‘reading your people as closely as you read your literature’—and she is also sensitive to Cross’s need. One Christmas, when she is trying to be cheerful in front of her children by telling herself that ‘gum-trees were not monotonously grey, but really a fine, rosy colour’, she receives a letter and a parcel from Hart:
Chinese lanterns, soaps, and sweets, and aeroplanes, and handkerchiefs, and books, and all sorts of fairy things like weeny bottles of scent, and chocolate balls, and cards, all carefully packed in separate boxes, came out of the parcel from a writer who understands a child’s heart …
In the middle of the article, Cross mentions that her dinner is burning, and compares her distraction with Hart’s efforts to write while being constantly interrupted in the library.
When Cross interviews David McKee Wright’s former partner Beatrice Osborn, who wrote as Margaret Fane, the two writers spend most of the time laughing.21 They both confess a lack of spelling ability, which Cross says is a sign of genius, and Osborn talks about her story-writing collaboration with her de facto partner Hilary Lofting. Calling herself ‘perfectly lazy at the manual work of writing’, she says she comes up with the setting, plot, characters and conversations then Lofting goes away and writes the story. Because Lofting is so well travelled, ‘I can send my characters anywhere’. Cross describes Osborn as a clever writer, a good critic and a light-hearted companion, as well as being ‘a most excellent cook’. She is one of several writers who claim to be ‘Australian before anything’.
Reading Cross’s Mirror profiles one after another, I begin to wonder whether the writers are competing with each other to come up with more mundane forms of inspiration: ‘I think of things quickest when I’m ironing. It is so quiet and brainless and warm …’ Or more romantic interests: ‘I love ridiculously long, polished filbert-nails … I love horses and gallops in the morning, and cats! … I love profiles and silhouettes in a half-light … and all beautiful things.’ Or more flapper-like self-descriptions: ‘I am a lazy, vagabond sort of person who has no aesthetic fancies, no neurotic leanings and no secret sorrows.’ One writer sends up her more earnest colleagues: ‘And she will tell you humorously that she does not want to write “the great New Zealand novel”!’
When asked for her philosophy of life Dulcie Deamer, in a hurry to get to her next appointment, answers: ‘Everything is worthwhile and nothing is wasted.’ When asked for hers, Eleanor Dark says she doesn’t have one. If she did, she says while working patiently in her garden, ‘it would be the opposite of Dulcie Deamer’s’. Cross suggests Dark is having us on. She is one of the few authors interviewed whose work would remain in print.
While Cross admires Deamer’s strength, calling her ‘frank to the point of daring’, the unconventional Deamer states that she is ‘no feminist’. Although the Bulletin and Mirror veteran Constance Clyde is reported to have spent 13 days in a London prison for the cause of female suffrage ‘among other things’,22 the only time the word ‘feminist’ appears in Cross’s articles is when her subjects claim not to be one.
‘Truly, are you an anti-feminist?’ Cross asks writer and actress Mary Marlowe. ‘Absolutely,’ says Marlowe, ‘I feel sure that in the race for material things in life woman must always take a second place by the mere fact of her emotionalism, without which no woman is worth her salt.’ Cross’s response reflects her own, and the Mirror’s, ambivalence. ‘No doubt it is pretty true,’ she writes as Bernice May. ‘In gaining so-called “rights” so many richer privileges may be lost which physically and emotionally are better for us.’
While many writers adopt pen-names to mask their gender and improve their chance of publication in places such as the Bulletin, the articles show other reasons for anonym-ity. Eleanor Dark began writing under her maiden name Pixie O’Reilly, choosing Patricia O’Rane because she didn’t want to be known as the daughter of the famous poet Dowell O’Reilly. Prolific authors such as Dulcie Deamer write under several names in order to get more work accepted. Cross uses a pen-name for work she considers inferior.
Whatever the reason, using a pen-name is thumbing your nose at immortality. You don’t expect this work to be collected and pored over by the readers and biographers of the future. You have written it for money, for the delight of seeing your work in print, and to move or entertain thousands of readers. Let it fall to dust.
An article in the Mirror of 20 March 1928 titled ‘Zora Cross’, by F.C. Brown, brings Cross to life as a young arts entrepreneur in wartime Brisbane, then contrasts her domestic seclusion at Glenbrook more than ten years later. In her fragrant garden with a view of ‘green gullies, purple spurs and blue hills’, Cross is asked if she ever misses the city. She shakes her head, ‘As long as I can write I don’t mind where I am.’ Like the pieces Cross wrote for the Mirror, her own profile combines journalistic candour with the romance of authorship:
Zora has no wish to travel, no love for expensive hats, frocks or shoes, would like to conduct a girls’ newspaper and, except for purely ‘literary’ work has no method in her writing … She has never attended a race meeting, nor heard Madame Melba sing, nor Mr. Hughes speak, and she doesn’t want a Ford car. She loves dictionaries, and her favourite possession is the Oxford, which occupies a corner of her study.
As the Bernice May profiles in the Mirror peter out, an article on Katharine Susannah Prichard by literary critic H.M. Green appears. Subtitled ‘Her Place in Australian Literature’, its distant judgement contrasts with Cross’s sense of connection. ‘Women are playing so important a part in the world of fiction nowadays,’ writes Green, ‘that even in so masculine a country as Australia it is not altogether surprising to find the two best novelists of the day to be women.’23 (Green also admired Henry Handel Richardson.) This ranking of authors and assignment of literary value in the decades that followed would leave most of the writers Cross interviewed in the dustbin of literary history.
Zora Cross’s interviews in the Mirror show the pleasures of correspondence, the frequency of meetings between women writers, and the sometimes joyful possibility of combining literary ambition with domestic and money-making tasks. While most of them missed out on lasting fame, they succeeded in having their work published, and entertaining thousands of readers. Individually, these articles capture the personality of some remarkable ‘writing women’, as well as the journalist who produced them. Together, they are a window on a literary community that remains relevant and compelling almost a century later.
•
About a kilometre from where Cross lived in the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney, an arrangement of concrete blocks the size of single-bed mattresses lies outside the entrance to the Glenbrook visitors centre. I’ve been told by a member of her family that Zora Cross’s face is carved into a sculpture there, but it’s below my line of vision and at first I walk past without noticing it.
The huge fallen dominos of the memorial carry symbols of the region’s natural and cultural history: a waratah and a lyrebird, a miner and a bushwalker. Two female faces are cut into the cement. Each has a loose bun and a long, flat nose. Gumleaves and white pebbles lie in the dip below their chins. One of the faces looks asleep, while the other stares upwards. I pick her for Cross. I thought I’d be looking straight into her stone eyes, but she’s at my feet.
When I ask at the counter for information on the carving, an A4 sheet is produced from a small filing cabinet. Unveiled in 1986, the blocks represent different parts of the Blue Mountains. Cross is on the first block because she lived at Glenbrook, the first town you encounter on the rise of
the Great Western Highway. She keeps company with a sprig of wattle, the zigzag railway and the ‘red hands’ cave painted by Aboriginal people hundreds of years ago.
The other face is Eleanor Dark, the publicity-shy novelist and resident of Katoomba who once suggested, ‘If I could arrange the literary world to my satisfaction writers would never be photographed, and would be known by numbers instead of names!’24 Dark has a more dynamic monument in the writers centre, Varuna, at her former home. ‘Everything is worthwhile and nothing is wasted.’
Like any monument, this concrete carving is unsatisfactory in the justice it pays to past achievements. But if we keep brushing off the fallen gumleaves, it is more than the writers themselves would have expected.
1. Donald Horne, On How I Came to Write ‘The Lucky Country’, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2006, p. 75.
2. ‘Llywelyn Lucas’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 4 October 1927, p. 11.
3. ‘Georgia Rivers’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 2 October 1928, p. 8.
4. ‘Myra Morris’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 19 July 1927, p. 8.
5. ‘Kathleen Dalziel’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 1 May 1928, p. 10.
6. ‘Some Impressions of Writing Women’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 11 May 1926, p. 11.
7. ‘Ethel Turner and her Daughter’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 3 January 1928, p. 12.
8. ‘A Shelf of Women’s Books’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 2 March 1926, p. 8.
9. ‘Jean Devanny’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 29 July 1930, p. 10.
10. ‘Elizabeth Powell’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 30 October 1928, p. 11.
11. ‘Iris Norton’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 11 September 1928, p. 10.
12. Under her married name Iris Dexter, Norton became an official correspondent during the Second World War. See Jeannine Baker, Australian Women War Reporters: Boer War to Vietnam, NewSouth, Sydney, 2015.
13. ‘Patricia O’Rane’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 25 September 1928, p. 8.
14. ‘Nina Lowe’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 30 December 1930, p. 10.
15. ‘Grace Ethel Martyr’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 2 August 1927, p. 13.
16. ‘E. Coungeau’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 3 April 1928, p. 11.
17. ‘Nora McAuliffe’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 7 August 1928, p. 10.
18. ‘Hilda Bridges’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 20 November 1928, p. 10.
19. ‘E. Beaufils Lamb’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 27 November 1928, p. 10.
20. ‘Writer and Librarian: A Long-distance Talk with Gertrude Hart’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 8 July 1930, p. 11.
21. ‘Margaret Fane’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 1 January 1929, p. 10.
22. ‘Constance Clyde’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 3 July 1928, p. 11.
23. H.M. Green, ‘Katharine Susannah Prichard: Her Place in Australian Literature’, Australian Woman’s Mirror, 28 April 1931, p. 11.
24. Letter from Eleanor Dark to US literary agent Nellie Sukerman, quoted in Marivic Wyndham, ‘Dark, Eleanor (1901–1985)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography.
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