Education
Sydney University Drama Society took Cusack into the world of `little theatre’.
Sydney University Drama Society took Cusack into the world of `little theatre’.
Cusack's début play script, `Safety First’—a feminist drama with themes of illegitimacy, middle-class hypocrisy and the liberated `New’ woman as heroine— was one of the final dozen selected in the 1927 competition of the magazine Triad.
After teaching (1926-27) at Neutral Bay Girls’ Intermediate High School, in 1928 Cusack was posted by the Department of Education to Broken Hill High School, where she wrote her first (unpublished) novel, `This Nettle, Danger’, a rite-of-passage, Joyceaninspired, `portrait of the artist’ as a young woman. Cusack returned to `the drama’, convinced that her true talent lay there, and her plays Shallow Cups (1933), Anniversary (1935), and Red Sky at Morning (performed 1935; published 1942) were well received.
After six years’ country service, teaching at Broken Hill, Goulburn and Parramatta, Cusack was posted in 1935 to Sydney Girls’ High School. Her second novel, Jungfrau (1936), about three young women and their views on abortion, was runner-up in 1935 for the Bulletin’s S. H. Prior memorial prize. In 1938 she was recruited to the executive of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (president 1968-69). Her controversial radio documentaries challenged social orthodoxies. By 1939, when Angus & Robertson published Pioneers on Parade—her first collaboration with Miles Franklin and an irreverent pasquinade of Australia’s celebrations of 150 years of British colonial settle-ment—she had taken on too many `sacred cows’ for the liking of the Department of Education. Moreover, after a fall two years earlier, she was pursuing a workers’ compensation case against the department. In December she was summarily transferred to Bathurst High School. Appointments at Parkes and Newcastle followed.
Her revenge in exile was the prize-winning play Morning Sacrifice (1943), set in an all-female staffroom in a girls’ high school. Another play, Comets Soon Pass (1943), was her personal catharsis and artistic reprisal for the defection of her former lover, the novelist Xavier Herbert, and payback to the `asparagus king’ Gordon Edgell, who had tried to damn her publicly for her activism on behalf of unemployed youth. She also indulged in another satirical collaboration with Miles Franklin in the play Call Up Your Ghosts (1945).
In 1944 Cusack’s always perilous health broke down and she was pensioned out of the Department of Education. To economise she pooled resources with a friend and fellow-writer, Florence James, with whom she shared a cottage in the Blue Mountains. They worked together on a children’s book, Four Winds and a Family (1946), before rigorously planning and writing their classic wartime epic of Sydney, Come In Spinner (1951), which won the £1000 prize in the novel competition run by the Sydney Daily Telegraph in 1946. Come In Spinner’s satirical exposé of low life and `high’ society in wartime Sydney bordered on the carnivalesque. The potential for libel action, latent in the authors’ descriptions of locations, the vice industries specific to them, and the rich caricatures of those who had profited through wartime corruption, caused the Daily Telegraph to hesitate about publication. The authors reclaimed their manuscript with the aid of the solicitor Marie Byles, and published it in London. Come In Spinner was a best-seller.
In 1949 Cusack sailed for Europe. When health permitted, she worked on the manuscripts that she had taken to London, including Say No to Death (1951), about a young woman with tuberculosis, Southern Steel (1953), set in Newcastle, and Caddie (1953), the autobiography of a barmaid which Cusack edited and introduced. She wrote The Sun in Exile (1955), based on the racism she had witnessed on her voyage through the Caribbean and in London.
After several months of near-paralysis in 1954 Cusack dictated Pacific Paradise (1955), a play protesting against atomic weapons.
While in China Cusack researched and wrote a collection of social documentary pen-portraits, Chinese Women Speak (1958).
In the winter of 1958-59, en route to London from Peking, Cusack happened to witness a Nazi SS officers’ reunion and the beginnings of the neo-Nazi cult in Germany. The result was Heatwave in Berlin (1961), also widely published and translated. From 1959 her works had found a popular audience overseas: in eastern European countries she was given untransferable royalties. This resulted in a nomadic annual schedule as, with Freehill, she lived on literary earnings and wrote, out of the cultural experiences, books including Holidays among the Russians (1964) and Illyria Reborn (1966).
In 1962 Picnic Races was published. In 1964 Cusack wrote Black Lightning, in which she experimented with free indirect style and multiple voices.
1967 - The Sun Is Not Enough; 1969 - The Half-Burnt Tree.
Cusack’s experiences of a sister’s battle with alcoholism resulted in A Bough in Hell (1971). In 1973 the Australian Council for the Arts awarded her a literary pension. An International Women’s Year grant seeded the production of Caddie (1976) as a film. Freehill wrote a biographical travelogue, Dymphna Cusack (1975), based on years of taped dialogues which they recorded as they travelled. Although frail they continued to travel and write—Fiji and Noumea (1976), Hong Kong (1977), South-East Asia (1979) and finally South America (1980)—using their preferred mode of transport, the cargo ship.
Jungfrau, 1936
Pioneers on Parade, 1939
Come In Spinner, 1951
Say No to Death, 1951
Southern Steel, 1953
Caddie, the Story of a Barmaid, 1953 (introduction only)
The Sun in Exile, 1955
Heat Wave 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
Dymphna Cusack was the third of six surviving children of James Cusack, storekeeper, and his wife Bridget Beatrice.