a twentieth-century Australian playwright, poet and freelance writer
Education
When Brand was seven years old, her mother died of a self-induced abortion, and she was sent to live with relatives in Rockhampton, attending the Rockhampton Girl's Grammar School. At the age of eleven she moved back to Sydney, finishing her education at North Sydney Girls' High School.
Career
During World War II, she worked as a social worker and then as a research officer for the Department of Labour and National Service.
Mona Brand joined the Victorian Branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers during the war years, discussing her early works with fellow writers Leonard Mann, Frank Dalby Davison, and Vance Palmer. After the war she joined the Melbourne Realist Writer's Group, where her first play Here Under Heaven was read. This group, which included writers such as Frank Hardy and Eric Lambert, recommended the play to Melbourne New Theatre and it was performed in 1948.
Mona Brand wrote on a wide variety of topics, usually of social relevance and often new to Australian playwriting. Her major work, Here Under Heaven (1948) tackles the dilemma faced by a Chinese war bride in Australia. It has been translated and performed in China and Eastern Europe. Here Comes Kisch! (1948) dealt with government action against the visit of the Czech anti-war activist Egon Kisch in 1934. In the comedy-drama Down Under Chelsea (1991) she focused on Australian Communists and ex-Communists living in London in the late 1940s and 1970s. Since 1948 Brand has had 24 plays, mostly full-length, staged in Australia and overseas. Between 1953 and 1976 she was almost a house playwright of New Theatre, Sydney.
Politics
Brand was a prominent member of the NSW Branch of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, and was a strong advocate of Aboriginal rights. With Fox, she campaigned for a 'yes' vote in the 1967 referendum to have Aboriginal Australians recognised in the Australian Constitution, as noted by Governor General, Sir William Deane at the Reconciliation Convention in 1997.
In 1956, Brand travelled to Vietnam to assist the Vietnamese revolution through her affiliations with the CPA. She assisted Radio Hanoi and the Voice of Vietnam, especially with English translations returning to Australia the following year.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) held a security file on Brand from 1950, detailing her movements and activities. The file was 379 pages long when it was released from closed access. Brand read the file herself, and expressed her distaste for ASIO's actions in a satirical piece in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2002.