(Drama examining the lives of residents of a Sydney apartm...)
Drama examining the lives of residents of a Sydney apartment block. Initial storylines focused on adultery, drug use, frigidity, rape, gossip, homosexuality, marriage problems, racism.
Pat Flower was an Australian crime novelist and television playwright. She is a recipient of the Mary Gilmore, and Awgie Awards.
Background
Pat Flower was born as Patricia Mary on 23 February 1914 at Ramsgate, Kent, England. She was one of four children of James Bullen, a hotel porter, and his wife Jessie Sarah (Bryson) Bullen. Pat was saved twice from drowning, first at age two at Ramsgate and another time at age eight at Littlehampton. In 1928 the family emigrated to New South Wales, Australia living at Kyogle first, and then in Sydney.
Education
Pat Flower studied at Worthing County High School, England, until she left to Australia with her family.
After finishing school Pat Flower's brothers went to Teachers College but Pat and her sister had to get jobs. Thus, during the Second World War Pat became friendly with Cynthia Nolan when they both worked in a government department finding hostel accommodation for munitions workers. Pat Flower was a New Theatre secretary from 1944 to 1949, writing radio plays and revue sketches in her spare time, and a Life Member by 1966. In 1949 Pat divorced her first husband Bruce Jiffkins and immediately married Cedric Flower, resigned from the New Theatre, and accompanied Cedric to England in 1950.
Pat and Cedric Flower spent the years 1950-1955 and 1971-1972 in Europe. While they were in England from 1950 to 1955, she began to write crime novels, the first of which, Wax Flowers for Gloria, appeared in 1958. Flower published at least one crime novel every two years until 1975, moving from detective stories such as Goodbye Sweet William (1959), featuring Inspector Swinton, her Australian "Maigret" character, to psychological thrillers, among them Cobweb (1972), Slyboots (1974) and Crisscross (1976). Some of her books were translated into French and German. Although Pat began to write full time after 1963, most successfully as a crime novelist and television playwright, she did not succumb to pressure to donate her royalties to New Theatre, working in Sydney as an advertising copywriter until 1963. She was in her own words "an underpaid overworked freelance writer-cum-housekeeper with a freelance husband, mortgage, and bank loan."
By 1961 Flower also wrote film and television scripts, including (with Cedric) From the Tropics to the Snow, produced by the Commonwealth Film Unit in 1965. Her play, The Tape Recorder for an actress and tape recorder, was televised by the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1966, appeared in the anthology Best Short Plays (1969), and was the first play to be produced in color on British television by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1967. Pat won the 1967 Dame Mary Gilmore Award for Tilley Landed on our Shores, a comic version of Governor Phillip's 1788 expedition. An adaptation of her novel, Fiends of the Family (1966), for A.B.C. television won an Awgie Award in 1969 from the Australian Writers' Guild. In the late 1960s, some of her television plays were screened in the A.B.C.'s Australian Playhouse series. She also wrote scripts for commercial television. Her adaptation of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist was a mainstage production in 1948 and revived in 1982. A skilled performer, Pat often acted in the plays, and co-wrote with Cedric Flower an election revue at New Theatre Pot of Message (1949), and contribute to several other revues such as You've Never Had It So Good (1965), Exposure 70 (1970) included "I Love Your Sunburnt Country" for a Japanese speaker keen to grab Australia's mineral resources, What's New (1973).
In 1971 the Flowers again visited Europe where Pat gathered further material for her suspense novels. Returning to Sydney in 1972, they took separate flats at Paddington, so that she could concentrate on her writing. Pat suffered from insomnia and arthritis for many years and was increasingly isolated as her health deteriorated. The two sides of Flower's writing: comedy, and horror reflected aspects of her personality, with her novels becoming progressively darker. On the night of 1/2 September 1977, Pat Flower died from the effects of poisoning by pentobarbitone, intentionally taken.
(Drama examining the lives of residents of a Sydney apartm...)
1972
Views
Quotations:
"When your stomach feels heavy, your life seems in vain, and all your acquaintances give you pain, and you don't give a damn if there's sunshine or rain, then it's time for review."
"Your life lacks a purpose, your mind lacks a guide, potential achievements are starting to slide - the New Theatre League is for you, its dominion is wide, and its motive is true."
"It doesn't count much if your name's Joe or Fritz or Marmaduke Archibald Featherstone-Ritz. So long as you've gutted and your character fits, and your heart's in its place."
Membership
Australian Writers' Guild
,
Australia
Personality
Pat Flower was described as an amusing companion with a dry wit. Her husky voice retained a slight English accent, and she was attractive in an angular, understated way. From the age of two, she wore glasses. She loved to write and began writing at the age of eight. In her own words "when sitting at the typewriter headaches and worries disappeared, even hunger was forgotten."
Connections
Pat Flower married Bruce Douglas Jiffkins on 22 December 1937 and they had a son two years later. When Pat became a New Theatre secretary, he was placed in a children's boarding home at Wentworth Falls where he remained until his paternal grandmother gained custody in 1946. In 1949 Pat divorced Jiffkins and immediately married Cedric Arthur Flower on 4 March 1949 at the registrar general's office, Sydney.