Ellen Dymphna CusackAM (21 September 1902 – 19 October 1981) was an Australian writer and playwright. She also wrote as Atalanta.
Personal life
Born in Wyalong, New South Wales, Cusack was educated at Saint Ursula's College, Armidale, New South Wales 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. She died at Manly, New South Wales on 19 October 1981.
Cusack early career was as a school teacher in NSW, including Sydney Girls High School where she wrote and produced plays for the students.
Cusack wrote twelve novels (two of which were collaborations), eleven plays, 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. Cusack's experience of collaborative writing with each of these co-authors, and the challenge of getting published, she described in correspondence as well as with Florence James with whom when she shared a house 'Pinegrove'.
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.
Activism
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. She and her husband Norman Freehill were members of the Communist Party and they left their entire estates to the Party in their wills.
In 2011, Cusack was one of 11 authors, including Elizabeth Jolley, Manning Clark, and Dorothy Hewett, to be permanently recognised by the addition of brass plaques at the Writers' Walk, Sydney.
Anniversary, 1935. 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. The play premiered at the Sydney Conservatorium. It was performed again the following year. In the play, an old digger meets the ghosts of his comrades.
↑Croft, Julian, 1941-; Bedson, Jack; Campbell Howard Collection; University of New England. Centre for Australian Language and Literature Studies; Dixson Library (University of New England) Australian plays in manuscript (1993), The Campbell Howard annotated index of Australian plays 1920-1955 / compiled and edited by Jack Bedson and Julian Croft, Centre for Australian Language and Literature Studies, University of New England.{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) pp.68-78.
↑"Women in the World", The Australian Woman's Mirror, 11 (41 (3 September 1935)), Sydney: The Bulletin Newspaper, nla.obj-572096208, retrieved 14 March 2024– via Trove
