Audrey Oldfield

Audrey Oldfield (6 October 1925 – 27 October 2010) was an Australian children's writer and historian of suffrage and republicanism.

A sixth generation Australian, Audrey Phyllis Oldfield was born in Mullumbimby, New South Wales, to butcher Joseph Parkes and Eileen, née Browne.^[1]

She was educated at Grafton High School and won a scholarship to Sydney Teachers' College from which she graduated in 1945 and began her teaching career.^[1] In 1949 she married Alan Oldfield and continued teaching until the birth of her children. She later became a teacher/librarian at Woolooware Public School and later still at Burraneer Bay Public School.^[2]

Her first novel for children was published in 1970. Daughter of Two Worlds tracks the life of a part-Aboriginal girl and the challenges she faces at school in Perth. Her second novel, Baroola and Us, covers a city family moving to the country and appeared in 1973.

In 1993 Oldfield won a CH Currey Memorial Fellowship, giving her open access to original sources held in the Mitchell Library and the resources of the State Library of New South Wales as a whole.^[3]

Her study Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or a Struggle? (1992) was warmly reviewed by historian Patricia Grimshaw as 'informative, judicious and persuasive', in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (vol 22, 2). Grimshaw wrote that it 'filled a vital place in the country's historiography, and in the history of the western suffrage movement'.

Works

• Daughter of Two Worlds (1970)
• Baroola and Us (1973)
• Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or a Struggle? (1992)
• Australian Women and the Vote (1994)
• The Great Republic of the Southern Seas: Republicans in Nineteenth-Century Australia (1999)

References