The Australian Women's Register

Mavis Thorpe Clark was born in Melbourne, Victoria, in 1909. Her writing career began at the age of 14, when the Australasian published, as a children’s serial, her work The Red School, by no means a masterpiece, but her first literary endeavour. Her first published book, written when she was 18 and sold to Whitcombe and Tombs in 1930 for the then handsome sum of £30, was Hatherley’s First Fifteen, a boy’s adventure story about Rugby football.

Her first book for adults, Pastor Doug, the biography of Sir Douglas Nicholls, Aboriginal pastor later appointed Governor of South Australia, was published in 1965 and re-issued in 1973 in a revised second edition. In 1979, she published another Doug Nicholls’s biographical account under the title The Boy from Cumeroogunga. In order to complete this task, she researched Aboriginal archives and associated with Aboriginal people, and has left a large amount of personal notes, correspondence, research files, etc. of relevance to Aboriginal scholarship.

Unlike most authors, Clark did not suffer rejection of any book submitted for publication. She became an extremely prolific writer and published 32 books, mostly for children, five of which were broadcast as serials by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Her book The Min Min won the 1967 Australian Children’s Book of the Year award, and film rights to The Sky Is Free were bought by the Walt Disney organisation. Clark died in Melbourne in 1999, at the age of 90. She has been honoured by having the national Fellowship of Australian Writers Mavis Thorpe Clark Award named after her.