The Australian Women's Register

Daughter of English-born parents, Edgar Scott Clarke and his wife Alice Jane (née Barber), Dorothy Dolling was educated at Otago Girls’ High School and the University of Otago. She completed a Bachelor of Science in 1918 and Master of Science in 1919. After two years teaching mathematics and physics at the University of Leeds, England, she returned to study advanced mathematics in New Zealand and married medical practitioner Charles Edward Dolling.

In the years before the Second World War, particularly during the Depression, Dorothy occupied herself with the activities of the South Australian Country Women’s Association (C.W.A.), organising handicraft classes, fundraising for bushfire and flood relief, and distributing blankets and necessities. She became a member of the Women’s Centenary Council of South Australia and, during wartime, initiated a register of volunteer personnel. She served with the Allied Forces Information Bureau and Women’s Air Training Corps, and chaired the central welfare committee of the Women’s Land Army. After the war, Dorothy established leadership schools for C.W.A. officers in the interests of developing their education.

From 1936, Dorothy had also begun work as a journalist, editing the women’s pages of the Advertiser as ‘Marian March’, and editing its weekly rural newspaper, the Chronicle, as ‘Eleanor Barbour’. She retired from the Chronicle in 1966.

Dorothy Dolling died of hypertensive heart disease in 1967, survived by a daughter and a son. Her son founded the Dorothy Dolling memorial trust, assisting country women and their children to obtain further education.