The Australian Women's Register

Helen Ferber was born in Adelaide on 15th February 1919, the eldest daughter of Richard Francis Hockey and Kathleen Isabel Hockey (née Butler). Her grandfather, Sir Richard Butler, was a premier of South Australia, as was her uncle of the same name.

Ferber completed a BA at Melbourne University in 1939, majoring in French and German. During a gap year in 1938, she completed a teaching diploma at Munich University and a course in Italian at Perugia University. She described her time in the tense atmosphere of pre-war Munich in a memoir published in Meanjin in 2006.

During World War II she worked as an interpreter for the Department of the Army, censoring foreign language mail, and later for the Australian Department of Information Shortwave Listening Post, monitoring enemy broadcasts in German, French and Italian.

After the war she worked with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, firstly in the UNRRA Yugoslav Mission, later with refugees in the UNRRA Displaced Persons Headquarters in Paris and Berlin. She wrote the official history of the Yugoslav Mission. She also worked with the Preparatory Commission of the International Refugee Organization in Geneva. In 1945 she investigated and reported to the International Federation of University Women on the postwar situation of the Yugoslav and Czechoslovak federations.

In 1948, Ferber married an American diplomat, David Ferber. Travelling with David, she undertook a series of lectures across Victoria, seeking support for a United Nations appeal to help displaced children in Europe. Further diplomatic postings took the Ferber family to America and the Philippines. They returned to Melbourne in 1953, and Helen spent the next decade raising two daughters, Jenny and Sarah, and a son, Michael. Michael suffered from severe disabilities and died in 1970, aged 19.

Helen Ferber became actively involved with a number of women’s organisations in Melbourne. She joined the Australian Federation of University Women-Victoria, becoming national Convenor of International Relations for AFUW in the late 1950s, and President of AFUW-Vic. in 1962. She was also an active member of the Melbourne Catalysts group and the Lyceum Club, becoming vice-president of the latter organisation. She also served on the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Victorian Talks Committee, and later its State Advisory Committee.

In 1965 Ferber took up a part-time position with the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne. She worked there until 1981, variously filling the positions of research fellow, business manager and editor of the institute’s publications, including its journal, the Australian Economic Review. She contributed to ground-breaking study of Australian poverty, the 1975 Henderson Report, and authored a seminal engagement with public policy, Citizens’ Advice and Aid Bureaux in Victoria.

Helen Ferber also undertook autobiography and family history, writing a record of her experiences in America and Europe from letters she had written to family and friends, and publishing Stagecoach to Birdsville, an account of her grandparents’ ill-fated 1894 journey to Birdsville. The breadth of her engagement with public life can probably be best gauged from the lengthy biographical interview recorded with her by the National Library in 2006.

In 2010 Helen Ferber was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM). The award was ‘for service to the community, particularly as a social policy researcher and historian, and through contributions to the advancement of women’. She died in 2013. She was remembered in her obituary as ‘a woman of action who was ‘clear-eyed’ but with a commitment to social justice’.