Dymphna Cusack (1902-1981), Cultural Historian, Controversialist and Opponent of Social Injustice: Her New England Threshing Floor

Abstract

As we know from this colourful and moralistic writer's joint account with her husband Norman Freehill, of her more public life, Ellen Dymphna Cusack was a descendant of Irish immigrants who came to Australia in the 1840s and 1850s and had had an exciting and remarkably vigorous settler background in eastern Australia. Her family had initially taken up land near Yass, and her grandfather and father had both mined for gold with very varied fortunes. They were both compulsive and hilarious storytellers.3 Born in Wyalong, in September 1902, Dymphna had attended the Convent there from 1910, moved to Coogee and then, due to both the declining family fortunes and her own indifferent health, had to be brought up by an aunt and uncle in Guyra from just before the First World War.