Joan Phipson

Pioneer of Australian children's writing

Joan Margaret Phipson, writer: born Warrawee, New South Wales 16 November 1912; AO 1994; married 1944 Colin Fitzhardinge (died 1998; one son, one daughter); died 2 April 2003.

A pioneer of 20th-century Australian children's writing, Joan Phipson also won international fame for her novels. With her contemporaries Patricia Wrightson and Ivan Southall, she was a key figure in establishing Australia as a leading country for children's literature, with her own stories preparing the way for later equally tough and successful home writers such as Sonya Hartnett and Gillian Rubinstein.

Born in 1912, in Warrawee on Sydney's north shore, to English parents, Joan travelled between Australia, India and Britain during her childhood. But her main education took place at the local Frensham School, whose outstanding headmistress invited her to return as a member of staff responsible for printing and running the library. Having previously visited private presses in Britain (she spent a day at the Hogarth Press with Leonard and Virginia Woolf), Phipson went on to found the small Frensham Press before working as a journalist and later serving during the Second World War with the Women's Australian Auxiliary Air Force.

In 1944 she married Colin Fitzhardinge, grandson of the first Western Lands Commissioner for New South Wales. Living in a rudimentary home near Carcoar, the couple finally moved during the 1960s to a farm in the Central Tablelands near Mandurama, where they stayed for the next 40 years, raising sheep and cattle.

Told to take a rest before the birth of a child, Phipson decided to write Good Luck to the Rider instead, which went on to win the Australian Children's Book of the Year award in 1953. This affectionate family story celebrates the way its characters learn how to cope with a series of hard but never impossible challenges arising from the rugged outback where the book is set.

Later novels, while keeping to the same type of background, became more concerned with the psychological processes of their main child characters. In The Boundary Riders (1962) the 11-year-old Bobby finally takes over after he and his older sister and cousin are unable to find their way back home after getting lost in a terrible storm. How he does this, and the struggles the other two have in accepting his authority, makes memorable reading. Narrated in the simple statements characteristic of all her writing, this excellent novel still reads well today, with the only sign of its age an omission of any references to local aboriginal tribes other than a casual mention of the possible need at one stage for a "black tracker".

After 1970 Phipson's stories broke away from descriptions of pastoral family life in favour of social and environmental issues, sometimes of a disturbing nature. The Cats (1976) features a couple of hoodlums who first kidnap two brothers but then become the prey of fearsome feral cats, and No Escape (1979) describes how two boys come to be trapped like animals. Saddest of all, A Tide Flowing (1981) follows the agonising story of a small boy who was the only witness to his mother's suicide.

There were lighter moments too, with Hide till Daytime (1977) describing the adventures of two children accidentally locked into a department store for the night. But, on the whole, Phipson was drawn towards serious topics, from The Bird Smugglers (1977), written about the brutal racket in rare-bird trading, to Dinko (1985), set at a time when the world was under nuclear attack.

Although she loved the hills and rivers of her home in New South Wales, Joan Phipson also hankered after Britain, finally buying a cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon. But, after her husband died in 1998, she decided to remain permanently in Australia. She had by this time stopped writing, having produced 30 books, won many awards and seen her work translated into French, German, Swedish and Hungarian.

Never talking down to her young readers, she preferred instead to travel with them on a voyage of mutual understanding and discovery. The poise and elegance of her writing are immediately apparent, even when she is describing nature and its various inhabitants at their harshest. But, although she always acknowledged human frailty, she never underestimated the strength of spirit needed not just to survive but also to enjoy the wild beauty of the countryside she knew and loved so well.

Nicholas Tucker