At the age of 96, Dr Patricia Clarke has just published her 14th book.
"It keeps me alive," she says, of the researching and writing, as she sits in the lounge room of her Deakin home, a house she built with her late husband, Hugh, after they bought the land for auction at the Albert Hall in the early 1960s.
Her latest book, Bold Types, How Australia's First Women Journalists Blazed a Trail, profiles brave and intrepid women who took on the male-dominated profession, from 1860 to the end of the Second World War.
Clarke is also a bold type - she was the only woman on the Melbourne staff of the Australian News and Information Bureau in the early 1950s and later, a journalist with the ABC in the press gallery at Parliament House in Canberra, who was also juggling family life.
Her memories are of "crowded newsrooms, clattering typewriters, overflowing cigarette trays", a world away from modern journalism.
But her experiences of decades ago still ring true as she speaks of taking her typewriter to the Cotter to tap out a story as her children played nearby, or of getting up early to write while her family slept and the house was quiet. She was a journalist, wife and mother and it was a juggle. But she also enjoyed the excitement of the profession and the flexibility it afforded.
FORGING HER OWN WAY
At Parliament House, she worked the 2pm to 11pm shift, covering regional news, a "career backwater when it wasn't interspersed with the daytime shift". But it suited her family life.
"I could not say that I experienced gender inequality at the ABC. I did the same work under the same conditions as a male journalist on the same shift," she writes in the book.
"Society imposed the gender inequality I operated under. In the 1960s, there was no government-supported childcare, no maternity leave, no time off when children were ill, and no expectation that men would help with housework or childcare. These absences prevented most women from working."
She later worked for Maxwell Newtown Publications as its Canberra representative covering economics, trade and mining, just around the corner from her home in Deakin. In the 1970s, she was editor of publications for the National Capital Commission and was graded A-plus, "the peak level for graded journalists".
"I loved all the jobs I had but they were ones I took to fit in with the stages of my family," she says
In 1961, she had married Hugh Clarke, who survived more than three years as a prisoner of war of the Japanese in World War II, including working on the Burma-Thai railway. He was also a public servant and author. Hugh had two older children and together he and Patricia had three more. Her husband died in 1996.
Now a grandmother and step-great-grandmother, Dr Clarke says she still needs to always have a project on the go, decades after leaving journalism to write books.
"Even now with my eyesight going, I can expand things on the computer," she says.
THE WOMEN JOURNALISTS WHO WOULDN'T SETTLE FOR THE WOMEN'S PAGES
During COVID, when she spent a lot of time alone, Bold Types began to form, the title a nod to the dark type newspapers used to emphasise names, but also to the character of the early women journalists.
"The fight by women journalists for gender equality continued to nag at me," Dr Clarke says.
She wanted to write about "independent, courageous women" who laid the way for others to follow. Edith Dickenson covering the Boer War as Australia's first female war correspondent. Anna Blackwell reporting from Paris in 1860 for The Sydney Morning Herald, readers eagerly awaiting her vivid dispatches, even though they took four months to arrive by sea mail. Frances Taylor who dressed as a young man to write articles from New Guinea in the 1920s.
In their reports, the women often emphasised the human details that male journalists missed, their readers appreciating that sense of empathy and compassion.
"They brought women's eyes to what they wrote about," Dr Clarke says.
Despite equal pay being a feature of journalism, it meant little in reality when women were left on lower grades and often confined to the women's pages. The women in her book didn't settle for that.
"I chose these women because each one exhibited some aspect of the fight for gender equality," Dr Clarke says. "Sometimes it ended up as a step backwards but they fought for something and that was their purpose."
A NATURAL CURIOSITY
Dr Clarke says always had a natural curiosity. Born in Melbourne, she was often taken for walks around the city by her father, a teacher, who loved to explain the development of the city.
"I was fortunate to have a few teachers who were great history people, including a nun, a very aged nun, or at least we thought she was, in Grade 4 who had actually waved goodbye to Burke and Wills when they left Melbourne on their failed expedition," she says. "She just ignited that feeling for history."
Dr Clarke was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2001 for her promotion of Australian history. She edited the Canberra Historical Journal for 14 years and has been a member of the Canberra and District Historical Society for 60 years.
And Dr Clarke is not slowing down. Her 15th book is in the works.
Bold Types, How Australia's First Women Journalists Blazed a Trail is published by the National Library of Australia. It will be launched at the library on Tuesday from 6pm-7pm by journalist Amy Remeikis, who wrote the introduction to the book. There will be a panel discussion featuring Remeikis, Patricia Karvelas and Katharine Murphy as they talk about the history of Australian women journalists and reflect on their own careers. Bookings essential at www.nla.gov.au.
