Murdoch, Nina (1890–1976)

Australian journalist, writer, and poet. Name variations: sometimes used pen name Manin. Born Madoline Murdoch on October 19, 1890, in Melbourne, Australia; died on April 16, 1976, in Camberwell, Australia; daughter of John Andrew Murdoch (a law clerk) and Rebecca (Murphy) Murdoch; attended Sydney Girls' High School, 1904–07; married James Duncan Mackay Brown (a journalist), on December 19, 1917; no children.

Selected writings:

Songs of the Open Air (verse, 1915); More Songs of the Open Air (verse, 1922); Seventh Heaven, A Joyous Discovery of Europe (travel, 1930); Miss Emily in Black Lace (novel, 1930); Portrait of Miss Emily (novel, 1931); She Travelled Alone in Spain (travel, 1935); Exit Miss Emily (novel, 1937); Portrait in Youth (biography, 1948).

Australian journalist and writer Nina Murdoch was born in Melbourne on October 19, 1890, the third daughter of law clerk John Andrew Murdoch and Rebecca Murphy Murdoch . She grew up in Woodburn, New South Wales, attended Sydney Girls' High School from 1904 to 1907, and then taught for a time at the Sydney Boys' Preparatory School. Establishing herself as a writer, Murdoch won a prize from the Sydney Bulletin in 1913 for a sonnet she wrote about Canberra, and in 1914 she joined the staff of the Sydney Sun as one of its first female reporters. In 1915, she published Songs of the Open Air, a book of verse.

Murdoch married fellow Bulletin journalist James Duncan Mackay Brown in December 1917. In 1922, they left the Bulletin and moved to Melbourne, where they worked for the Sun News-Pictorial. There, Murdoch became the first woman allowed to cover Senate debates. In 1927 she traveled alone through England and Europe and subsequently wrote Seventh Heaven, A Joyous Discovery of Europe (1930), the first of her four travel books. At that time, she also published two novels, Miss Emily in Black Lace (1930) and Portrait of Miss Emily (1931). The third novel in the "Miss Emily" trilogy, Exit Miss Emily, was published in 1937.

At the onset of the Depression in 1930, female employees of the Melbourne Herald, where Murdoch was then working, were fired in order to provide job openings for men. She turned to radio broadcasting, giving talks on travel. With the inauguration of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in 1932, she managed children's programming, pioneering the "Argonauts' Club," which aired for only about two years but was successfully revived in similar form to run from 1941 to 1972.

When her husband moved to Adelaide in 1934 to work for News, Ltd., Murdoch followed a year later. She traveled again in Europe in 1934 and 1935, producing the 1935 travel book She Travelled Alone in Spain. Abroad again in 1937, she wrote articles for the Australian press warning against Nazism. Murdoch published her last book, a biography of John Longstaff called Portrait in Youth, in 1948. A member of the Lyceum Club, the Incorporated Society of Authors, and the Fellowship of Australian Writers, Nina Murdoch spent her final years in a nursing home at Camberwell, Australia, where she died on April 16, 1976.

sources:

Radi, Heather, ed. 200 Australian Women: A Redress Anthology. NSW, Australia: Women's Redress Press, 1988.

Wilde, William H. et al., eds. The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Ellen Dennis French , freelance writer, Murrieta, California