Margaret Dunn: A life and career biographical study

Despite the challenges and difficulties involved in crafting a viable living as a professional creative writer, a number of Australian women sustained careers as popular writers in the twentieth century. Some of these worked across multiple genres, media and professional descriptors, maintaining what can be described as portfolio careers. This case study recognizes that the task of writing the lives of such popular writers is important because, in addition to restoring women to the historical record, such narratives make an important contribution towards understanding the production and consumption of popular writing. Margaret Dunn (1919–2011) worked for 70 years as a popular journalist, radio dramatist, cookbook writer and historian in Adelaide, Sydney, New York, New Delhi and Geneva. In addition to outlining the trajectory of her life, this study provides the first profile of her career as a popular writer and of the narratives that she constructed and published for both Australian and international audiences. This will include discussion of the ‘golden age’ of radio and the roles that women played in the production of this media, her bestselling cookbook Mother’s Best Recipes (1974) and how she wrote engaging institutional and family histories that reached mainstream audiences.