Henrietta Frances York Drake-Brockman b. 27 July 1901

Also known as Henry Drake
  • Artist (Painter)
Painter and author of articles, short stories, novels and plays. President of WA Women Writers' Club and WA Fellowship of Australian Writers. She was awarded the OBE in 1967 and has won numerous literary prizes.

painter and author, was born in Perth on 27 July 1901 into a cultured, Christian and socially-committed family. Her father, Martin Edward Jull, WA’s first public service commissioner, was an able administrator whose other interests included maintaining an orchard, cricket, swimming and boating. Her mother, Roberta Henrietta Margaritta Jull, née Stewart, was a Glasgow trained medical practitioner whose formidable presence and enduring dedication to social reform, science and women’s affairs (especially health, rights and education) gained her national and international recognition.

The family lived at Brookside orchard and vineyard near Armadale; in 1910-13 Henrietta was in Scotland with her mother. Afterwards she went to Frensham School at Mittagong (NSW) and later studied languages at the University of WA. She was sixteen in 1917 when her father died prematurely and her plans to study art in Paris were abandoned. On 2 August 1921 at Guildford, she married Geoffrey Drake-Brockman, engineer, soldier and twenty-four years her senior.

The couple settled at Broome and Drake-Brockman turned her creative talents to the written word. Already a short story had appeared in the Children’s Corner of the Western Mail ; now, as 'Henry Drake’, she wrote articles on the north west for the West Australian and in future years would contribute to Walkabout .

Drake-Brockman considered creative writing to be her real m étier . From Broome’s exotic environment, multicultural society and relaxed lifestyle she found inspiration for short stories, novels and plays, e.g. Blue North (1934), Sheba Lane (1936) and in 1938 her sesquicentenary prize-winning play, Men without Wives . All the time she continued to write short stories for the Bulletin , Smith’s Weekly , Southerly and Meanjin . The twenty stories she chose for Sydney or the Bush (1948) reflect the belief, born of her own observations of Aussie battlers on the land, that Australians 'are a nation of gamblers; and often our stakes are very high’.

Drake-Brockman worked from a wide palette, her artist’s eye transposing real images into vibrant word pictures. Characters, caught in nets of comedy or pathos, are inexorably pitted against a dominant environment. Yet her writing seldom lacks a social dimension, nor is it free of value judgment. As she told the WA Fellowship of Writers in her 1941 presidential address 'Education for Life’, the creative writer makes 'a conscious selection and nicely weighed consideration of values’. This intellectual dilemma is pertinent in novels such as The Fatal Day (1947), The Wicked and the Fair (1957) and Voyage to Disaster (1963). Voyage to Disaster was Drake-Brockman’s greatest challenge. It demanded extensive archival research at home and in Holland, work with translator E.K. Drok, and aerial and underwater (aged fifty-nine, in an aqua-lung!) reconnaissance of the Batavia wreck on the Abrohlos reef.

Tall, elegant, forthright, her seemingly imperious manner belying an innate shyness, Drake-Brockman was extolled by her peers. Much involved in Perth’s literary life, she was consistently generous to aspiring young writers. At times president of both the WA Women Writers’ Club and the Fellowship of Australian Writers (WA), Drake-Brockman was awarded the OBE in 1967; she also won numerous literary prizes and saw most of her plays performed. She died suddenly in Perth on 8 March 1968, survived by her husband, son and daughter.

Writers:
Birman, Wendy
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992