(1885-1964)
(1917-1979)
Niece
and great-niece respectively of Henry Bournes
Higgins, Janet (Nettie) Palmer (right) and her daughter Helen exerted
an enduring influence on the cultural life of Australia.
Nettie Higgins took her BA in 1909 and after a year in Europe returned
to take her MA in 1912. Her marriage, in 1914, to Edward Vivian (Vance)
Palmer established one of Australia’s most significant literary partnerships.
Herself the author of two collections of poems, literary criticism,
local histories and a memoir of her uncle, Nettie also wrote Fourteen
Years: Extracts from a Private Journal, 1925-1939, published in 1948,
and pamphlets on the Spanish Civil War.
She is perhaps best remembered for her literary contacts and the support
and judicious critical appraisal she and Vance extended to new and established
Australian writers. Her Henry Handel Richardson (1950) was the first
full-length study of the author whom she had known for 25 years. Her
critical work appeared mostly in newspapers and journals. It exposed
many Australian writers such as Martin Boyd, Barbara Baynton and Frank
Dalby Davison to their first serious critical attention. Nettie Palmer’s
work was the subject of a special issue of Meanjin in 1959 and is examined
in Drusilla Modjeska’s Exiles at Home (1981).
In 1999, Deborah Jordan published Nettie Palmer: Search for an Aesthetic.
Helen Palmer was honoured after her death by a memorial publication,
Helen Palmer’s Outlook (1982). A member of the Communist Party of Australia
until 1957, Helen graduated in Arts and Education from the University
of Melbourne, and after wartime service during which she was in charge
of educational services by WAAAF personnel throughout Australia, she
became a secondary school teacher.
Helen published numerous textbooks for high schools, but her most significant
contribution to Australian culture lay in the journal she founded and
edited: Outlook: An Australian Socialist Review.
