Consignment received 2023

Component identifier:

Class 1

Content Summary:

This consignment comprises Kenneth Henderson's unpublished draft memoirs, associated photographs, correspondence and poems. The material relating to Henderson's memoirs consists primarily of drafts of an autobiography plus a series of sketches of family and others, particularly in Sydney during the 1930s. There is a focus on life in Sydney's northern suburbs esp. North Turramurra, as an only child of a returned Australian soldier, one of three brothers - of the Henderson 'sweets' family - who had been gassed on the Western Front and spent years, in one form or another, in ex-service rehab, who himself had brought a British war bride to Australia and died in the late 1920s. There are passages about the families and houses of the area – Mollie Douglas, Charles Mackerras, H.V. Evatt, Grace Cossington Smith, Ethel Anderson, for example, as well as his own struggles/observations, in retrospect, about the area, and his own extended family. They do not embrace the war, or, very much about his post-war career, although there is a good deal of incidental material about his time in Switzerland and Indonesia. There are 'current day' reflections on Australian society generally and changes in the 1950s-60s. The photographs are mostly of people in classical music, one of Daisy Bates, whom he interviewed in 1941, some of Ethel Anderson, and writer Barbara Jefferis.

Subjects:

Mass media

Contents

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