Early History of FAWWA

The impetus for the formation of a West Australian Section of the Fellowship of Australian Writers came from a dinner held in June 1938 to welcome the American critic Hartley Grattan to Perth. None of the eleven writers present knew all the other ten and so the oldest writer there, Jesse Hammond, urged that a group be formed. The aim of the group was to support Western Australian writers and at the same time to promote Australian literature and its creators. At the first meeting in October 1938 John K. Ewers was elected as Foundation President. Early members included Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Mary Durack Miller and her sister Elizabeth, Molly Skinner, Professor Walter Murdoch and Gavin Casey.

Back: H. Drake-Brockman, Jesse Hammond, Walter Murdoch, J.K Ewers, E.W (Bill) Irwin, W.C. Thomas, Gavin Casey.
Front: Mary Durack, Annie Mark, C. Hartley Grattan, Ethel Davies, Katherine Susannah Pritchard.

Early activities included monthly meetings with guest speakers on a wide range of topics of interest to writers, Round Table workshops to discuss members’ writings and public reading of works by Western Australian writers. The Fellowship was soon involved in entertaining writers from overseas and interstate, as well as meetings of community organisations such as the Good Neighbour Council and Adult Education, in planning literary activities for the annual Festivals of Perth and organising Children’s Book Weeks. Members lobbied to improve conditions for Australian writers in fields as diverse as the policies of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, censorship, newspaper syndication, the establishment of children’s libraries, the Commonwealth Literary Fund and literary pensions as well as Public and Educational Lending Rights payments to writers. The FAWWA played a major role in the formation of the Australian Society of Authors, the Children’s Book Council and, in the 1970s, the rescue of the Greenmount home of writer Katharine Susannah Prichard, and the formation of the KSP Foundation and Writers Centre.

In 1949 the FAWWA gained a headquarters of its own when Samuel Furphy, son of author Joseph Furphy, known as the Father of the Australian Novel, bequeathed to the FAWWA the wooden cottage built by his father in 1908. The author of Such Is Life lived there until his death in 1912. In September 1949 it was officially opened as Tom Collins House.

In 1959, Sydney writer Kylie Tennant, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald about the Festival of Perth under the title 'Culture Blooms in the West' asserts
"...and every established writer, whatever his shade of political opinion, is a member of the Fellowship of Australian Writers."                 
                                       [Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday February 21 1959, p. 17]

From the early 70s the FAWWA established regional branches in Albany, Geraldton, Kalgoorlie and the Hills Region. For the following twenty years they organised annual country tours of schools by writers with the aim of ensuring that every school student had contact with at least two writers during his or her education.