Dr Jeff Brownrigg

Barbara Blackman has died in her 96th year. Many at the National Flm and Sound Archive (NFSA) have counted her as a good friend of many years standing. That all started when what was to become the sound section of the NFSA was still at the National Library.

Can you add your memories of Barbara?

It would be valuable to fill in some of the history involving Barbara in the years just before the Archive was opened forty years ago in 1984.
So, the NFSA Owls invite people to share their memories.

To get things started, a couple of ‘organisational Owls’ (or should that be ‘organising’ Owls?) will kick things off with a few recollections.
Your contribution might be a single memory of Barbara or thought bubble. Or, the addition might be a single story, or a single sentence of her association with so many of us. We’ll start with Jeff Brownrigg. Marilyn Dooley also has memories she will be willing to share.

It is worth adding that Peter Burgis and Bruce Skilton, Jean Waghorn née Wein and others, all of whom assisted with the provision of radio serials, distributed nationwide through Radio 4RPH in Brisbane.

For information about Barbara’s long, productive and interesting life you might consult her autobiographical writing, and in particular, Certain Chairs (1968, new edition 1998), Glass After Glass (1997), Portrait of a Friendship, Fifty Years’ Correspondence with Judith Wright (2007), All My Januaries (2016).

In addition, Barbara’s daughter, Christabel, has gathered material from correspondence between Barbara and Charles in the early days of their lives together in Charles and Barbara Blackman: A Decade of Art and Love (2024). (Certain Chairs and Christabel’s biographical anthology are, in their way, first and last works by or about Barbara in her lifetime.)