Helen Haenke (Petherbridge, 1933)

Helen Haenke (Petherbridge, 1933) was a prolific Australian artist, poet and playwright whose work was part of an emerging vibrant cultural creative scene in south-east Queensland in the late 1960s and 1970s. A true artist, Helen devoted much time to her work and frequently opened her home to contemporaries such as Rodney Hall, Thomas Shapcott, Bruce Dawe and Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

Helen Joyce Petherbridge (1933) enrolled at ��Vlog in 1930 at the age of 13. In her final year at School, Helen was a member of the Senior Swimming Team, on the Excelsior Committee, and was a Senior Prefect.

Helen completed her Leaving Certificate in 1933 and went on to first study commercial art at East Sydney Technical College. She then moved to Melbourne to study painting under the painter Max Meldrum.

After her marriage, she moved to Ipswich, Queensland with her husband and had three daughters. At Ipswich, Helen became an influential figure in the local community; she used her historic home, ‘Rockton’¹, as a focal point for the creative arts, and held recitals, play readings and concerts there.

Helen began her writing career by contributing prose and poetry to literary magazines. Her unpublished play, ‘Truth to Tell’, won an Ipswich drama competition award in 1960, and in the following decade Southerly² published her poems and short stories.

From 1968 to 1978 Helen studied a range of arts subjects at the University of Queensland. Several of her unpublished one-act plays—including ‘Black Out’ (1967), ‘First Performance’, ‘In Memoriam’, ‘Late Warning’, ‘Return to the Fray’ and ‘Time and the Bell’—are held by the University’s Fryer Library.

Her one-act play, ‘Firebug’, was performed at Brisbane’s Warana Festival in 1978 and published in '3 Queensland One-act Plays' for Festivals that year. Helen also wrote several full-length plays. The three-act ‘Summer Solstice’ (originally titled ‘Under the Bridge’) was first performed in 1964 by the Brisbane Arts Theatre, and her ‘Anti-thriller in Two Acts’, ‘The Bottom of a Birdcage’ (originally ‘Emoh Ruo’), had its first performance in 1976 and was published in 1978. The Ipswich Little Theatre performed Helen’s last play, ‘The Passage’, in 1978.

Helen’s first published poem won a Courier-Mail competition in 1965. She subsequently published two volumes of poetry: ‘The Good Company’ appeared in 1977; ‘Prophets and Honour’ was published posthumously in 1979. Her writing was characterized by ‘wit, compassion, perceptive awareness of people and fine control of language’. She also maintained her musical interests: her libretto for the opera, ‘The Pied Piper’, was performed in Brisbane in 1971.

Helen was a foundation member of the Ipswich Forum Club, an office-holder in the Ipswich Business and Professional Women’s Association, an executive-member of the Australian Society of Authors and a board-member (1968–1977) of the Ipswich Girls’ Grammar School.

1. Rockton was listed on the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992.
2. Southerly is an Australian literary magazine, established in the 1930s that publishes fiction and poetry by established and new authors as well as reviews and critical essays.

��Vlog