The journalist, editor and historian was born Mary Patricia Ryan on 30 July 1926 in Alphington, a suburb of Melbourne, in the house built by her father John Laurence Ryan, a teacher. Patricia’s mother Annie Teresa, née McSweeney, a bookbinder, had an aversion to hospitals, with two younger brothers also born at home.
From 1932 to 1937 Pat was educated at St Anthony’s School in Alphington, where her interest in Australian history was sparked by an elderly nun who had waved goodbye to the explorers Burke and Wills on their failed 1861 expedition. Pat recalled that she was ‘brought up with Carlton [Football Club] as closely as she was brought up in the Catholic Church, both seemed tied by unbreakable bonds and the Labor Party had a similar hold’. After the family moved to Sale, she attended Notre Dame de Sion, matriculating with honours in 1942. Pat’s studies in economics, pure mathematics, English and political science at the University of Melbourne were interrupted by tuberculosis. During the war she also worked in an ice-cream factory, where demand soared with US servicemen in town.
In 1951 Pat joined the Australian News and Information Bureau, which was essentially what remained of the wartime Department of Information. She was initially in charge of the ‘morgue’, as the libraries in news organisations were known. After a time, she also began submitting articles as a freelancer, based on interviews with Asian students in Melbourne, and these articles were in turn picked up by Asian newspapers. Pat often described herself as extremely shy, and used journalism to tell the stories of people who might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
When a vacancy arose in the newsroom, Pat was employed as a D-grade journalist. Joining the Australian Journalists’ Association, she came to realise that equal pay was largely negated by women being employed at lower levels with no easy route to promotion. With a tiny staff in Melbourne, Pat managed to report on a range of subjects, although she was assigned to cover a disproportionate number of social events for the Bureau. The 1956 Olympic Games gave her good exposure, and she was promoted to C-grade, the highest level by a woman in the ANIB at that time.
Pat then moved to Canberra for the Bureau, where she began sub-editing, wrote a weekly digest of government and political news, and covered assignments further afield, from the work of Burmese engineers in the Hunter Valley to that of the Royal Flying Doctor Service in Queensland. On 6 June 1961 Pat married Hugh Vincent Clarke (1919–96), a writer, public servant and former prisoner of war. With no option for maternity leave, Pat resigned from the ANIB ahead of the birth of their first child in early 1962. She did some freelance work before joining the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, electing to stay as a casual as it allowed her greater flexibility for her family responsibilities.
In 1968 Pat resigned from the ABC just before the birth of her third child. She was able to work from home writing and editing Canberra ‘insider’ tariff, trade and political newsletters for the brilliant and often controversial Maxwell Newton, who recognised her worth and promoted her to A-grade. It was a sociable household, with visitors of many nationalities, and barbeques most weekend, while Pat shielded the children from Hugh’s nightmares (almost certainly PTSD). She took care with evening meals, and would set up her typewriter while the children played in a park. In 1972 the Clarkes built an extension, adding a study and a new front door so distinguished guests could get in without falling over a bicycle or a car part. From 1974 to 1979 Pat was publications editor of the National Capital Development Commission.
After leaving full-time journalism, Pat ‘pursued the dream of many Australian journalists – including Alan Moorehead, George Johnston and Charmian Clift – to write books’. Her husband was well-known as an author of non-fiction, partly about his wartime experiences, which he wrote about in longhand and Pat would type up. She gravitated towards researching the lives of women, having been struck by the poignancy of the situation of her great grandmother, who had been left widowed with five young children and no money; Pat tried without success to establish how she had managed to make a living.
Editors and publishers were frequent visitors to the Clarke home in Deakin, and in 1983 Pat was awarded a NSW Premier’s Department Cultural Grant. Her first book, The Governesses, was published in Melbourne and London two years later. Drawing on the letters and diaries of governesses who travelled from England to find posts with local families, it provided a rich insight into daily life in the Australian colonies in the mid-nineteenth century. The Governesses was widely reviewed (including by Nancy Keesing in The Australian, who wrote: ‘It is a rare pleasure to read a book that is excellent in every way: research, writing, balance, interpretation’) and sold well. Christmas and other school holidays were often spent on the road in the family Holden, as Pat and Hugh visited sites connected to their research.
A string of books followed The Governesses, including A Colonial Woman, based on the diaries of Mary Braidwood Mowle, and biographies of Louisa Atkinson, novelist, journalist and naturalist, Jessie Couvreur (‘Tasma’), journalist and novelist, and Rosa Praed, novelist and spiritualist. A pioneering group biography of nineteenth century Australian women writers and journalists, Pen Portraits, appeared in 1988, and Pat joined with feminist Dale Spender to edit Life Lines, based on Australian women’s letters and diaries in the early years of European settlement, four years later; these, together with several other titles by Pat, were published by John Iremonger at Allen & Unwin. Her 1994 biography of Praed, which she had researched partly by borrowing her younger son Justin’s four-wheel drive for a Queensland road trip, was joint winner of the Society of Women Writers’ Non-fiction Award.
In addition to reviewing books for the Canberra Times, Pat was active in the city’s scholarly and cultural life. She edited the Canberra Historical Journal (1987–2000), and from 1987 served variously as president, vice president and councillor of the Canberra & District Historical Society. Pat was a member of the Commonwealth Working Party of the Australian Dictionary of Biography by the late 1980s, bringing her personal and professional experience in journalism, literature, feminist advocacy, government and community engagement to bear on the selection of subjects and authors. She also wrote 14 entries herself, with the early ones especially important in ensuring the inclusion of women at a time when women represented less than five per cent of ADB subjects; the last, on broadcaster and actor Gordon Gow, was published in 2022.
From 1995 to 2001 Pat was founding honorary secretary of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia. Much of her research, together with the travel it entailed, was self-funded, with advances and royalties augmented by Literature Board grants (1986, 1988) and fellowships from the Australia Council (1995, 2000). She embraced computers well before her children.
Pat, who received a Harold White Fellowship from the National Library of Australia in 1993, regarded the Library as her second home, particularly after Hugh’s death in 1996. She served on the Library’s Fellowships Advisory Committee (1997–2017) and on the executive of its Friends (1997–99). Pat was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2001 for services to Australian history, and a PhD by publication from Griffith University in 2004 for ‘Life Lines to Life Stories’, based on six of her books. She was elected an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities the following year.
One of my first personal encounters with Pat (I had obviously been aware of her publications while I was a postgraduate) was in 2001, when she occupied the room above mine at the second Australian Media Traditions conference, held in Yeppoon, and I over-heard her cheerful ’phone conversations with family on her balcony. Pat was to become a regular at AMT conferences and Centre for Media History events, later with her daughter Brigid as travel companion. Pat accepted my invitations to write for A Companion to the Australian Media (2014), including on Max Newton, press in the ACT and, crucially, on ‘women in the media’. While she was now nearly 90, and getting smaller physically, there was nothing dated about Pat’s research or diminished about her intellectual curiosity. She advised the Australian Media Hall of Fame on women who should be inducted, and could be found on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
I have particularly fond memories of a lunch with Pat, Meredith McKinney (Judith Wright’s daughter, on whose work they collaborated), and the press and literary historian Dr Elizabeth Morrison at the Southern Cross Yacht Club in Yarralumla when I was visiting Canberra in 2019 for a meeting of the AAH’s Council. Since then, every year or two, I’d try to pop into Pat’s for afternoon tea. We’d talk about our research, the state of publishing and of universities, the ADB, and my mother’s declining health (somehow we never managed to join the dots of our convent educations). Pat’s prodigious memory became increasingly important as her eyesight failed, hindering her reading and her writing.
On one visit Pat presented me with a copy of Great Expectations: Emigrant Governesses in Colonial Australia (2020), and on another she made it clear how pleased she was I’d reviewed Bold Types: How Australia’s First Women Journalists Blazed a Trail (2022) for Australian Book Review – both of these, which were her last books, were published by the NLA’s imprint. In 2024 I landed on Pat’s doorstep after ‘touring’ the suburbs of McKellar and Gilmore with streets named after journalists and writers, and she told her about her work, and Hugh’s, on selecting Canberra place names. As the journalist Amy Remekis, who hosted the podcast series that accompanied Bold Types, remarks, Pat ‘made stories, and history come alive, weaving it through the everyday, and reminding us that history never truly sits in the past’.
I was unable to be in Canberra in June 2025 when Pat was presented with an ADB Medal for 35 years of distinguished service at a ceremony in her home. Our last afternoon tea was on 11 November 2025, when I was in town for the 50th anniversary of the Dismissal, and she wanted to know all about the Press Gallery exhibition to which I was consulting at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House. ‘Despite Mum’s remarkable intellect and achievements, she was always far more interested in what others were doing,’ Justin recalls. ‘She listened carefully to their stories, gently asking the right questions – which, I suppose, is what makes a great researcher’. On that last visit I found Pat her usual humble self, cognitively sharp as a tack, and determined to stay at home with the support of carers, family and friends. As I headed out the ‘new’ front door to my car, I took a flower from her garden and wondered if I would see her again.
Pat died on 9 March 2026, aged 99, having spent only her last few days in hospital. She is survived by her three children, their families, her brother Frank – and a remarkable body of work (113 books, articles and reviews appear in AustLit). A Requiem Mass was held at St Peter Chanel’s Church in Yarralumla. Speaking at the wake at the NLA, Amy Remekis paid tribute to Pat’s use of ‘facts, evidence and a compassionate moral compass as her north star … She was gracious in how she guided, generous in sharing what she knew’. I felt Pat with me as I attended the opening of the Press Gallery exhibition in May, and if you visit it at Old Parliament House, you will see a photo of her conducting an interview in the 1950s, and her hand-drawn layout of the ABC bureau. A large collection of her papers is held at the NLA, together with two oral history interviews, one of them conducted by her contemporary Ann Moyal FAHA.
Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley FAHA
Macquarie University
15 June 2026
