Hilarie Lindsay was a former president of the Toys and Games Manufacturers' Association of Australia and of the Society of Women Writers, who has been inducted into the Australian Toy Association Hall of Fame and the National Pioneer Women's Hall of Fame, Alice Springs.
15 Facts About Hilarie Lindsay
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Hilarie Lindsay's best-known work, The Washerwoman's Dream, was a biography of Jane Winifred Steger, described by one reviewer as "enthrallingly readable"; it has become an Australian classic.
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Hilarie Lindsay attended a business college in Sydney in 1939, and in 1944 she married Philip Singleton Lindsay, with whom she had two daughters and a son.
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Hilarie Lindsay was active in the company for over 40 years, as marketing manager, and designing and making costumes, particularly for girls.
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Hilarie Lindsay sought that the girls had as many costumes as the boys had as she created the outfits thus ensuring there was gender equality.
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Hilarie Lindsay was one of the first women to serve on the committee of the Toys and Games Manufacturers' Association of Australia, and was instrumental in establishing the first toy fairs in Sydney and Melbourne.
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Hilarie Lindsay began writing as a child, but was first published in 1966, after winning the Henry Lawson Festival of Arts Award for Short Story that year, as Lindsay Dyson, a pen name she used in writing poems and newspaper articles.
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Hilarie Lindsay was awarded the same prize the following year.
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Hilarie Lindsay wrote a well-received guide for teenagers setting up home for the first time, You're On Your Own.
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Hilarie Lindsay continued writing short stories, and wrote a series of stories for children about Mr and Mrs Poppleberry, "an elderly couple who always tackle problems without using any sort of violence".
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Hilarie Lindsay wrote beginners' guides to writing, and the Handbook, the Society of Women Writers.
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Hilarie Lindsay edited several anthologies of short stories, memoirs and poetry, and in 1977 received the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal.
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Hilarie Lindsay began postgraduate studies at Sydney University in 1992, intending to explore the difficulties which Australian women had experienced in being published.
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Hilarie Lindsay's thesis narrowed to a study of one woman in particular, Jane Winifred Steger, who had published weekly serials during the early 1930s, and had been unable to publish fourteen novels.
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In 2006, Hilarie Lindsay was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia, for service to literature and through a range of professional organisations mentoring aspiring writers.