31 Facts About Mona Brand

Mona Brand was a twentieth-century Australian playwright, poet and freelance writer.

Mona Brand had an older brother, John, and a younger, Deryck.

Mona Brand wrote of her childhood feelings of displacement in her autobiography, Enough Blue Sky, which she published in 1995.

Mona Brand often felt the disparity between her own treatment and the treatment her brothers received, and noticed other disparities in class and race from an early age.

Mona Brand believed this informed her later writing and opinions.

On 26 September 1955 Mona Brand married Len Fox, a journalist for the Communist Party, who was a poet and fiction writer.

Mona Brand was a prominent member of the NSW Branch of the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, and was a strong advocate of Aboriginal rights.

In 1956, Mona Brand travelled to Vietnam to assist the Vietnamese revolution through her affiliations with the CPA.

Mona Brand assisted Radio Hanoi and the Voice of Vietnam, especially with English translations, returning to Australia the following year.

Mona Brand read the file herself, and expressed her distaste for ASIO's actions in a satirical piece in The Sydney Morning Herald in 2002.

Mona Brand joined the Victorian Branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers during the war years, discussing her early works with fellow writers Leonard Mann, Frank Dalby Davison, and Vance Palmer.

Mona Brand began writing theatre with a one-act play for an evening aid event for the Red Cross.

Mona Brand's cousin was part of the event and was given a play to perform which she didn't like.

Mona Brand agreed and wrote her first one-act play, a comedy about the learning curves of first aid treatments titled First Aid.

Mona Brand travelled extensively overseas, going first to London in 1948.

Mona Brand attempted to interest London theatre groups with her work but was told that London audiences would not be interested in plays about Australia.

Mona Brand uses the play to consider issues of child abuse, commercial exploitation and the criminalisation of young people.

Mona Brand's works were well received in Britain, Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Germany, Rumania, Poland, Latvia and India.

Mona Brand regarded feminist literature at the time as a little irrational when words were simply changed to sound feminine rather than masculine.

The collection has papers of Mona Brand including lectures, playscripts, musicals and poems.

Mona Brand had four collections of poetry published and had numerous individual poems published in newspapers and periodicals during her career.

Mona Brand's first published poem 'Shy as a Deer' appearing in The Australasian in 1928 when she was 12 years old.

Mona Brand's poetic focus during this period therefore was on the social and political environment in Australia as well as the unique Australian landscape and seascape.

Mona Brand became friends with a Brisbane poet, James Devaney, who introduced her to John Shaw Neilson, who Brand thought was Australia's finest lyric poet.

At this period, Mona Brand collaborated with modern composer, John Antill.

Barr and Antill both insisted on free verse format, which changed Mona Brand's writing styles to some extent.

The foreword was written by Dame Mary Gilmore, who pointed out that Mona Brand's poetry was "direct and simple".

Mona Brand published the short story 'The Fairie's Ladder' in Artesia on 16 January 1925, when she was 9 years old.

Posters, ephemera and a large collection of Vietnamese art collected by Mona Brand are held at the State Library of NSW.

Mona Brand initiated the Len Fox Painting Prize, called Len Fox Painting Award, in her husband's memory.

In 2016 the biennial Mona Brand Award, known as the Mona Brand Award for Women Stage and Screen Writers, worth, was inaugurated by the State Library of NSW Foundation, following a bequest from Brand's estate.