Deirdre Cash

Deirdre Cash (1924–1963) was an Australian novelist and torch singer, who wrote her novels under the pseudonym Criena Rohan.

Background

Deirdre Cash was born in Melbourne into an Irish-Australian Catholic family. Her father Leo Evaristus Cash, a salesman, had been active in the 1930s New Theatre movement in Melbourne, while her mother Valerie (née Walsh) was an operetta singer. Her parents separated when Valerie and her younger brother were still young, and they were brought up by relatives in Calca, South Australia, and then by unmarried aunts in Melbourne.^[1]

Education and singing

Deirdre boarded at the Convent of Mercy, Mornington, Victoria. After matriculating, she enrolled at what became the Melba Conservatorium of Music. On 4 February 1948, she married Michael Damian Blackall, a law student, but eventually left her husband and young son to earn a living as a torch singer and teacher of ballroom dancing in Melbourne. She remarried in 1956, to a coastal seaman, Otto Ole Distler Olsen, with whom she lived at various ports.^[1]

Writing

Cash turned to full-time writing after a bout of illness. Her first book The Delinquents (1962), set in Brisbane, was published in London under the pseudonym Criena Rohan. The book received praise in the London press, being described by the Daily Mail as a "back-street Tristan and Isolde", and praised for its characterization in the Times Literary Supplement. In 1989 the book was turned into a teenage cult film, directed by Chris Thomson and starring Kylie Minogue and Charlie Schlatter.^[1]

According to a recent literary history of Queensland, the novel was "of a tradition of critical social realism... largely absent from 'home-grown' Brisbane writing in the postwar decades." It notes also "the crisp authenticity of the dialogue".^[2] The novel was reissued in 2014 by a Melbourne publisher, with an introduction by the fellow Australian novelist Nick Earls.^[3]

Cash published her second novel Down by the Dockside, set in Melbourne, in 1963. A possible third work in manuscript, The House with the Golden Door, has never been found. She died of colonic carcinoma in Melbourne on 11 March 1963, aged 38, leaving a husband, a daughter by her second marriage, and a son by her first.^[1]

References