Cirrus@Austlit

'Dymphna Cusack's books were best-sellers in Australia and more than thirty other countries in the mid to late twentieth century. Radio and television adaptations of her novels and plays reached audiences across three continents. Her works continue to provide a valuable record of people within their cultures engaging with the socio-political issues of the particular time and place. Her two novels that dealt with the impact of World War Two on the lives of ordinary Australians at the Home Front - Come in Spinner (1951) and Southern Steel (1953) - were immediate best-sellers and have never been out of print. Southern Steel brought her legendary status in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley where (in early 1937) she had already earned a reputation as an advocate for the working class. At the opening of the new Cessnock High School she publicly denounced the then Minister for Education for his government's health policies (or lack thereof) vis- -vis malnutrition in the children of the mining families of the Hunter at the height of the Great Depression (North, RN). Come in Spinner was later made into a popular ABC-TV mini-series. Produced in 1989, the DVD has kept its place in the ABC's backlist as a valuable resource in social history classes.'

Source: Abstract.