Barbara Wall is the eldest of three children of Arthur Elliot Welbourne Wall and his wife Lucy Thelma (Simes). She attended Nailsworth and Blair Athol Primary Schools and Adelaide High School. She was a prefect for three years, and more importantly, she says, in her last year was Captain of the A Hockey Team. She was Tennyson Medallist in 1941.
In 1949 Wall graduated from the Adelaide University with a BA, First Class Honours in English and in 1950 with an MA. She won the Tormore Prize for English in 1945 and became the John Howard Clark Prizeman in 1949 and scholar in 1950, while working as a tutor and postgraduate student. She continued to play hockey, became a university blue, and in 1947 captained the first Adelaide University side to win Intervarsity hockey since 1922.
In 1952 Wall joined the staff of Woodlands CEGGS at Glenelg, working there for thirty years apart from one year overseas and a year at PGC (now Seymour). From 1957 she was Senior English Mistress and from 1964 Joint Chief of Staff with Nancy Webb. During this time Wall produced many school magazines, and produced nine of Shakespeare's plays. She was made a Fellow of the Australian College of Education and a life member of the English Teachers' Association and of the Woodlands Old Scholars' Association.
Wall served on the SSABSA's examination panel for matriculation English for eleven years to 1993, but retired from teaching in 1981 and entered Flinders University as a PhD student, graduating in 1988. Her thesis 'The Tellers and the Told' was later turned into a book, The Narrator's Voice: The Dilemma of Children's Fiction (1991).
Barbara Wall has always been interested in writing and has belonged for over fifty years to a private writing group, the Tatlers Club. She has written articles and has edited the work of friends Charles Jury, whose literary executor she is, and John Bray. She was a contributer to Southwords: Essays on South Australian Writing. Wall has researched the lives and work of SA's two earliest women novelists, Catherine Spence (qv) and Matilda Evans (Maud Jean Franc, qv). Her book on Evans has been published and her bibliography of Spence is available on the website of the State Library of SA ( http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/spence/ Sighted /12/2006).
