Marien Oulton Dreyer was the daughter of New Zealand-born surveyor-turned-journalist Joseph Dreyer and his second wife wife Mary Oulton.
Joseph Dreyer married Mary Oulton sometime between 1906 (when his first wife died) and 1911 (when Marien was born), and after his move from Northam, Western Australia, to Mornington, Victoria, where he took up farming and agricultural reporting. Some (but it seems not all) of his eight children from his first marriage accompanied him in the move; two of his sons drowned in the farm's dam in 1915, and Joseph Dreyer himself died unexpectedly of cerebro-spinal meningitis in 1916, during an outbreak in the area.
Marien Dreyer and her mother remained in the Mornington area until at least 1919, when Marien's younger brother John Joseph Oulton Dreyer died aged four ('In Memoriam', The Argus, 7 October 1922, p.11). By 1921, Marien and her mother were living in Melbourne, where Mary Dreyer was working as a housekeeper at the Exford Hotel; it was here that Marien suffered the injury that led to the amputation of her leg (see note below). She was at this time ten years old.
At some point, Dreyer's mother remarried and had a third child: when she died in February 1952, she was listed as Mary Oulton Connolly, mother of Marien Dreyer, Jack Dreyer (deceased), and Noel Connolly ('Deaths', Argus, 4 February 1952, p.14).
The Australian Dictionary of Biography notes that Dreyer left school at fourteen, worked as a stenographer, and eventually moved to Sydney. She was back in Melbourne by 1940, where she was working as a telephonist at 6th Division AIF Headquarters; in an interview given to the Australian Women's Weekly at this time, she notes that during a two-and-a-half-year period in Sydney, she held sixteen jobs, including telephonist at the Sydney Sesqui-centenary Board ('Young Girl is Guardian of Army H.Q.', Australian Women's Weekly, 17 February 1940, p.30).
One obituary notes that Dreyer published her first story, in Smith's Weekly at age sixteen ('Author and Kings Cross Campaigner', Sydney Morning Herald, 18 January 1980, p.5), but it was during the war that her output really accelerated: her short stories appeared in newspapers in Melbourne and Sydney. She and husband Rodney Beaumont Lovell Cooper returned to Sydney in 1940, where they settled in an apartment in Kings Cross.
Dreyer continued to publish short stories, as well as beginning to write for the stage and for radio. Her best-known play, perhaps, is Bandicoot on a Burnt Ridge, which won first prize in the Sydney Journalists' Club competition in 1964. Among her other plays were the 'adult fairy tale' Wish No More and the three short plays performed as one show in 1959: Charlie Was There, The Power of a Woman, and Two of a Kind. Among her radio plays were Diary of a Lonely Only and The House that Walked by Itself.
Dreyer was also involved in early Australian television: contemporary reports note that is was she who sold production company NLT the idea for The Unloved, which subsequently ran for 210 episodes (see Nan Musgrove's articles in Further Reading below). The National Film and Sound Archive holds correspondence relating to the production of the series, almost all of which is by Marien Dreyer, suggesting that she had an active and ongoing role in the series.
In the 1950s, Dreyer became particularly active in local community matters, especially to do with development around the Kings Cross area: she remained involved with the Kings Cross Protection Society for many years, and became a prolific writer of letters to the newspaper on local matters. For many years, she also wrote a weekly column in New Idea.
Dreyer died in 1980, and one of her obituaries credited her with 'about 4000 short stories and many plays' ('Author and Kings Cross Campaigner', Sydney Morning Herald, 18 January 1980, p.5). Many of her works are still being traced.
More information on Dreyer can be found in the note field below.
Further Reading:
Bandicoot on a Burnt Ridge
1962
1964
Z441983
1962
single work
drama
