Cirrus@Austlit

Barbara Stellmach was born in Warwick, Queensland in 1930. She spent most of her childhood in Cunnamulla. Stellmach was educated at St Catherine's School in Cunnamulla, St Mary's School in Gatton and St Ursula's College in Toowoomba. She topped the state in speech and drama and won a scholarship to Trinity College in London. She also studied at the University of Queensland. From 1953 to 1969 she taught speech and drama and was an actor and writer for Villanova Players in Brisbane from 1954. In 1971 she directed the National Iona Passion play.

Stellmach began writing seriously for the theatre in 1961 and wrote some 20 full-length and single-act plays for theatre, radio and television. She founded the Queensland Playwrights Laboratory in 1973 and was its president until 1977. Rod Lumer (557) says Stellmach is 'Perhaps the most performed playwright in Australian amateur theatre..."the playwright of the little theatres".' She was one of the the first Queensland born playwrights, and with the publication of Four Australian Plays (1973) she became only the second Australian woman to have a book of plays published by a national press. The first was Mona Brand (q.v.), also a Queenslander.

(Source: Rod Lumer 'Barbara Stellmach' in Currency Press Companion to Theatre in Australia ed. Phillip Parsons (1995): 557).