Sara Dowse

Born Dale Sara Rosenthal in Chicago in 1938, her mother, Louise Fitch, was a radio actor, her father, Jerome Bernard Rosenthal, an attorney. At the age of three, after the United States entered the war, she moved with her mother to New York, where she was a pupil at P.S. No. 6 in Manhattan.

Her parents had divorced before her father was drafted in 1942. A lieutenant, he served in the Pacific as an army pilot and was awarded a Purple Heart. After his discharge he settled in Los Angeles with his new wife and family, and established himself as one of Hollywood’s earliest entertainment lawyers.

In 1947 Dowse’s mother also remarried, and with her mother and stepfather, the scriptwriter Jerry D. Lewis, she moved to Los Angeles, and divided her time between her two families. She attended El Rodeo primary school in Beverly Hills, then Emerson Junior High School and University High School in West Los Angeles. It was during this period that Dowse’s mother and stepfather were blacklisted. These were the McCarthy years, which had a profound influence on the direction of her subsequent life would take.

Graduating from high school in June 1956, Dowse enrolled as a freshman at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) the following September, but studied to be a singer after her classes. In the summer of 1957 she met her future husband, John Dowse, an Australian from Sydney who was at UCLA on a rugby union scholarship. In May 1958, she and John married. She dropped out of university and took up a cadetship at Bullock’s, a Los Angeles department store. She left that job for a better paying one as a bookkeeper at Litton Industries, a high-security missile factory.

Expecting their first child, Sara agreed to move to Sydney, where John had a job with his father, a North Sydney publican, who had started building home units to meet the postwar housing shortage demand. The couple booked passage on the P&O liner Orcades, and arrived in Sydney on 3 October 1958. On 24 December their first son, Joseph, was born. A second, Jason, was born in 1960, followed by Joshua, their third, in 1964. A daughter, Jessica, was born two years later.

The Dowses moved to Canberra in 1968, separated in 1972 and were divorced in 1977. A second relationship with Lynn Dalgarno, a biochemist, began in 1975 and lasted 19 years. Dowse and Dalgarno had a son, Samuel, in 1980, but the relationship ended in 1994. She married Tony Taylor in 1996. In 1998 she went with him to British Columbia, settling in the small fishing town of Sidney on Vancouver Island. The couple were in Canada for five and a half years before returning to Australia in 2004. They were living in Manly when Taylor died in 2015.

Three months after the birth of her first child, Dowse enrolled in night classes at Sydney University. She continued her studies intermittently between children, and took the last subject for her Bachelor of Arts degree at the Australian National University (ANU) after the family moved to Canberra.

Her first job after graduation was as Canberra field editor for the publisher, Thomas Nelson Australia. Part of her brief at Nelson was to search for potential manuscripts at ANU’s Institute of Advanced Studies and School of Asian Studies. It was through this that she met two research assistants who were members of the women’s liberation group that had started up in the capital. She began going to meetings and was soon swept up in the movement, abandoning a law course to devote what time she could to her activism. Like other women’s liberationists, she was producing discussion papers and speaking in public about the need for wide-ranging social change for women. In 1972, after she and John Dowse had separated, she got a job tutoring in the professional writing course at the Canberra College of Advanced Education (now the University of Canberra). But, like the Nelson work, tutoring was only part-time, not enough to support herself and her children, so she joined what was then the Australian News and Information Bureau (ANIB) but had to take out naturalisation papers to do so. She became an Australian citizen, renouncing her U.S. citizenship as dual citizenship was not an option in either country at the time.

The December 1972 election was the first in which she had ever voted. Under the new Whitlam Labor government, ANIB became the Australian Information Service. In April 1973, Elizabeth Reid, a tutor in the ANU philosophy department, became Gough Whitlam’s prime ministerial adviser on women, a world first. On Reid’s recommendation, Dowse was seconded to the staff of Clyde Cameron, then the minister for labor and immigration, to write speeches on equal pay, child care and part-time employment. Her major speech for Cameron outlined his support for extending the adult minimum wage to women (substantially lower than for males since the 1907 Harvester ruling). The following year, with the government’s support and a Women’s Electoral Lobby submission, the Arbitration Commission ruled in a landmark decision to make the female minimum wage the same as it was for men.

Dowse returned to AIS after her secondment but was soon appointed head of the new women’s affairs section in the prime minister’s department, established to give bureaucratic support to Elizabeth Reid. The section’s role was to deal with Reid’s voluminous correspondence and advise on the wide range of policy matters of special concern to women and with impact on them. With such a remit, the work of the section inevitably grew. When Reid resigned in October 1975, not long before the Whitlam government’s dismissal, the section was upgraded to a branch with Dowse as its acting head.

It was a time of great tension. After the Coalition government was elected, with Malcolm Fraser the new prime minister, Dowse’s expectation of remaining as head of the women’s affairs branch was low. It was a public service position, however, not a political one, and the department’s decision was to appoint her to the job. Under her leadership the branch was upgraded to an office, and many of the reforms initiated under Whitlam were saved, with some, like refuge funding, child care, and establishing the government machinery for women, improving. But Dowse harboured a hope of becoming a writer, and had decided that she would resign from the service when she was no longer useful in her role.

In 1977, she was interviewed by Biff Ward about how feminism had changed her life, for radio program "This is Your Changing Life" on 2XX Canberra radio station.

Dowse’s moment came in December 1977 when the office was removed from his department. Her resignation in protest of the removal provoked more media attention than she had ever received as a public servant, because the circumstance in which she had worked required that she keep a low profile, and she had always believed that public servants were most effective when working behind the scenes. But that didn’t mean she didn’t value her experience or the public service itself. As one critic wrote about her first novel, West Block, ‘her approach to novel writing demands sympathy for people and seriousness about policies.’ Or, as another put it: ‘With sensitivity and humour, she has added features and soul to the faceless image of the public servant.’

Dowse was part of the Seven Writers Group, also known as Seven Writers or the Canberra Seven.

A single mother again, Dowse wrote West Block when her youngest child, Sam, was an infant. It was published in 1983. For its time, it was a commercial success but she was still short of money. She and Patricia Giles contributed the piece "Women in a Warrior Society" to the 1984 anthology Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology, edited by Robin Morgan.

She wrote her second novel, Silver City, to coincide with the release of the film of the same name. It was Penguin’s first novelisation, and her contract gave her a free hand in developing the film’s story about Polish migrants to Australia. She finished the novel in eight months. Aside from the money, she was interested in learning about the film industry in preparation for her third novel, Schemetime, about an Australian filmmaker in Hollywood.

Dowse assisted the local Canberra group, Majura Women's Group, in publishing a short story anthology in 1993.

It was with her fourth novel, Sapphires, that she gained the most critical acceptance. It was chosen Australian Capital Territory’s Book of the Year and was on the Australian long list for the Impac Dublin Prize. Sapphires was based on her grandmother’s family, who had migrated to the United States from what is now Belarus at the end of the nineteenth century, and the novel was informed by what the late John Berger had called the migrant’s ‘life in fragments’. A fifth novel, Digging, revisited some of the themes she grappled with in West Block, though from a single mother’s perspective.

Publications

Novels

• West Block: The Hidden World of Canberra's Mandarins (1984)
• Silver City (1984)
• Schemetime (1990)
• Sapphires (1994)
• Digging (1996)
• As the Lonely Fly (2017)

Short stories and contributed works

• "My cousin Paolo", published in Canberra Tales: Stories (1988)
• Correspondence in The Prince: Faith, Abuse and George Pell (2013)

Since 1989, while on a National Library Harold White fellowship for preliminary research for what became As the Lonely Fly, Dowse was invited to initiate an oral history archive on the Australian women’s movement. Since then, some 50 interviews have been collected, most of them conducted by Dowse herself. She has also contributed to the Library’s AIDS and publishing archives, and has started interviewing Americans who have settled in Australia.

It was while she was in British Columbia working on her last novel that Dowse began producing prints composed on her computer using an early Adobe Photoshop program. She then started painting in watercolour and acrylic. On her return to Australia in 2004 she continued her art practice. In addition to the pieces sold in Canada, her works have been shown at the Warringah Art Space, the Left Hand Gallery in Braidwood, the Red Olive Artspace in Balgowlah, the Manly Art Gallery and Museum and the Nishi Gallery in Canberra.