Eldershaw, Flora, 1897-1956. (ed.)

Australian Writers’ Annual 1936 (Sydney: The Fellowship of Australian Writers, 1936).

Published in association with Australian Authors’ Week, the Australian Writers’ Annual 1936 featured work by Eleanor Dark, Jean Ranken, Dulcie Deamer, Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Mary Gilmore, Miles Franklin, Zora Cross, Dora Wilcox, Frank Dalby Davison, Hilary Lofting, Tom Inglis Moore, Vance Palmer and Ian Mudie, with illustrations by Norman and Percy Lindsay among others. Eldershaw's introduction to Annual, while entitled "The Future of Australian Literature", concerns itself almost entirely with a retrospective account of the development of Australian writing on the grounds that the "past is all we can know of the future with any certainty. The past indicates the future". Eldershaw had served as President of the Fellowship of Australian Writers the previous year. Frank Dalby Davison claimed that he was "instrumental" in Eldershaw's election in 1935 to the Presidency of the FAW, prompted apparently by the conviction that it was "time the Fellowship had a woman President". Marjorie Barnard's counter claim, however, that Eldershaw was elected because "she was the only member of the Committee who had the brains and personality for it and was not involved in any of the numerous and violent quarrels that beset the Fellowship", suggests that the final outcome was influenced by a variety of factors. Barnard took a something cynical view of the Fellowship in those years, describing the conclusion of an FAW meeting during Eldershaw's Presidency to Nettie Palmer in the following way:

a comic and depressing evening… The 'Presidential party' went to coffee afterwards and that was worse. [Flora] being very nice to everyone as a president should and cursing - I knew full well - like a trooper underneath; Frank [Dalby Davison] very tired, very anxious that no one should notice it, saying 'What shall we do to bring up the Fellowship in the way it should go?' and getting no answer...

Even during the years of her most active involvement in the FAW, Barnard still questioned its direction and maintained to Nettie Palmer that "the untidiness of the meetings would horrify [her]".

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