Marjorie McLeod

(1893- ) was born in Dimboola, Victoria. Founder of the Swan Hill National Theatre, of which she was director and producer for many years, she worked as a teacher of speech and as an actor and writer for ABC radio before moving to Swan Hill in 1946. Two of her plays were published in anthologies, Travail in Eight Plays by Australians (1934) and Moonshine in Five Plays by Australians (1936), and she also published Within These Walls (1948), a four-act historical play first produced in Melbourne in 1936, and Four Period Plays (1958). The last-named collection comprises Within These Walls; Mine a Sad One, which is based on an imaginary incident in the life of the explorer Robert O'Hara Burke and was first produced in 1956; A Shillingsworth, a study of a Melbourne family in the Depression, which was first produced in 1931 and won first prize in the Australian Literature Society competition; and Horizons, a study of the experience of New Australians in the Murray River district, which was first produced in 1952. She has also published a poetry collection, Verses from Swan Hill (1946), which includes a verse drama, 'The Enchanted Tryst'; and an account of her experience with the Swan Hill National Theatre, All the World's a Stage (1980).

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