Gwenyth Valmai Meredith OBE (18 November 1907 – 3 October 2006), also known by her married name Gwen Harrison, was an Australian author, dramatist and playwright, and radio writer.

Works and Career

From 1932 to 1939, with her father's financial backing, she was the owner of the Chelsea Book Club, which she soon expanded to include a drama club Chelsea Theatre Group that performed her earliest plays, including her "witty and sophisticated Wives Have Their Uses" that St James' Hall, Sydney. Other plays were Murders Are Messy, Ask No Questions and Shout at the Thunder (these last two performed at the Independent Theatre). From 1939 to 1943, she worked as a freelance writer, before commencing a 33-year career with the Australian Broadcasting Commission for which she wrote radio plays, serials and documentaries.] According to Arrow, Meredith entered a play competition in 1940 but was not selected as a winner by the judges. She did, however, win the listeners' poll. Following this she wrote over 200 episodes of a serial Fred and Maggie and 50 episodes of Night Porter. She was then chosen to create the ABC's new radio serial in 1944, The Lawsons, as a propaganda medium to introduce modern agricultural methods to Australian farmers. It proved a highly successful drama that ran for 1,299 episodes from 1 February 1944 to 5 February 1949. It chronicled a family living on a rural property, and their battle to survive and to cope with sons being away at war. When the final episode was announced, The Sydney Morning Herald remarked that "to many people throughout the Commonwealth this will be almost a national day of mourning. The complicated affairs of the Lawson family, their friends and their enemies have made the serial the most popular in the history of Australian radio". A stage version of The Lawsons premiered in the Masonic Hall, Bathurst, New South Wales, on 28 January 1950. None of the radio cast appeared in the stage version, but it did include a young Ed Devereaux. The Lawsons serial was replaced by the even more popular and longest running radio serial production Blue Hills, which comprised 5,795 episodes, all written by Meredith, and which ran for over 27 years, from 1949 to 1976. Her method of writing Blue Hills was unusual. Though she originally typed her own scripts, she soon progressed to a Dictaphone, later a small tape recorder, and this was transcribed by ABC typists for the actors to read. Blue Hills made her a household name in Australia. There were several novels based on the serials, and a comic strip version of The Lawsons, which appeared in The ABC Weekly during the mid to late 1940s. Besides these two long-running serials and Ask Ginger, a children's serial which ran for a few months 1949–50, Meredith was also a noted playwright; three of her plays (Ask No Questions (1940), Shout at the Thunder (1942) and These Positions Vacant (1945)) were performed by the Independent Theatre, Sydney.