A sixth generation Australian, Audrey Phyllis Oldfield was born in Mullumbimby, New South Wales, to butcher Joseph Parkes and Eileen, née Browne.
[1] She was educated at Grafton High School and won a scholarship to Sydney Teachers' College from which she graduated in 1945 and began her teaching career.
Daughter of Two Worlds tracks the life of a part-Aboriginal girl and the challenges she faces at school in Perth.
(1992) was warmly reviewed by historian Patricia Grimshaw as 'informative, judicious and persuasive', in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (vol 22, 2).
Grimshaw wrote that it 'filled a vital place in the country's historiography, and in the history of the western suffrage movement'.