Sara Dowse (born 12 November 1938) is an American-born Australian feminist, author, critic, social commentator, and visual artist.
[1] Her novels include Schemetime published in 1990, Sapphires, and As the Lonely Fly, and she has contributed reviews, articles, essays, stories, and poetry to a range of print and online publications.
At age three, after the United States entered World War II, Dowse moved with her mother from Chicago to New York City and later attended PS 6 in Manhattan.
[10] After graduating from high school in June 1956, Dowse enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) the following September and took voice lessons after her classes.
[12] She continued her studies intermittently between children, and passed the last course for her Bachelor of Arts degree at the Australian National University (ANU) after the family moved to Canberra.
Elizabeth Reid, a tutor in the ANU philosophy department, became Gough Whitlam's prime-ministerial adviser on women in April 1973, a global first.
At Reid's recommendation, Dowse was seconded to the staff of minister for labor and immigration Clyde Cameron to write speeches on equal pay, child care and part-time employment.
The section provided bureaucratic support for Elizabeth Reid, dealing with her correspondence and advising her on the wide range of policy matters of special concern to women.
[14] When Reid resigned in October 1975 (not long before the Whitlam government's dismissal), the section was upgraded to a branch,[15] with Dowse its acting head.
After the Coalition was elected, with Malcolm Fraser the new prime minister, Dowse's expectation of remaining head of the women's-affairs branch was low.
[3] Under Dowse, the branch was upgraded to an office and many reforms initiated under Whitlam were saved; some, like refuge funding, child care, and establishing a government machinery for women,[16][17] improved.
Penguin's first novelisation, Dowse's contract gave her a free hand in developing the film's story about Polish emigrants to Australia and she finished the novel in eight months.
[35] As the Lonely Fly (2017), Dowse's sixth novel, is a family saga reaching from 1904-1967, based around the lives of three Jewish women, two sisters and a niece, who migrate from Russia to the US and Israel.
[36] On a 1991 National Library Harold White fellowship[37] for preliminary research for what became As the Lonely Fly, Dowse was invited to begin an oral-history archive on the Australian women's movement.
[39] In British Columbia, while working on As the Lonely Fly, Dowse produced prints composed on her computer with an early Adobe Photoshop program and then began painting in watercolour and acrylic.