New Zealand-born Australian writer, stage performer, and journalist, known as the “Queen of Bohemia.”
The daughter of a physician and his wife, who had been a governess, she was home-schooled by her mother. Dulcie got a taste of the theatre at an early age. At 9 she appeared with R. Brough’s Comedy Company. As she grew, she was able to take ballet and music lessons. At age 17, in 1907, she won a prize for her writing talents in her “Stone Age Story.” Her imagination was touted and she later admitted: ‘Even at that tender age I loved blood, murder and violence’.
In 1908, she joined a touring company where she met a much older (by about 14 years) man Albert Goldberg, nicknamed Goldie. They married August 26, 1908. She continued to perform in small parts and continued to write. In December 1910, she reported on the Billy Papke-Dave Smith fight, the first female reporter of a boxing match.
Deamer and her husband had six children from 1908-1924, two of whom died in infancy. Her large family did not prevent her from traveling or writing and she published a collection of short stories and four novels in the those years. She and her husband separated in 1922 and her parents in Sydney took care of the children while Dulcie traveled and produced reports as a freelance journalist, poet, and short-story writer for the likes of the Australian Woman’s Mirror, Bulletin and the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1929 she founded the Fellowship of Australian Writers. On July 13, 1925 she was crowned “Queen of Bohemia” by artists, musicians, and performers who frequented Sam Rosa’s Restaurant. And ‘Theo’s Club.’ Deamer’s appearance in her leopard skin costume and long black hair was the subject of much discussion! The slight dark woman was described by Zora Cross as s ‘Speedy as a swallow in movement, quick as sunlight in speech … [and] restless as the sea’. Full of joie de vivre, she enlivened many a party by doing the splits and dancing the hula-hula.
Deamer’s plays include “That by which Men Live” (1936) and “Victory” (1938), and one critic for the Sydney Morning Herald described her as ‘playwright of powerful imagination’. She continued to write and produced several novels and her autobiography which wasn’t published until long fter her death. She died on August 16, 1972 in Sydney, Australia.
Link to Wikipedia biography