People Australia

Laura Palmer-Archer, n.d.

State Library of Queensland, 128160

Laura Maude Archer, née O’Ferrall, also known as Laura Palmer Archer (1864-1929) author

Birth: 1864 in Jolimont Square, East Melbourne, Victoria, third of eight children of Hugh James Vincent O’Ferrall (1830-1891), a clerk and civil servant born at Dublin, Ireland, and his native-born wife Mary, née Brophy (1841-1917). Marriage: 2 June 1888 at St Patrick’s Catholic Cathedral, Melbourne to Tom (Thomas) Palmer Archer (1852-1948), a stock and station agent, born at Tasmania. They had three daughters and two sons. Death: 8 June 1929 in hospital at Belgrave, Victoria. 

• Laura’s grandfather, John Brophy (1818-1862), worked with John Pascoe Fawkner in the early days of the Port Phillip Gazette, and kept the books for George Cavenagh at the Melbourne Morning Herald.
• Her early life was upended in October 1873 when her father abandoned the family, having absconded with funds he had embezzled from the Board of Land and Works. Arrested in the Straits Settlement and tried in 1875, he was sentenced to eleven years gaol on 15 July 1875, but released because of ill health in November 1878. He returned to his wife who bore three more children.
• Laura’s education was described as being “grounded . . . at Madame Vieusseux’s, East Melbourne, helped forward at home and finished off in a ten years’ course at the Academy of Life with her husband on the Warrego and Flinders, in the Queensland ‘Never-Never’”.
• About 1881 she began writing articles and a New Zealand periodical accepted some. After her marriage she and her husband moved to north-eastern Victoria, where Tom managed two stations. In 1893 the family shifted to far western Queensland from where Laura submitted items about the life of men women and children in the region to the Melbourne Argus and Australasian under the pseudonym ‘A Bushwoman’. She also contributed to the Bulletin as ‘Larrikin’ and also items for the Sunday Times and Australian Town and Country Journal.
• In 1898 she departed Australia for England in connection with publication of her stories, aboard the RMS China, which was wrecked on 24 March off Perim, an island in the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb at the entrance to the Red Sea, shortly after leaving Aden. All passengers were safely transferred to the RMS Carthage and continued their voyage. While she was overseas, her youngest daughter Mary Laura (born in Brisbane in 1895) died aged three in Melbourne.
• About 1899 the Archers moved to the Flinders River region, north western Queensland, and soon Laura and the children settled in Melbourne for the children’s education. She continued contributing to the press.
• Collections of her stories were published in Racing in the Never-Never (Melbourne 1898) and A Bush Honeymoon and other stories (London, 1904). She also wrote a “playlet”, ‘The Scribes’ performed in Melbourne in 1911. In 1912-1916 electoral rolls show her as a journalist living at East Melbourne and then at Brighton. In the 1920s she wrote humorous verses for children, published in The Australasian and also recited on radio.
• Cause of death: auricular fibrillation (six months) and heart failure (1 week).
• Her younger sister Anna Mary “Nance” O’Ferrall (1870-1949) also wrote short stories, contributing to the Australasian as ‘Bohemienne’. The journalist and author Ernest O’Ferrall ‘Kodak” was their brother.

Sources
Patricia Clarke, Pen Portraits (1988)