Sandra Jobson
, b. 1942
Author and Illustrator, Sandra Jobson, was born in 1942 and was brought up on the Sydney waterfront. Her anaesthetist father introduced her to the rock pools of Long Reef and taught her to look under rocks “to find the most amazing things” (Alomes, 1999, p. 201). Jobson attended the Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney, and subsequently studied history at the University of Sydney. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts, Jobson became a journalist. In an era when female journalists were beginning to be recognised and released from their traditional roles of reporting on the prescriptive “women’s pages” in newspapers in Australia, Jobson was the first woman to work on general news at the Sydney Morning Herald, moving to the UK in the 1960s, to work in their London office.
Returning to Sydney in the late 1960s, with her husband Robert Darroch, in the 1970s and 1980s Sandra Jobson Darroch contributed to numerous Australian magazines and newspapers, including articles for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Consolidated Press, and later, The Australian, published in Melbourne. Jobson writes in the genres of Australian Studies, biography, journalism and literary criticism.
Jobson has published nine books, mostly on local history. As a writer she is best known as Sandra Jobson Darroch for her recently revised and republished biography of Lady Ottoline Morrell. Once Upon a Vase is her only book for children.
Sources:
Alomes, Stephen, When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, 201–206.
Darroch, Sandra Jobson, Garsington Revisited, The Legend of Lady Ottoline Morrell, brought up to date, 2017, Indiana University Press, Indiana.
Bio prepared by Margaret Bromley, mbromle5@une.edu.au, brom_ken@bigpond.net.au
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