Irina Dunn

Irina Dunn
Senator for New South Wales
In office 21 July 1988 – 30 June 1990
Preceded by	Robert Wood
Personal details
Born	1948 (age 68–69) Shanghai, China
Nationality	Australian
Political party	NDP (1988) Independent (1988–90)
Occupation	Activist

Patricia Irene (Irina) Dunn (born 1948) is an Australian writer, social activist and filmmaker, who served in the Australian Senate between 1988 and 1990. Born in Shanghai, Dunn grew up in Australia and studied at the University of Sydney.

In 1988 she became a senator representing the Nuclear Disarmament Party. She was chosen following the disqualification from parliament of the man originally elected from that party in the 1987 election, Robert Wood, who was ruled ineligible as he did not hold Australian citizenship. Following her refusal to resign to allow Wood to return to the Senate once he had become a citizen, she was expelled from the party and sat as an independent. She was defeated at the 1990 election.

Dunn was the executive director of the New South Wales Writers' Centre from December 1992 to 2008.

Dunn was born in Shanghai, China around the time of the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War, and her family, associated with Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Hong Kong. They later immigrated to Australia, where Dunn attended school and was naturalised as an Australian citizen in the 1970s. After graduating in Arts from the University of Sydney, Dunn held several jobs, including as an editor at Pergamon Press. It was here that Dunn first drew publicity for activism. Dunn complained to a recruitment firm about sexism in their advertisements, however her attachment of her business card to the letter got her fired, an action which became front page news in Sydney. She was later partly reinstated.

In the early 1980s she married Brett Collins, a convicted bank robber turned prison activist and co-ordinator of Justice Action, whom she met through her work editing a prison magazine. They separated within a few years and subsequently divorced. Throughout this period Dunn was engaged with political and social issues.

Dunn was an activist through the 1970s and 1980s, and was particularly involved in the campaign to free from jail three men—Tim Anderson, Ross Dunn and Paul Alister—implicated in the Hilton Bombing. Their eventual release (Anderson was in fact jailed again, before having his sentence quashed a second time in the early 1990s) was something Dunn regarded as her most significant achievement.

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