Nina Murdoch

Madoline "Nina" Murdoch (19 October 1890 – 16 April 1976), also known by her married name Madoline Brown and pen name Manin, was an Australian writer and journalist, best known for her biographies and poetry, and travel writings, as well as a radio broadcaster and teacher. She was author of half a dozen books but remembered today for forming the Argonauts Club, which in a second incarnation (but largely following her vision) was to have a significant influence on postwar Australian culture.

She was born as Madoline Murdock, the third daughter of John Andrew Murdock, a Law Clerk, from North Carlton, Victoria, and his wife Rebecca Murphy. The family moved to Woodburn, New South Wales, where Nina grew up, attending first a school where her mother taught, then Sydney Girls' High School; it was here that her interest in writing began. She began her working life teaching with her mother, then at Sydney Boys' Preparatory School. She then secured a position with the Sydney Sun as one of its first women reporters, and became the first woman to cover Senate debates. She married fellow reporter (and ex-teacher) James Duncan McKay Brown on 19 December 1917 They moved to Victoria, both working on Melbourne's Sun News-Pictorial, Nina often under the byline 'Manin'. In 1927 she travelled unaccompanied through England and Europe, gathering material for the first of her travel books Seventh Heaven.

On her return, she joined the Melbourne Herald, but was retrenched because of the Depression. She gave travel talks on radio 3LO, and when that station was acquired for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in 1932, ran the Children's Corner. It was then she came up with the idea of the Argonauts' Club. It was a bold concept: publishing original contributions from children who would remain anonymous under assigned Ship names and numbers; treating children as creative individuals in contrast to the pandering to trivial enthusiasms which was general then as now. She wrote its pledge, inscribed on every membership certificate: "I vow to stand faithfully by all that is brave and beautiful; to seek adventure, and having discovered aught of wonder or delight, of merriment or loveliness, to share it freely with my comrades".

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