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puppeteer, was born Edith Constance Blackwell in North Sydney on 26 February 1897. From Fort Street Girls’ High School she went to the University of Sydney, where she obtained a BSc degree in 1920. Further qualifications were a Dip.Ed. (Sydney Teachers’ College) and a Dip.Soc.Sci. (1937). In 1935 she introduced glove puppets to a class of State wards she was teaching in Glebe and was surprised by their positive response. This experience eventually led to a lifelong involvement with puppetry, not only in therapy but also as an art form.

For many years she worked with the Children’s Library and Crafts Movement (later the Creative Leisure Movement), founded by the sisters Mary Matheson and Elsie Rivett. Edith supervised puppet making and puppet shows with children and adults at the Movement’s various centres in the Sydney area. In 1949 the Movement opened the Clovelly Puppet Theatre in an ex-army hut in Burnie Park, with Edith as director. There plays were presented by children and adults using glove puppets and marionettes on Saturday afternoons in the cooler months for some thirty years.

She encouraged children to have a free approach to the making and use of puppets, although her own were painstakingly made. Some plays, notably those for marionettes, were tightly scripted, but often the young puppeteers were invited to improvise dialogue for the glove puppets. In 1950 Edith also began instructing occupational therapists in the use of puppetry.

Edith Murray brought puppeteers together. She was a foundation member of the Puppetry Guild of NSW (later the Australian Puppetry Guild) in 1948 and its secretary for many years. She initiated the first Australia-wide gathering of puppeteers in Adelaide in 1968 (when the Salzburg Marionettes visited) and this led to the formation of an Australian Centre of UNIMA, the International Association of Puppeteers, with Edith as Founding Secretary. At the UNIMA Congress in Washington DC in 1980 she was made a Member of Honour.

Edith did not usually give performances as a professional puppeteer, but in 1957 she toured a small company with her 'Moonahwarra Marionettes’ for the NSW Division of the Arts Council of Australia. She used glove puppets for a closed-circuit test of television in Sydney’s AWA Building in 1952.

Edith visited the United Kingdom in 1963-65. She taught in Scotland, worked as a puppeteer in pantomimes and attended puppet festivals in Wales, Czechoslovakia and Russia. In 1976 she was invited to Japan as a guest of the PUK Puppet Theatre of Tokyo.

She featured in two instructional films: Let’s Make Puppets (1951) and Let’s Make a Puppet Play (1954). The play in the second is about a bushfire, and Edith had a strong love for the Australian bush. For much of her later life she lived in Springwood (NSW), at the end of a steep unmade road at the edge of the bush.

Edith Murray was awarded the BEM in 1979 for her work with children and puppetry. She died in Sydney on 30 January 1988.

Writers:

Bradshaw, Richard

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

1992