Camillus travers biography

PL Travers, aged 60, is on a flight to Hollywood and her suitcase is too large for the luggage rack. They want to take it away but she insists she must keep her bag with her. A young woman with a baby in her arms generously allows her case to be taken down instead. Travers, far from grateful, eyes the baby coldly and says: “Will the child be a nuisance?” 

In the new film Saving Mr Banks, Emma Thompson is practically perfect at delivering the withering putdowns of Travers, reminding us that not all children’s authors are renowned for their love of children. Indeed, Travers claimed emphatically that she did not write for children at all. But the film is a fictionalised episode in a long, complex life.

Few knew that behind the quintessentially English nanny named Mary Poppins was an Australian. Five Mary Poppins books – including a translation of one into Latin, Maria Poppina ab A ad Z – had appeared by when Travers was featured in a “Meet the Author” feature in the first issue o

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Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The true story of Australian writer P. L. Travers, creator of the quintessentially English nanny by Valerie Lawson

‘Where were you born?’
‘Oh, we’re onto that kind of question are we?’
‘You wouldn’t believe in writing an autobiography?’
‘No, being born, going to school, having measles, being married or not wouldn’t really be an autobiography for me. An autobiography would be an inner statement, how one grew within, the hopes, the difficulties, the aims. But as I never do want to write anything about myself, no autobiography.’
‘You wouldn’t read a biography of a writer, you would read the work?’
‘Yes, that’s a beautiful question Robert, because the work is the biography.’

How complex a task it is to write the biography of a writer. For writers, whose daglig business is making things up, the truest experience may be one they have imagined. All biographers need to be storytellers and private detectives, but the biographer of a writer must also be a literar

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The Life of P.L. Travers

The creator of one of the most beloved characters of 20th century children's literature began her story in the building that would become The Story Bank on Wednesday, August 9,

In the very last years of the Victorian era, on the eve of Federation, Helen Lyndon Goff was born into a respectable and financially comfortable family.  Her father, Travers Goff, was the bank manager of the Australian Joint Stock Bank, and he and his family lived in the second storey residence of the building. The first-born child of Goff and his wife, Margaret, Helen enjoyed a typical Edwardian childhood filled with fairy tales, poetry, and astronomy, instilling in her a sense of wonder and a love of storytelling that fuelled her magical creativity for nearly a century.

After spending the first few years of her life in Maryborough, she and her family moved to Brisbane, then Ipswich, Allora, Bowral, and Sydney.  She began her career as a dancer and Shakespear