Caroline Chisholm

Caroline Chisholm (30 May 1808 – 25 March 1877) was a progressive 19th-century English humanitarian known mostly for her involvement with female immigrant welfare in Australia. She is commemorated on 16 May in the Calendar of saints of the Church of England. There are proposals for the Catholic Church to also recognise her as a saint.

Early life

Caroline Jones (Chisholm) came from a very large family. Her father, William Jones, had been married four times. His first three wives had died in childbirth and from illness. Caroline was William's sixteenth and last child. Her mother, also named Caroline, had seven children. William, who was born in Wootton, a village just south of Northampton, was a pig dealer who bought in and fattened pigs and sold them on. By the time he died in 1814, when Caroline was only six, he was able to leave his wife £500 and several properties to his twelve surviving children.

Caroline was born in Northampton and lived with her family at 11 Mayorhold. When she was a young child, her father brought a poor maimed soldier into the house. He pointed out the children's obligations to the man who had fought for them. There is little doubt that this would have had an effect upon the young child, and something she would have remembered in later life. Caroline was 22 in 1830 when she married Archibald Chisholm, a Roman Catholic ten years her senior, serving with East India Company Army. It is believed that Caroline converted to her husband's faith at this time. They were married at the Anglican Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Northampton. The Roman Catholic clergy at that time were not legally empowered to perform wedding services.

George Landen Dann

George Landen Dann (1 January 1904 – 6 June 1977) was an Australian playwright, writer, and draftsman. He is best known for a number of award-winning and critically acclaimed plays such as In Beauty It Is Finished, Fountains Beyond, Caroline Chisholm and The Orange Grove. Dann wrote dozens of published and unpublished plays over the course of his lifetime. Originally writing plays for the amateur dramatic society at Sandgate, Queensland, Dann was a particularly shy and reclusive person, and even though he wrote part-time, his more popular plays were widely performed by amateur theatre companies around Australia. George Landen Dann's writing has been appreciated for its social realism, with a number of his plays delving into issues involving Indigenous Australians and their central characters reflecting individuals that Dann had met during his time in outback Australia.

The George Landen Dann Award was established in 1992. It was awarded to promising young Australian playwrights until 2007.