Helen Caterer breaks through as Adelaide's high-profile female journalist from 1960s but only given a C Grade
Adelaide pioneering female newspaper jounalist Helen Caterer on her 100th birthday. Caterer reignited the winter blanket appeal and promoted other social welfare causes through her Sunday Mail column.
Main image courtesy Eternity News
Helen Caterer became one of Adelaide’s most high-profile journalists from the 1960s – but was never promoted beyond C Grade status.
Caterer, with Sunday Mail editor Ken Parish, revived the newspaper’s winter blanket appeal from the 1930s and promoted other welfare causes. Caterer was also prominent in the 1970s Adelaide morality crusade. Caterer’s service particularly through church and social welfare groups was honoured with a 2016 medal of the Order of Australia.
Born in 1914, she was granddaughter of Frederick Caterer, a pioneer headmaster of Glenelg Grammar School. Caterer’s father was a clerk and her family lived in a rented house in inner Adelaide suburban St Peters. Although gaining a Leaving certificate (and love of literature) at Adelaide Girls High School, Caterer, at 16, couldn’t wait the two years to enter teachers’ college and took a job as stenographer at the Savings Bank of South Australia – a better financial option for her family at 30 shillings a week. She stayed there 20 years. One of her first jobs was typing labels for every South Australian baby who received a savings bank money box.
Outside of work, Caterer kept writing, along with some drawing, as an outlet. She broadened experiences during World War II with the voluntary aid detachment and later in the army interstate at Heidelberg military hospital. She became the hospital librarian and took up some rehabilitation courses – such as writing for radio – being offered to the soldiers. Caterer already had done freelance writing courses at the school of mines and industries and WEA (Workers’ Education Association).
Her writing blossomed from the trip to England and hitchhiking around Europe during her year’s long service leave from the bank after 20 years. A piece she wrote on the Bodleian Library, while staying with her aunts in Oxford, made it into the BBC Listener magazine.
Back in Adelaide, Caterer left the bank and worked as secretary to the manager of Gordon and Gotch publishers for a year. But she had started contributing articles from her travels to the magazine section of the Sunday Mail – enough to get her a job with the new Sunday Advertiser in Adelaide.
When that venture folded, Sunday Mail editor Ron Boland picked Caterer and another woman to work on the newspaper’s social pages. Caterer recalled those three months: “Can you imagine anything more boring than sitting and ringing up Mrs So-and-so to find out who she's having to her morning tea or her cocktail party and what she's going to be wearing! … I was frantic to get out of that”.
Her chance came from chasing fire engines at Norwood and being first to phone through a report on a big fire at Essery’s firm. That led to her becoming the Sunday Mail’s only female general reporter. Caterer was given rounds covering the art gallery, library, zoo and museum. But she made the most of stories from visits to Queen Victoria Hospital and her news from the churches column – written from a strong Christian faith, including attending an evangelical congress in Berlin.
Caterer made the most of chances – like interviewing a visiting Portuguese bullfighter who’d had a romance with Ava Gardener. That back-page story got Caterer her own column that’d be the platform for social causes such as the blanket appeal, with editor Ken Parish’s full support.
Caterer also used her column to promote an Australian Festival of Light after she saw the impact in London of the United Kingdom’s movement founded by Mary Whitehouse and others in 1971. Caterer encouraged Lance Shilton, rector of her Anglican Holy Trinity church in Adelaide city, to campaign against the staging of Oh! Calcutta! revue in Adelaide. Dr John Court, first Festival of Light for South Australia chairman wrote Stand Up and Be Counted (1973) with Caterer, outlining what they saw as disturbing trends in Western society.
