Olga Maria Roncoroni—A Last Link with Henry Handel Richardson

Abstract

Olga Roncoroni's name is best known to students of Australian Literature as the author of a memoir in a collection of memorial essays about Henry Handel Richardson, which she edited with Professor Edna Purdie, of the University of London, in 1956. 

But her death on May 19th, 1982, removes not only the last link with H.H.R.'s household, but also a woman of unusual gifts and attributes, a strong personality in her own right, full of wit and charm. From 1919 to 1946, Olga Roncoroni shared the life of H.H.R. and her husband Professor John Robertson in some way or other, first as companion and secretary, then after Robertson's death, as nurse and guardian, a task made extremely onerous during the second world war. In spite of a life of tragic ill-health (she was a victim of a curiously complicated form of manic-depression, which seems to have been caused by some chemical imbalance), she never lost her sense of humour, her sheer exuberance and her passion for music, song and dance. It is not hard to imagine how she must have brought light and warmth into the Robertson's somewhat staid scholarly and literary household.