In this blog for the AJBH series, Patricia Clarke explores the life, career and struggles with domestic violence of ‘Ace’ reporter Iris Dexter.

I first wrote about Iris Dexter in 2020 when I was researching a group of privileged women journalists who toured Australia’s far northern defence bases during the most critical phase of the Second World War. The ‘ace’ reporter for the weekly magazine Woman, during the tour she published articles on servicewomen and wrote a column under the pseudonym Margot Parker in which she took a humorous satirical look at the foibles of civilians adapting to wartime regulations. I described her as looking the part of a stylish, sophisticated journalist. Her private life – married to one man and living with another – reinforced the slightly bohemian view of women journalists at the time. To me she was an intriguing character ripe for further investigation. Little did I know the trauma and tragedy that would unfold when I delved into Iris’s life story.

On 16 August 1928 Iris Chapman Norton, then a 21-year-old Sydney journalist, married Harry Norman Dexter, a sports journalist, aged 27. A few months later, Harry began bashing Iris viciously. This continued for more than two years. Towards the end of 1930, Iris fled from Harry, and in 1934 she sought a divorce on the ground of ‘constructive desertion’, arguing that she had been forced by her husband’s violence to desert their home and the marriage.

A child contributor to the ‘Sunbeams’ page of the Sydney Sun, at age 15 Iris started editing comics for the Sunday Times. At 16 she was employed on editorial work for a new weekly film magazine, Photoplayer, and filled in as editor of Theatre Magazine. By the time she married she was the very hard-working publicity manager for the Hoyts motion pictures chain. She told an interviewer, Zora Cross, that she intended to be working until 2pm on the day she was married. Cross described her as a brilliant young person maintaining a big position over the heads of men by sheer brains. She surely could not have imagined that two years later, Iris would be physically and mentally a distraught, ragged nervous wreck.

Iris’s evidence at her divorce hearing makes for grim reading. Harry regularly called her a gutter prostitute, town pushover, bloody harlot, and beat and raped her unmercifully. The divorce hearing made headlines in the salacious Truth newspaper. Iris testified that Harry beat her over her bare body with a razor strop, pulled her hair, and pushed her against the walls. At the hearing, sexual assaults were hidden behind veiled references by using words such as rearranging her nightdress and dragging her back to the apartment when she was seeking medical assistance after he slashed her cheek from eye to chin.

Although Iris had threatened to call the police, the fact she never did so reflects a commonly held belief that the police often took the husband’s side. Harry’s abuse continued, and finally in November 1930 Iris sought refuge with her friend Elizabeth Riddell, a fellow journalist. Riddell described her arriving in a ‘dreadful’ state, ‘crying and sick’ and ‘thin and nervous looking’, in contrast to her appearance at the time she married, when she had been ‘plump and very healthy’. She introduced Iris to Aubrey J. Aria, a well-known Sydney cartoonist, who took pity on Iris. A few months later they were living together in a relationship that lasted until Aria’s death.

The judge in Iris’s 1934 divorce case, Francis Boyce, was conservative and elderly. His decision against granting a divorce on the ground of ‘constructive desertion’ was not unusual. Although he found ‘constructive desertion’ proved, he found another reason for denying a divorce. He stated: ‘this woman simply takes a fancy to somebody else and goes to live with him’. In effect, Iris was denied a divorce because she was defying public morality by openly living with a man other than her husband. Another judge in a similar case said he believed very strongly that the law on constructive desertion had gone far enough, and he was not inclined to extend it. ‘Marriage is marriage however miserable it may turn out to be … [it] should not be dissolved for such trivial causes’. In this case, the husband had tortured and threatened to kill his wife and baby.

Following her failure to gain a divorce, Iris and Aria continued to live together. If they had ever wished to have children, Iris’s child-bearing years passed by. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, journalism jobs dried up, especially for women, and Iris was without any fulltime work for several years, making a pittance writing freelance articles and short stories for any magazines that would take them.

The best years of her life came during the Second World War and a few years afterwards, when she had a permanent, important and satisfying job as a senior journalist on Woman magazine.

The ironic end to Iris’s quest for a divorce came in 1950, when she received a court notice that her husband was suing her for a divorce on the grounds of her desertion in 1930. In 1952, Jack Aria and Iris were finally able to marry. Her failure to get a divorce had a lasting effect: after Aria’s death, Iris spiralled into reclusiveness and despair.

It was a revelation when I came across a constructive desertion case, Lang v. Lang, that reached the British House of Lords appeal. I was well aware of the British Law Lords being the final court of appeal in Australian constitutional cases at that time but hadn’t come across a case such as this one. It involved extreme abuse of Jean Lang by her husband Eric, who set out to subjugate his wife in every possible way. She was granted a divorce of the ground of constructive desertion by a Victorian judge. The decision withstood appeals to the Victorian Supreme Court and the High Court. The husband then appealed the case to the British House of Lords. It was quite an experience to read Lord Porter’s judgement dismissing the appeal.

This case was no help to Iris. In 1974, at her wish, Iris died alone at St Vincent’s Hospital and was privately cremated with no one present.

In 1975 the Whitlam Government passed the Family Law Act, which allowed divorce on the basis of ‘irretrievable breakdown’ after 12 months. It was too late for Iris, the once-vibrant woman who, the day before she first married, said in the Australian Woman’s Mirror: ‘Yes. I’ve got ambitions. Oh millions!’

‘No fault’ divorce was a great advance in the last century. In this century domestic violence is still an ‘epidemic’.

Read more about Iris Dexter’s story in Patricia Clarke’s article ‘Divorce divide: How divorce laws discriminated against women before “no cause”’ in the Australian Journal of Biography and History.

Dr Patricia Clarke OAM is a writer, historian, editor and former journalist. She has written extensively on women in Australian history and is an authority on media history. Several of her 14 nooks are biographies of women writers and journalists. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA). She is a Fellow of the Federation of Australian Historical Societies (FFAHS) and was the Founding Honorary Secretary of the Independent Scholars Association of Australia (ISAA). In addition to her 14 books, she is the author of numerous chapters in books and of more than 00 articles in journals and biographical collections. She was a member of the National Library of Australia’s Fellowship Advisory Committee from 1996-2016 and of the ACT Historical Houses Advisory Committee between 2010-2016. She has been a member of the Commonwealth Working Party for the Australian Dictionary of Biography since 1987.

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