Amy Witting

In 1974, using the pseudonym Chris Willoughby, Witting wrote a lampoon for Tabloid Story as the result of her anger at "the sexism of the Frank Moorhouse/Michael Wilding tabloid Story tales of sex with an unconscious drugged girl at a party". Her story outraged parents, politicians and teachers; the Minister for Education accused her of corrupting children and stated in Parliament that "Amy Witting is a scribbler on lavatory walls". However, this did not harm her career, and three years later she was mistress of modern languages at North Sydney Girls' High School.

For most of Witting's working life, teaching English and French, and making a living took priority, and writing was done only in her spare time. Already established Australian writer Thea Astley, who taught with Witting at Cheltenham Girls High School, was impressed by one of her stories, Goodbye, Ady, Goodbye, Joe, and encouraged her to submit it for publication. It was published in The New Yorker in April 1965. Indeed, the poet Kenneth Slessor told Thea Astley to "tell that women I'll publish any word she writes".

Witting married Les Levick, a fellow high school teacher, in 1948, and they had one son. Greg. She continued to write until her death, dying of cancer a few weeks after the publication of After Cynthia, her last novel, in 2001.

On 28 July 1934, when Witting was 16, one of her poems, written under the pseudonym De Guesclin, was published in the Sydney Morning Herald. Witting always wrote under a pseudonym. Her name, Amy Witting, is from a promise she made to herself to "never give up on consciousness', not be unwitting, but to always remain 'witting'".

Amy Witting (26 January 1918 – 18 September 2001) was the pen name of an Australian novelist and poet born Joan Austral Fraser. She was widely acknowledged as one of Australia's "finest fiction writers, whose work was full of the atmosphere and colour or times past".