For a while I thought she might be the Dorothea Vautier I found on a listing at Ancestry.com, but that one was born in 1908 in Charlton, in country Victoria and died in 1977 in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne, her father Alfred Clark Vautier, and mother Willamena Sarah Klug. A profile of Vautier from Wireless Weekly, however, cited her as the daughter of C. A. Vautier, a well-known New Zealand architect, so she was clearly not the Victorian Dorothea. And I still did not know when (or if?) she had died.

But wait! A Wireless Weekly “Portrait Gallery” from December 1933 – captioned “The first portrait of a woman announcer to be published in our series” – included the news that back then Vautier was married to Mr. F. W. L. Esch, a somewhat radical Sydney journalist. And, among other outlets, Esch wrote for The Australian Women’s Weekly! He covered New Books, as well as writing some feature articles. (My favourite: “Eating of Sugar Once Was Terribly Wicked!” – an article written in 1934, and of which echoes can be found in paleo blogs and the like across the internet to this day.)

For all his works, however, not much is now known of Mr. Esch’s life and times. I know he was still alive in 1976, because a founding member of the D. H. Lawrence Society of Australia spoke to him regarding Lawrence’s visit to our shores, something Esch had researched as early as the mid-1950s, and which is very intriguing in its own right.

And I know he is now dead, because artworks from his estate were sold in 2014.

But, this is interesting! Turns out the Bill Power to whom Dorothea was married in 1939 is William Power, a playwright and “brilliant radio dramatist” (cf. Wireless Weekly) who also worked at 2GB. Wonder if they moved to America to avoid the scandal, when she left the journalist for the dramatist? Was divorce still scandalous in 1939?

Then, in 1940, Vautier was working for CBS radio. And then: nothing. I can’t even find an obituary for a Dorothea Power anywhere, let along a Vautier or an Esch.

So, she’s vanished from the record, best I can tell.

But yes, she did write the book about the koala.

IT seemed like the radio angle, at first so tantalising, was going to be a dead end. (Or, in Dorothea Vautier’s case, a presumed dead end.) So next I returned to the microfilm that had typified my long-ago forays into “On Such a Night” research, spending many, many more hours at the State Library immersing myself in the magazines of yesteryear.

Magazines that were full of the “ex-King,” Edward VIII-turned-Duke of Windsor who abdicated the throne for love, long-forgotten matinee idols and the “Quins” – the Dionne Quintuplets, born in Canada in 1934 – while the newspapers carried news of Japanese war efforts and the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany (while many book review sections give a disconcerting number of column inches to thoughts on Mein Kampf, which I never thought of as having been translated and sold under the English title My Struggle, but yeah, it was), and advertisements exhorted the joys of “damp setting” one’s hair and the miracle food that was the “rindless” and “completely digestible” Kraft Cheese. There were short stories by H. G. Wells, and book reviews of the newly-released Gone with the Wind, and reference to a host of long-forgotten and out-of-print authors who were once so prolific and popular – just another reminder of how rare it is that Georgette Heyer’s works have so long outlasted her, when so many of her contemporaries have fallen by the wayside. She’s certainly up there with Wells and Margaret Mitchell, at any rate.