Thelma Honora Forshaw or Thelma Korting was an Australian short story writer and journalist. In 1967 she published a largely autobiographical collection of short stories, An Affair of Clowns, in 1967. As a journalist she worked as a freelancer and book reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian, The Bulletin, Meanjin, Nation, and Quadrant.
Biography
Thelma Honora Forshaw was born on 1 August 1923 at Glebe Point – a suburb of Sydney. Her father, Leslie Alfred Forshaw, was a labourer and part-time boxer, her mother was Mary Winifred Forshaw, and her two younger brothers Walter and Leslie junior. From August 1935 after her father's death, the family lived with relatives in Annandale. Forshaw was educated at St Michael's Catholic Primary School in Stanmore and St Fiacre's Primary School in Leichardt. At the age of 14 years she wrote a poem, "Idyll of a Summer Noon", which was published in The Sydney Morning Herald in February 1938. Forshaw undertook tertiary studies at Sydney Teachers' College. During World War II, Forshaw enlisted on 15 April 1942 in the WAAAF and was honourably discharged as an Aircraftwoman on 1 March 1943. She worked as a secretary and an advertising writer before marrying George Korting, an Austrian refugee, in 1948. In January 1951, using her married name, Thelma Korting, she wrote "This Veil Wore Me!" in The Argus. Subsequently, she worked as a freelancer and book reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian, The Bulletin, Meanjin, Nation, Quadrant and other publications. Her short stories appeared in a number of journals and anthologies. In 1967, a collection of them, An Affair of Clowns, was published by Angus & Robertson. Stephen Torre, in The Cambridge History of Australian Literature, described the book's first section, "Some Customs of My Clan" as "stories about a working-class Irish Catholic family narrated by a daughter, an aspiring writer. The manners of the Sydney 'clan' include hard drinking, gambling, ferocious gossiping and scandal-mongering, fighting and loving." These stories were notable for their realistic characters set within gritty, penetrating and humorous depictions of Australian city life in the first half of the 20th century, with a focus on outsiders, working-class lifestyles and the migrant experience. In January 1972 Forshaw wrote a review of Germaine Greer's book, The Female Eunuch for The Age which "has stirred up a considerable controversy". According to Keith Dunstan in The Best Australian Profiles, this review was "he most famous.... described as 'the orchestrated over-the-back-fence grizzle... based on the curious fancy... we were all men, and then some fiend castrated half of us.'" Forshaw compared herself to Greer: "I'm not a middle-class lady defending her domain. My parents were working class.... I'm a housewife because I want to, I write because I want to, I love my husband who is a male, chauvinist pig and I love my two children." Thelma Forshaw died on 8 October 1995 of a stroke in her sleep, aged 72, and was survived by her husband George and their children Helene and Grea.
