Australian Dictionary of Biography

P.L. Travers, c. 1934

State Library of New South Wales

Pamela Lyndon Travers (1899–1996), author, was born on 9 August 1899 at Maryborough, Queensland, and named Helen Lyndon, eldest of three daughters of Travers Robert Goff, a London-born bank manager, and his Sydney-born wife Margaret Agnes, née Morehead. Boyd Morehead, premier of Queensland (1888–90), was Lyndon’s great-uncle and Barbara Goff (later Moriarty), Red Cross field representative, was her sister. In 1905 her father was transferred to Allora, on the Darling Downs. She attended Allora State School the next year.

The death of Travers Goff in 1907 from alcohol-related illness prompted Margaret to take the family to Bowral, New South Wales, where they lived in a cottage on which her Aunt Helen (known as Ellie) Morehead paid the rent. Late in life, Lyndon recounted that, on one rainy night in about 1911, Margaret fled from the house threatening to drown herself in a nearby creek; the children waited anxiously until she returned. Lyndon attended the Bowral branch of the Sydney Church of England Grammar School for Girls, before boarding at Normanhurst, a private girls’ school at Ashfield, Sydney, from 1912 to 1916.

When Goff’s mother and sisters moved to Sydney in 1917, she began a moderately successful career on the stage, under the name Pamela Lyndon Travers. In 1921 and 1922, she toured with theatre companies in New South Wales and New Zealand, mainly playing Shakespearean characters. At Christchurch she showed a journalist on the city’s Sun newspaper an example of her prose and was invited to contribute a weekly column. Back in Sydney, she began publishing poems and articles in the Bulletin and Triad, her success convincing her to embark on a literary career.

As Pamela Travers, she migrated to Britain in 1924 and took up residence in London. To support herself, she worked as a freelance journalist, and soon became well known. She produced perceptive newspaper articles, which included a profile of Albert Einstein, a report of an interview with President Éamon De Valera of Ireland, and her impressions of the Soviet Union, gained during an organised tour (1932).

Writing poetry was Travers’s principal interest, however. Stirred by her father’s Irish heritage and his interest in the Celtic Twilight movement—with its emphasis on the country’s history, myths, and folklore—she contrived to meet G. W. (‘Æ’) Russell, the poet, mystic, and editor of the Irish Statesman, who published her verse. She mixed in his circle, which included W. B. Yeats. Russell mentored her and ‘introduced her to the meaning of fairy tales, to myths, the spirit world and Eastern religions’ (Lawson 1999, 78). Thereafter, she devoted much of her life ‘to a quest for the meaning of existence’ (House 1996, 20) through immersion in these arcane subjects; the mystics Alfred Orage, P. D. Ouspensky, George Gurdjieff, and Jittu Krishnamurti were to be future influences on her.

In 1930 Travers and her friend Madge Burnand rented a cottage near Mayfield, East Sussex, and two years later Travers began writing a fairy tale, Mary Poppins, set in Edwardian London, about a magical nanny who drops in to assist a busy banker and his wife with their four children. In Mary’s care, the Banks children experience wonderful adventures: they enjoy a tea party after they and the table have levitated almost to the ceiling; travel instantly around the world, transported by a magic compass; and buy gingerbread with attached gilt paper stars, which, when the gingerbread is eaten, must be glued back on the sky. As promised, Mary leaves when she opens her umbrella and the wind changes, carrying her away.

Published in 1934, Mary Poppins (by P. L. Travers to veil the author’s sex) was an instant success, aided by captivating illustrations from Mary Shepard. Seven Mary Poppins sequels were to follow, the last in 1988. People in Travers’s life, especially her childhood, were models for her characters: wistful and unfulfilled Travis Goff, for Mr Banks; and stern but kind Great-Aunt Ellie Morehead, for Mary Poppins. Ellie Morehead was also the inspiration for the eponymous character in Travers’s semi-autobiographical short story `Aunt Sass’ (1941). In ‘her mystic and mythic [books] scholars have found references to the Bible, Greek deities and Sufi parables’ (Griswold 2018, E12). The character of Mary Poppins would remain popular for generations, with a timeless message of teaching children how to behave and parents how to love.

Travelling to Ireland for the purpose, in 1939 Travers adopted a baby boy named Camillus. She told him she was his widowed natural mother. He was to be unaware of his parentage or siblings until, aged seventeen, he encountered his twin brother, Anthony Hone. In 1940, during World War II, Travers took Camillus to the United States of America, where they lived in a New York apartment and she made morale-boosting broadcasts to countries in occupied Europe for the Office of War Information. She spent a few weeks in 1943 in New Mexico and five months in the summer of 1944 in Arizona and New Mexico, seeking peace in the landscape and enlightenment in the culture and spirituality of the Navajo people. In 1945 she returned to England and soon settled at Chelsea, London. She would have more sojourns in America, two of them as an autumn-semester writer-in-residence at Massachusetts women’s colleges: Radcliffe, Cambridge (1965); and Smith, Northampton (1966).

From 1945 Walt Disney had made repeated attempts to buy the rights for a film adaptation of her books. Travers resisted his offers until 1959, when, with her income decreasing, she finally accepted. The musical film Mary Poppins, based loosely on the novels, was released in 1964. Although Travers had been an adviser on the set, she had little sway and disliked the diluted Poppins character, the music, the animation, and the trivialising of her stories.

The film was acclaimed, winning five Academy Awards. Grossing $31 million on first release, it made Travers wealthy. In 1981 she began investigating the possibility of a stage musical, which was slow to materialise and did not premiere until 2004, after her death. A second motion picture, Mary Poppins Returns (2018), featured Mary revisiting two of the Banks children, Jane and Michael, as adults during the Depression.

Travers professed fondness for Australia but no sense of belonging to it and returned only once, in 1963, briefly to visit her sisters in Sydney. In 1977 she was appointed OBE. She published more than twenty books, including novels, a poetry collection, and non-fiction works. What the Bee Knows (1989) reproduced essays she had contributed to Parabola, an American magazine dedicated to myth and tradition. She died on 23 April 1996 at her Chelsea home and, after a Church of England funeral, was cremated. Camillus survived her.

Saving Mr Banks, a mostly fabricated ‘biopic’ dramatising Travers’s relationship with Disney and her involvement in making the film Mary Poppins, was released in 2013. Jerry Griswold, an American academic who knew her well, objected that it presented ‘the wisest woman [he] ever met’ as ‘a grouchy misanthrope’ (2018). In contrast, Joseph Hone, Camillus’s elder brother, remembered her as ‘a steely, self-centred, very controlling woman’ (2013). She never married. Her biographer Valerie Lawson argued that her apparently platonic attachments to a succession of men manifested a search for the beloved father she had lost as a child. Lawson also concluded that Travers’s relationship with women was sexually ambiguous. Travers guarded her privacy and said that she did not want a biography but, nevertheless, sold her papers in labelled boxes to the Mitchell Library in Sydney.