Daphne Tuttle

Daphne Tuttle grew up on a dairy farm amongst the sun baked hills and river valleys of South Africa’s Eastern Cape. She was sent to boarding school in the historic ‘1820 Settler’ city of Grahamstown where, age 12, she wrote and directed a play and decided to be a writer.

At 19, Daphne travelled on the back of a motorbike through Southern Africa, seeking fodder for her writing. At 21, she sailed to Europe, worked for a library in London and then went to Bergen, Norway to write. When money ran out, she found a job washing dishes on the cruise ship Meteor and sailed on fjord and midnight sun cruises, heading further north to Spitsbergen then to the Baltic Sea where in communist Leningrad the crew were fêted while the passengers were ignored. She travelled the Mediterranean and on to the Caribbean, writing and illustrating everything she saw and experienced.

In Durban, everything she owned was stolen, including her precious diaries, and a door seemed to close on her writing. Here, she met her Australian husband, Alan, getting married in Grahamstown before sailing for Sydney where she worked at Manly Library and then spent two years in Rabaul, New Guinea.

The family returned to Australia some twenty years after Daphne and her new husband had first moved there. This time, they settled on Bribie Island, Queensland, and began running a travel agency amongst the picturesque Glasshouse Mountains. Daphne now committed herself to a path she had never given up on – writing. Travel articles, newsletters, short stories – some featured on local radio – and two novels, Under Pressure and Shadow Patterns, were the creative explorations of her life’s experiences and greatest passions: family, spirituality, voyages of discovery, and the personal and cultural complexities of a troubled land.

It was an immense satisfaction for her to have completed and published Shadow Patterns shortly before she passed away in 2012.

Scroll to Top