Poet and playwright Helen Joyce Haenke was born on 9 May 1916 at Wickham, New South Wales,to Walter Charles Petherbridge, a medical practitioner, and his wife Lily Myrtle, née Wood. She married Willis Lynn Haenke, an industrial chemist from Queensland, and from 1943 settled in Ipswich. She became an influential figure in the local community and used her historic home, Rockton, as a focal point for the creative arts. She began her writing career by contributing prose and poetry to literary magazines. Throughout the 1950s her short stories appeared in the Australian women's weekly. Her unpublished play, 'Truth to tell', won an Ipswich drama competition award in 1960, and in the following decade Southerly published her poems and short stories. From 1968 to 1978 she studied a range of arts subjects at the University of Queensland. Her first published poem won a Courier-mail competition in 1965. She subsequently published two volumes of poetry and her libretto for the opera, The pied piper, was performed in Brisbane in 1971. She also published under the pseudonyms, 'Winkle' and 'Inglewick'. She died of cancer on 7 December 1978 - excerpted from Australian dictionary of biography.