Irene ‘Rena’ Deborah McCawley (nee Collas) was born on 22 June 1916 in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) in Russia, to a Russian mother (Nadezhda) and a British father (Laurence Collas). The family fled to Riga in Latvia in 1918 and migrated to Australia in September 1927. Her father Laurence Collas established a photography business in Stanthorpe, Queensland, and from a young age Irene assisted him. In ca. 1939 she married Leo McCawley. The couple had two sons. McCawley took up photography again in the 1940s. After WWII she worked for The Courier Mail for a while, and then set up her photography business, Cameo Photos, at 46 Martha St in Camp Hill, Brisbane. In the 1960s she worked as a photographer in the foyer of Her Majesty’s Theatre. In the 1970s she documented women’s liberation demonstrations in Brisbane. In the early 1990s, she travelled the world after her husband’s death and moved to Canberra. She remained active into old age and in September 2016 a retrospective exhibition of her work was held at Canberra Artworks, in Phillip, Canberra. Irene McCawley died aged 101 on 21 February 2018.