When I commenced this blog last August I posted about the Australian psychoanalyst Ivy Bennett. She was born in Wagin, Western Australia in 1919. Through sheer determination and a British Council scholarship she travelled to England in 1946. Through a series of connections she was one of the first people, if not the first, to train in Child Psychoanalysis with Anna Freud. In 1953 Ivy returned to Australia and set up a practice as a psychoanalyst near Kings Park in Perth, Western Australia. She had frequent communication with psychoanalytic professionals in the Eastern States and remembered the warm reception she received from Clara Lazar-Geroe at the Melbourne Institute of Psychoanalysis.She returned to England for further training in 1958, married and eventually moved to Kansas in the United States. During 2011 I had a brief correspondence with her. Although she was ill, she wrote me a long letter outlining as many memories as she could about her life and the psychoanalytic scene she during the 1950s.
I have recently learned that Ivy Bennett ( Ivy Gwynne-Thomas) died on 2 December 2011. I have copied her obituary here.
Freud in Oceania 
Sad to say goodbye to another of the great ancestors, but that correspondence you have however brief is such a treasure. I hope you can share it one day.
In time and with a bit more work I will do so Elisabeth. There are many, like her, whose claim to the gallery of the ‘great ancestors’ is quite legitimate indeed, I think.