Pat’s life included the roles of farmer, wife, mother, author, illustrator and teacher. She is perhaps best remembered locally as an author of a number of Australian history books on exciting people and events in the nation’s colourful past under the name of Pat Studdy-Clift.

Born in Gunnedah in 1926 to parents Gordon and Jean Studdy, Pat came second in the family with an older sister, Joan, and a younger brother, Tom.

Her initial education came via Brackfriars Correspondence School at the family rural property, “Kareela”, outside of Gunnedah, followed by secondary schooling in Sydney at Ascham Girls School to intermediate standard. Her final schooling was at the time of the Japanese midget submarine shelling on Sydney suburbs and their torpedo attacks on harbour shipping in 1942.

The following year, at the age of 15, she joined the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps in Sydney where she taught Morse code to the personnel from the Australian Air Force, Merchant Navy and also American Airmen, who had trouble grasping the concept.

With her father doing his war duty as an Army officer in Victoria Barracks in Sydney, Pat’s world was turned upside-down when the farm manager of “Kareela” suddenly resigned in 1943 and the women folk returned to look after the property.

As a teenager, thrust into what was normally a man’s world, Pat together with her mother and five-year-old brother, faced the complexities of running a rural property compounded by wartime rationing and a raging drought. Battling these elements, she learned many farm skills including killing and cutting up their own meat, even mastering a Caterpillar-type tractor to build a dam for part of their failing water supplies.

A year after they returned to “Kareela”, her father was invalided out of the Army and they were assigned three Italian prisons of war (POW) to help relieve the manpower shortage. Pat often worked on her own with these men in remote parts of the property and never felt threatened by them even though they were technically the enemy. She wrote and illustrated a book on these experiences titled, Only Our Gloves On, which was published in 1981.

After the war Pat and her sister, Joan, became share farmers, working their father’s land with their own tractor, truck and equipment. They traded as the Studdy Sisters and are believed to be the first known female broad-acre share farmers in NSW and possibly Australia.

Pat married Jim Clift from Breeza in 1948 and in late 1954, they moved to a river-front property, “Condabri”, near Condamine in the western Darling Downs in Queensland.

The couple developed the property through almost 30 years of hard but rewarding work. Again Pat faced many challenges, including a six-month period in 1956 when the property was cut-off by floodwaters, with no communication possible. Pat was heavily pregnant and spent her days with a small but active toddler and his two older brothers, who had to travel to school by row boat and then bus.

Heavily engaged in transforming the under-developed lands into a thriving rural enterprise, she involved herself and the family in many local activities. One unusual interest that the family followed from the start of the 1960s was water skiing on the local lagoons, with Pat becoming very proficient at water ballet.

Pat wrote of these experiences and many others in a book titled, On the Banks of the Condamine, with a later revised edition titled, On the Banks of the Condamine Revisited. It personalises the challenges of being on the land and threads a tapestry of the strong social fabric of the surrounding rural community of those times.

“Retiring” to northern NSW in the 1980s and captivated by the cosmopolitan nature of the Tweed Shire, Pat wrote and illustrated two books including The Many Faces of the Tweed –  a snapshot of the characters from her newly adopted neighbourhood.

Interviewing and recording a diverse range of people varying from followers of Hare Krishna and ‘Orange People’, through to singers like Jade Hurley and the civic movers and shakers, Pat immersed herself in many aspects of local culture very different to her rural roots. 

With the time to seriously pursue her love of writing, Pat undertook the research and completion of a number of books on some of Australia’s lesser-known events and characters.

A chance meeting with an ex-Northern Territory policeman, Ron Brown, led to a collaboration that resulted in two books. The first book, Bush Justice, tells of Ron’s experiences as a lone representative of “the white man’s law” and mediator on camel patrols in the red centre of Australia between 1945 and 1952.

The second book, Darwin Dilemmas, details life and the events at the top end administrative centre through the eyes of a local policeman stationed there between the years of 1939 to 1945. His first-hand account recalls the times of the much hushed-up 68 air raids on northern Australia by Japanese bombers and the human face of Darwin in the period.

In 1996, Pat completed perhaps her most intriguing book, The Lady Bushranger, which explores the life of Elizabeth Jessie Hickman, a colourful woman with many aliases, whose story remained hidden along with the Wollemi Pine and her hideout in the extended valleys of the Blue Mountains until the early 1990s. Elizabeth’s early circus life, cattle duffing, repeat escapes from the police and her final taming are now portrayed for all but like most accounts of bush-ranging adventures, it is mixed with truth, legend and mystery.

In between all these activities, Pat, with a strong love of music, found time to teach the piano, organ and keyboard.

Following Pat’s diagnosis with macular degeneration in the early 1990s, her sight deteriorated to a world of blurred images and shapes with some very minor peripheral vision. She treated her handicap as just another one of life’s challenges and continued to undertake as many of her previous activities as possible.

Writing continued to be a passion for Pat who wrote two more book. The Incredible Klemm involved the story of remarkable surviving New Guinea mission plan. When Nuns wore Soldier’s Trousers was an enthralling adventure of nuns escaping the Japanese occupation of northern New Guinea.

In her later life, Pat continued to be active in her community, and became one of the Lismore City Library’s “Living Books”, with “readers” able to borrow her for half an hour before putting her back “on the shelf”.

Pat’s husband, Jim, predeceased her in late 2015, however, she continued to live independently even with her lack of vision.

For her swansong, Pat’s final book, Touch Me Not, was finally finished only a month before she died. The book is about a young woman who contracted leprosy in pre-war Darwin, and will be launched at Lismore Library in early August.

Pat is survived by her four sons, Bill, David, Tony and Tom, and their families.