KATHARINE BRISBANE AM, Hon.Ph.D (UNSW, UWA) was co-founder in 1971 of Currency Press Pty Ltd, the performing arts publishers and its publisher for 30 years. In 2001 she founded Currency House Inc. as a non-profit association to assert the value of the performing arts in public life. She was a theatre critic for 21 years, notably national critic of the Australian 1967–74 during a time of radical change; and has published extensively on the history of Australian theatre, including Not Wrong, Just Different: Observations on the Rise of Contemporary Australian Theatre (2005) and on drama in The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (ed Peter Pierce, 2009). Over 40 years she has received many awards for service to the performing arts.

ORIEL GRAY (1920–2003) was born into a politically active family in Sydney. At age eleven she began her long association with Sydney's left-wing New Theatre, firstly as a comedian and then as a writer. She was a member of the Communist Party of Australia from 1942 to 1950. Her first plays were five-minute radio dramas for a trade union education program. Her numerous stage plays and revues included Marx of Time, Lawson, Westernlimit, My Life is My Affair and Had We But World Enough. The Torrents shared the 1954 Playwright's Advisory Board prize with Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and Burst of Summer won the 1958 J. C. Williamson Theatre Guild Competition. In the 1960s she became a television writer, and for nine years was a writer for the popular serial, Bellbird. Her autobiography, Exit Left: Memoirs of a Scarlet Woman, was published in 1985.

RALPH PETERSON (1921–1997) was born in Adelaide and began acting as a child. He started writing for radio and film after military service in World War II. Best known as a writer and producer for television, he wrote five stage plays beginning with The Square Ring in 1951 which he adapted from a radio serial he had written for the ABC. Performed in London and Melbourne, it was later made into a film by Ealing Studios. His second play, The Night of the Ding-Dong played in Britain and the USA as well as Australia. He also wrote The Third Secretary, one of the first plays published by Currency Press in 1972, The Mating of Ulrich Dooley and The Big Boat. His forte was comedy.

DOUGLAS STEWART was born in Eltham, New Zealand, in 1915. He came to Australia in 1933 and was literary editor of Bulletin between 1940 and 1960. He was the foremost verse dramatist in Australia and believed that plays should create 'the myths by which the people live' and depict the heroic, legendary figures that help shape national identity. He died in Sydney in 1985.

RIC THROSSELL (1922–1999) was born in Western Australia, the only child of writer Katharine Susannah Prichard and Captain Hugo Throssell, V.C. After education at Wesley College he saw war service in New Guinea during World War II. In 1943 he joined the Department of External Affairs. He was a leading advocate and activist for Australian theatre from 1945 to 1966, especially through the Canberra Repertory Society where he was an actor, producer and writer. Throssell wrote twenty-six plays, most of which have been widely performed, particularly The Day Before Tomorrow. He published a biography of his mother, Wild Weeds and Wind Flowers and an autobiography My Father's Son, and has edited two collections of his mother's writings Straight Left and Tribute: selected stories of Katharine Susannah Prichard.