Dr Patricia Clarke OAM FAHA was a writer, historian, editor and former journalist, who wrote extensively on women in Australian history and the history of journalism. Dr Clarke contributed to this history herself as the first and only woman on the Melbourne staff at the Australian News and Information Bureau in the early 1950s, before she moved to the press gallery at Parliament House in the 1960s. In 2001, she was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to Australian history and was made an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2005. 

Dr Clarke also had a long-standing association with the National Library. She was the longest card-carrying Petherick Reader in the Library's history (from 1980), was awarded a Harold White Fellowship in 1993 and served as a member of the Library's Fellowship Advisory Committee from 1996 to 2016. She published multiple books with NLA Publishing including With Love and Fury: Selected Letters of Judith Wright (2006), Great Expectations (2020) and Bold Types (2022), with the latter turned into a podcast featuring the stories of trailblazing women journalists. She was awarded a Friends of the National Library of Australia Medal in 2016 for her significant contribution to the work of the Library.  

Her papers, comprising correspondence, draft manuscripts and research material, are held in the Library's manuscript collection (MS8363).