Criena Rohan

Deirdre Cash (16 July 1924 – 11 March 1963) was an Australian novelist, dancer and torch singer, who wrote under her Irish pseudonym Criena Rohan

Education and singing Deirdre boarded at the Convent of Mercy, Mornington, Victoria. After matriculating, Deirdre enrolled at what became the Melba Conservatorium of Music. On 4 February 1948, she married Michael Damian Blackall, a law student, but left her husband and young son to earn a living as a torch singer and teacher of ballroom dancing in Melbourne. She remarried in 1956, to a coastal seaman, Otto Ole Distler Olsen, with whom she lived at various ports. The novel was reissued in 2014 by a Melbourne publisher, with an introduction by the fellow Australian novelist Nick Earls.

Cash published her second novel Down by the Dockside, set in Melbourne, in 1963. A possible third work in manuscript, The House with the Golden Door, has never been found. She died of colonic carcinoma in Melbourne on 11 March 1963, aged 38, leaving a husband, a daughter by her second marriage, and a son by her first.