Eileen Naseby

Eileen Naseby (born 4 Jan 1943 - died 22 Feb 2024) is the Australian author of Ursula, A Voyage of Love and Drama, abiography of Naseby's mother.

The biography tells the story of her escape from the Nazi regime, her closeted upbringing in Palestine, her love affair with the adventurer and writer Laurens van der Post, and her eventual emigration with the baby Eileen and her new husband Nigel - a gentle idealist - to an Australian outback Queensland dairy farm. Ursula and her husband eventually converted from Judaism to the Baháʼí Faith.

Naseby was born in Haifa, but Ursula left Eileen's father soon after her birth. In her early childhood Eileen emigrated to Australia with her mother and stepfather, growing up on the remote dairy farm with two younger brothers and three sisters.

Married to the painter David Naseby in the mid-1960s, Eileen raised four children before establishing Australia's leading stock footage archival film library, Film World. With Film World and Murdoch Books Eileen produced the Australian Memories series of photographic books, showcasing images from Film World's Cinesound Movietone Archive.

Eileen has received several fellowships to Varuna, The Writers' House in the Blue Mountains of NSW. After Ursula, Eileen contributed her short story Looking For Love to the book Grandma Magic: True stories by and about grandmothers. Eileen began two fiction books but she developed dementia and she was unable to complete them before her death.