The daughter of an innkeeper, Dempsey was born in Boggabri, New South Wales, in 1892. Three of Dempsey’s six sisters died in tragic circumstances as young women; she herself was lucky to survive scarlet fever. Hers was a close-knit family known for its strong-willed women. After being educated by a governess, Dempsey secured her first job by putting her age forward. Then she heard that a store in Lismore was looking for an assistant accountant. She also became involved in raising funds for the war effort, and relished clambering aboard a lorry with other women to go busking for donations around town. After the war, Dempsey worked variously as a store buyer, driving instructor and car saleswoman, and served as ‘hostess-pianiste’ at the Hotel Kosciusko in winter and at the Hydro-Majestic Hotel, Medlow Bath, in summer. In 1922 she embarked on the young Australian woman’s obligatory grand tour of Europe. Some of her happiest years were spent in the company of her dog, Ginger, driving around New South Wales as a saleswoman and organising women’s auxiliaries for the Country Party. She also seems to have acted as Amy Johnson’s driver following the aviatrix’s triumphant arrival in Australia in 1930.

Dempsey soon made her way on to a commercial radio station (probably 2CH) in Sydney. Her musical, sales and organisational experience, coupled with unshakeable self-confidence, secured her an on-air position. With radio clubs, usually mixing social and charitable functions, proliferating from the early years of the Depression, Dempsey founded the Rosemary Club for 2UW. Tall and stylishly dressed, with a golden-hued Eton crop, Dempsey recruited a sponsor (‘J.D. Borrowman: The Permanent Wave Specialist’) for the club. She presided over the opening in a Sydney restaurant in 1933, an event attended by 2UW managers and broadcasters, including the feminist Linda Littlejohn and the oily news commentator J.M. Prentice. Dempsey directed the club’s regular concerts and fulfilled requests to deliver monologues like ‘His First Long Trousers’.

Well into the 1950s women broadcasters tended to be confined to presenting sessions for housewives and children, singing and acting, and running stations’ clubs. Dempsey refused to be a radio ‘aunt’, broadening the ‘Women’s Homecraft Session’ into the ‘Women’s Interests Session’. Having demonstrated a particular enthusiasm for cricket, she was on the road by late 1936, seeking an opportunity to cover the Ashes. We cannot know whether Dempsey had hoped to do so for 2UW, the station which had pioneered ball-by-ball cricket commentary in 1930; what we do know is that sport was the most male of broadcasting preserves.

By New Year’s Day, 1937, Dempsey was a fill-in presenter on Bendigo’s commercial station. Each night during the third test in Melbourne, listeners could hear Dempsey discuss the day’s play with a woman they called ‘Gabba’. The telephone interviews were supplemented by sound effects of applause and cheering. Australian supporters had cause for jubilation, for Australia won the match after losing the first two tests. For the fourth test in Adelaide, with Australia needing victory to have any chance of retaining the Ashes, a Bendigo sports organisation agreed to sponsor a special feature on Dempsey’s program, ‘The Gabblings of Gabba’. Interest in the 3BO session seems to have prompted 2SM to recruit ‘Yabba’ himself to comment on the vital fifth test, which secured the Ashes for Australia.

Dempsey returned to Sydney and was a somewhat unlikely appointment to the labour station, 2KY, where she was besieged by telephone calls, letters and gifts from her old listeners. In the daily session associated with the 2KY Smilin’ Thru’ Club, which she established, Dempsey discussed news and sport, as well as fashion and everyday problems. It is tempting to believe that she managed to comment on the Australian women’s cricket team’s tour of England in mid-1937. Regarding herself as essentially a saleswoman, she personally signed up sponsors for her session and insisted on seeing and testing the goods she advertised.

Radio magazines, which were accustomed to being fed broadcasters’ profiles by studios and advertising agencies, described Dempsey as a ‘superbly capable’, ‘lively’ and ‘indomitable’ straight talker. They also insisted that she was perfectly ‘sincere’ and ‘sentimental’, with nothing ‘of the spinster about her’. Marriage, she was reported as saying, was ‘the crowning glory of every woman’s life’, but she would have found it difficult to juggle a husband with a career. Little has survived about Dempsey’s activities beyond the 1940s. Her last public foray was in June 1972, when she wrote a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald from her home on Sydney’s upper north shore, asking for vignettes for the book she was writing about radio. She failed to secure support for the book from the Federation of Australian Radio Broadcasters, as it had already commissioned another broadcasting veteran, Bob Walker, to write a history to mark the fiftieth anniversary of radio in Australia. Dempsey died in a Leura nursing home in 1981, aged eighty-nine. The death certificate recorded her occupation as ‘Radio Announcer’. The fate of ‘Gabba’ is unknown.