Lady Francisca Adriana (Paquita) Mawson OBE (1891–1974), community worker and writer, was born in London and came to Australia when her father, mining engineer Guillaume Daniel Delprat, became the General Manager of the Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd. Paquita attended school in Broken Hill and Adelaide before studying piano and singing at the Elder Conservatorium of Music. She was seventeen when she met Douglas Mawson, shortly after his return from Ernest Shackleton's British Antarctic Expedition. They were engaged within a year, Paquita accepting that she would have to wait until the end of Mawson's next venture, the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, before their wedding could take place. They married in Melbourne, a month after Mawson's return from Antarctica, in March 1914. Their first of their two daughters, Patricia, was born in 1915; she remained in Australia when Paquita went to England to assist Mawson in his wartime role with the Ministry of Munitions. Their second child, Jessica, was born in London in 1917. After the war, the family settled in Adelaide, where Paquita worked for the Mothers' and Babies' Health Association, including nine years as president, and the Australian Red Cross Society. Notable for her community work, Paquita was equally prominent in Adelaide's social and cultural life. Appointed an officer of the Order of Oranje-Nassau in 1946 for her work with Dutch refugees during the Second World War, she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1951. She also wrote two books – the first a biography of her father, A Vision of Steel (1958), and the second a biography of her husband, Mawson of the Antarctic (1964).
