Glynn was born at Woodgreen Station, 150 km north of Alice Springs and is the daughter of Ron Price and Topsy Glynn, a housemaid and cook and she is the half-sister of Rona Glynn. In September 1939 Rona and Freda, were placed in The Bungalow, a "half-caste institution", at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station. Topsy worked as a laundress here in order to stay with her children. During World War II, Glynn, with her mother and sister were evacuated from Alice Springs to Melbourne following the bombing of Darwin and Katherine. Glynn, and her family, were returned to Alice Springs in 1949, when she was 10 years old, and they lived at St Mary's Hostel and attended Alice Springs High School until she was 17.
Career
After leaving school, in 1956, Glynn worked at Trish Collier's photographic studio in the darkroom; she was one of the first Aboriginal girls in Alice Springs to get a job other then as a domestic or cleaner. Freda has a number of other roles before she became involved in media but in 1977, after gaining a community development qualification from the South Australian Institute of Technology, she did take a job as a community development adviser for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. After a lot of consideration, in 1980 Glynn joined John Macumba and Philip Batty in volunteering to make "The Aboriginal Half Hour", the first Aboriginal radio program in the Northern Territory, where she began recording interviews around town, doing the program "links" and voice-overs as well as working on English language programming. Following this Glynn became an advocate for Aboriginal media and was appointed as a committee member of CAAMA when is was chartered on 12 May 1980; this again was a voluntary position. In June 1981 Macumba resigned as the director of CAAMA and was replaced by Glynn, then known by her married name Thornton, with Philip Batty as the deputy director; the two worked together from 1981 - 1991. During this period CAAMA grew exponentially and they established:
8KIN-FM, the first Aboriginal radio station in Australia
Imparja Television drew a lot of complaints from media activists about its lack of Aboriginal programs and the fact that only 10% of its staff were Aboriginal. Following this, Glynn and Batty, were drawn in direct confrontation with not only the management board of Imparja but also their governing committee and, finding their positions untenable, they both resigned in 1991. Following her time at CAAMA Glynn has continued to work in media and in 2002 she played Grandma Nina in the short filmShit Skin and, again in 2002, she received the Award for Contribution to Indigenous Media at the Third Tudawali Indigenous Film and Video Awards.
Legacy
Glynn is the matriarch of a film making family and two of her children, Erica Glynn and Warwick Thornton are both successful film makers. Her granddaughter, Tanith Glynn-Maloney, is also a film maker. In 2019 Erica Glynn released her film, She Who Must Be Loved, about her mother; she was assisted by her daughter Tanith.
