Kathleen O’Connor (1876 – 1968)

BEGINNING OF INTERVIEW

Christine: So most of us are well versed in C.Y. O’Connor, the Irish Engineer responsible for bringing water to the Goldfields, power to Katanning and the harbour to Fremantle. He stands as a legend of WA history. But what about his daughter? A renowned artist of her time, Kathleen O’Connor stands as an influential figure in her own right; studying art in Perth then later in Paris. Her work is highly regarded in the art community. An independent woman striving to succeed in the twentieth century. We’ll be looking at her story with Dr Kate Gregory, Battye Historian from the State Library of WA.

Hello Kate.

KG: Hi Christine.

Christine: I was going to say another independent woman with an incredible story and I couldn’t get the words together. So who is Kathleen O’Connor?

KG: Yes, look I’ll be honest with you. I am really super excited about this week’s topic because I actually trained as an art historian so...

Christine: Did you?

KG: [Giggles] Yes, that’s my secret.

Christine: [Astonishment] Ahhhh that’s your...wow...I had no idea you had that discipline under your wing.

KG: That’s right, yes so it’s just wonderful to be able to delve into the story of Kathleen O’Connor. She was known to her family and friends as Kate. Kate O’Connor and she was a really significant Australian female artist who had a highly distinctive painting style and really was considered...I think is considered a major figure of the late Edwardian to inter-war generation of Australian artists and we are very, very lucky at the State Library because we have her private archive.

Christine: [Astonishment] Ahhh wow!

KG: Yes!

Christine: I did not know. So what is in the private archive?

KG: Yes, and it’s just a really great example of the types of materials that we collect relating to significant West Australians as Kate O’Connor was.

So this archive, we’ve got her private papers and they are like a trail of bread crumbs of her life.

It’s just incredible. So they’re sort of fragments and snippets and you get a sort of snap shot of her life. They range from the years of about 1913 which was just after she left for Paris until 1981 in fact and...

Christine: Wow. That’s impressive.

KG: Yes, well that’s right. She...I think there’s some additional materials that were put in by her family because she died in 1968 and at the State Library, it’s funny...I’ll give you a little insight today in which archives work [laughs].

Christine: [Laughs] Please, please tell me.

KG: [Laughs] Just imagine...In the private archives there are you know, it’s vast. We have a vast collection. So there are archival boxes after archival boxes after archival boxes through rows and rows and rows and rows...

Christine: Because you’d have different shaped things, different aged things.

KG: Yes.

Christine: Yes.

KG: Ok, so open a compactus unit in this quiet backdrop...of background of the State Library and we’ve got about...it’s actually measured in centimetres the amount of shelf space that the private archive takes and Kathleen O’Connor has 64cm of shelf space.

Christine: Is that a lot?

KG: And that is quite a lot. It’s about five archival boxes and they’re all obviously special acid free archival boxes and inside each of these archival boxes it’s stacked with special acid free archival folders which are sort of filled to the brim with her private papers that essentially are...I’ll give you a sense of the types of materials...

Christine: Yes, tell me.

KG: ...Letters, cards, there are postcards, there’s lots of correspondence with all sorts of...you know on all sorts of different issues. Ephemera...lots of ephemera. So there’s things like railway tickets. She kept railway tickets and her luggage tags. Luggage tags. And you know, sort of ephemera from exhibitions that she was visiting in Paris, calling cards, business cards, notices, exhibition catalogues, newspaper clippings. There are...

Christine: So places and things that made an impression on her perhaps.

KG: Exactly, as well as financial records, customs notices in terms of move...because she moved a lot back and forth from Paris and...look it’s just an extraordinary insight into her life and her career as an artist.

Christine: What do we know about her early life?

KG: Ok, so as you mentioned at the outset, her father was the very significant C.Y. O’Connor who means a lot to us in Western Australia. So Kathleen O’Connor was born in New Zealand. So the family lived in New Zealand and then she was about 13 by the time the family moved for C.Y’s new career as a Chief Engineer in Public Works Department, Western Australia. So she was aged 13. We’re very lucky to have an oral history with Kathleen O’Connor in which she talks about how she had always, always been interested in art and she loved colour and she talks about how this was just a key, key aspect of her early life and her father always encouraged her. So we know that he was a really instrumental kind of figure in saying ‘this is a great thing for you to pursue’, and she did because you’ve got to think this was sort of more or less coming out of the Victorian era. She was born in 1876 so pursuing a career in art as a professional artist was a really radical thing for any woman to do. She decided not to marry. She never married and after her father’s death, his suicide which we might be able to talk about...touch on a little bit more later on...I mean that had obviously a big impact on her and the family...she went with her mother and her sister to Paris. She’d had some preliminary training in art here in Perth through the Perth Art School, James Linton, and but she herself said...she sort of knew nothing as a painter. It wasn’t until she got to Paris that she learnt everything. And look, she spent the better part of 50 years in Paris.

Christine: [Astonishment] Wow!

KG: Yes.

So she was there intermittently. Obviously there was World War I. There was World War II. So it was interrupted by major changes and in fact there’s a story of her being on the last train out of Paris in World War II and that train being bombed by the Germans. She was fine. She escaped fine but you know that’s how close it got and while she was in Paris, look she was immersed and just saturated herself in Parisian art culture and that was the centre of the art world at that time.

Christine: So as an art historian, how did her work change over that time?

KG: Well, it’s actually really interesting. So she says she was really influenced and you can see it in her work. Really influenced by the French impressionists. So you’ve got this very painterly gestural...you can see the brush strokes. You can see the light and the sort of spontaneity that’s really very much like the French impressionist. But I think her work is actually even more experimental in some ways than the French expressionist because she is so much about that texture and that gesture that it starts to become almost, almost towards kind of expressionist and you know the form is there but it’s a very...it’s almost starting to get towards abstraction although she says she was always very interested in maintaining the form. So she...look she painted still lives. She painted portraits. She painted in plain air, outside in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris with a circle of other Australian expatriate painters including Rupert Bunny who is a really, really significant, well known Australian artist. So, she was immersed, she studied with the artists. She was exhibiting regularly; she did some wonderful classes at night. So she’d paint all day and then do drawing and sketching classes at night, so really committed disciplined artist who really had high ambitions for her work.

Christine: We’ve actually got a little recording of her speaking I believe. So this is the voice of Kathleen O’Connor. Let’s listen.

“...when I was a small child, yes I was always into study in things like... oh colours and things that other children didn’t like so much you know and then ...then I used to try to sketch and my father was always encouraging me to be an artist. He liked the idea of me doing it you see. And I had a brother who was very clever at drawing cats and things like that and he would have been quite good if he had gone with it...he never seemed to want to but...I always did want to be an artist you see from the beginning I think. I always tried to do the things...you know...tried to paint and tried to draw and tried to do things that I saw and all that kind of thing. Oh I was...ever since I was quite young”.

Christine: Wow, what an incredible oral history to have.

KG: It is. It’s a really special one. And you can hear her voice there. She’s a strong woman. A really interesting accent too after you know living in France for so long. And...

Christine: Do you know how old she was when it was recorded?

KG: Yes, she would have been...well it was 1967 and she passed away in...

Christine: 1968.

KG: Yes, that’s right. So she would have been 89, 90 maybe.

Christine: And you can hear in her breathing...

KG: Ohh, I know...

Christine: What was her...?

KG: Asthma. Asthma. Yes. I mean she was just generally at that point in where she didn’t have a lot of energy and obviously the breathing is quite laboured. But, yes that’s a really special recording. It was actually just on the occasion of...there was a major retrospective of her work held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia which must have been a really wonderful thing for Kate to be acknowledged in that way as an artist finally because she hadn’t always been acknowledged. I think she was very much acknowledged in France and in fact it’s interesting because I think she didn’t necessarily think of it. I don’t know if she thought of herself as a West Australian. She wouldn’t...even in Australia. I mean often she referred to herself as a New Zealander, you know as Irish...having Irish background because of course C.Y. O’Connor came from Ireland and...

Christine: Was she...was that recorded in Western Australia as well?

KG: It was. So she came back to Perth in...the fifties...mid fifties and that was really...I mean she herself says that she didn’t want to really return. She didn’t particularly want to return in Perth. She thought Perth was a cultural backwater to her. It was just...it did not have the opportunities and the ambiance, the atmosphere for artists so she was quite distraught to have to return but really she did this...she was I guess, I guess in her final decade of life. Also her sister, her oldest sister was unwell, you know the family were urging her to return. It was difficult living in Paris. It was expensive. It was starting to get expensive and she never had much money. She survived on a really small amount. Yes, and I think she clearly had mixed feelings but she was back here and in fact in the 15 years that she had in Perth for the remainder of her life, she was quite prolific and she produced more paintings and she exhibited and she won awards and...really quite an extraordinary figure.

Christine: It’s 23 minutes past two.

If you’ve just tuned in, I have Dr Kate Gregory with me: Battye Historian from the State Library of WA.

We are talking about C.Y. O’Connor’s daughter Kathleen O’Connor who went by ‘Kate’. What was her relationship with her father like? Do we know much about family life?

KG: Look, the little that I’ve read and you know some of this is gleaned from...there’s a wonderful book published by Amanda Curtin in 2018 and Amanda who’s a fictional...fiction writer but she produced this work called ‘Kathleen O’Connor of Paris’ and in it, she actually delved into our archives quite meticulously at the State Library, spent days and days if not weeks and weeks going through to sort of unpack to try and put together the fragments of her life and part of that was her relationship with her father as well. And I mean it seems to me from what I’ve read, he was a very positive figure; a really positive figure in the lives of all the children. He was very encouraging, enthusiastic about their pursuits, quick witted, funny, warm, compassionate. He just sounded like a really wonderful, really wonderful person and I think obviously the way in which he was hounded by the press and by the government of the day prior to the pipeline as successful...ten months after his death the water was turned on and it was a perfect success. So he was vilified. His work was clearly outstanding so I think obviously that would have been a terrible tragedy to get over. You can’t really imagine it.

Christine: Mmmm definitely. So in terms of the collection of her work, has any of it been digitised yet for those who can’t get to the State Library? How does it work?

KG: No, it hasn’t. Well this is one of the challenges that we have with private archives. So because it’s such a vast collection, there’s so much material and in fact we have decided that we are going to put it on our digitisation schedule because it offers a really interesting opportunity to think about well how do we go about digitising this wealth of material. There’s so much there. And do we do it...do we just do a kind of snapshot of the papers or we do endeavour to do the whole collection? So it does pose lots of kind of challenges but it is a wonderful collection and I will put on the State Library website a few photos because we’ve also got photographs as part of the collection, so we’ve got some photographs of Kate; of Kathleen O’Connor and we’ve also...there’s a wonderful portrait in fact that Richard Woldendorp took.

Christine: Oh really? [Laughs]

KG: Yes. We were talking about Richard Woldendorp...

Christine: Yes, a month ago.

KG: Yes, that’s right.

Christine: Dutch photographer.

KG: Yes, and he took a portrait of her when she was aged 90 and it is just such a powerful image so I’ll make sure that that’s on the website as well and perhaps a link to this oral history. The oral history is actually held by the National Library but it’s 18 minutes and it’s well worth listening to.

Christine: Yes, if you can send it to me I’ll tweet it as well. That would be great.

KG: Great.

Christine: Kate, thank you for doing all the research that you do. It was really interesting to learn about her. Have a good weekend.

KG: Pleasure, thank you.

Christine: Dr Kate Gregory. She is the Battye Historian from the State Library talking about C.Y. O’Connor’s daughter Kathleen O’Connor. Her achievements as an artist and her relationship with her father as well.

END OF INTERVIEW