A reflection on the life of Margaret Olley

Peter Joseph

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 85 spring 2011

Margaret Olley was a member and friend of St James Ethics Centre for many years. Coincidently, she was also a personal friend of my wife, Nettie, and I for the past 25 years—introduced by her close and kind fellow traveller, the well known Brisbane based art dealer Philip Bacon.

Margaret was forthright, fearless and at times fearsome. At the same time she was generous, gentle and gregarious. She smoked all her life. In recent years, with deteriorating health, she would push her ‘chariot’ (walking frame) through the crowd to have a smoke outside wherever she might be. It was in such places, often on the street, that she would have engaging conversations with strangers. Deep in her psyche she had an acute awareness of their needs.

She was brilliant as a painter (she thought it too pretentious to ever call herself an artist) as we all know. She was also brilliant in the art of being human. This endeared her to the nation as much as her paintings. She had a deep and passionate sense of community and despaired of those who did not contribute according to their means and talents—and told them so!

Margaret, like many Australians, had a highly sensitive ‘bullshit detector’ and once it activated she could be fearsome. For half of her life she lived a peripatetic existence in Australia and Europe, starting in Lismore where she was born in 1923, to far North Queensland and boarding school in Townsville and then south to Brisbane in
Depression Australia.

During World War II she continued her art studies and then was sent south of ‘the Brisbane line’ to Sydney in 1942, the darkest times of the war. She graduated in 1945 from what became the National Art School. One can only imagine the exuberance and enthusiasm in post war Australia and later in Europe. At such a young age she had seen the best of times and the worst of times. This perhaps explained her no nonsense approach to life as well as her love of shopping.

Margaret became, and perhaps always was, a free spirit whose creativity was a huge gift but somehow also led her to becoming an alcoholic. She was literally on the street. Margaret entered a clinic in 1959 and never drank again. She helped many others who suffered similarly; mostly, but not always, with success.

Later in life she suffered from depression and Nettie and I were able to introduce her to Professor Gordon Parker, the Executive Director of the Black Dog Institute. Gordon is a marvellous physician and helped her enormously, thus enabling her to continue painting to the day she died. He was able to put the colour back in her life. Typically, she became an advocate for mental health and Black Dog and gave the Institute one of her paintings to auction at a Gala Dinner—it raised $50,000.

I am not sure why she became a member of St James Ethics Centre other than that she admired the work it did and the practical, applied, no nonsense approach of its Executive Director, Simon Longstaff. Perhaps she saw that ethics, like art, can speak to the heart, can stimulate and challenge the brain, can re-focus the emotions and eventually can bring harmony to the spirit. Art has the capacity to banish the concept of impossibility that imprisons humanity at its most vulnerable. Maybe the examined life does the same.
I believe Olley (as she was affectionately known) understood this from her own life story. She also understood the triumph of the human spirit that can arrive from misfortune or tragedy. She understood how one’s greatest tragedy can eventually become one’s greatest gift, adding rare depth and breadth to one’s humanity,
including lightness and brightness, love and laughter. Or that at least is my interpretation of her feelings. It was never hard to find humour with Margaret. Later in life when shopping was a challenge for her, Nettie offered to help with buying some birthday presents. Olley thanked Nettie and said it wouldn’t be necessary, quipping: “Nowadays I go shopping in my drawers!”

Her art was her magic and Olley used it to perfection—perhaps for her own wellbeing as much as that of others. She painted listening to classical music, knowing that no one can escape from the glorious surprise that a work of art or piece of music can spring on us. Like some power divine, art touches us with the new, the different, the refreshing.

Olley, the courageous leader who never thought she was, the magician and the master painter she most definitely was, will be deeply missed. Every time she picked up a brush there was an act of creation as if to remind us that we care for each other by giving of ourselves.
What a chariot ride, what a love of life, what a character. Vale Olley