The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, issued by Gornall the Publisher of Sydney (Coumans #67) was undated, but contemporary newspaper advertisements for it show it to have been on the market by the end of July 1945 (1a). It used FitzGerald’s first edition and had a short introduction by E[dgar] A[llan] Gornall, in which he wrote, “Should the Fitzgerald (sic) version be lost to the world, by any strange chance, man would be poor indeed, for where there is Omar there can only be joy.” The artist behind the illustrations is named as O’Brien on the cover (Fig.1a), with the same characteristic signature appearing on each of the four black and white illustrations, shown here as Figs.1b, 1c, 1d & 1e. They face, respectively, quatrains 13, 28, 45 & 60. However, only Fig.1e, set in the Potter’s Shop, seems to bear any close relation to its facing quatrain, depicting Omar’s vision of the dead from whose clay the pots have been made. Fig.1c perhaps relates to the fourth line of quatrain 28, “I came like Water and like Wind I go”, though why most if not all the figures being swept along are naked women is something of a puzzle. This, and the mildly erotic nature of Figs.1a & 1b, alike generic images of Omar and his Beloved, plus the orgiastic Fig.1d might suggest that the artist was a man, but in fact, as we shall see, the artist was a woman – Kathleen O’Brien. [The illustrations can be browsed here.]
O’Brien clearly favoured a hedonistic interpretation of The Rubaiyat, though most of us would regard this as an unjustified distortion, with Fig.1d being particularly ‘over the top.’ Certainly other artists have followed this route, taking oriental dancing girls and houris as a good excuse for depicting naked women, which, the cynic might add, is a good way to sell books. But I am not sure this is the whole story behind O’Brien’s illustrations, for one has to remember that it was issued towards the end of the Second World War, and war has always had the tendency to foster an “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’ view of life. It is interesting that contemporary newspaper adverts for the book urged readers to “SEND YOUR SERVICEMEN a copy of the Soldier’s most treasured companion – OMAR KHAYYAM.” (The War in the Pacific, remember, only formally ended on 2 September 1945, with pockets of Japanese resistance holding out in various places for some months after that.)
Kathleen O’Brien is perhaps best known for her creation of the cartoon strip Wanda the War Girl in 1943, whose advent was announced in The Daily Telegraph (Sydney) on 7 February 1943, p.3 (Fig.2a), this referring readers to p.22 of the same issue for an account of the artist, which was accompanied by a photograph of her (Fig.2b). This article, headed “Introducing Wanda the War Girl”, being based on an interview with the artist, is well worth quoting in full here:
Her admiration for the fine qualities of the Australian Service girls inspired Sydney artist Kathleen O’Brien to create “Wanda the War Girl.”
Miss O’Brien’s weekly strip of Wanda’s adventures will begin in next week’s Sunday Telegraph.
Few Australian artists have tried to give Australian service girls credit for the marvellous job they have been doing,” Miss O’Brien says.
“The Australian service girl has got everything – daring, beauty, wit, charm, and a fresh, open–air outlook.”
“I am delighted that the Sunday Telegraph will bring her to the public.”
Miss O’Brien was born 28 years ago in her grandfather’s hotel in Mackay, Northern Queensland.
Since then she has travelled all over Australia with her parents while her father prospected for gold, broke–in horses, and worked for years in the outback.
Her mother, who models aboriginal subjects in clay and is an expert in hand–weaving, inspired her to become an artist.
Miss O’Brien first studied art at the Brisbane Technical College.
She came to Sydney six years ago to study for three years under the late J.S. (“Wattie”) Watkins, great art teacher.
She has never been abroad, but she can read and speak both French and Italian.
“Wanda is not a portrait of any real person, but she represents the spirit of Australian girls I know who have done such wonderful work in uniform,” says Miss O’Brien.
“I first thought of Wanda when I was watching a march of Service girls in Martin Place about a year ago.”
“They looked so brave and smart as they marched that I felt inspired, particularly as my only brother, Bill, had joined the A.I.F. not long before.”
“I spent days and nights sketching girls before I was satisfied I had found a true type of real Australian girl.”
The first episode of Wanda, which featured in The Sunday Telegraph (Sydney) on 14 February 1943, is shown in colour in Fig.2c, though the black and white version shown in Fig.2d is clearer, particularly as regards her characteristic O’Brien signature in the top right–hand corner, which shows conclusively that she was also the artist behind the Gornall edition of The Rubaiyat. Note, too, the mildly erotic content of the cartoon strip: it is not surprising that many Servicemen were avid readers of the curvaceous and leggy Wanda’s adventures (2). Indeed, it is quite possible that they were an intended market, given the popularity of erotic artwork on the noses of wartime aircraft and such like, for it has been rightly said that there was no good reason why “Wanda, beautiful Australian business girl” should expose her stockings and suspenders in the first drawing of the first episode!
At the end of the Second World War, the comic strip became just Wanda – the post–War adventures of a curvy young Australian girl – and it continued to run for some years.
The above quoted newspaper account of O’Brien is one of the key sources of information about the artist. Another account of her, by James S. & Joan Kerr, to be found in the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online (3), adds to this. It gives her date of birth as “18 October 1914 (sic)” – I’m not clear why the “(sic)”, but the date is consistent with her being “born 28 years ago” in the February 1943 newspaper article quoted above. It also gives an account of her time with the bohemian colony of artists known as the Merioola Group or the Sydney Charm School – whether the latter epithet was to be taken literally or was a piece of artistic sarcasm is not clear. At any rate, she left the group when she married an ex-naval man called Robert Blanche in 1947, a marriage which resulted in four daughters. She had a brief teaching career at Springwood Ladies College (where Joan Kerr was one of her pupils) and later a distinguished career as a fashion artist, gaining prestigious awards for her designs for advertisements for the Sydney firm of Hordern Brothers (in 1962) and for the Canberra firm of David Jones (in 1973). Her artistic career was effectively ended in 1984 on account of arthritis, after which she was looked after by one of her daughters, Cynthia Blanche, who described her mother as “strong–minded, strong willed and an enemy of pretension.” Kathleen O’Brien died at her home in Hazelbrook, New South Wales (some 90 km west of Sydney), on 8 May 1991.
Of particular interest to us here is the following account of her work as a commercial artist and book illustrator:
Altogether she illustrated 12 books with Hans Christian Andersen’s Mermaid a favourite. She illustrated Australia’s first unabridged Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in Australia (ACP [= Australian Consolidated Press]: Sydney, 1943: reprints 1944, 1946 and 1947 – all on increasingly poor quality paper) – one of several wartime versions of Alice produced along with other British classics to compensate for the fact that UK books were no longer being shipped to Australia. O’Brien’s Alice is a bold, confident and assertive little girl in a short wartime skirt. She illustrated Ella Greenway’s Peter Cat (Colorgravure: Melbourne, 1950) and one of Nourma Handford’s ‘Carcoola’ books – Carcoola Backstage: A Career Novel for Girls (Dymock’s Book Arcade: Sydney, n.d. [1956] (1b)).
One wonders if the Gornall Rubaiyat was one of the “other British classics” published “to compensate for the fact that UK books were no longer being shipped to Australia.” Curiously, her Rubaiyat receives no mention at all in the Kerrs’ lengthy article.
Three examples of her illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, published by Consolidated Press, Sydney, are shown here as Figs.3a, 3b & 3c. The first shows Alice with the Duchess and the Baby, the Cook in the background, from “Pig and Pepper” in Wonderland; the second, the Walrus and the Carpenter, and the third, Alice with Tweedledum and Tweedledee, both from Looking Glass. Though O’Brien is not named as the illustrator in the book, her characteristic signature demonstrates clearly that she was.
Three examples of her illustrations for Ella Greenaway’s book for children, Peter Cat, are shown here as Fig.4a (p.2 – Peter found as a kitten in an aeroplane), Fig.4b (p.12 – Peter annoys Mrs Brown) and Fig.4c (p.36 – Peter finds a new owner.) These are unsigned, but then the artist is named on the title–page as “Kath. O’Brien.”
Two examples from Nourma Handford’s “Career Novel for Girls”, Carcoola Backstage, a tale set in an Academy of Dramatic Art, are shown in Fig.5a (p.64) and Fig.5b (p.128). Again, these are unsigned, but the artist is named on the title–page as “Kate O’Brien.”
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
One of the difficulties in tracing books illustrated by O’Brien, in library catalogues or newspaper archives, is her changes of name – Kathleen / Kate / Kath / K – and with O’Brien being such a common name, the difficulties are even worse without even so much as a K to guide us. To add to the problem, some publishers – the above mentioned Consolidated Press is one – seem to deem the illustrator’s name as not worth any mention at all on the title–page, or anywhere else for that matter, so only the characteristic O’Brien signature can tell us of her involvement, and cataloguers can so easily miss it. This is at the root of our next section.
Among the twelve books she is said to have illustrated in the above quote from the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online, we learn that “Hans Christian Andersen’s Mermaid [was] a favourite.” The Wikipedia page for O’Brien (4) gives the title of the book as “The Little Mermaid” and gives its publication date as 1943. But no such book is to be found for sale anywhere – I contacted several Australian rare book dealers, and not one of them had ever seen a copy. Nor was a copy to be found in JISC Hub (formerly COPAC) or WorldCat, nor even in the online catalogue of the National Library of Australia. It was not without reason, then, that the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online cited no publisher or date of publication for it. It did occur to me that “The Little Mermaid” might not have been published as a book on its own, but as one story amongst several others in a children’s book. Such books are legion, and if O’Brien was not named as illustrator on the cover or title–page of the book, as is so often the case, it is hardly surprising that an online catalogue search fails to find it. Short of trawling through endless books of children’s stories, “The Little Mermaid” seemed doomed to remain a mystery.
I emailed the National Library of Australia and made contact with Reference Librarian Sonja Barfoed, who turned out to be just as intrigued by the mystery as I was, and set out to investigate, using the library’s extensive collection of Australian children’s books. The first promising lead was that the Consolidated Press of Sydney had published English Fairy Tales illustrated by “K. O’Brien” (she is named thus on the title–page) in 1943 – right illustrator, right year of publication, but unfortunately no sign of anything like an English equivalent of Andersen’s (Danish) story of “The Little Mermaid.” (We shall look at some of the illustrations in this book in the next section.) Next, working on the assumption that since most of the Consolidated Press’s publications did not name their illustrators (as with Alice in Wonderland, above), Sonja began to look at the collections of children’s stories published by them in roughly the same time–frame. Thus emerged Children’s Favourite Stories in Pictures, subtitled “selections from the famous stories by Hans Andersen and Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, and from the Arabian nights, Australian Aboriginal folklore, Aesop’s fables, Greek mythology and old English fairy tales.” Undated, in the library catalogue it was assigned the somewhat late date for our time–frame of “[195– ?]” (contemporary newspaper advertisements show it to have appeared on the market in the run–up to Christmas 1954 (1c)), but it did contain a story titled “The Little Sea–Maid”, which is, of course, an alternative title for “The Little Mermaid.” Fig.6a shows the first full page of the story, and Fig.6b the scene in which the Sea–Maid first catches sight of the handsome prince. O’Brien’s characteristic signature (indicated by the yellow arrow) is almost hidden in the waves, in the bottom right illustration of Fig.6a. (Her signature appears in only 6 of the 36 illustrations which make up the story.) The mystery is almost certainly solved, then, since no other solution has ever been found: “The Little Mermaid” book of 1943 was actually “The Little Sea–Maid” story contained in a book of 1954, the date of 1943 having been that of the Consolidated Press’s other book, English Fairy Tales – a case of bibliographically crossed wires.
This being one of O’Brien’s favourite projects, I give four other illustrations from it here. Fig.6c shows the Sea–Maid visiting the Sea–Witch to get the magic potion which will turn her into a human (O’Brien’s signature is just below the cauldron); Fig.6d shows her drinking the magic potion; and Fig.6e shows her meeting the handsome prince, the magic potion having taken effect. In the story, of course, the Sea–Witch has told her that if the prince does not marry her, she will die, and when the prince marries a princess, her death becomes inevitable, unless, that is, she can stab the prince in the heart with a magic knife. But she loves the prince too much to do this, and as Fig.6f shows, she throws the knife into the sea before herself plunging headlong into the waves, thus becoming “one of the sweet and gentle daughters of the air who float about bringing good to mankind everywhere.” I suspect that it was the story as much as the prospect of illustrating it that made this one of O’Brien’s favourite projects.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
Children’s Favourite Stories in Pictures contains 28 stories, of which six are illustrated by O’Brien (or at least visibly bear her signature!) Another good example of her work is “Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp.” Fig.7a shows Aladdin with the genie of the magic ring; Fig.7b shows Aladdin with the princess; and Fig.7c shows Aladdin and the princess with the genie of the magic lamp. O’Brien’s signature can be found in all three of these.
Three of the stories illustrated by O’Brien are in colour, but it has to be said that the quality of the printing results at times in a blurring effect, plus it may well be that, like many another artist, she was better in black and white than she was in colour. I give two examples here. Fig.8, from “Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming,” shows the prince awakening the princess from her hundred years sleep with a kiss, and Fig.9, from “The Flying Horse,” shows the Prince of Persia on his way to meet the Princess of Bengal.
As stated in the previous section, the first edition of English Fairy Tales was published by Consolidated Press, Sydney, in 1943, its title page telling us that it was “Illustrated by K. O’Brien.” It contained 21 stories, with 12 full–page and 3 half–page black and white illustrations. Four of the full–page illustrations are shown here as Fig.10a (“The History of Tom Thumb”), Fig.10b (“Dick Whittington and His Cat”, Fig.10c (“The Pied Piper”) and Fig.10d (“The Giants’ Stairs”). For the benefit of the curious, this last, a lesser–known Irish story, tells of a young boy who is kidnapped by giants, and subsequently rescued by the village blacksmith. The illustration shows the blacksmith’s dream, in which the boy reveals his whereabouts. [The illustrations can be browsed here.]
A revised edition of this, basically a reprint of the Consolidated Press edition, but with the addition of three extra stories at the end, and an additional full–page illustration to one of them, was published by The Shakespeare Head Press of Sydney, but printed for them by the Consolidated Press. It was one of their S.H.P. Pocket Classics series. Its title–page tells us that the stories were “Collected and Re–written by E. Harden” and again “Illustrated by K. O’Brien.” It was undated but a contemporary book review shows it to have been published in 1948 (1d). The text of the two editions being identical, one wonders why E. Harden wasn’t credited on the title–page of the earlier Consolidated Press edition, but the answer may lie in the intertwined history of the two publishers.
The Shakespeare Head Press has a long and complicated history, but the key point for us is that educationalist Ernest Harden, in partnership with fellow educationalist Francis Jackson, took over The Shakespeare Head Press of Sydney in 1932 (1e). Their aim was to produce quality text books for schools (both were former teachers) but also to promote Australian literature. The road was apparently beset with financial difficulties, however, and in 1946 Consolidated Press acquired a controlling interest in it (1f). Consolidated Press, who retained the Shakespeare Head imprint, apparently intended to continue to promote original Australian works, but found that there was a greater market for foreign classics like Little Women, Treasure Island, A Christmas Carol, Black Beauty, and such like. It was from this background, then, that the Shakespeare Head Press Pocket Classics series emerged. By the end of 1949 there were no less than 32 titles in the series, among them, of course, English Fairy Tales – with Harden’s name on the title–page at last.
We have seen it said that Kathleen O’Brien illustrated 12 books, of which this preliminary essay accounts for 6 (or 7 if we count the two editions of English Fairy Tales separately.) So what were the other 5 or 6 ? In 1945 Consolidated Press published a 15 page booklet bearing the title Wanda, recycling some of O’Brien’s war–time comic strips. In 1947 the press also began to issue their so–called “Supercomic Series”, of which no.1, a booklet of 32 pages, was Wanda Smashes the Black Market, and of which no.4, also a booklet of 32 pages, was Wanda in India. (These were the only two of the series devoted to Wanda, it seems.) But are these three booklets, all of which are now very rare, to be counted among the 12 books illustrated by O’Brien ? If they are, that still leaves 2 or 3 of the 12 unaccounted for. Hopefully they and any others will turn up in the not–too–distant future.
Note 1a: The earliest example I have seen is from the New South Wales newspaper, Barrier Daily Truth, 28 July 1945, p.3, where it was advertised with Gornall’s editions of Charles Dickens’s The Life of Our Lord and two educational sex–instruction manuals for young people, Biosex–F for adolescent girls and young women, and Biosex–M for boys and young men.
Note 1b: It was certainly on sale in early January 1957, for it is listed under the heading of “New Books for Young Readers” in The Canberra Times on 4 January 1957 (p.4.) However, I have seen no newspaper advertisement for its actual publication.
Note 1c: A full page advertisement for it appeared in The Daily Telegraph (Sydney) on 3 December 1954 (p.25), for example, with similar adverts appearing in this and other newspapers up until the “last minute shopping” offers of Christmas Eve.
Note 1d: The Sunday Times (Perth) 28 November 1948. p.16.
Note 1e: The Sun (Sydney) 14 October 1932, p.7, under “Companies Registered”.
Note 1f: See https://ausreprints.net/publisher/249/1/10 for the 1946 date. The Sunday Times (Perth) 29 September 1946, p.12, under “Australian Books”', confirms that it had happened.
Note 2: There is an interesting parallel between O’Brien’s curvaceous and leggy Wanda and Norman Pett’s equally curvaceous and leggy Jane, whose cartoon strip (literally – Jane usually shed most, and sometimes all, of her clothes in the course of her adventures) featured in the English newspaper The Daily Mirror from 1932 and on through the war years. Jane too was a particular favourite of wartime servicemen. Whether O’Brien was influenced by Pett is unclear, however.
Note 3: http://www.daao.org.au/bio/kate-obrien/biography/. The site’s biographical details for O’Brien are taken from: Heritage: the National Women’s Art Book: 500 works by 500 Australian Women Artists from Colonial Times to 1955 (Craftsman House, 1995), edited by Joan Kerr.
Note 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_O%27Brien
My thanks are due to Sonja Barfoed, Reference Librarian at the National Library of Australia, for her painstaking search for “The Little Mermaid” and to Sandra Maloy and Jess Wellham of Q’s Books, Hamilton NSW, for the two editions of English Fairy Stories and also the serendipitous finding of a copy of Children’s Favourite Stories in Pictures. My thanks are also due to Joe Howard, who shared my interest in Kathleen O’Brien and who made some useful comments on this article.
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