Barbara Hanrahan uses Adelaide working-class start to build her dual feminine creativity in many prints and books
Barbara Hanrahan presented two sides in her books and hundreds of prints, including Girl with a cat and Sun and moon and the eye of God.
Main images courtesy National Gallery of Australia
Barbara Hanrahan, as an artist, printmaker and writer, evocatively captured the essence of a suburban working-class Adelaide childhood, with a focus on relationships and women's issues.
Hanrahan’s father Bob, a labourer, died soon after she was born in 1939, so she was raised by her mother Ronda, a commercial artist, grandmother Iris Goodridge and great aunt Reece Nobes in the suburb of Thebarton. She was educated at Thebarton Technical School, Adelaide Teachers’ College, and the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts (later the South Australian School of Art).
In 1960, Hanrahan’s prints attracted critical approval in an exhibition of student work and she won the Harry P. Gill Memorial Medal for Applied Art. After graduation, she taught art at Strathmont and Elizabeth Girls' Technical high schools before becoming assistant lecturer in art at the Western Teachers College from 1962. She had won the Cornell Prize for painting the previous year.
Hanrahan travelled in 1963 from “a little city and the certainties of a neat brick house” to study art in London – as did Hanrahan’s heroine Kate in her novel Sea Green (1974). Hanrahan enrolled in printmaking at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, and taught at the Falmouth School of Art, Cornwall (1966-67), and the Portsmouth College of Art (1967-70). During this time, she had an abortion that always tormented her.
Hanrahan started a relationship with South Australian-born Jo Steele, later a noted sculptor, in 1966. The couple commuted between London and Adelaide for the next 20 years. They never married and had no children.
By 1965, Hanrahan’s art had been bought by the art galleries of New South Wales and South Australia. But, in London, Hanrahan turned seriously to writing. The death of her grandmother in 1968 prompted nostalgia for her Adelaide childhood in the memoir The Scent of Eucalyptus (1973). In autobiographical fictions and memoirs—Sea Green. Kewpie Doll (1984), Iris in Her Garden (1991) and Michael and Me and the Sun (1992)—she returned to her early years.
Her diaries, published posthumously, reveal a sometimes fragile dual persona; one hungry for critical recognition and commercial success, the other wanting to live apart from the world.
Between 1973 and 1992 Hanrahan produced 15 books, including gothic novels—The Albatross Muff (1977), Where the Queens All Strayed (1978), The Peach Groves (1979), The Frangipani Gardens (1980) and Dove (1982)—and biographical fictions Annie Magdalene (1985), Dream People (1987), A Chelsea Girl (1988), Flawless Jade (1989) and Good Night, Mr Moon (1992).
Her gothic novels created a fantastic world where evil, carnality, and greed ran unchecked. Her biographical fictions affectionately celebrated the hidden spirituality of heroic working-class people. Hanrahan also created more than 400 prints, held in most major Australian galleries.
She taught art part time until 1981 and from 1977 was awarded a series of fellowships from the literature board of the Australia Council up to 1984 when she was diagnosed with cancer. Although nominally Catholic, Hanrahan embraced an intense idiosyncratic spirituality with art and writing as her religion. Her medical condition intensified a belief it would be a sin for her to fail to complete the “terrible creative task” of revealing God’s goodness through her work.
With Steele’s support, she completed seven books, published a book of linocuts, and held multiple art exhibitions in Australia. During the final hospitalisation before she died in 1991, she was researching and planning literary projects.
