People Australia

Noel Counihan, by Julie Millowick, 1976

National Library of Australia, 8936105

Noel Jack Counihan (1913- 1986) artist and Communist

Birth: 4 October 1913 at Albert Park, Melbourne, Victoria, and registered as Jack Noel, second of three sons of Victorian-born parents John Henry Counihan (1882-1960), a salesman, and his wife Jessie Pritchard, née Evans (1882-1951). Marriage: 21 May 1940 at the registrar’s office, Wellington, New Zealand, to New-Zealand-born Percivale Patricia (Pat) Edwards, (1916-2001) a fellow Communist. They had two sons. Death: 5 July 1986 at Melbourne. 

• He was a pupil at Caulfield Grammar and St Paul’s Cathedral School, Melbourne, where he was also choirboy. Worked as an office boy in Flinders’ Lane warehouse.
• Counihan enrolled at the National Gallery Drawing School, where he encountered radical politics. He was sacked from his job after leading a protest against unpaid overtime.
• He joined the Young Communist League in 1931 and was active in Free Speech rallies, Brunswick Road, Coburg, 1933. He was deeply engaged in the Unemployed Workers’ Movement and Movement against War and Fascism activities in the 1930s.
• He worked as caricaturist and cartoonist for several newspapers, Bulletin, Table Talk, as well as Workers’ Weekly.
• In 1939 he worked for the New Zealand Observer but was deported from NZ for anti-conscription activities during World War II.
• Prominent in Communist Party of Australia after WW II, he was elected to the Central Committee in the 1960s.
• He studied/worked in Europe in 1958-1962, attending the 1949 Paris World Peace Congress. In 1953 he visited the Soviet Union as part of a cultural delegation.
• A professional painter from the 1950s, he was Australia’s most eminent social realist artist, though his paintings never won any major prize and were occasionally dismissed as propaganda. He particularly focussed on working class subjects as in ‘human society, the warmth is at the bottom…it’s there you see humanity at its most colourful’.
• Cause of death: heart attack. 

Sources
Tribune (Sydney), 23 July 1986; Age (Melbourne), 7 March 1962, 16 July 1986; Australian, 22 August 1979, 17 September 1981, 30 April 1986; National Times, 4 November 1983; Bernard Smith, Noel Counihan (Melbourne, 1993).