Evelyn Healy - papers, 1929-1999

MLMSS 6919/Box 1X
MLOH 388

fonds

1929-1999

Textual Records, Graphic Materials, Nonmusical Sound Recordings, Clippings, Photographs

403389

0.16 metres of textual material (1 outsize box) includes photographs - manuscript, computer printouts, photocopy, carbon, typescript, processed, and printed

Evelyn Healy, nee Shaw, artist, teacher and peace and political activist, was born in Ballarat, Victoria, in 1912. Since the late 1930s she has used her art in the service of numerous causes. In 1937 she joined the Melbourne artists' branch of the Communist Party of Australia, and then became Secretary of the Richmond Branch of the Movement Against War and Fascism.

She illustrated Helen Palmer's book Beneath the Southern Cross : a story of Eureka (1954). In the late 1990s Evelyn was instrumental in preserving a piece of Australian labour heritage by having removed from public auction a fragment of the 1854 Eureka flag and then arranging for its repatriation to this flag in the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. As a commercial artist under the name 'Lyn Lavelle', she had sketched portraits of shoppers in Sydney and suburban department stores during the 1950s and 1960s. A founder of the Cabramatta and District Art Society in 1961, she went on to become a community arts lobbyist. In 1983 she was one of a group who formed Sydney Artists for Nuclear Disarmament. In 1993 she published an autobiographical account, Artist of the left : a personal experience 1930s to 1990s, and later that year was interviewed by Caroline Jones for the ABC Radio National programme, 'The Search for Meaning'.

Evelyn married, first, Charlie Walters, a former International Brigader in the Spanish Civil War, in 1941. Her second husband Bill Armstrong, whom she had recruited into the CPA, died in 1976. She is married to ex-Communist and trade union official, Kevin Healy.

Papers concerning the Eureka flag, including correspondence, being mainly letters received, with Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Len Fox, Vikki Kyriakopoulos, Margaret Rich and Anne Beggs Sunter, and notes by Evelyn Healy's mother, Myrtle Shaw, 1929-1999

Life History Material Collected for Caroline Jones's Questionnaire and Interview 14.11.93, with additional papers documenting Healy's life and career, including correspondence with Caroline Jones and Bernard Smith, 1929-1999

Evelyn Healy. Artist of the left : a personal experience, 1930s to 1990s. Sydney : Evelyn Healy, 1993

Cassette recording of the ABC Radio National programme, 'The Search for Meaning', 14 Nov. 1993, featuring Evelyn Healy interviewed by Caroline Jones. Consult the Curator of Oral History for access to this tape, 1993. (Call No.: MLOH 388/1)