Obituaries Australia

Janet O'Connor, c.1870

State Library of Queensland, 66921026

Through the regretted death of Mrs. Janet O'Connor, of Duporth Oxley, whose portrait we publish, the colony has sustained a distinct loss, for during the last twenty years her public and private services have been of inestimable benefit to the community. The eldest daughter of Mr. Andrew Dods, R.N., Mrs. O'Connor was born in 1827, at Duporth, near Truro, England. Married in 1852 to Mr. Daniel O'Connor, late of the Australian Joint Stock Bank, Brisbane, she with him emigrated to Victoria three years later. After about nineteen years' residence in that colony, during part of which time she was engaged in the conduct of a private school, Mrs. O'Connor came to Queensland to inaugurate the Brisbane Girls' Grammar School, of which she remained principal until the end of 1875, when she resigned and, with her three daughters, established a young ladies' school in Brisbane, which has been carried on ever since with considerable success, a large number of the younger matrons of the colony owing their intellectual tastes and their ennobled ideas of life to the faithful training received at Mrs. O'Connor's school. Possessing literary ability of a high order, Mrs. O'Connor was the author of several published books. Among these was her poem, "Ich Dien," which first appeared in Melbourne and subsequently in London, and elicited many favourable notices from the Press, which space forbids us from quoting except in one case, in which the writer remarked, "The style is decidedly Tennysonian, and indeed many of the passages might have been written by the poet laureate himself." A second poem by the deceased lady, "Resurgens," received equally complimentary notice, as did also her well-known ode written on the inauguration of the Burke and Wills monument at Melbourne. Mrs. O'Connor leaves a husband, one son, and three daughters to mourn their irreparable loss.