Background
He was born in St Kilda, Victoria and attended Christian Brothers College, St Kilda. He graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1937, and worked as a teacher in New South Wales and Tasmania. He spent 12 years in a monastery of the Christian Brothers, taking annual vows, but left in 1941 without taking final vows. That same year, he married (this first marriage did not survive), and enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force. He was seconded from the RAAF to work for Billy Hughes, former Australian Prime Minister, for a time. After becoming well known for producing radio serials, he left Australia in 1955 to write, and lived in Austria, Italy, England and the United States, finally returning to Australia in 1980. During this time he had a stint as the Vatican correspondent for the Daily Mail. His son, C. Chris O’Hanlon, said that he spent his first 12 birthdays in 12 different countries.
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Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)