Early Life
Connor was born in Wollongong, New South Wales, where he lived all his life and which he represented in the New South Wales and Australian Parliaments. Descended from Irish Catholics (though not himself a practising Catholic in adulthood), he was educated at state schools, including Wollongong High School, of which he graduated as dux, despite contracting pneumonia in his final year.
Due to his father's death in 1925, he gave up his intention of becoming an analytical chemist and became an articled clerk. He qualified in law, but was twice rejected for registration as a solicitor, the result of his dismissal by his former employer. Instead he went into business as a car dealer and later took up farming. Despite these middle-class occupations he was a dedicated socialist. In 1931 he married Amelia Searl. From 1938 to 1945 he was an Alderman on the Wollongong City Council.
Read more about this topic: Rex Connor
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“They circumcised women, little girls, in Jesus’s time. Did he know? Did the subject anger or embarrass him? Did the early church erase the record? Jesus himself was circumcised; perhaps he thought only the cutting done to him was done to women, and therefore, since he survived, it was all right.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)
“But one sound always rose above the clamor of busy life and, no matter how much of a tintinnabulation, was never confused and, for a moment lifted everything into an ordered sphere: that of the bells.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)