John Olday

In 1967, Olday opened a communal arts centre in the inner suburb of Paddington where he impressed visitors with his versatile talents ("He sings, he writes, he composes, he paints, he acts") and his sincerity, "the result of profound experience of sadness and life".

In 1963 he is recorded as presenting masterly folksong recitals on a spacious houseboat moored off the northern-beach suburb of Clontarf.

He returned to Europe in the late 1960s, settling in London in 1970 and remaining politically active until his death of stomach cancer in 1977.

Olday emigrated from the UK to Sydney in early 1950 and moved to Adelaide where he worked as an art gallery attendant and donated a collection of his paintings to the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Olday took with him to England the draft of an autobiographical book, Kingdom of Rags, written in German, which was translated into English and published by Jarrolds, London, in 1939. This is an account of his life in Germany, illustrated with anti-Nazi cartoons.

In 1938 he entered into a marriage of convenience in 1938 with Hilde Meisel (alias Hilda Monte), a member of the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (International Socialist Struggle League), who thus acquired British nationality.

The same source asserts that Olday's artistic and cabaret skills (and homosexual mannerisms) bestowed on him a position of privilege among "the highest circles" of the Hamburg Nazi Party, providing him with access to information which he was able to use to warn revolutionary friends and save them from committal to concentration camps. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he renewed active links with former Anarcho-Sparticist colleagues and joined an active anti-authoritarian campaign against Hitler's dictatorship. He wrote regularly for a Hamburg newspaper. He also worked closely with Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union seafarers coming into the port of Hamburg. Inevitably, his behaviour attracted the attention of the Gestapo who were about to arrest him as he fled to England in 1937. He had been granted a British passport that year in Hamburg on production of his birth certificate.

Later Olday became active in the tumultuous unrest of the Kiel mutiny and the resultant German Revolution of 1918–19, reportedly "acting as an ammunition hauler for a Sparticist machine-gun emplacement. When the year-long struggle was crushingly defeated, he made a last-minute escape, narrowly avoiding certain execution"—but continued in violent activist causes until 1925, at age 20.

John Olday (10 April 1905 – 1977), birth name Arthur William Oldag, was an artist, cartoonist and writer, and an anarchist revolutionary. He was active in Germany, France and Britain in the 1930s and 1940s and resided in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s. Returning to London in about 1970, he remained active in anarchist groups until his death in 1977.

Born out of wedlock in London, 1905, Olday is recorded as having no memory of his Scottish father. His German-born mother moved to New York City, where he was brought up until age 8 (1913) when his mother returned to Germany and left him with his grandmother in Hamburg. The mother apparently returned to New York and American citizenship. In urban Hamburg, the child's life was immediately blighted by the onset of World War I and a hunger crisis precipitated by agricultural manpower losses and the Allied blockade of Germany In 1916, at the age of 11, he was a participant in workers' unrest against severe food shortages and black-market practices of the day.