page_title: Ailsa O'Connor
section_title: Childhood
hierarchical_section_title: Ailsa O'Connor / Childhood
caption_attribution_description: MacRobertson Girl's High School
context_page_description: Ailsa Margaret O'Connor was an Australian artist specializing in sculpture and painting in the style of realism. Following her belief that art and artists cannot be separated from questions of society and politics, she was an activist against social injustice in Australia and abroad, and particularly against suppression of the rights of women.
context_section_description: Ralph Charles Donaldson's second daughter, Ailsa, was educated in the towns where her parents lived: Heyfield and then Portland, until her final year at school which she spent apart from her family, at Mac.Robertson Girls High School in Melbourne.  There she matriculated with five subjects - gaining honours in two : Art and English.
  Ailsa Donaldson is reported by Sandy Kirby as recalling that after school her tertiary education began in 1937:
   I left home at fifteen, was at school in Melbourne, and at sixteen commenced an art course at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology on a technical scholarship which paid an allowance of £7 a term plus fees. I used up two years of the four-year scholarship, managed to cram in a teaching course as well as a fine art course by going to classes every night, then a further year of teacher training, and at nineteen I was on the payroll in front of those large wartime classes of Brunswick boys, ousted from their classrooms by the needs of airforce trainees. (Kirby, 1995) 
  Not only disruptions to school life resulted from World War II - most other aspects of Australian life were impacted by the severity of the austerity and dangers at home, added to anxiety for the troops sent overseas. The Australian National Archives' World War II Collection contains the military dossiers of six male relatives of Ailsa's extended David and Donaldson families who fought overseas, whilst at home, her widowed aunt, Annie Ethel Warren, née Donaldson, enlisted in the Army Citizen Military Forces in Melbourne, at the age of 50.
  Ailsa Donaldson married during the war, to another artist Victor George O'Connor, who enlisted in the Army Citizen Military Forces, rising to the rank of Sergeant, whilst his younger brother, Norman Andrew, and his sister's husband, Sidney Henry William Mounsey, fought overseas. Ailsa took her husband's surname thereafter, becoming Ailsa O'Connor.
caption: Mac.Robertson Girls High School, Melbourne
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