John Bernard O'Hara

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

John Bernard O'Hara (1862–1927) was an Australian poet and schoolmaster.

Early life
O’Hara was born on 29 October 1862 in Bendigo, Victoria, in the British Empire. His father, Patrick Knight O’Hara, was a schoolteacher and editor of the Chiltern Leader, and his mother was Mary Ann (Connolly) O’Hara. He studied at the University of Melbourne.

Family note
His sisters Elizabeth and Annie O’Hara became doctors, one of the early groups of women to study and graduate in medicine in Australia.

Career
O’Hara wrote poetry and worked as a schoolmaster. He published several books of poetry, including Songs of the South (1891), Songs of the South, Second Series: The Wild White Man and Other Poems (1895), Lyrics of Nature (1899), Rural Scenes from the Golden West (1900), A Book of Sonnets (1902), Odes and Lyricsa (1906), Neath the Southern Cross: Bush Scenes (1909), Calypso and Other Poems (1912), The Poems of John Bernard O’Hara: A Selection (1918), At Eventide: New Poems (1922), and Sonnets and Rondels (1925).

Personal life
He married Agnes Law in 1910.

Death and legacy
John Bernard O’Hara died on 31 March 1927 in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, at the age of 64. He is buried in Brighton General Cemetery, Victoria. He is remembered as a contributor to Australian poetry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.