Committed to political and social justice, artist Noel Counihan painted miners, construction workers, demonstrations and other scenes of working-class life. This portrait of writer Alan Marshall AM OBE (1902–1984), painted in Counihan’s Melbourne home studio, was reproduced on the cover of The complete stories of Alan Marshall, published in 1977. Marshall contracted poliomyelitis at age six, and the vicissitudes and triumphs of his childhood are detailed in his best-selling autobiographical work, I Can Jump Puddles (1955). The book has sold more than eight million copies and has been translated into 30 languages. Marshall wrote with great dedication from the early 1920s and in 1933 won the first of his three Australian Literary Society Short Story Awards. He wrote for Worker’s Voice, the Communist Review and the Left Review, Smith’s Weekly, the Bulletin, ABC Weekly, Bohemia and Meanjin. These Are My People, stories he collected while travelling with his wife Olive in a horse-drawn caravan through Victoria, was published in 1944. Late in life he worked on projects highlighting various challenges confronting people living with disability.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Gift of Barrie and Jenny Hadlow 2015
© Noel Counihan/Copyright Agency, 2024
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Diana O’Neil on Noel Counihan’s vivid 1971 portrait of Alan Marshall.
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Drawn from the National Portrait Gallery collection, this salon-style hang references the lavish 18th- and 19th-century European salons where paintings were hung floor-to-ceiling.
