Olive Ashworth

Olive Ashworth (1915-2000) was a British-born Australian graphic designer and industrial designer. She was a pioneer in her field and a cultural hero who merits a place alongside those depicted in the six Australian decimal banknotes she designed. She also designed the logo for the Reserve Bank of Australia, as well as products such as cookware, furniture, jewellery, interiors, murals, exhibitions and photography. She was a versatile and creative artist who worked in various media, including painting, sculpture, cartooning, silversmithing and illustration. She was awarded the honorary Royal Designer for Industry in 1987 and the Design Institute of Australia's gold medal in 1985. She was also a Fellow of the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers in the UK, and a member of the Royal Designers for Industry and the Alliance Graphique Internationale. She was widely acknowledged as one of Australia's most prominent mid-20th century multi-disciplinary designers. Ashworth was born in Brisbane and educated at Somerville House where she was taught art by Enid Dickson. Her father died when she was 15 and she moved to Melbourne with her mother. Encouraged by her mother (who had attended art classes at the Brisbane Technical College under Godfrey Rivers), Olive Ashworth spent a year studying at Melbourne’s Art Training Institute in 1933. Aged 17, she completed the first year of her course with one gold, two silver and two bronze medals. She then returned to Brisbane to work as a commercial artist, completing her course by correspondence. In Brisbane she ran Burns Philp’s art department until setting up on her own in 1945; 'Olive Ashworth Publicity Services’ lasted for over 20 years. ⁴ Ashworth had visited Lindeman Island for a holiday in 1939 but became aware of the Great Barrier Reef’s design potential only in the early 1950s, when she visited Heron Island and was commissioned to design a promotional brochure for the resort. Many of Queensland’s island resorts were being developed at this time and Ashworth was commissioned to design several of their earliest tourist brochures. As McKay points out, in the 1950s the Reef became as familiar to potential visitors through these as through the colour photographs of Frank Hurley or Noel Monkman. Many of Ashworth’s most striking and original textile designs were based on sketches and photographs of the Reef that she made over the years from underwater observatories. She was a keen photographer, using a Hasselblad camera. Her first success in textile design came in 1951 when one of her Barrier Reef designs was runner-up in the first Grafton Award, offered by a British textile firm. In 1954 she was one of 10 prize-winning finalists in the Leroy-Alcorso prize for textile design, won by Douglas Annand . However, when made up as a dress fabric her design proved by far the more popular with purchasers; the following year the all-male judging panel was enlarged by the addition of two women judges. Ashworth’s textile designs were included in exhibitions at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1982, at the Queensland Wildlife Artists Society in 1983-88, and in the Centre Gallery’s important bicentennial exhibition, 'Women Artists in Queensland, Past and Present’ (1988). ⁴