Leo Kelly

Infobox Scientist
box_width = 300px
name = Patrick Leo Kelly


caption =
birth_date = 1914
birth_place = Scotland
death_date = August 22, 2007
death_place =
ethnicity = Ashkenazi Jewish
fields = Journalist, publicist, writer, public activist
religion = Vedanta

Patrick Leo Kelly (1914-2007) was a journalist, publicist, writer and public activist. Initially a journalist, he was a successful publicist for public charities and a campaigner for the interests of indigenous Australians. Well-known to Australian newspaper readers in the 1950s and 1960s for his historical features on a wide variety of topics in the "Daily Mirror" and other tabloids.

He had innumerable artistic and literary pursuits, and his tastes were eclectic. He published poetry and plays, and in his youth was an accomplished actor.

Early life - the Kelly family

Kelly was of Irish Catholic family who had settled in the Clare region and elsewhere in South Australia. The Kelly family included a number of members in holy orders. His father Tom had been a wheat farmer on the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia who took up medicine in his 30s, travelling to Edinburgh, then as now a world centre of medical studies, to read his MD degree. Following Tom’s marriage to a young Scotswoman, Winifred Costello, Leo was born while the family were still in Scotland. Arriving in Adelaide as an 11 year-old boy (with two younger brothers, Gerard and John), Leo was to retain a faint non-“Aussie” accent all his life.

Nonetheless, his exposure to Australian life was broad. Tom Kelly pursued his medical profession through a series of rural practices, principally in New South Wales. Kelly was at one stage a choirboy at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Goulburn.

When still in his teens he married Naomi Louvish, a young woman of Ashkenazi Jewish background, who had recently arrived from Romania via Harbin in Northern China. Leo joked in later years that he was “Jewish by marriage.” In many ways alienated from mainstream society in his youth, Kelly had become widely read in current avant garde literature (D. H. Lawrence was an early hero). The couple were fellow spirits. They were to raise four children (Helena, Maureen, Carmel and David); he remained devoted to her memory after her death in 1981.

Family views

Like many people at the time, their anti-fascist views led them to the far Left. They were members of the Australian Communist Party, and Kelly claimed all his life to be an adherent of Marxism, though he could never be described as orthodox. Naomi Kelly developed a public speaking career as a columnist on Australian Broadcasting Commission current affairs broadcasts. Helping her research and polish her presentations, Leo discovered his own talents for analysis and presentation of complex materials.. Medically excluded from military service in World War II, he became a journalist on the Young "Mercury", transferring to the Canberra "Times" under the legendary Bill Shakespeare. At one stage posted to cover General Douglas MacArthur’s wartime operations from his headquarters in Brisbane, Leo took up a position in the Department of Information in Melbourne in the post-war era.

Returning to the private sector following the dismantling of the DOI by the incoming government of Robert Menzies, Leo brought his young family to Sydney in 1948. In 1950 they settled down in the far southern suburb of Heathcote, surrounded by his beloved Royal National Park. His constant roaming of this subtropical forest region, which he was to leave only after his final illness, was a great source of spiritual strength.

Becoming an activist

In the 1960s, Kelly moved from journalism to public relations, becoming the national publicity officer for the Freedom From Hunger Campaign (which sent him on a memorable research visit to India and Sri Lanka), and for Tranby College, an institution serving indigenous youth in Glebe, Sydney. His interest in indigenous affairs grew stronger in later life. In 1981 he launched a major campaign entitled Operation Aborigine, and was campaign director for the Aboriginal leader Burnum Burnum’s bid for a Senate seat in the 1980s.

Leo launched "Goorialla," of which he was editor and principal writer, as a media vehicle for Operation Aborigine. [http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/barani/images/themes_images/goorialla.jpg]

Leo kept up his historical writing throughout his life, commencing an epic research project into the history of the Australian Overland Telegraph Line in the 1960s. He worked through the archives in the State Library of South Australia in Adelaide, then traveled up the route of the “OT” from Adelaide to Darwin, by bus, car and on foot. Long delayed by his other commitments, the resulting "Waddilecki the String" was published in 2004 when he was 90.

While notionally an atheist in line with the teachings of Marx and Engels, Leo Kelly was in fact of a spiritual bent and was intrigued by mystical traditions in Buddhism, and Sufism in the Islamic world. He eventually found his transcendental moorings in Vedanta, to which he had been introduced by writers he respected like Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley.

Leo Kelly died on 22 August 2007 after a long illness.