Australian Dictionary of Biography

Mick O'Brien, with his wife, Mattie, 1990s

photo supplied by Jennifer Beresford

Harold Francis ‘Mick’ O’Brien (1913–2000), hairdresser and small business owner, was born on 14 December 1913 at Fairview, a property near Hall, Federal Capital Territory. He was the eldest of seven children of Francis Daniel O’Brien, labourer, and his wife Eveline Harriet Ruth, née Gribble, both born in the Ginninderra area that became part of the Federal Capital Territory in 1911. From childhood he was known as Mick in memory of a much-loved dog. When he was four the family moved to ‘a little hut on the side of Mount Pleasant’ (O’Brien and O’Brien 1997) while his father worked on erecting the Molonglo Internment Camp (1918–19). Once this work cut out the family returned to Hall where the O’Brien children enrolled at the local public school.

With workers needed to construct the new national capital, in the early 1920s the family moved again, to the St John’s school residence on the north side of the Molonglo River in what became the Canberra suburb of Reid. Mick attended Acton Provisional School and Telopea Park Intermediate High School. In 1927 his family settled in the new local workers’ settlement at the Causeway.

O’Brien left school at the age of fifteen to supplement the family’s meagre budget. His father had struggled to find regular work once the provisional parliament house had been completed in May 1927. Mick earned thirty shillings a week delivering newspapers for a shop owner in the emerging retail centre of Kingston. In around 1931 he trained with Jack Edlington, a local barber.

O’Brien started his own men’s hairdressing business on 2 January 1934 in the back portion of a newsagency run by the Charlton family at nearby Manuka, another nascent retail area. He worked twelve hours per day but considered himself fortunate: ‘The first week in this shop I took five pounds odd and the basic wage for a man was three pounds something, and I thought I was made’ (O’Brien and O’Brien 1997). He subsequently expanded his business by purchasing a two-thousand book private lending library for £100, and became an agent for a dry-cleaning firm.

On 28 September 1940 at the recently completed St Paul’s Anglican Church, Manuka, O’Brien married Matilda Ann (Mattie) Beadman, who had moved with her family to the Causeway from Araluen, New South Wales, in 1926. The couple lived in a house at the back of the Manuka shop until 1952, when they moved into government housing in the nearby suburb of Griffith. Mobilised in August 1942 for service in the Citizen Military Forces in World War II, he served part time in Canberra with the 21st Battalion, Volunteer Defence Corps, from 27 March 1943 until discharged on 30 September 1945 when the unit was disbanded. He was a slight man, just five feet seven inches (170 cm) tall and weighing nine stone six pounds (60 kg).

Affable and with a dry sense of humour, O’Brien immersed himself in the local community. Among his clients in the barber shop were the Federal politicians Ben Chifley, John Curtin, Sir Arthur Fadden, and H. V. Evatt. He and Mattie also allowed their business to become a de facto source of local welfare: ‘During the war we loaned out so many two bobs it wasn’t funny … We had all sorts of people coming in and asking for help’ (O’Brien and O’Brien 1997). Along with other shopkeepers, the O’Briens hosted local events that in most other communities would have been conducted from a civic hall. Impromptu Christmas parties were held on the public lawn adjoining their shop: ‘people would come from miles—we had a great time’ (O’Brien and O’Brien 1997), Mattie recalled.

After the war the shop supplied an increasingly eclectic miscellany of goods, especially sporting equipment that included—for a time—rifles. Fishing was O’Brien’s passion, so he also sold rods and reels, lines, lures, sinkers, and worms, and issued fishing licences as an agent for the New South Wales government. The shop became a popular venue for conversation, sage personal advice, and expert tips for Canberra and district anglers. In February 1949 he was elected vice-president of the newly formed Manuka Business Association.

By the late 1960s the O’Briens employed an additional three hairdressers, including Mick’s son Bill. Mick later retired from the barbering side of the business due to poor eyesight. When the shop finally closed on 27 June 1998 the O’Briens had for years been Manuka’s longest-established traders. Their shop, however, had become something of an anachronism amid the increasingly stylish, up-market shopping precinct. Its endurance as an independent business for sixty–four years testified to the O’Briens’ deftness in adapting their stock to satisfy local needs, and in providing a community centre that included becoming a ‘kind of sanctuary’ (Fraser 2000, 13) for the least well-off. O’Brien died on 23 April 2000 and was cremated. He was survived by Mattie, Bill, and his daughters Joy and Julie. The shop’s sign, ‘O’Brien’s Hairdresser & Sports Store,’ is preserved in the Canberra Museum and Gallery.