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This article was published online in 2024
Phyl Harnett as Sylvia (left), and Joyce Coombes as Crystal, in 'The Women', c1940, MOPA
Museum of Performing Arts, Perth
Kathleen Phyllis Yalden Ophel (1907–2000), actor, activist, and writer, was born on 30 December 1907 at Sale, Victoria, younger daughter of New South Wales-born parents Charles John Harnett, surveyor, and his wife Ethel Mary Louise, née Wythes. Though Phyllis, or Phyl as she was also known, was a ‘daughter of the squattocracy’ (Hyde 2019, 22), she grew up in Sydney, where the works of Karl Marx ‘lived in a trunk … along with the psychology of [the sexologist] Havelock Ellis’ (Ophel, in Hyde 2019, 22). The left-wing politics of her youth, fostered by her father and a suffragette aunt, would shape her life. After finishing school, she studied sculpture under Rayner Hoff at East Sydney Technical College and became interested in the theatre. Her stage debut, with (Dame) Doris Fitton’s Independent Theatre company, was curtailed by her father’s disapproval of her entanglement with the Kings Cross bohemian set.
In 1931 Harnett moved to Perth, where she married the artist and set designer Clement Charles Kennedy on 12 August 1931 at the Perth district registrar’s office. Their son, Gerard, was born the following year. Though she initially found Perth more stifling than Sydney, her status as an outsider and actor held a glamour that heightened her reputation. In time, the city became a site of political and artistic foment. At the heart of this world was Keith George, the flamboyant director of the Five Arts Club, a modernist theatre troupe from which the Perth Workers’ Art Guild emerged in 1934. She was offered lead roles and gained experience as a producer, and in 1937 her playscript, I Am Angry, won the prize for the best play written by a Western Australian at the Drama Festival. Her involvement in theatre circles cemented her connection to the city’s left intelligentsia, including Katherine Susannah Prichard, Hugo Throssell, Herbert McClintock, Harald Vike, and the Masel family, with whom she sometimes lived.
While the Workers’ Art Guild was officially a non-partisan organisation, its interrogation of social injustice and radical change was informed by the politics of the Community Party of Australia. Harnett, like many other theatre workers, joined the Communist Party of Australia in the mid-1930s. In the late 1930s, after establishing a branch of the international Left Book Club, she acted as a conduit between Perth communists and the CPA’s central committee and fellow travellers overseas. While protesting the National Register Act 1939, she heckled Prime Minister (Sir) Robert Menzies at a public meeting, ‘defiantly’ (West Australian 1939, 16) shaking her fist as she was dragged away by police. The following year, the police obtained a warrant to search her house. Despite her political commitments, her bohemian sensibility disturbed CPA comrades, for whom such demonstrations of ‘petty-bourgeois irresponsibility’ (Macintyre 2022, 112) were a political liability.
To support her creative ambitions, Harnett worked as a fortune teller, radio actor, and typist; the soprano Lorna Sydney Smith was among those that sought psychic counsel. In 1935 Harnett also spent time working as a laundress and barmaid in the State’s north-west, before managing Perth’s Radical Bookshop. Emerging as a ‘leading light’ (NAA A6119) of the guild, she directed its children’s theatre (1936–38) and served as secretary and producer. In these positions she organised lectures and poetry recitals, and staged plays by contemporaries such as Luigi Pirandello, Clifford Odets, and Eugene O’Neill. She also fundraised for international causes. On Keith George’s resignation from the guild in 1939, which was hastened by disagreements with an increasingly dogmatic CPA bloc, she served as director until mid-1940, when she too fell afoul of the guild’s fractious politics.
As Harnett’s public commitments expanded, her personal life became turbulent. In 1938 she separated from Kennedy, who took Gerard to Sydney; the pair did not divorce until 1947. She remained in Perth, living with the Hungarian mechanic George Pick. In 1943 she moved to Adelaide, where she had her second child, Julian, with Pick, whose status as an enemy alien meant he was refused permission to leave Western Australia. She worked as a childcare nurse and co-founded the Adelaide Theatre Group in 1946. Like many comrades, she had come under surveillance after the CPA was banned in 1940. Yet, despite the Commonwealth Security Service branding her ‘a zealous propagandist,’ she considered herself ‘a drifted party member’ (NAA A6119) during World War II. Having separated from Pick, she met Kenneth Arnold Ophel, a South Australian-born engineer, and the pair moved to Melbourne. They later married at the Unitarian manse on 14 March 1949, and had a son, Kenneth, the same year.
Unlike many middle-class communists, Ophel returned to the CPA after the war. Her decision was determined by Melbourne’s housing crisis, which left the Ophels living at Camp Pell, a disused city barracks requisitioned by the Victorian Housing Commission for emergency shelter. The conditions at the camp were miserable and drew the pair into housing activism. Working with party grandees such as Ralph Gibson, they combined electioneering for the CPA’s Parkville branch with community organising: strengthening solidarity among residents, demanding improvements to amenities, and arranging deputations to the Cain government on behalf of evictees. According to a fellow resident, Mary Baird, their activism saw the family denied resettlement by the housing commission until they took legal action in 1954. They then moved to Reservoir in Melbourne’s north but divorced in the early 1960s; thereafter she lived at Port Phillip. Alongside her political activism, she had resumed her stage career, beginning a twenty-year association with Melbourne’s New Theatre. In 1947 she directed and starred in Ric Throssell’s adaptation of the Soviet playwright Leonid Leonov’s The Ordinary Man (1939).
Amid the tumultuous decade of resignations, expulsions, and schisms that winnowed the CPA after Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956, Ophel let her membership lapse. She also severed ties with the CPA’s auxiliary, the New Theatre. Despite her youthful insistence that theatre should serve as a didactic tool, she increasingly found the compromises in personal expression that CPA precepts demanded intolerable. She nevertheless remained a committed actor and activist, especially for the rights of Melbourne’s homeless and against the Vietnam War. In the 1960s and 1970s she combined amateur theatre with appearances in television dramas such as Bellbird, Homicide, Lawson’s Mates, and Division 4 (for which her son Gerard won two Gold Logies for his performance as the protagonist, Frank Banner). She also played the barmaid Ivy in Ken Hannam’s award-winning film Sunday Too Far Away (1975).
Outspoken, exuberant, and never shy of a moral rant, Ophel was described as a ‘free spirit’ and ‘raconteur extraordinaire’ who ‘believed passionately—and lived passionately’ (Johnston and Hyde 2000, 39). In later life, she returned to poetry, performing on stage, and publishing in literary journals. She also contributed to Kate Jennings’s feminist anthology Mother I’m Rooted (1975) and published a poetry chapbook, The Vanished Edge (1986), which featured work dating back to her years in Perth. A second collection, ‘Year of the Catswhisker,’ was never published. She died in Melbourne on 17 June 2000. Survived by three sons, she was cremated and interred in Fawkner Memorial Park.
James Keating, 'Ophel, Kathleen Phyllis Yalden (Phyl) (1907–2000)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ophel-kathleen-phyllis-yalden-phyl-34196/text42909, published online 2024, accessed online 9 February 2025.
Phyl Harnett as Sylvia (left), and Joyce Coombes as Crystal, in 'The Women', c1940, MOPA
Museum of Performing Arts, Perth
30 December,
1907
Sale,
Victoria,
Australia
17 June,
2000
(aged 92)
Melbourne,
Victoria,
Australia