About Rosemary Opala
by Jan MacIntyre
In 2023, the centenary of Rosemary Opala’s birth, we celebrate her work on Peel Island and Coochiemudlo Island with a special event. The Rosemary Opala Retrospective is an insight into times gone: the nurses’ quarters that ‘were in some respects midway between a convent and a home for delinquent girls’; when having ‘leprosy’ made you an outcast, never to be returned to the community; when flotsam and jetsam on a beach did not include plastic!
Rosemary Opala
Rosemary was born in Bundaberg in 1923. She trained as a nurse at Brisbane General Hospital in the 1940s, after giving up an arts course, ‘to do something more useful than playing with paints’. She did, though, consider the duties of a nurse as a ‘glorified domestic’. During her training, she began sketching and drawing as well as writing for leading women’s magazines. Her later nursing duties were on Peel Island, where she wrote extensively about life as a nurse, and, with great empathy, how it was for the patients, and the misunderstanding of Hansen’s disease (also known as leprosy).
An introduction to Coochiemudlo
Rosemary’s attachment to Coochiemudlo Island began on a day off from her work at Saint Anne’s Private Hospital in Cleveland. She rowed her little dinghy to Coochiemudlo Island and heard an inner voice say, ‘You have to live here’, and thus she did. Later, she wrote about life on the Island when there was no mains power or piped water, and she illustrated her stories with sketches of the natural environment. She had a fascination with the sea, ‘being able to look into infinity’.
Rosemary lived on Coochiemudlo Island for some time, and was a member of the Heritage Society.
Later achievements
After building her home with her husband on Coochiemudlo, Rosemary moved to Caloundra and continued her writing, art, and nursing. She became a supervisor at Prince Charles Hospital. After retirement, Rosemary continued to advocate for the environment, including editing the Caloundra Branch of the Wilderness Society of Queensland newsletter. She moved to Victoria Point, and became a foundation member of the Friends of Peel Island. In 2005, Rosemary Opala was awarded the Redland City Council’s Australia Day Cultural Award.
