Joe Lynch, Bohemian Hero of Five Bells

Abstract

Prominent among the wilder bohemians of Sydney in the 1920s was Joseph Lynch, a gifted black-and-white artist originally from New Zealand. Jack Lindsay placed him alongside Anna Brennan as a figure symbolic of the times when he wrote in his autobiography Life Rarely Tells that 'Joe in one way, and Anna in another, were the Hero, the Heroine, of Our Days'. Anna died of tuberculosis in October 1929, a victim of the 'Roaring Twenties'. Lynch died two and a half years before her in circumstances which have become famous through their evocation in Kenneth Slessor's poem 'Five Bells'.