John Kingsmill (1 September 1920 – 6 August 2013) was an

Australian Australian(s) may refer to: Australia * Australia, a country * Australians, citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia ** European Australians ** Anglo-Celtic Australians, Australians descended principally from British colonists ** Aboriginal Aus ...

author In legal discourse, an author is the creator of an original work that has been published, whether that work exists in written, graphic, visual, or recorded form. The act of creating such a work is referred to as authorship. Therefore, a sculpt ...

actor An actor (masculine/gender-neutral), or actress (feminine), is a person who portrays a character in a production. The actor performs "in the flesh" in the traditional medium of the theatre or in modern media such as film, radio, and television. ...

and public speaker, and amateur social

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the ...

. He was born in

Sydney Sydney is the capital city of the States and territories of Australia, state of New South Wales and the List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city in Australia. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Syd ...

in 1920 and educated at

Sydney Boys High School Sydney Boys High School ('SBHS'), otherwise known as Sydney High School ('SHS') or simply High, is an Australian government-funded single-sex academically selective secondary day school for boys, located at Moore Park, New South Wales, a s ...

. He was on active service in World War II, after which he completed his accountancy studies and was in practice for some years. He achieved notice for his performance as Des Nolan (Gig) in ''

Rusty Bugles ''Rusty Bugles'' was a controversial Australian play written by Sumner Locke Elliott in 1948. It toured extensively throughout Australia between 1948–1949 and was threatened with closure by the New South Wales Chief Secretary of New South Wales, ...

'', the controversial 1948 play by

Sumner Locke Elliott Sumner Locke Elliott (17 October 191724 June 1991) was an Australian (later American) novelist and playwright. Biography Elliott was born in Sydney to the writer Sumner Locke and the journalist Henry Logan Elliott. His mother died of eclampsi ...

. In 1955, he was a founding member of the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association (Australia), and was its leader for several years, serving on its Board until 1984. During the 1970s he worked as a senior advertising copywriter at the George Patterson advertising agency Sydney office.Administrative / Biographical Note
John Kingsmill - papers, 1948-2000 at the State Library of NSW

Bibliography

* ''No Hero: memoirs of a raw recruit in World War II'', Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1994 * ''Australia Street: a boy's eye view of the 1920s and 1930s'', Hale & Iremonger, 1991 * ''The Innocent: Growing up in Bondi in the 1920s and 1930s'', Collins/Angus & Robertson, 1990 * ''Sydney: The Harbour City'', text John Kingsmill, paintings Jeff Rigby, Pierson & Co., 1988 * ''My Brief Strut upon the Stage'', Jacobyte Books, 2001 * ''Dancing with the Patients: how PRA began'', 2005 * ''A Speaker Silenced'', 2006 * ''A Guide for Speechmakers'', 2006

References

External links

Catalogue
at the

National Library of Australia The National Library of Australia (NLA), formerly the Commonwealth National Library and Commonwealth Parliament Library, is the largest reference library in Australia, responsible under the terms of the ''National Library Act 1960'' for "mainta ...

1920 births 20th-century Australian memoirists 2013 deaths Writers from Sydney People educated at Sydney Boys High School Male actors from Sydney {{Australia-writer-stub