Richard Connolly (composer)

He was best known for having composed the theme song to the children’s TV series Play School for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC); the lyrics were penned by Rosemary Milne. In 2017 the tune was added to the list of the top 10 Sounds of Australia list by the National Film and Sound Archive for being culturally, historically and aesthetically significant.

Connolly fell ill prior to his ninetieth birthday on 10 November 2017, which he celebrated with his family at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital, but makd a full recovery. He died in Sydney on 4 May 2022, aged 94.

In December 2009, he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Arts by the University of Notre Dame Australia in recognition of his “extraordinary contributions to Catholic liturgical music in Australia”. In his acceptance speech he said the hymns he had made with James McAuley were “the centrepiece of my liturgical work and, of all the things that I have made, apart from my family, the best”.

Connolly joined the ABC in 1956 and by 1960 worked in its education department, mainly in schools broadcasts. In 1967 he joined the Radio Drama and Features Department, becoming features editor. In 1971 he undertook a Churchill Fellowship in Italy and at Radio France and Bayerischer Rundfunk. He also spent several months working in the BBC’s radio drama script unit. During this time, he also composed music for the BBC TV series The British Empire. He returned to Australia and was appointed Head of Radio Drama and Features at the ABC.

Connolly aspired to join the priesthood and, from 1946 and 1950, pursued theological studies in Rome. A few months before his planned ordination, however, he abandoned his studies and returned to Australia where he completed an arts degree at the University of Sydney. At that time, he was a member of Holy Spirit parish in North Ryde. In 1955, he was introduced to McAuley by Father Ted Kennedy who asked Connolly to compose hymns to sing at various points during Mass. Thus began a longstanding partnership between McAuley and Connolly. Their subsequent musical collaboration during the 1950s and 1960s contributed significantly to contemporary Australian hymnody. Their compositions were first released in a collection titled Hymns for the Year of Grace in 1963. In 1960 Connolly’s work had anchored the Living Parish hymnbook, edited by Tony Newman and published by a group gathered around Roger Pryke, which would sell one million copies over the next decade, enabling congregations to sing hymns in a distinctively Australian voice. Many of the hymns published in both collections are still widely sung across various Christian denominations in Australia and internationally.

Richard Connolly (10 November 1927 – 4 May 2022) was an Australian musician, composer and former broadcaster.

Connolly composed music for the first Australian visit of a pope, Pope Paul VI, at both Randwick Racecourse and St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney. For the cathedral’s liturgy he composed a “papal entry and march” version of Psalm 85. In 1844, the bishops of Australia had chosen the Virgin Mary, under the title of “Mary, Help of Christians”, as patroness for the Australian nation, and the words are nationalistically resonant for Australian Catholics. While he personally remained largely aloof from Catholic politics, Connolly’s setting of these words in his hymn “Help of Christians, Guard this Land” became the battle hymn of the Catholic Right in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s.