In urban Hamburg, the child's life was immediately blighted by the onset of World War I and a hunger crisis precipitated by agricultural manpower losses and the Allied blockade of Germany[1] In 1916, at the age of 11, he was a participant in workers' unrest against severe food shortages and black-market practices[2][3] of the day.
[5] The few available sources (including some deemed autobiographical) indicate that Olday, having reached the age of 20, had chosen to exercise his talents as a draughtsman, cartoonist and writer, by which he could continue to advance revolutionary causes without offering himself as direct cannon-fodder.
[6]The same source asserts that Olday's artistic and cabaret skills (and homosexual mannerisms) bestowed on him a position of privilege among "the highest circles" of the Hamburg Nazi Party, providing him with access to information which he was able to use to warn revolutionary friends and save them from committal to concentration camps.
In 1938 he entered into a marriage of convenience in 1938 with Hilde Meisel (alias Hilda Monte), a member of the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (International Socialist Struggle League), who thus acquired British nationality.
He remained at large until 1944, drawing caustic political cartoons and caricatures, working as an editor and, with two well-known libertarian activists (Marie Louise Berneri and Vernon Richards), writing a fortnightly anti-militarist broadsheet distributed to soldiers in the British Army.
At the same time he provided numerous drawings and poems for a Scandinavian paper, the Industrial Worker, distributed in German ports,[4] and produced, along with the English anti-militarist broadsheet, Forces Newsletter, in a small studio shared with Philip Sansom.
He later spent time in Melbourne where he "continued his artistic-cultural-political activities" while employed as a hospital worker before returning to Sydney where he conducted "adult education classes, mime shows, recordings, radio broadcasts and exhibitions and advocacy of gay liberation".
[8] In 1967, Olday opened a communal arts centre in the inner suburb of Paddington where he impressed visitors with his versatile talents ("He sings, he writes, he composes, he paints, he acts") and his sincerity, "the result of profound experience of sadness and life".