He has said he seeks to help Australians appreciate the variety and value of their own landscapes, and to adapt a European language (English) to regions for which it still lacks vocabulary.
He is the author of twelve books of poetry, several of which deal with regions of Australia such as the Great Barrier Reef and the Blue Mountains, often collaborating with well-known nature photographers.
He has won numerous national and international prizes and awards, and has undertaken fellowships or writers-in-residency in several countries including United States, Europe, Russia, China and India.
[8] During his travels, he spent three winters house-sitting for the actress Miriam Margolyes in Italy, and writing about Italian village life.
Emeritus Professor Michel Fabre of the Sorbonne called O'Connor's "a mind full of sensitivity and passion to new probings or to sometimes disenchanted narrations (contatations)".
Fabre added that O'Connor excelled in:[9](re-)discovering, from a new viewpoint, places to which our Greco-Latin culture would attach a supposedly precise and limited connotation.
[8] In the 1980s and 1990s he compiled and edited the much re-printed Oxford anthology Two Centuries of Australian Poetry (1988, revised 1996)[10] which was structured by themes to present the main "conversations" of the nation.
[11] Subsequently, he published two prose books on overpopulation as a neglected cause of environmental damage: This Tired Brown Land (1998) and, more recently, Overloading Australia (2008, 2010, co-written with William J.
Through the 1990s he was National Vice-president of Sustainable Population Australia, whose patrons included the fellow authors Judith Wright, Tim Flannery, Mary White and Fr Paul Collins, and often spoke on the media.
[13] An example was his poem "Coming Home Strong: for Cathy Freeman",[14] which he read on the ABC Radio National Breakfast Program the morning after she won the Women's 400 Metres event.
[20] He is also the inventor and patent awardee for the Pro-NOUNCE-it software that allows individual readers to selectively display the pronunciation of English words without changing the spelling.
The fifth edition of the Oxford University Press Anthology "Seven Centuries of Poetry in English" (2003) gives O'Connor more space than any poet of later birth-date than Seamus Heaney, born 1939,[23] and its editor John Leonard has described O'Connor as, "that rare thing, a genuinely popular poet of real power and complexity".
"[26] The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature calls his 1990 Fire-Stick Farming, A remarkably fine collection, which reinforces the impression that O'Connor's poetry draws strongly on the external natural scene, and the diversity of flora, fauna, and landscapes.
"[27] O'Connor has worked closely with environmental scientists at the Museum of Victoria, where he served as the Thomas Ramsay Science and Humanities Scholar (1987–1988),[28] and also at the Australian National University.
In 1999 he began a three-year term as visiting fellow in the ANU's Department of Archaeology and Natural History, working with Professors Geoffrey Hope and Rhys Jones.
O'Connor was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 2024 King's Birthday Honours for "service to literature as a poet and educator".