Born in Lismore, New South Wales

Margaret Hannah Olley was born on 24 June 1923 in Lismore, a rural town in northern New South Wales, Australia. She was the daughter of a pharmacist, and her family later moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, briefly before settling in Brisbane, Queensland, where she spent much of her childhood.

Her early years in regional Australia and abroad exposed her to a variety of environments that would later inform the richly coloured domestic interiors and still-life compositions for which she became famous. She attended Somerville House in Brisbane before the family's fortunes led her toward an artistic education in Sydney.

Olley's birth in a relatively small, isolated town in a country still developing its own artistic identity is significant in the context of Australian art history: she would go on to become one of the most celebrated and beloved painters in the nation's history, helping to define a distinctly Australian tradition of still-life and interior painting throughout the twentieth century.

Her humble regional origins are often cited in retrospectives of her life as part of the story of her rise to becoming a central figure of the Sydney art establishment and a generous patron of the arts.