by Alex Miller
After we first returned from Sofia Station I drank a great deal of wine and walked the paddock all night barefoot in my nightdress and howled Pat’s name by the wattle flat in the moonlight (if there was a moon). None of it helped. He was gone. I suffered the emptiness of my despair. And when I had exhausted myself I fell ill and took to my bed. Arthur took time off work and nursed me like a mother nursing its sick child. I lay in bed all day weeping. I am ashamed to confess how low my spirits sank before I began to revive. I believe I was unspeakably cruel to Arthur—so I will not speak of it.
Anne Collins had declined Arthur’s offer to curate our exhibition of the new Melbourne modernists and had begun curating for a rival gallery recently established in High Street, Malvern, and for Gallery 5 in Sydney (owned by Ginni Lamont, the flamboyant daughter of millionaire collector and racing identity Jack Lamont). Anne was known for knowing all the right people. We heard news of them from Barnaby. When her exhibition of Hinterland was announced Arthur and I saw the advertisement in the paper one Saturday morning. It was the illustration that caught my eye. The shock of it. The grinning corpse in the long grass in the shadow of the citadel range, daisies growing out of its shirt. It was like seeing my own flesh displayed on the page. I had to turn away.
Arthur and I did not receive an invitation to the opening. I felt physically ill for weeks dwelling on this non-invitation and decided I could never again look at those pictures that he and I had made together in our brief magical time in the machinery shed at Sofia Station.
Guy Cowper disdained either to visit or to review Hinterland in his column in the Herald. Cowper’s silence was the biggest Melbourne critical reaction Pat received. And the most damning. There were others. But their murmurs of incomprehension scarcely rose above the din of Cowper’s silence. I knew Pat had been hoping for puzzlement and ridicule from Cowper and that silence from his old enemy would be a great disappointment to him. I felt for Pat and longed for him to know success and to receive understanding for his work. No matter how vindictive my mood I never sank so low as to wish failure on Pat. Ever. There were times I cursed him and might have killed him if I’d had a knife in my hand. But I never hoped to see him fail.
When the exhibition had been on for nearly two weeks and it was no longer news, Rodney Armitage’s review came out in the Sydney Morning Herald and was reprinted in the Argus and suddenly people were talking about Hinterland again. Armitage was a friend of Anne’s. It had not been easy for her to convince Armitage it was worth his while coming down to Melbourne to review a show by an unknown young artist. But she had persisted and had eventually convinced him Pat was important enough for him to notice. There was more to it than this, for Armitage was Cowper’s arch-rival. They despised each other and were inclined to despise whatever was going on in each other’s cities. Anne argued that Cowper’s silence on Pat’s show was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Armitage to seriously bloody Cowper’s nose and reveal him to be the self-serving provincial neophyte (Armitage’s words, not mine) of English artistic taste that Armitage was always claiming he was. ‘Let them all know that Cowper has missed the most important art event in Melbourne during the entire period of his tenure.’ Anne was good at this sort of thing. Setting dog against dog in the pit. She enjoyed the feel of it. I think in her heart she probably disliked all men in pretty equal measure but found them far too useful ever to let herself seem to be in open conflict with them. There were times, I recall, when a certain look came into her eyes at Old Farm. Impossible to describe. But bearing a lethal message. Unmasked in a moment of distraction. And if she caught you looking, her features broke into a perfect smile that managed to convince you of her perfect trust. ‘I am sharing something with you, my dear,’ her smile seemed to say, ‘that I would share with no one else.’ She possessed exactly the right character (is it?) for negotiating the labyrinth of conflicting power plays and bitchery between departments that ruled the Tate when she finally got there. She slid into that world with scarcely a ripple, an eel slipping into a muddy creek. A little flick of her tail and she had propelled herself into the centre of the action. Anne Collins was to become one of that select tribe of Australians who found themselves to be more at home in London than many Londoners ever were. I never did understand why men tried so hard to please her. It was her abiding mystery. She and Cowper and Armitage are all long gone and forgotten now, of course.
After a brief period during the seventies when interest in Pat’s work slackened off and it looked as if his reputation was waning, Pat’s pictures are now more widely celebrated than ever. The man is no longer with us (he hardly ever was during his lifetime anyway) but his pictures are as important to us in Australia today as they ever were. Some would say they have become more important with the passage of time. And for many their value as art is just as controversial. Such things will never be finally settled. There will always be someone coming along to build their reputation on the new things they can think of to say about old art. Whether what he did was great art or not, the fact is that Pat Donlon has become one of our immortals. And we have very few of those.
In his Sydney Morning Herald review of Hinterland, Armitage described Pat’s Sofia collection as having ‘a knowing simplicity that is at once new and interesting, but is perplexing to the conventionally trained eye’. (For ‘conventionally trained’ we all knew we must read ‘Melbourne Gallery School–trained’). He compared Pat to the Douanier Rousseau. Which was stupid of him and only drew attention to his own European bias, but it did Pat no harm at all. ‘There is a lack of refinement and a kind of open-faced candour in his pictures that offends commonplace expectations.’ He heralded (the pun hopefully not lost on Cowper) Pat Donlon as the new in Australian art. Anne had skilfully briefed him on Pat’s own views about what he (Pat) was doing. It would not have been Pat who had done the briefing. He never had much to say about his own work or anyone else’s. Which happily left the way open for Anne. Talking about art was pretty much all she ever did, and she did it to great effect. Armitage employed such hackneyed phrases in his review as ‘the breaking wave’ and ‘Australian art comes of age’. But no one demurred. ‘These works are modern,’ Armitage sidled along, ‘but in a way seem also to be anti-modern. Most viewers will be puzzled. A few will be dazzled, as I was. Many will be repelled. And of course there will be those few benighted souls who will remain indifferent and will have nothing to say.’ (Such as Guy Cowper, we all knew we were being told.)
Armitage credited Anne Collins with having ‘discovered’ the most important new voice (voice?) in Australian art for more than two decades. Why two decades? No one asked. The deed was done. Pat’s work had become controversial. Anne had used the oldest trick in the book and it had worked. She had aroused that most provincial of all Australian antagonisms, the rivalry for first place in art and culture between Sydney and Melbourne. Sydney won this round. And red-haired Ginni Lamont invited Hinterland to her Sydney gallery for a four-week show in May, the best month in those days for showing in Sydney. Anne had won. But for her, Sydney was only the beginning. She was planning on taking Pat to the world, not just up the Hume Highway to Sydney. I could not have said it then, but Anne Collins was the perfect partner for Pat Donlon. I could not have done for him what Anne did for him. And he could not have done what he did without her as his champion. All art needs its champions. Without champions, art remains in the racks of the artists’ studios and is unknown to us and uncelebrated in the world. And what is the point of that? The task of rehabilitating the artist whose work is not celebrated in his or her own time is never entirely successful. It is always a Lazarus affair; the pale show of life may be miraculous but is more a reminder of the death of the subject than of their current vitality.
Melbourne had had its chance with Pat and had blown it. It was not to Melbourne but to Sydney, where his work was amply celebrated, and to the Central Highlands of Queensland, where his source never failed him, that Pat returned whenever he revisited Australia. He was
more at home among artists and writers in Sydney than he ever was in Melbourne, where a certain mean-spirited reluctance to acknowledge his importance can still be found among artists and their keepers to this day.
There are some events, not in themselves vastly interesting or bloated with portent, the effects of which however are never quite undone in our lives or in the cultural directions our country takes. Cowper’s silence on Pat’s show was one of those small events. Without Cowper’s silent disdain for Pat and his art it is unlikely Armitage would have reviewed Hinterland, and without Armitage’s review the show would almost certainly not have gone to Sydney, and without the success it was to enjoy in Sydney Anne would not have been able to convince Rodney Falk (another man keen to please her) to take the show for the spring opening of his Camden Town gallery, and if that had not happened the prestigious art journal Apollo would not have put one of Pat’s paintings (the one with the floating teapot, his mother’s) on its cover and published that long and richly illustrated piece about Pat’s life and work, which drained the blood from Cowper’s cheeks when he received his copy (he had to sit down) and caused such a stir here (well, a stir in the small circle of what we liked to call the art world, but which we might more justly have called the art island. For it caused no stir at all among workers at the port of Melbourne, nor among Collins Street financiers and the great legal minds in their chambers).
There was no mention of me or of Old Farm in the Apollo account of what the author of the article referred to as ‘Patrick Donlon’s seminal ten days at Sofia Station’. The only women mentioned in that article were Anne Collins (seven times) and his mother (once). His wife Edith and I were dropped from his history. A deep and, I am afraid to say, ineradicable scar was branded into my soul by this wounding of the truth. I shall carry that scar to the furnace with me (tomorrow or the next day).
So on we go. For we must go on in our search for truth and justice; collecting a bit of this and a bit of that, each morsel connected in some way to the invisible circuit from which the expression of our sense of ourselves and our culture is slowly (and painfully) fitted together. It is the lives of all of us, experience both as fire and dust. But is it history?
One morning, not long after my partial recovery, Arthur had left for the office and I was sitting at the kitchen table (not propped up in bed as I am now, writing this in my nineteenth exercise book) feeling guilty because I should have been in the garden helping Stony with the pruning. But I was helplessly in the grip of lassitude and boredom, and was too deeply detached from any sense of purpose to get up from the table and go out into the garden. Pruning roses was impossible. It could not be done. I thought of opening a bottle of wine. But an image of Freddy’s sadly bloated features came into my head and I resisted. Poor dear Freddy, he was showing the signs of his alcoholism by then. Suddenly (and it was very sudden), without considering what I was doing or debating my intention, I got up from the table and went to the bathroom and had a shower and changed into my smartest suit and caught the train into town. I was on my way before I’d had time to think about it.
I sat by the window watching the suburbs sliding by and listening to the lively clatter of the wheels on the rails, knowing I looked good in my grey suit and aware of being looked at admiringly by both men in my carriage and by one of the women. I had been careful with my makeup. Pat disliked makeup that was obvious. To impress him, makeup had to be applied so delicately he would not know it was there but would mistake its effects for nature’s gifts. I could see him squinting at me, the smoke from his cigarette curling from his lips, his heart contracting as mine with that pain which I knew neither of us would be able to resist if we were ever so close to each other again. I was so deeply lost in thoughts of meeting him that I continued to sit in my seat in the train after we had reached Flinders Street station and the carriage had emptied.
It wasn’t a hot day so I decided to walk to Swanston Street. It was a nice change to be one of the city crowd. The young women all looked smart and busy and I was glad I had dressed up. I hardly ever came into the city these days, and almost never alone. It was Arthur who was our daily ambassador to the city. I walked along Bourke Street, perhaps in order to avoid passing his office. At Swanston Street I waited at the stop for the tram.
Standing there, calm and without anxiety, I remembered the great black boar watching me from the dark shade under the wild lime trees, and I felt a strange kindred link between us. That woman on the bank of the creek staring back at the pig was not this woman in the smart grey suit waiting for her tram, but was a woman in the imaginary life of this woman, with no future, no past and no substance, only her existence as a vivid memory, she and the pig mysterious elements of an unfinished story. I wondered if Bill had had his way yet and had shot the pig, or had Margery been successful once again in getting a stay of execution for the doomed animal?
The tram came and a man who had been waiting next to me stepped back and touched his hat, holding up the throng so that I could get on the tram first. I thanked him and as I went up the step I half turned to him and smiled. I have never begrudged any man a smile. It was all he was after. An acknowledgment from a nice-looking woman ten years his junior. I went into the non-smoking section and found a seat facing the direction of travel, my bag on my knees. I think at that moment I was probably happy.
When I pushed open the glass door of Visions in High Street half an hour later, however, my heart was pounding and I was feeling sick with tension at the thought that I might be about to see Pat. For some reason I thought he would be there, and had imagined him watching the reactions of the people who came to look at his pictures, like a proud mother unable to take her gaze from her first child on its first day at school. But the gallery was empty. It was a long wide space, the floor of polished timber, the lighting very bright. There was no furniture, no chairs or anything else occupying the centre. Not even a rug. In an alcove at the far end a vacant upright chair stood squarely behind a polished timber desk with a glass top. A closed door, white with a shiny brass knob, was behind the desk. There was no sign of an attendant or the gallery’s owner. There was nothing to distract the visitor’s eye from the pictures on the walls. The message was emphatic: We are clean and new and are not to be distracted by ornament and the trinkets of the past. It was a space designed to harbour no shadows. No uncertainty. I found it cold and intimidating.
The forty paintings of the series, unvarnished and all on two-foot squares of masonite board, were hung on a level with the viewer’s eye, twenty down the length of one wall, twenty down the length of the other. They were unframed. We were still used to seeing paintings in gilt corner frames in those days so the impression was stark. Something uniform, austere, aware of its own importance. A whole thing, not a selection or a variety of things. A large statement. It was consistency and conviction that met my eye. I had never seen works presented in this way before and realised at once the effect was due to Anne Collins’ sense of design. A sign on an easel to the right of the door said, Hinterland, Pat Donlon. Exhibition only. The paintings were not for sale. The feeling was that whoever had done this had done it with confidence. Not in the detail of each painting—I was not registering detail—but in the bold uniformity of the series and its setting. I felt at once that I was being presented with a work of substance and that a degree of attention, and even concentration, was being demanded of me. And although there was no one in the gallery I also felt that I was being observed.
I stepped up to the picture closest to me on the left wall, just inside the entrance, and I stood in front of it and stared at it. I wasn’t seeing it. My mind was searching for him like a radar searching for its target. The details of the picture slipped about in front of me, blurred and indistinct. I have no recollection of which of the pictures it was and I moved on to the next without having registered it. Even though there was no one there to see me, I pretended to be seriously examining each picture, stopping a moment, then stepping back a pace to make a more
sure appraisal, then moving on to the next. I could see printed catalogues piled on the desk at the far end; the green sky and the dark bulk of the citadel range were unmistakable. I could not stop myself from shivering.
I was looking at the third or fourth painting before I began to see detail. It was clear to me at once that he had done more work on the pictures since Sofia. There was now a sense of narrative loosely uniting the pictures and giving them an order of progression, the order, indeed, in which they had been hung, progressing down the left wall front to back and then back to front along the right wall. The loose sense of order and narrative was given by the progressive inclusion of the white and green homestead. In the earliest picture it did not appear at all. In the second and subsequent pictures increasingly large sections of the homestead were visible at the lower right-hand side of each painting. By the last picture the homestead covered almost two-thirds of the painted space. The face of the woman at the window was repeated in each of them. Besides the addition of the homestead there were numerous other details that had been added since Sofia. Now there was what looked like a wild pig hunt in three of the pictures, body parts flying about in the air, a severed leg here, a severed head there, teeth flashing in the sunlight, a pair of yellow underpants with blue patches sewn on caught on the branch of a dead tree. Pat’s little jokes to give his detractors something to work with. I imagined Pat working on the series, encouraged by Anne at his side in the spare room of her flat. I had never been to her flat but I could see them there together (as I can see almost anything I set my heart on seeing; I have an imagination). He without his shirt and she attending him closely. I was there in each picture, gazing out from that awful silent homestead in the wilderness. I was there but I had been disowned. Abandoned in that house. Looking at the pictures made me feel ill. I wanted to sit down and close my eyes.