I felt she was unfairly accusing me of being shiftless when I was after all only a young child and had to go with my family wherever they went, whether they were shiftless or not. That girl was especially neat in her hair, dress and manner and had developed a stencil technique of drawing where you cut out a shape then fill in small blocks of coloured pencil around the edge of it. Then you place it coloured side up where you want it and rub the colour onto the page either with your finger or another piece of paper. Thus the crisp outline of the shape is surrounded by tiny soft clouds of multiple colours.
Unlike the neat hearts and flowers of my school companions, the few drawings that I did of the insects, flowers and mushrooms that I saw around me in the castle garden were rough and crude. I often broke pencils by pressing too hard and was really better with oil crayons. My drawings show water bugs, bees, beetles, and different flowers and mushrooms, each with a number to accompany them and a key listing their names. These were partly in imitation of the primers we used to learn German and our guidebooks for birds and mushrooms. These drawings in a small yellow and black padded book are one of the few things left from that time, apart from the wooden spoons and the wastepaper basket and some photographs which show how the upstairs staterooms of the castle which we very rarely went into had dark polished wooden floors and were flushed with red-gold light. In the photos we stand pale, stiff and small against their glowing golden beauty. In the warmer weather we ate outside under a big spreading linden tree and when we were outside everything was always better, the food tasted good and anxiety was dissipated. That spring and summer was a wonderful season of flowers and watching growth from the earth, being close to and studying water and trees, dragonflies and tadpoles. Perhaps for each child there is one special spring and that was mine. A soft green European one.
At high school in Australia in 1968 I was graded as far too intelligent to study art and placed in a Latin class. After spectacular failure at Latin I received special dispensation to leave the Latin scholars four times a week and study art with the other non-Latin students, who were generally considered beyond redemption. Art was seen as vaguely therapeutic but not useful in any way. The art room was a place with few rules and little instruction – certainly no art history was taught – but what I recall is an almost empty room with a row of tall windows letting in lots of light, desks, and a row of fat cardboard tube containers full of powdered paint in acid green, red, black, yellow and blue, which we mixed with PVA glue to make different colours. I liked using oil crayons and then covering the drawing with paint which would roll off the crayon in a patchy way. Once, using this technique, I drew a picture of people decorated with feathers and body paint dancing around a fire, a wardance or corroboree; it was rewarded with an A and mounted by the teacher on a piece of red cardboard. Another one of my prize-winning works was King Arthur’s magic sword Excalibur being caught over the lake, a complex swirl of green and blue with a cut-out arm clutching the sword pasted on top.
One day we did linocuts and I had a sharp introduction to printmaking when I pressed a curved blade deep into my thumb when thoughtlessly pushing it onto the tool-holder. After being bandaged I cut out a radiant sun. I recall experiencing two epiphanies in the art room; one was when drawing a cow’s skull in charcoal that while I worked gradually took on the form and more than that, the spirit of the skull. This also happened with a rose. As I drew the lines I followed what I saw with my charcoal to show the rose’s petals folded and unfolded around its heart and somehow it came to life. This looking and transcribing was a transformational event as the drawing somehow broke away from its source to own its own volume and meaning. To me this is like Dürer’s experience with the Blue Roller wing. His drawing possesses affection as well as wonder, joy as well as skill. He was equally engaged with his ability and the magical way life could be recreated with it, as with the infinite diversity and beauty of nature.
Dürer is the only artist known to have recorded his admiration for the Aztec treasures sent by Cortés from Mexico in 1520, which he saw when they were on show in Brussels. He wrote in his diary commenting on ‘the wonderful works of art and subtle displays of ingenuity of people in faraway lands’ that ‘were much more beautiful to me than miracles’. In his view it was not necessary for an artwork to be laboured over to possess life:
A man may often draw something with his pen on a half-sheet of paper in one day or engrave it with his tool on a small block of wood, and it shall be fuller of art and better than another’s great work on which he has spent a whole year’s careful labour.
Dürer’s wing says to me that art is not labour but love.
——
The dog and I like to walk at dawn, in the early evening and at night. At dawn the earth is exhaling and there is more scent for him to smell, left over from the night travels of animals, and for me a fresh dampness in the air that carries more scent than the day’s drier air. In the early evening we smell dinners cooking and see into lighted rooms looking to see what pictures people have hanging on their walls, but at night we could be anywhere, the sky is a deep purple rather than black or grey – maybe it never really is grey or black except in artworks. We walk under wheeling stars through darkness and find a place to be.
JULY
measuring the world
As a woman, I have no country …
As a woman my country is the world.
Virginia Woolf
Several pages cut from calendars have watched over the childhood of my son Jerome.
I carried them with me from Canberra to Adelaide, from the site of his conception to the site of his birth. That year when we moved together into my old bedroom in my mother’s house I taped them to the wall where they stayed for the next fifteen or so years. We looked at them many times and they became part of the furniture of our lives. If I see one of them illustrated in a book it is as if a part of me is there.
I cut them from two calendars published in 1982 and 1986 by the Australian Information Service. My favourite, now on my office wall, is a powerful bark painting by an artist called simply Nanjewara. It was collected on Groote Eylandt by the Czech artist and collector Karel Kupka in 1963 and is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. It is a marvellous image in red, black and white of stars in the sky. Painted on a black background is a red ochre circle along the edge of which are seven red frogs reaching out. Around them in the night sky are twelve large red ochre stars with white points and inside the circle like constellations are two eels or snakes and two fish as well as a circular stem from which stems of yellow and white star-like flowers sprout. It is an explosive, energetic image that speaks of creation and metamorphosis, of the exultation and consolation of viewing the night sky loaded with stars. And of learning the stars to navigate or tell stories and drawing imaginary lines between them to make images in order to find a way through what seems so illimitable and complex. I was so attached to it that I kept the calendar as well as the image. The story it tells is that the painting represents a legend from Groote Eylandt and shows a waterhole surrounded by frogs which later went into the sky and became stars like the Southern Cross. The stars within the circle are stars reflected in the water.
In 1973 I visited Groote Eylandt. My father was working there in the Gulf of Carpentaria doing a consultancy for a mining company that involved studying the tides and currents. He had imported his oceanographic measuring meters from Russia. Getting through the airport with timers ticking inside weighty metal cylinders about the size of a small fire extinguisher covered in Russian writing was part of the fun. I was at the University of Adelaide studying classical studies, philosophy, politics, history and English when he rang and said to ask his secretary to book a ticket for me to visit in my holidays. On the light plane from Darwin to Groote there were both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, and I still recall how uncomfortable I felt when the non-Aboriginal men spoke disparagingly and unpleasantly to me about the Aboriginal people who seemed to look ash
amed for them.
On Groote my father was staying in a white, wooden house on stilts with louvres and mosquito mesh on all sides and lots of ceiling fans. The temperature was the same inside and outside your body so that having a shower made you feel invisible or as if you might be about to wash away. We went to a BBQ and I found that drinking lots of beer, holding the can in a special foam sleeve, a stubbie holder, so that it did not get hot from being held in your hand, was very easy. I had a wakeful night and told my father the next day; he was amused and said that that can happen with alcohol. No matter, for I had plenty of time to doze during the day when we went out in the Arabia, the slow diesel boat of Gerry Blitner, to check tide and current meters tucked under rocks or hanging from buoys out in the Gulf. The boat moved at about two kilometres an hour so that we would see where we were headed and then know it would take a few hours to get there. We put long fishing lines with shiny lures on them to trawl off the back of the boat for large silver fish which we pulled in and ate immediately, either quickly fried or raw and whitened with lemon juice. At various times I was put ashore on a rock outcrop with an Aboriginal man to do some rock-fishing. One thing that my father asked me to bring with me was some saffron in order to make bouillabaisse, and one night we made it with at least four or five different kinds of fish as well as shellfish, including the amazing thick-shelled Moreton Bay bugs.
From the boat we saw an island with a rock formation on it that looked like a turtle (I was asked what I thought it was called – everyone expected me to get the answer), this was the home island of my fishing companion. He was sad that he could not live there any more – no-one did – and we went onto it with him to view rock paintings of birds, kangaroos and handprints hidden between vertical rocks. Recently I found out that it was Chasm Island, where in 1803 William Westall who travelled with Matthew Flinders on the Investigator made watercolour drawings of Aboriginal rock art, said to be the first Aboriginal art seen by Europeans.
I recall bits and pieces of my visit, like when we had to cross a waist-deep, narrow creek and the Aboriginal men told me it had crocodiles in it and all laughed and laughed when I crossed it especially quickly; and when we stopped the car so someone could chase a frill-necked lizard and put it on the road so that I could photograph it and then they put it back on a tree upside down so that its tail hung over its head and we all laughed at the expression on its face; and when we drove my fishing friend home to the Umbakumba Mission where he lived and my father stopped to give some women a lift the man had to get off and walk because he was not allowed to be with them (one of them was his mother-in-law or something like that); and I recall my father’s disgust at the Aboriginal peoples’ living conditions compared to those of the white people, and the small whites-only club. I remember seeing vivid green tree ants swarming over vines, and I recall walking in the shallow water of the sea and being closely followed by a small shark, then taking a photo of my father striding along the beach way in front of me with a huge cloud reaching into the sky over him. Most of all I remember the paintings on the island; I remember having to clamber over rocks and then walk up a hill and there being great vertical slabs of rock and having to walk through quite a narrow passage in between them to see the rock paintings and hand stencils, and asking permission to take photos.
In November 2009 I attended ‘Barks, Birds and Billabongs’, a conference at the National Museum of Australia on the fiftieth anniversary of the American–Australian scientific expedition to Arnhemland. The expedition had base camps at Groote Eylandt, Oenpelli and Milimgimbi. One of the conference convenors, Martin Thomas, had interviewed Gerry Blitner, who had helped the 1948 expedition just as he had helped my father. I took some photos from my 1973 trip which I had been looking for over many years and miraculously located and had printed about two weeks before the conference. At the conference I met five of Gerry’s children, all of whom remembered me and my father visiting them and going out in Gerry’s boat. Gerry died in 2008. His son Donnie Blitner was able to tell me the name of his boat and that indeed the island we visited was Chasm Island where today no-one is allowed to go.
Australia is part of Oceania, a place more sea than land. The word ‘oceanic’ means merging with the world. It is an idea which was incomprehensible to Sigmund Freud, though he mentioned its introduction to him by novelist Romain Roland in a letter in 1930 at the beginning of Civilisation and its Discontents:
It is a feeling which he [Roland] would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded – as it were ‘oceanic’… it is a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.
As a child in Austria I learnt a song the first line of which was Weisst du wieviel Sternlein stehen an dem blauen Himmelszelt? A literal translation reads: ‘Do you know how many stars stand in the blue tent of the sky?’ The song went on to ask other large questions such as: ‘Do you know how many clouds travel the world, do you know how many grains of sand are on the beach, do you know how many fish are in the sea?’ And so on. The answer contained in the song was ‘God knows’, not meant as in ‘well, who knows’ but in a comforting way to describe a reliable omnipotence. It said that He knows how many of them there are, and loves them all just like He knows and loves you. It was a song for children, after all. The song raises questions asked by all children of their parents in one way or another: ‘who knows the world, is the world measurable, who made me, what is my place here, do I have to die, does anyone love me?’
The answer that God does is unsatisfying to many people and certainly was to me. To say that there is an invisible Father who will look after you, who acts mysteriously on your behalf was not comforting to me as a young child with a particularly erratically behaved father. It seemed to have the purpose of making me feel even more powerless and patronised, kept in ignorance of what was going on as if I was not capable of knowing the truth. Perhaps an acceptance of mystery as well as a feeling for the oceanic is at the bottom of all religious thought and faith – but I was not ready for such a thought at that time, nor was it ever presented to me like that.
My previous experience of God was in the suburb of Baldwin on Long Island in North America where my best friend Suzy went to Sunday School. I went along with her once and was immediately disillusioned when the first thing that we were asked to do was to put money in a collection plate. I thought that God should not be connected with money and if He was just a way to get money, even from small children, then I thought He was not deserving of my respect or attention. I never went back to Sunday School. I have to admit that I was haunted by the thought of a giant angry invisible foot, the foot of God, which might stand in my way as I walked to primary school. And perhaps a large invisible finger pointing down at me and a voice booming out: ‘This girl thinks she can defy Me!’ If the foot was invisible would it be made of something like glass? Would it be like a line drawing or would it be permeable? If I could walk through it then how would I know it was there? If I didn’t know it was there then was it there at all? I was prepared to risk it.
Compared to religion art was free. It was free to enter galleries and walk and wander, free to look at works of art in spacious and peaceful places with shining floors where you decided how long you looked at something and did not need to sit still while someone talked endlessly as you fought to stay awake. Here were things made by people in other times and current times, objects from the recent past, the far distant past and the present, from all over the world. They did not ask to be paid but offered themselves freely. They were made by people and were there to communicate with other people. They were treasured and kept in special places, yet they had connections to what I might make myself or find at home either in books or on the wall. I wonder now how much I also responded with pleasure to the architecture of the museums and galleries, those expansive calm spaces with their large amounts of beautiful polished materials like marble, wood, metal and glass. I have an ongoing habit of appreciating
the shiny floors of public buildings, and their impressive restrooms with their heavy doors, hi-tech taps and cutting edge bathroom fittings. It is an experience of the palatial which, like most people, I will never get anywhere else.
The artworks were accessible to me as objects the qualities of which I might come to know intimately without needing to own them. They seemed a lot less complicated than people, certainly they stayed still to be contemplated. If I owned something about them it was what they made me feel or think. New art was always being made everywhere in the world, thus endless discovery of it was possible. There was plenty of discovery involved too in looking at old art and finding out about it and developing a personal series of touchstones or making up my own mind about the works called masterpieces and deciding what I thought about them. Though I could become more and more informed about it my personal response was always an important part of the equation. In some way art belonged to me in the same way that it belonged to anyone who looked at it.
Immigrating from my birthplace Australia with my family in 1955 to America, thence to Austria in 1961 and back to Australia in 1963, my early life took me repeatedly to live in countries starting with A. My bent against organised religion which began in America continued in Austria where in Grade Three I got special permission not to pray with all the others in class every morning. Sadly the girl I had to stand next to, a small demon called Brigitte with a short brown fringe and fat rosy cheeks, while everyone else had their eyes closed used to pinch my skinny little arm really hard in her rage at my ungodliness. Later and older in Adelaide I quietly conformed, and calmly prayed and hymned at a non-denominational school holding prayers and Bible readings every morning without either being a believer or needing to announce that I wasn’t. Thus I heard readings, often the same pieces many times, from the King James Bible regularly over eight years and was filled with its language, rhythms, imagery and stories which I responded to as literature, mythology and poetry rather than religion. Any probing questions about religion or indeed literature infuriated my teachers, so I learnt to be silent about my doubts.
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