Australians, Volume 3

by Thomas Keneally

  He now had the Lady Southern Cross flown to England, and followed it by ship, since doctors had ordered that he must rest from his frenetic schedule. From England he took off in November 1935 to make one more record-breaking flight to Australia. Kingsford Smith and his co-pilot J.T. Pethybridge disappeared on that flight. It is believed that they crashed into the sea somewhere off the coast of Burma while flying at night towards Singapore.

  Kingsford Smith had an extraordinarily obsessive approach to aviation and to the urgency of its development. It would be an irony that four years after his death, when war began, Australia would be left with only the less advanced or obsolete aircraft, such as Ansons, and the Australian training fighter the Wirraway, to put into the sky. Aircraft would prove to be so scarce that the 7th Australian Squadron waited eighteen months from 1940 to 1941 to be equipped with them. And this despite the patient and continuous work throughout the 1920s and 1930s of the underfunded Sir Lawrence Wackett, former pilot and engineering innovator on the Western Front, head of the underfunded Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Experimental Section, and the officer who gave his name to the Wackett training aircraft, to provide something better.

  MANAGING THE NEW WOMAN

  To part-manage and part-exploit the new freedoms of women, Charity Queen events, to honour girls who combined beauty and charitable endeavour, came into being. So did the beauty contest, which was less based on traditional feminine virtues and less tolerable both to feminist organisations and to the establishment. During 1922, while Molly Meadows endured her lashing at the hands of judges, Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmanian newspapers held photographic competitions to find the most beautiful girl in their respective states. In September 1925, Sydney’s Smith’s Newspapers, of which Robert Clyde Packer was chief executive and managing editor, decided to initiate a swimsuit parade. Packer announced a Miss Australia contest, to be held in various picture theatres, the winner of which would be taken to the United States to compete in the Miss America quest, which had commenced in Atlantic City in 1921.

  At the end of June 1926, Miss Beryl Mills of Western Australia was chosen as the first Miss Australia. The contest had provoked great resistance. Edith Jones of the Women Citizens’ Movement in Melbourne implied the competitions came from a suspect and racier source, New South Wales: ‘This is the first year they have been held in Victoria, and next year, if no action is taken, they will be held in twice as many theatres.’ There was pressure for politicians to intervene. But in fact the selection events were well run, and so popular with such a range of women that the legislatures could see little reason for interfering. In both 1926 and 1927, the contestants who reached the finals in the Miss Australia quest were chaperoned by their mothers or another older woman, and the chaperone was paid to travel with the winner to the United States and, in later years, to Britain and Europe. Women doctors were present at the judges’ interviews of finalists, and inspected the girls for healthy weight and general well-being. Contestants were not allowed to wear cosmetics, there were strict rules about the bathing costumes to be worn, and the judges were claimed to be artists, sculptors and doctors. The organisers liked to point to the ‘good stock’ that made up their finalists. The idea of ‘stock’ and ‘good blood’, taken up manically by an as yet small German party called the Nazis, was a common concept of the period. These finalists were the daughters of solid folk, and in 1927 Miss Victoria was a physical culture teacher, Miss Queensland a telephonist, Miss South Australia a dancing teacher, Miss Western Australia a nurse, Miss Tasmania a secretary (to her own father) and Miss New South Wales an art student.

  In 1926, Beryl Mills, the first girl-triumphant, was a nineteen-year-old final-year art student at the University of Western Australia. She came from ‘good pastoral stock’, had won scholarships to Perth Modern School and the university, and was an accomplished pianist, swimmer, diver and hockey player. Miss Australia 1927 was similarly laudable: Phyllis van Alwyn, of Launceston in Tasmania, also of ‘good pastoral stock’, descended from the Scottish Highland Black family of Victoria’s Western District. Her father managed McRobertson’s Confectionary in Tasmania. She had qualifications in shorthand and typing, and asserted her super-modernity by driving her own car. Such girls, though still condemned in some quarters for entering the contests, actually bespoke competence and confidence rather than degeneracy.

  The skills of dressmaking and cooking that both Beryl Mills and Phyllis van Alwyn possessed allowed them to be depicted as future mothers, as solid subscribers to women’s biological duty. This national duty of the beauty queen was confirmed during Phyllis’s American trip when the Mayor of San Francisco told a large audience that they had with them that day a sister of the Anzacs of imperishable fame, and a future mother of men of that ilk.

  ART, DOCTRINE AND MAKING A LIVING

  Beauty queens might occupy the popular imagination, but the cusp of the 1920s was still a struggle for Australian artists. Paintings that embraced the Australian landscape and milieu were still of interest only to a minority. It had been so since the nineteenth century.

  For a considerable number of notable artists, including Julian Ashton (who came to Australia in hopes of curing his asthma) and Max Meldrum, who had emigrated to Australia as a Scots-born adolescent travelling with parents, art was a crucial arena and—as elsewhere in the world—there was a hope that within that stadium the issues of ‘What is art?’ and ‘What is Australian art?’ would be settled. As always, there was no one finally to settle it, but there were plenty of contenders.

  Australians, like the two Victorian-born gold rush artists, Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, were forced overseas, in part by curiosity but also by poor pickings in Australia. Charles Conder, the tall, personable English surveyor who had come to Australia to work in the Lands Department of New South Wales, and then shared a Melbourne studio with Tom Roberts, left for Europe after ten years in Australia, but did not observe French artistic society as a visitor. He would instead quickly find his place in it. Conder had a gift for acquiring patrons, and in the early 1900s the hard-working young Australian Will Longstaff, living close to the bone in squalid accommodation, saw him in the ‘congenial society of young Frenchmen at Montmartre who speedily learned to idolise him’. Conder had been a friend of Toulouse-Lautrec’s, who included his form in paintings of the Moulin Rouge.

  This inside running evaded other artists in exile. Roberts was away from 1903 to 1923, part of that time spent working as a facial-restoration orderly at Wandsworth Hospital in London. He had taken his big unfinished painting of the opening of Federal Parliament to England with him. Lacking a patron during his long English years, Roberts made his living from portrait painting. Streeton, considered a quintessentially Australian artist, was absent from 1898 to 1924, George Lambert from 1900 to 1921, E. Phillips Fox from 1901 to 1915. John Russell, friend of the sculptor Rodin, and of Matisse and van Gogh, and Rupert Bunny, spent just on forty and fifty years respectively overseas before returning in their old age—Bunny returning in 1933, after the death of his French wife, to find that Russell had already died in Sydney in 1930.

  Australian painters, like writers and others then and later, looked to the northern hemisphere to anoint them, and it rarely did. According to the art historian Bernard Smith, ‘perhaps the European venture ceased too quickly from being part of a lifelong process of self-discovery and became, for most of them, a step on the road to success and public acclaim’. That is, like many travelling Australian artists and writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were looking for European success to underpin success in Australia. But such judgements by scholars often take little account of the force of economics upon hard-up artists such as Tom Roberts, and in any case, success and public acclaim evaded so many of the gifted, the British having their own talented artists to celebrate and the French theirs. But the pattern of the Australian artist having to go overseas for nurture and instruction and a key to success had become established, and would continue th
roughout the twentieth century.

  Even if Australian public response to its artists was limited, in Australia in the 1920s, schools of art and competing dogmas about how to paint flourished with the same passionate abomination of each other that characterised Europe and the United States. The result would be significant in national myth-making, the way Australians saw themselves. Meldrum was one of the principal sources of argument. He had come to Melbourne as a fourteen-year-old with his mother and father, the latter a chemist. At seventeen he was enrolled in the National Gallery School in Melbourne and was one of the artists of the exclusive—at least in its own eyes—Prehistoric Order of Cannibals club. In 1899 he won the National Gallery of Victoria’s travelling scholarship and went to France to study at the Académie Julian and Colarossi. He married there the sister of the painter Charles Nitsch, Jeanne Eugenie, a singer at the Opéra Comique, and while living in Rennes exhibited at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français in 1904 and 1908, and received a commission to paint murals in the local chateau. He seems to have been more successful in France than his Australian contemporaries, who went to Europe half-timidly to peek at the masters.

  Meldrum returned to Melbourne in 1912 after an absence of thirteen years and acquired a studio. In 1919 he published his argumentative, assertive book, Max Meldrum: His Art and Views, which included the essay ‘The Invariable Truths of Depictive Art’. He argued that painting was a pure science of optical analysis or what he called ‘photometry’, by means of which the artist could carefully see and analyse tone and tonal relationships, to produce an exact reproduction of the thing seen. ‘The superficial area occupied by one tone’ was the basis of art, he dictated, and colour was the least important component. He believed that the lack of tonal analysis in modern art, and an increased interest in colour, were signs of the decline of civilisation. Besides that, sketching of the kind Julian Ashton taught in his school in Sydney was futile; it introduced lines that didn’t exist in nature. Again, tone was all. Meldrum, diminutive and full of generosity and furious conviction, was the most doctrinaire of all Australian artists, and influenced many painters.

  Indeed, his theory became the orthodoxy of painting in Melbourne, and from the 1930s his ideas were made popular in the United States by his former student Percy Leason, at the Staten Island Institute of Art and Science. On the one hand, the artist Norman Lindsay disliked him for his lack of flexibility and humour, called him ‘the mad Mullah’, and depicted him as a dogmatic artist named McQuibble in his first novel, A Curate in Bohemia (1913), set in artistic Melbourne. On the other, Meldrum’s strong opposition to the buying of modernist work for the National Gallery of Victoria, a struggle that had been raging since the gallery acquired a Pisarro in 1905 under the influence of the newspaperman Keith Murdoch, attracted the approval of the equally anti-modernist Lindsay. Despite his contempt for sketching, Meldrum won the Archibald Prize two years running, in 1939 and 1940.

  Parallel to Meldrum, Norman Lindsay had emerged as a force of nature, though more the sort of nature encountered in Greek and Roman classics than that of gumtrees. Lindsay’s father had been a surgeon from Northern Ireland and his mother was the daughter of a Wesleyan missionary. Lindsay would inherit nothing of Wesleyism. During the summer of 1897 to 1898, he placed classical Greek and European figures in the landscape of Charterisville near Heidelberg outside Melbourne, and did line and wash drawings for Boccaccio’s Decameron, for whose raunchiness any young bohemian had to be an enthusiast. Reading Nietzsche gave Lindsay an enhanced abhorrence of wowserism and the churches. In Melbourne, he made a living as an illustrator and lived as a bohemian, a spirited member of the arts circle, the Prehistoric Order of Cannibals. The work that spoke most directly for what he believed at the time was Crucified Venus, in which a monk nails a naked woman to a tree while an ugly host of clerics and wowsers applaud.

  Newly married, Lindsay came to Sydney from Melbourne in 1900, and he showed some of the Decameron drawings to A.G. Stephens, literary editor of the Bulletin, who said they were ‘the finest example of pen-draughtsmanship of their kind yet produced in this country’. At the Bulletin, and through other forms of publication, Lindsay would become Australia’s illustrator-in-chief. Julian Ashton, after seeing the Decameron drawings, offered to raise £300 to enable him to study in Europe, but Lindsay refused, believing it would be ‘disastrous to every Australian who had submitted himself to the corrupting influence of [modern] European movements in art’. He was not afraid of classical painting but of the moderns. And his work for the Bulletin and for his brother Lionel’s journal, Lone Hand, expressed irreverent nationalism and respect for the classic forms as they manifested themselves in ordinary Australians. He combined all this with racial prejudices against Asians, Jews and Aborigines. He also continued to illustrate classic texts.

  His wife Kathleen went to live in Brisbane because of Lindsay’s intimate relationship with his young model Rose Soady. In 1909 he did go to England, not to see the latest in painting but with new sketches for The Memoirs of Casanova, which he wanted to see published in a new edition. Trying unsuccessfully to find a publisher for the Casanova drawings, he saw post-Impressionist paintings and was appalled by them, calling the artists ‘a mob of modern Hottentots’. From then, hostility to modern art became his credo. In London he sold 250 drawings for the Satyricon, the chaotic but profane Roman quasi-novel in which an ex-gladiator named Encolpius travels with his beautiful young male companion, the slave Giton. Rose joined him for a time and they lived in a flat in Hampstead. But he profoundly disliked the Old World and returned home in 1910 to work for the Bulletin again. In 1913, his first novel, A Curate in Bohemia, was published. Throughout World War I his feelings coincided with Bulletin policy, which was pro-war, unlike its stance towards the Boer conflict at the turn of the century. He drew recruiting posters, drafted some ferocious anti-Irish drawings after the Dublin Easter Uprising of 1916, depicting the Irish there and in Australia as enemies of civilisation and supporters of Germany—not least, in the Australian case, for supposed Irish opposition to conscription. He depicted the Germans even more savagely, since his younger brother Reginald had been killed on the Somme and Norman had been given Reginald’s blood-spattered notebook.

  Because he was suspected to suffer from tuberculosis, Lindsay and Rose Soady moved to Springwood in the Blue Mountains, where he continued a high output through the post-war years. He had acquired a ouija board through which he tried to communicate not only with Reginald but with Shakespeare as well. In 1918 he published his children’s classic, The Magic Pudding, but then, more crucially for artists, went on to restate his Dionysian beliefs—that is, uninhibited and joyously sensual but above all anti-modernist bias—in two tracts, Art in Australia (1920) and Creative Effort (1924). Australian artists must react to the world, wrote Lindsay, by ‘a profound response to life, by the expression of a lyric gaiety, by a passionate sensuality, by the endless search for the image of beauty, the immortal body of desire that is Aphrodite’. As the young poet Judith Wright would complain, ‘It was all false, the dream of a place in which women had no part except as “the foil to a man’s physical robustness”.’ One of his friends in the 1920s was, however, a young poet-journalist, Kenneth Slessor, whose early work played with modernism and which he illustrated.

  Lindsay was fortified in his convictions and in the war he fought against the wowsers and killjoys when in 1923, Sydney Ure Smith and Julian Ashton arranged a large exhibition of Australian art at the Royal Academy in London, and a deputation to the British Minister for Public Instruction unsuccessfully tried to prevent the inclusion of Lindsay’s racy works. Some critics, however, simply did not admire his work. They found him simply a bad artist. In 1931, he sailed with Rose for New York, where he found himself widely acclaimed because of the success of Every Mother’s Son, the American edition of his novel Redheap. A depiction of life in a country town in all its oddity and hypocrisy, Redheap had got him into trouble at home—the book, a British edi
tion, was banned in Australia, and sixteen thousand copies were returned by bookshops to the publisher for pulping.

  By April 1932, Lindsay was back in Sydney and nearly out of funds but rich still in opinions. So again he rejoined the Bulletin staff and talked the then editor, Samuel Prior, into establishing the Australian Book Publishing Company with, as the editor, Inky Stephensen, the eccentric man of letters from Queensland who would favour in his time a range of ideologies, from Communism while at Oxford, then Labor then extreme isolationism in the 1930s, the latter of which would see him publishing Hitler’s speeches with approval, and would ultimately land him in a World War II detention centre. The Australian Book Publishing Company published twenty highly significant titles, including Lindsay’s Saturdee, part of the Redheap trilogy, but then closed. Meanwhile The Cautious Amorist, Lindsay’s raunchy first novel written twenty years before, and concerning a girl on a desert island who happily has liaisons with three men, was published in New York, but again Australian customs seized copies entering the country in people’s luggage and saw it banned by the federal advisory board on literary matters.