Portrait 51, Summer 2015-16

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MAGAZINE OF AUSTRALIAN & INTERNATIONAL PORTRAITURE

SIDESHOW ALLEY’S GRISLY TREATS TIM BONYHADY ON ANDREW SAYERS WILLIAM DOBELL WHITLAM’S CHINA MAN ANGUS TRUMBLE ON GORDON DARLING BIRDY STYLE

SUMMER 2015

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05 Observation point Natasha Bieniek 06 At easel Tim Bonyhady recalls his experience as sitter for his close friend and former National Portrait Gallery director, the late Andrew Sayers.

08 Portrait of the Gallery A design diary retrospective

by Graeme Dix, director at Johnson Pilton Walker, the architecture firm that designed the National Portrait Gallery.

11 Inner vision Angus Trumble pays tribute to the Gallery’s founding father, L Gordon Darling ac cmg.

14 The Dissecting Room Joanna Gilmour accounts for Australia’s deliciously ghoulish nineteenth century criminal portraiture.

20 Getting a head Alexandra Roginski gets a feel for phrenology’s fundamentals.

26 The portrait writ large Karen Vickery on Chang the Chinese giant in Australia.

30 The boy, the bed and the gun Christopher Chapman contemplates the provocative performance art of Chris Burden.

33 A real tweet Sarah Engledow plays wingman to Leila Jeffreys.

45 Paper, boy Peter Wilmoth’s boy-journalist toolkit for antagonising an Australian political giant.

48 Bill and Ted’s excellent portrait Sarah Engledow on Messrs Dobell and MacMahon and the art of friendship.

54 Food for thought Michael Wardell on Chrys Zantis’ ORA. 56 Recollections of a sinologist sitter Stephen Fitzgerald traces the historical course from Sino-Australian cultural engagement to a maturing Australian identity.

62 Australia’s great internationalists Penelope Grist explores the United Nations stories in the Gallery’s collection.

68 On show International and national portraiture exhibitions.

70 Tribute Bart Cummings

Study for portrait of Bart Cummings 1986 (detail) Bryan Westwood oil on canvas Purchased 2002

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CONTRIBUTORS

PORTRAIT#51 SUMMER 2015 Portrait is the magazine of the National Portrait Gallery King Edward Terrace Parkes Canberra ACT 2600 Australia 02 6102 7000 portrait.gov.au/magazine Editor-in-chief angus.trumble@npg.gov.au

karen vickery (“The portrait writ large” p. 26) is Director Learning and Visitor Experience at the National Portrait Gallery.

dr stephen fitzgerald (“Recollections of a sinologist sitter” p. 56) was Australia’s first ambassador to China, from 1973 to 1976.

Editor stephen.phillips@npg.gov.au

graeme dix (“Portrait of the Gallery” p. 8) is a director at the architectural firm Johnson Pilton Walker.

Design brett@portrait.gov.au Rights and permissions katrina.osborne@npg.gov.au Photography mark.mohell@npg.gov.au Print adamsprint.com.au

Circle of Friends The Circle of Friends plays an important role in the life and work of the National Portrait Gallery. Friends contribute to the acquisition of works of art, the mounting of visiting exhibitions, continual learning and the publication of new scholarship.

Friends enjoy many benefits through their association with the Gallery including an annual subscription to Portrait magazine and a 10% discount at the Portrait Gallery Store Join the Circle of Friends Contact the Membership Coordinator on 02 6102 7022 or join online at portrait.gov.au/site/member_apply.php Sponsorship The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the continuing support of its sponsors to present exhibitions, programs and publications

Distribution publicationsolutions.com.au portraitgallerystore.com.au has an extensive stock of back issues of Portrait and National Portrait Gallery publications

tim bonyhady (“At easel” p. 6) is Director of the Australian Centre for Environmental Law at the ANU.

joanna gilmour (“The Dissecting Room” p. 14) is Curator at the National Portrait Gallery.

angus trumble (“Inner vision” p. 11) is Director at the National Portrait Gallery.

Twitter Join the twitter feed twitter.com/NPG_Canberra Flickr flickr.com/photos/ nationalportraitgallery/ Facebook facebook.com/pages/NationalPortrait-Gallery-Canberra/ Online portrait.gov.au/magazine

alexandra roginski (“Getting a head” p. 20) is a PhD student at the ANU, where she researches the history of popular phrenology in Australia.

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michael wardell (“Food for thought” p. 54) is the Art Gallery Coordinator, Logan Art Gallery, Queensland.

peter wilmoth (“Paper, boy” p. 45) is a freelance writer and former Fairfax journalist.

dr sarah engledow (“A real tweet” p. 33) (“Bill and Ted’s excellent portrait” p. 48) is Historian at the National Portrait Gallery.

illustrator alice carroll

dr christopher chapman (“The boy, the bed and the gun” p. 30) is Senior Curator at the National Portrait Gallery.

penelope grist (“Getting Bare” p. 4) is Assistant Curator at the National Portrait Gallery.

ATSI readers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this magazine may contain the images of now deceased Indigenous people

Copyright The material in this publication is under copyright. Excluding fair dealing purposes, such as private study, criticism and review, research and education, no part of the publication may be reproduced or transmitted without permission from the National Portrait Gallery. Where applicable, every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and acknowledge the source material. Errors or omissions are unintentional and corrections should be directed to katrina.osborne@npg.gov.au © 2015 National Portrait Gallery issn 1446 3601

The cover Portrait of Tim Bonyhady 2015 (detail) Andrew Sayers Courtesy Art Gallery of New South Wales, Mim Sterling

portrait 51 summer 2015

OBSERVATION POINT NATASHA BIENIEK

Sahara 2014 Natasha Bieniek oil on wood Courtesy the artist

W

hy portraiture? It’s a question I’ve asked myself time and time again. In terms of painting portraits, when you take a step back and analyse each day, it can often seem quite odd. My time in the studio is spent hunched over an easel, often in pain, meticulously applying tiny amounts of paint to especially petite surfaces. One slight slip or error in judgement could spell disaster. This painstaking approach repeats itself endlessly to fulfil a certain desire to perfect, dissect and manipulate painted imagery. Portraiture has been the most consistent of subjects throughout my painting practice. I’ve always been drawn to paintings that convey emotional exuberance. It’s human nature

to be intrigued by others, and the slow movements of oil paint can act as an ideal vehicle to communicate a broad subject.

I became fascinated with the ancient tradition of miniature portraiture about five years ago. These tiny portraits, which can sit comfortably in the palm of one’s hand, became significant in England and France during the 16th century. They were often deeply personal and acted as a keepsake or memento, but also became a useful tool in providing a visual representation for someone abroad.

The invention of photography in the 19th century inevitably led to the decline of the miniature portrait. But echoing the past, portraiture still plays a significant role in how we perceive and relate to each other in present-day culture. However, the jewel-like paintings that once held

our attention have been replaced by shiny pieces of technology in the form of smart phones.

In an age that is dominated by quick snaps, selfies and a constant flow of digitally manipulated imagery, it’s worth questioning the relevance of the painted portrait. For me, portraiture offers the chance to subtly travel between fact and fiction in a poetic way. The subjects of my paintings are often close friends, which I believe can create a strong sense of intimacy within the work.

At the end of the day, I see portraiture and all its intricacies as the optimal genre to communicate directly to the viewer’s senses. Portraiture connects us to complex histories and will inevitably be a prominent subject in art for years to come.

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Portrait of Tim Bonyhady 2015 oil on canvas Andrew Sayers Courtesy Art Gallery of New South Wales, Mim Sterling Self-portrait with Sun Damage 2014 Andrew Sayers oil on canvas Courtesy Lauraine Diggins Fine Art

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portrait 51 summer 2015

At easel tim bonyhady recalls his experience as sitter for his close friend and former national portrait gallery director, the late andrew sayers.

When Andrew embarked on my portrait at the start of this year, I did not know what he planned for it. Having painted his self-portrait twice, Andrew was, I thought, just looking for another subject, and I was happy to oblige because it gave us one more reason to be together. When I first went to his Melbourne studio in my usual jeans and t-shirt, and Andrew photographed and sketched me sitting in a white upholstered chair of no distinction, I did not give my appearance any thought, or what Andrew might do with the picture. I only later realised that he wanted to enter it in the Archibald Prize.

Andrew’s prime focus through the summer was his first Melbourne exhibition with Lauraine Diggins, whose entire gallery was Andrew’s to fill, so he had lots to paint. But he also gradually worked on my portrait, in which he evoked the family history I had written about in my book, Good Living Street. Andrew did so partly through the background of the painting which echoed that of Gustav Klimt’s portrait of my great grandmother Hermine Gallia, first shown at the Vienna Secession in 1903, and now in the National Gallery, London. Andrew also did so by depicting me on a dining room chair, designed by Josef Hoffmann for my great grandparents, which had only recently been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria and, unlike the other Gallia chairs in the Gallery, was a chair on which I had never sat.

Because he was in Melbourne and I was in Canberra, Andrew picked out a photograph he took of me in his studio early in 2015, and used it to rough in my body and face and resolve the background. He also went to the National Gallery of Victoria and sketched and photographed the Hoffmann dining room chair – making drawings of the whole as well as details, supplemented by written notes. A couple of times I sat again for him on his white studio chair, even as he painted the Gallia one from the Gallery. Then, with his show at Lauraine Diggins open, my portrait

became his prime focus and next goal. At the start of June, I returned for two days and sat for a long afternoon and a long morning.

It was cold in Andrew’s upstairs studio, with its window open. He was in a blue boiler suit and beanie. I had to be in my summertime jeans and t-shirt as he had reminded me to do before I flew down from Canberra. As I passed through the city on my way to Richmond, I bought a new t-shirt, exactly the same, so it would be clean and uncrumpled. At first I tried to keep my entire body still and, with just a small heater nearby, lost feeling in my feet. Eventually, I realised that Andrew was working on me bit by bit, so there was no need to be entirely still. Instead, Andrew would tell me which part, and I would focus on keeping only that in place, which was much easier. While he painted and asked questions, I tried to entertain. As usual, he wanted to know what I was writing and when I might follow his example by quitting institutional life. When late on the first afternoon we ran out of talk, he asked the painter in the studio next door for music. He offered Beethoven’s late quartets and we accepted.

Most of the time Andrew was at the easel, but every so often he would step back, look at me, then squint at the painting, evaluating what he had done, then perhaps step back, look at me and squint at the portrait again, before resuming painting. I, of course, could not see what he was doing, but occasionally would get up to stretch and restore circulation and then sometimes walk around to his side of the easel. It was a strange experience; we were used to talking freely about pictures, whether in museums or dealers’ galleries. We had done the same with Andrew’s paintings when they were completed. This one was different, because it was a work in progress and because it was of me, so I largely held my tongue.

When he had been a private painter, between working as a curator and then director, Andrew had completed several small series of pictures of very different subjects in very different styles. When he set out to become a public painter after leaving the National Museum in mid-2013, he continued to work in dramatically

different modes, even as he primarily painted landscapes. When it came to the painting of me, he had just the beginnings of a practice as a portrait painter, having only completed his two self-portraits. He also had never attempted a painting in a Viennese mode so it was, as another of my friends, the sculptor Nigel Lendon, has observed, as if my portrait came out of nowhere, yet appeared fully formed – a mark of Andrew’s prowess as a painter.

I was not sure how the picture would turn out; at one point, I wondered if it might look too much like a caricature. During those two days of sittings in June, I watched the likeness grow stronger and stronger and the painting become ever more intense. When I left Melbourne, it was set to be a striking portrait, a mark of how, even as Andrew had cancer, he kept getting better as an artist. In another week working in his studio, without me there, Andrew made the portrait even more compelling. When he sent me a photograph of the picture, complete except for varnishing, and then Perry sent me another of the portrait framed, I was astounded, and the enormity of what he had created grew, as the cancer took more hold and it became clear that I would be one of his last oil paintings.

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Portrait of the Gallery a design diary retrospective. by jpw director graeme dix.

When National Portrait Gallery Director Angus Trumble contacted me to enquire as to whether I might be interested in writing a short piece for Portrait, twenty-one issues since my last contribution in 2008, I was enthusiastic and excited. But I was also on holiday in the south of France, enjoying slow summer afternoons by the pool and luxurious evenings outside on the terrace with friends, family and food. Summer in the Languedoc, when the temperatures edge closer to 40 degrees than 30, runs to a very different timetable to the ones we traditionally enjoy over Christmas. They surely are longer than the ones we have at home, and so it seemed an easy commitment and something to look forward to, but definitely not until we got home.

Needless to say, very soon after we arrived back those dreamy days were all too quickly smothered by this drama and that crisis, and so I must confess that I have left my scribblings until the very last moment possible. However, this is similar to the way in which the Design Diary pieces were prepared, so at the very least there is some consistency in my method. During the design, development and then construction of the building, there were always more pressing matters 8

to attend to, and it was always a last minute scramble to gather together a summary of what we’d been up to, or what we were about to embark on, to keep the Portrait editor at bay.

Angus had suggested that the piece might reflect on how the building has settled in since opening in late 2008, and what, if anything, the seven years since have shown. For us, the building is already ten years old, having sprung to life in a heady few weeks in September 2005, as we raced against the clock and our colleagues to develop our ideas for the competition submission.

As I wrote in Design Diary II, my fellow director Richard Johnson remarked in our presentation to the competition jury that ‘our aim was to deliver a design where visitors would remember the experience of the National Portrait Gallery, not their visit to the building’. That this outcome seems so often to be the response from people who have visited, where they describe their impressions and experience, is an enormously satisfying one, as it suggests to me that the essential character of the National Portrait Gallery, which we endeavoured to capture in concrete, timber and glass, now plays an active, but not overt part in defining the contemporary identity of the institution.

Buildings tire when they are no longer cared for, either by those

who use them, or by those whose responsibility it is to maintain them. On both counts, the National Portrait Gallery seems to me to be travelling well, and is in good care.

First, it has accrued a substantial body of support from people who value the place as an integral part of our national cultural infrastructure, as well as an important part of Canberra’s local infrastructure. I don’t often visit Canberra now, but

having spent most of my childhood and early adult life there, one of the aspects of the Portrait Gallery of which I am most proud is that it has become an integral part of daily life for locals, not least my 82 yearold aunt, who still circumnavigates the lake every week, with the obligatory pit stop at the Portrait Gallery Café. The experience of a place as a visitor is very different when you are aware that locals are portrait 51 summer 2015

there, too – they make the place authentic, alive, connected.

Secondly, and just as importantly, the building feels as though it is now finely tuned, having successfully passed the notional running in period. Whilst most modern cars, particularly those pushed off the production line, don’t seem to need much considerate attention in their first few months of use, buildings do

need some time to settle in, and for their ‘drivers’ to become familiar with their idiosyncrasies and personality. This is not to suggest that the place is now predictable or unchanging. For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of the Gallery is that it retains elements of the original experience of the place from 2008, with new ways of working with the building to create fresh experiences and

encounters with the portraits. This combination of (relatively) old and new suggests to me that the place is constantly being tested and tweaked to suit whatever the current requirements might be, but in a way that shows a commitment to working with the grain of the building, rather than against it.

Each of the temporary exhibitions I have seen has made me reflect on how the building has

participated in the experience – sometimes openly, mostly discreetly.

In every instance, the response has shown me, and I hope others, a different character to the place.

Having aligned the completion of every stage of my architectural education perfectly with a major downturn in the Australian economy, over several stints I managed to accumulate more than a decade of living in London. Life 9

as a young graduate when work was tight didn’t afford much time off, but almost without fail I would visit the Tate Gallery in Millbank (now Tate Britain) every weekend to marvel at their unrivalled collection of J. M. W. Turner’s swirling, seething storms of colour and light. It was an easy visit from my digs in Putney, and whilst I was always captivated by the art, I was never completely satisfied – the building was tired, the galleries were drab, the coffee was awful.

Visiting Canberra is a very different experience, but my visits do run to the same pattern – I always visit the Portrait Gallery, and as browsing has never really been my thing, I always seek out certain works, hoping they are on display. But my first stop is always the sofa in the Gordon Darling Hall, preferably one facing west.

Five minutes there, surveying the movements of whoever is about, brings me a great sense of calm and refreshment. It is the perfect place from which to survey the life of the place, and gauge the mood. Not too noisy, not too quiet; every aspect of the place can be experienced from this central strategic position. Having recharged, I check the flowers, which are not just a decorative flourish but an important orientation device that was mentioned obliquely in the competition brief, and which for us become an important emblem for the character of the place. Set in the beautiful vessel made by Johannes Kuhnen, and different on every visit, they are the pivot for the entrance into the galleries, and a foreground to moving into that part of the building, not part of the background.

Then I’m off, looking for three favourites in particular, and anything and everything in between. First, Webber’s portrait of Cook, then Chrissy Amphlett

by Ivan Durrant, and then Paula Dawson’s portrait of Graeme Murphy. Why these? Well, that’s another story, but they do illustrate the extraordinary diversity of the Gallery’s collections, and how each works with the building in a different way. Combined with a coffee, and without wanting to 10

sound vainglorious, my visits to the National Portrait Gallery, short and sharp or long and luxurious (if a meeting finishes early or a plane is delayed), feel uplifting and complete – after another five minutes on the sofa, I leave refreshed, satisfied, but also wanting more of the place, not just the collection – a complete experience very different from those earlier visits to the Tate.

Thinking of those three favourite pieces now, it strikes me that it is the people and personalities who I encountered, and who made the National Portrait Gallery a reality, that are reflected in the building and my personal experience of the place, and refresh my experience on every visit.

Some are universal yet intimate, like Richard Johnson’s shoulder line discreetly marked on the rounded edges of each of the gallery thresholds, or Andrew Sayers’ considered pacing of the gallery layouts, which were worked through with him in a series of discussions and working sessions in our Sydney studio.

Having just learned, at time of writing, of Andrew’s passing after his courageous battle with pancreatic cancer, it is important to acknowledge his significant influence on every aspect of the National Portrait Gallery. His input and vision, from strategic planning and operational issues, policy and governance matters, to details of space, light, materials and finishes, was instrumental in defining the essence of the place. Andrew’s optimism, and his care for the institution, the portraits and the visitor, inspired us and everyone involved in the delivery of the project, and his influence will be an enduring one.

Other memorable experiences refer specifically to moments in the building’s construction that were humorous and horrendous, generally in equal measure, like the time when one of our project architects, quite late in the construction phase when time pressures were at their peak and everyone was stressed as the opening day neared, prepared a site observation report noting

a major structural crack in the entrance hall. Horrifying at first, it quickly became evident through reading the notes that it was a report on a crack of a rather more temporary nature – ‘builder’s crack’, inadvertently encountered when trying to document the installation of some ceiling panels – so readily fixable with no longterm implications for the building!

Thankfully, everyone, including

the contractors, saw the funny side, and it served a very useful purpose to defray the collective nerves for another week or so, and get everyone to focus on the main objective – complete the building, and do it as well as we could collectively manage.

Moving through the collection, I am sure others will recall their own connections with friends, relatives, personalities, moments portrait 51 summer 2015

which link them to others or other events that are significant in their own lives. Those encounters with the portraits are what make the National Portrait Gallery so powerful and so broad ranging in appeal.

I’m not sure this constitutes a ‘portrait of a building’ and it is probably not at all what the director was hoping for – the editor may need to find something

a little racier to pique the interest of Portrait’s readers! It is only my portrait of the place, which I recolour a little every time I visit, adding something, filling in a gap here and there, scratching out something else. All this investment is not to improve the design, or make the building better, but to measure my experience against those earliest design ideas we sketched out a decade ago.

My portrait of the building is always taken from the viewpoint of that sofa in the Gordon Darling Hall, where it is possible to take stock of the formalities which mark the place as a national institution of international repute, as well as the informal bustle of the staff and visitors, comfortable in a setting which exudes excellence and confidence in the future. That seat is also overlooked by Jiawei

Shen’s luminous portrait of Gordon Darling, the Gallery’s founding patron, who has just recently passed away; and it is where I most vividly recall the gravity of Gordon’s influence on the project – like that mysterious force, it was ever-present, always drawing us towards excellence, quietly forceful, unifying and ultimately indelible on every aspect of the place.

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Inner vision angus trumble pays tribute to the gallery’s founding father, l gordon darling ac cmg.

The Chairman, Board, Director and all the Staff of the National Portrait Gallery mourn the loss of our Founding Patron L Gordon Darling ac cmg, who died peacefully in Melbourne on Monday 31 August, 2015. He was 94.

Without the vision, commitment and unfailing support of Gordon Darling – practical, financial, and, above all, moral (for well over the past twenty-five years) – the National Portrait Gallery would never have come into being as it did.

A few months ago, the Gallery was able to pay a fitting tribute to Gordon and Marilyn Darling for all that they have achieved at the Gallery to date. At the same time, commensurate with their vision, the National Portrait Gallery Foundation was launched. Gordon Darling foresaw that this measure will ensure that future generations will build upon the very solid foundations that he and Marilyn Darling have laid.

To Marilyn Darling ac and their families, we extend our most sincere condolences in their loss – a loss in which the whole of their extended National Portrait Gallery family and indeed the Australian public shares.

Gordon Darling was born in England to an Australian father and an English 12

mother. His Scottish great-grandfather John Darling was a pioneering pastoralist, and his grandfather (also John) was one of the founders, and, later, Chairman from 1907 to 1914, of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company Limited (BHP).

Gordon Darling was educated first at Stowe School, Buckingham. During World War II, he served as a major in the AIF in Papua New Guinea. He sat on the Board of BHP for a record 32 years from 1954. For fifteen years during that period he was also Chairman of Rheem Australia, and of Koitaki Ltd. For twenty years he was also a Director of Elder Smith Goldsbrough Mort, as well as being on the Council of Geelong Grammar School. He was also a trustee of the World Wildlife Fund from 1978 to 1982.

Gordon Darling was distinguished by an abiding and passionate interest in the visual arts. From 1982 to 1986, he was chairman of the Council of Trustees of the Australian National Gallery (as it was then known, now the National Gallery of Australia).

He was instrumental in establishing the American Friends of the Australian National Gallery (AFANG), the Gordon Darling AFANG Fund, and, at the end of his term as Chairman, Mr Darling provided funds for the establishment of the Gallery’s Gordon Darling Asia Pacific

L Gordon Darling ac cmg 2006 Jiawei Shen Purchased with the assistance of the Mundango Charitable Trust and Claudia Hyles 2006

Print Fund, which has since acquired more than 7,000 works of art for the national collection.

In 1991 he established the Gordon Darling Foundation, which has since provided funding and support for a wide range of visual arts projects to more than 700 institutional recipients, an extraordinary record of munificence.

Any one of these distinctions would have been enough to define Gordon Darling as one of Australia’s most influential businessmen, and certainly as one of our most effective and generous philanthropists. However, in the years following the Bicentenary in 1988, and his marriage to Marilyn Darling in 1989, Gordon Darling turned his attention to the idea of establishing for Australia a National Portrait Gallery.

To that end, he and Marilyn Darling convened an exhibition entitled Uncommon Australians – Towards an Australian Portrait Gallery, which toured throughout Australia in 1992–93. The huge success of that project ensured that, in stages, the National Portrait Gallery was established – at first as a program within the National Library of Australia, and subsequently, from 1998, in Old Parliament House as a separate entity with an impressive series of board members, initially chaired by Robert Edwards ao for three years, and then by Marilyn Darling ac for eight years. The inaugural director from 1997 to 2010 was Andrew Sayers am.

With Gordon and Marilyn Darling’s unfailing commitment, support and encouragement, the National Portrait Gallery quickly established itself as an ambitious collecting institution, and, in 2008, a new building, designed by the Sydney firm of Johnson Pilton Walker, was opened in the Parliamentary Triangle.

For Gordon Darling the National Portrait Gallery would without hesitation, in our splendid building today, adopt the latter part of the famous epitaph of Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul’s Cathedral: ‘…Vixit annos ultra nonaginta, non sibi sed bono publico. Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice,’ which means ‘He lived for more than ninety years, not for himself but for the public good.

Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.’

Gordon was a great visionary, a great Australian and a great friend.

He is sorely missed. portrait 51 summer 2015

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The Dissecting Room joanna gilmour accounts for australia’s deliciously ghoulish nineteenth century criminal portraiture.

According to the caption on the lithograph issued as a souvenir of the occasion, John Jenkins was twenty-six years old when he met his death in the yard of the Sydney Gaol in November 1834.

A Londoner and sailor who had arrived in Sydney in June 1833 to serve a seven year sentence for theft, Jenkins was hardly the only felon done away with in the batch of hangings that took place in Sydney late the following year, but he was possibly the only one whose execution was such a keenly anticipated event. Not only had Jenkins invited vengeance and disgust with the ‘atrocity of the deed’ he’d committed, the defiant and gleefully unrepentant conduct with which he greeted his trial and conviction for murder had made him the subject of outrage and fascination. Jenkins ‘made such an impression on the minds of the Public’, said the Sydney Herald in its account of his hanging, that at ‘the time appointed for his execution, the neighbourhood of the gaol was crowded to a degree never before observed on any similar occasion, to witness the last scene of one the most depraved of the human species.’

Some months previously, around August or September 1834, Jenkins had escaped from a chain gang and taken up with two other bolters before proceeding on a series of attacks on settlers

to the immediate south-west of Sydney, bailing up isolated huts and relieving their occupants of cash, clothing, food and firearms.

After a few weeks on the run, he and his mates, Thomas Tattersdale and Emanuel Brace, established a hut on land that was part of the Petersham estate, a farm extending south from the Parramatta Road to the Cook’s River and belonging to Robert Wardell, a barrister, co-founder of The Australian newspaper, and a close associate of some of Sydney’s most powerful citizens.

On 7 September 1834, in the midst of making ‘a general inspection of the condition of his property’, Wardell came across Jenkins and his cohorts at their shanty in the bush. Easily construing that they were runaways, Wardell engaged them in a brief exchange and tried persuading them to give themselves up, at which suggestion Jenkins shot him. Wardell’s body was found the next day.

The three offenders were apprehended in the vicinity of a pub on the Liverpool Road less than a week later, and brought before the magistrate almost immediately on a charge of wilful murder. Brace, the youngest of them, agreed to ‘turn approver’ against Tattersdale and Jenkins; when they came to trial the following week the court was ‘crowded to excess’, with spectators shocked and enthralled in equal measure by the callousness of the offence, but in particular by the contempt for proceedings and utter absence of contrition evident in its

perpetrator. ‘The countenance, as well as the demeanour of Jenkins, indicated him to be of a most reckless and ferocious disposition’, stated the Sydney Gazette, and The Australian reported on the ‘desperately audacious character’ Jenkins displayed in physically attacking his co-accused in court. On being found guilty and sentenced to death, Jenkins said that ‘they might have well have sent him a bloody old woman as the counsel he had … that he had not had a fair trial, but that he did not care a damn for anyone in the court; and that he would as soon shoot any of the persons present as not’.

John Jenkins, aged 26, executed at Sydney, Novr. 10th, 1834, for the murder of Dr. Robert Wardell 1834 Charles Rodius lithograph Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia Self portrait c.1849 Charles Rodius pastel, ink and wash on paper Purchased 2009

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Violent, shameless, rancorous, murderous: Jenkins was exactly the type of individual whose likeness was ripe for commercial exploitation, and his activities, happily for Sydney’s small but mercantile-minded artist community, coincided with the emergence of the local printmaking industry and the development of a market for depictions of peculiarly colonial subjects. As historians of Australian colonial art have often explained, the 1830s was the decade during which locally-based artists and printers began being able to capitalise on the numbers of free settlers encouraged to the colony during the previous decade, transforming Sydney and Hobart from brutish outposts into thriving and respectable municipalities replete with the usual commercial features of British provincial centres. ‘The muses and graces are not inimical to our southern climes’, wrote Presbyterian minister John McGarvie in 1829; ‘there are several good painters and engravers in Sydney, and bank plates, shop bills, silver plate arms, lettering, cards & c. and all that is technically named job work may be executed here with as much beauty and accuracy as in any provincial town in Britain.’

The transportation system having already supplied the Australian colonies with a number of proficient printmakers, the increased free immigration of the twenties and thirties bolstered the available numbers of artists versed in the ‘useful rather than the ornamental’ branches of the profession, and those who chose to come to Australia for the economic opportunities afforded by middleclass, consumerist communities.

This meant a setting that was no longer primarily concerned with the production of natural history, ethnographic and topographical images that served a curiosity or propaganda purpose and were intended solely for the satisfaction of interests and authorities at Sketches of street sellers, including a seller of execution broadsides c.1835 George Scharf graphite on paper The British Museum Purchased from Elizabeth Scharf 1862

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portrait 51 summer 2015

‘home’, but, rather, one that had local consumers and collectors in its sights with the types of images that reflected colonial quirks and experience.

As colonial art scholar Richard Neville has explained, the printing industry in pre-1850 Sydney was ‘competent but limited’, unable to equal the technical quality of works produced in London, and making few pretensions to ‘high art’, but sufficiently equipped to create ‘provincial imagery … for a market which did not require highly finished works of art.’ In communities with such a history of malefaction to draw on, it is perhaps to be expected that the depiction of various types of ne’erdo-well forms a small but distinct vein in the output of certain artists working in Australia in the first half of the nineteenth century, and whose works constitute an Australian edition of the catchpenny criminal images and execution broadsides that had been a feature of the English popular print trade since the early 1700s.

Portraits of criminals were printed and collected for various reasons, not least of which was the growing currency of the theories of phrenology and physiognomy, which held that mental faculties and character could be understood by an analysis of skulls, features, bones and anatomies. Souvenir lithographs such as that of John Jenkins, or of the dead bushranger John Donohoe, killed in a gunfight near Campbelltown in 1830, were of interest for such reasons and would have been consulted for physical ‘evidence’ of the subjects’ predisposition to violence and destructiveness. Many, evidently, were interested in how criminals looked, in the dock or standing on the scaffold, and a standard component of newspaper reports of executions was to describe the villain’s pre-death demeanour or their appearance in the exact moments before they met their awful fates. Were they repentant, defiant, resigned, petrified, unmoved? And were they weeping, whimpering, sneering, smiling, quivering, or praying fervently in the moments before they dropped

to their deaths? Printmakers responded, producing portraits which satisfied the appetite for real-life, salacious, sordid and gruesome stories, but which equally were promoted, sold and accepted as didactic, scientific and morally fortifying texts.

Consider some of the portraits created by Charles Rodius

(1802–1860), who arrived in Sydney as a convicted thief in late 1829. German-born and Frenchtrained, Rodius’ skills as an artist and draughtsman were made use of soon after his arrival in Sydney, and by 1832 he had begun working independently. Like other artists in Sydney at the time, Rodius’ practice was by necessity diverse,

accommodating the tastes and sensibilities of the elites along with the more prosaic requirements of a provincial market. In addition to topographic views, portraits of his patron’s houses and estates, and likenesses of eminent citizens, Rodius produced works of grittier or urban flavour, most notably the lithograph of Jenkins, advertised Donohoe c.1830 attributed to Thomas Mitchell lithograph Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

A government jail gang, Sydney, N.S. Wales 1830 Augustus Earle printed by Charles Hullmandel lithograph Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia

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Knatchbull, Murderer of Mrs Ellen Jamieson c.1844 published by the Hibernian Printing Office, Sydney lithograph National Portrait Gallery Gift of Leo Schofield am 2005.

Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

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by publisher John Gardner Austin within days of Jenkins’ execution in November 1834. Rodius was also among the artists who cashed in on the hanging of murderer John Knatchbull in February 1844.

Transported to New South Wales for robbery in 1824, Knatchbull’s suitably villainous colonial back story included a subsequent conviction (for

forgery), a commuted death sentence, incarceration on the Phoenix prison hulk, a poisoning attempt, and a stint on Norfolk Island, where he became involved in a convict escape plot to steal a ship and sail it to South America.

Knatchbull only escaped the noose in the case of the latter offence by informing on his co-conspirators, and was returned to Sydney

and thence Port Macquarie to complete the remainder of his fourteen-year sentence. He gained a ticket of leave in 1843, but early the following year was arrested for the horrendous assault carried out on a woman named Ellen Jamieson, a Sydney widow and shopkeeper. Knatchbull is said to have gained access to Jamieson’s shop after hours ‘on pretence of purchasing a pint of vinegar’ before attacking her with a tomahawk and stealing her pocketbook. The alarm was raised, and Knatchbull – whom witnesses had earlier seen lurking in the neighbourhood looking as if he was ‘after no good’ – was soon located hiding behind a door, his trousers bloodied and his victim insensible on the floor.

She lingered for a fortnight before dying of her injuries. The inquest into Jamieson’s death attracted ‘intense interest’, and on being committed to stand trial for murder Knatchbull was subjected to the ‘hootings, hissings and cheers of the several hundred men, women and children’ who had congregated outside the public house where the inquest and committal proceedings were conducted. During his consequent trial for murder, Knatchbull’s defence barrister, the politician Robert Lowe, attempted to persuade the court that his client should be found not guilty on the grounds of ‘moral insanity’. He failed. Lowe then appealed against the penalty of death duly meted out, arguing that the sentence was invalid because the judge, William Burton, had neglected to give the order in sentencing that Knatchbull’s body be anatomised and dissected. This appeal, unsurprisingly, failed too.

In the weeks leading up to his execution, various printers were advertising the availability of Knatchbull portraits, all claiming to be ‘just published’ and ‘taken from life, as he appeared at the Supreme Court’. Similar instances – of publishers clamouring to outdo their competitors as soon as the prospect of a bankable hanging was announced – are documented as having occurred in England, portrait 51 summer 2015

with historian Vic Gatrell pointing out how the law reforms which afforded offenders a chance to appeal against their sentences played nicely into the hands of the profit-focused print fraternity.

No more the scenario wherein a malefactor was sentenced to die one day and dispatched the next; instead, there might exist a period of days or weeks in which a series of build-up portraits and accounts might be produced. In Knatchbull’s case, for example, publisher Edward Barlow began by offering customers ‘a correct likeness of this inhuman monster’, and several weeks later advertised the availability of a view of Darlinghurst Gaol taken during Knatchbull’s execution, presumably an image which depicted the thousands of people who were said to have gathered for the event.

Barlow’s rival, William Baker (c.1806–1857), was another who got in on the action, his Hibernian Printing Office producing a beforeand-after lithograph showing Knatchbull in life, apparently in the dock, atop an illustration of his head in profile, shaved and laid out in the deadhouse. Within a week of Knatchbull’s conviction, Rodius too was respectfully acquainting the public with his intention ‘to publish a lithograph likeness of John Knatchbull, convicted … of the murder of Ellen Jamieson, of whom a likeness in profile will in the same drawing be subjoined.’ Rodius’ print could be acquired for a shilling and was later ‘pronounced by several cognoscenti to be the only correct likeness of Knatchbull now published.’

Despite the many newspaper references attesting that these portraits and their like were created in Australia, extant examples are now comparatively few. Produced cheaply and quickly in response to the stories and scandals of the day, it is to be assumed that their appeal or collectability just as rapidly became outmoded as their subjects disappeared from public commentary and view. ‘The expensive and exquisite has been

treasured and guarded from the day it was made’, British Museum curator Sheila O’Connell has stated of popular prints, while ‘the cheap and the crude has been thrown away once it served its purpose.’

Extant examples of the various prints made of Knatchbull are rare, as are copies of Rodius’ lithograph of Jenkins, whose demise was seemingly a cause for public celebration. By contrast, the death mask taken of Jenkins’ victim Robert Wardell has been preserved as the basis of the marble portrait medallion installed at St James Church in Sydney, underlining the correspondingly poor survival rate of printed portraits of despised, unconventional or

ephemerally interesting sitters.

As one Sydney Morning Herald contributor said in regards to the brief bout of enthusiasm among Sydney printmakers for the documentation of Knatchbull’s features: ‘To preserve the portraits of the virtuous is an excellent way of keeping them in remembrance, but we do not approve of anything likely to perpetuate the memory of such a man as Knatchbull; the sooner he is forgotten, the better.’

The Govenor of Gaol (Henry Keck) 1847 William Nicholas pen-lithograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2006

This is an edited extract from Chapter 5 of Joanna Gilmour’s Sideshow Alley: Infamy, the macabre and the portrait, available now as an accompaniment to the Gallery’s eponymous summer exhibition.

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Getting a head

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alexandra roginski gets a feel for phrenology’s fundamentals.

In the hours after Ned Kelly was hanged at the Melbourne Gaol in November of 1880, the owner of a popular waxworks museum stooped over his head to create the mould for the famous death mask. This object, depicting a Kelly shorn of his beard, today embodies the 19th century interest in criminal type, and the anatomical clues that doctors, scientists, and advocates of social reform tried to glean from measuring head shape. It also stands in for Kelly’s skull, which was separated from the rest of his remains and never recovered, a pawn in the period’s fascination with

the collection of crania for analysis and display.

The phrenologist Archibald Sillars Hamilton published his analysis of the death mask in the Melbourne Herald within days of the execution, feeding a public fascination with the fate of the bushranger. The skull was remarkable, he wrote. ‘There is not one head in a thousand of the criminal type so small in caution as his, and there are few heads among the worst which would risk so much for the love of power.’

Hamilton, a bombastic Scotsman aged in his early sixties, had positioned himself at the centre of the protest movement against Ned Kelly’s execution, even accompanying Kate portrait 51 summer 2015

Kelly and other supporters to meet with the Governor to plead for a last-minute reprieve. In death, Ned Kelly provided Hamilton with a platform for preaching the anti-capital punishment values of the contested science on which he had built his career as a showman.

Devised at the very end of the 18th century by Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall, phrenology arrived in Australia by 1829, when the short-lived Australian Phrenological Society was born in Sydney. Phrenology soon forged a position as a reform science debated at the highest levels of colonial politics, and also as a moral philosophy that aligned with 19th century values of selfimprovement. Its practitioners claimed

that, by identifying inherent strengths and weaknesses, one could position him or herself for the greatest success.

Phrenologists believed that the exterior of the skull directly reflected the surface of the brain, which itself comprised a multitude of organs responsible for functions ranging from love of children to religiosity, concentration, and social sympathy.

Gall identified 27 such ‘organs’ within the brain, which – aside from a few coincidences – bear little similarity to the actual functionality of the brain as we know it today. The exterior of the head was mapped with the characteristic sections of the head that continue to symbolise this practice.

Death mask of Franz Muller 1864 attributed to Cornelius Donovan plaster Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy & Pathology, University of Melbourne

And while today we might term phrenology a ‘pseudoscience’, it was in fact the subject of hot academic debate among doctors, anatomists and naturalists for much of the 19th century.

Scottish lawyer George Combe was arguably phrenology’s greatest populariser. He expanded the system to include 35 organs, and penned the Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects, a book that adapted phrenology into a moral philosophy, and which – according to historian of science Roger Cooter – sold more copies during the 19th century than Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

Meanwhile, in the US, the Fowler family commercialised phrenology into 21

Ned Kelly death mask 1880 Dr Maximilian L. Kreitmayer plaster Private collection

an empire that centred on a prolific printing press that also advocated reformist causes ranging from anticorsetry to the virtues of octagonal housing. It was the Fowlers who designed and manufactured the iconic porcelain phrenological heads that inhabit dusty shelves in curiosity shops today. Within this American milieu, explains art historian Charles Colbert, artists such as the painter William Sidney Mount and the sculptor Hiram Powers explored principles of phrenological composition in their portraiture.

For phrenologists, the greatest prizes were heads that differed from the middling European type. Intellectuals such as composer Joseph Hayden, or even the phrenological superstar 22

Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (sometime assistant and dissector to Gall), found themselves posthumously cut up and analysed. At the other end of the spectrum, criminal skulls and remains of non-European races were collected and shown as demonstrations of aberrance.

Wax museums such as that operated

by Maximilian Kreitmayer (who took Ned Kelly’s death mask) titillated the public with lifelike representations of celebrity criminals, and an economy of plaster casts also emerged to service the popular science.

During the Victorian era, droves of phrenologists appeared in the Australian colonies. Enthusiasts ranged from lowlevel ‘bump readers’ that even other phrenologists did not take seriously, to

administrators with interest in social reform such as Alexander Maconochie, superintendent of the penal colony of Norfolk Island between 1840 and 1844.

Successful lecturers such as Hamilton displayed skulls and demonstrated on live subjects to fulfil the period’s entertainment genre of ‘rational amusement’. Others offered divination from stalls in arcades or markets.

This was science accessible to anybody who could pick up a book or attend courses at one of the many mechanics’ institutes that peppered Australian towns and cities during the period. Through the power of touch and observation, a practitioner could claim to offer insights into the most intimate secrets of the human mind, and assume the social authority of a scientist, often acquiring the title of ‘Professor’. It became so popular here that, by the end of the 19th century, authors could casually drop phrenological terms or ideas into their work and expect comprehension from the reading public.

Henry Lawson, for example, played on the trope of the skull-collecting phrenologist in his bitter-sweet Story of Malachi, published in 1896 in a collection of short fiction.

Archibald Sillars Hamilton, known professionally as ‘AS’, became one of the most famous phrenologists in colonial Australia. Born in or before 1819 in Ayrshire, Scotland, he grew up as phrenology reached a frenzy of popularity in his native country. His father, Edward Hamilton, was a muslin manufacturer, but it was the influence of his mother, the popular phrenologist Agnes Sillars Hamilton, that determined his future livelihood. Cooter writes that she attracted large crowds and even using a bag of marbles to represent the organs of the brain, but that other phrenologists regarded her as a ‘quack’, and that one client termed her a ‘dirty old wench’.

Her son arrived in Launceston in November 1854, and over the next 30 years lectured and gave private readings across Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and both of New Zealand’s islands. In 1854, a private customer of Hamilton’s could opt for either a description of their character with advice (3 shillings, 6 pence), a written sketch of character (5 shillings), or a detailed character reading with a phrenological chart (10 shillings).

Among his many patrons, some of whom undoubtedly visited out portrait 51 summer 2015

Archibald Sillars Hamilton 1871 photograph within the documents from the divorce of Emma Elizabeth Hamilton and AS Hamilton Image courtesy the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office Agnes Maria Hamilton Grey (nee Melville) From collection of photographs, principally of Henry Kendall, but also of his biographer Agnes Maria Hamilton Grey and her family Image courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW

of curiosity, were young adults who consulted Hamilton for career guidance, including aspiring actress Agnes Melville. As her biographer Jill Dimond describes, in 1878 this young woman, aged in her twenties, sat before the phrenologist, and quickly became his amanuensis and then wife.

Parents took children to Hamilton for advice on future employment, with his summations of character seemingly general enough to apply to most boys or girls. For example, in an 1855 character sketch of Tasmanian Quaker boy Robert Walker, Hamilton wrote: ‘He is fond of animals and passionately delighted with

play … He requires a great deal of advice and guidance as he is so very impulsive.’

Such character readings, scattered through Australian archives, are pen portraits pieced together from abstract measurements. Perhaps the most significant of these was carried out on the head of Mr Wilson Esquire in January 1880. Hamilton advised this 23-year-old man: ‘You are best fitted for a profession in which quick observation, penetrating intelligence, lively wit, good language and logical acumen are indispensible. You have more than ordinary courage and excellent selfpossession … You require a little more

patience, reserve, acquisitiveness, tact, diplomacy and management in the strict financial and prudential sense.’

Hamilton thought that Mr Wilson would make a good advocate, or that, with ‘a few years study’ of political economy, social science, natural theology, phrenology, psychology and human physiology, he could ‘make [his] way successfully as a member of parliament’.

The assessment was correct in substance, but underestimated the potential of this singular young man.

‘Yours is an intellect of ability, not genious’ [sic], wrote Hamilton. But this tall, dark-haired person was in fact Alfred Deakin, lawyer, journalist, spiritualist, and future Prime Minister of Australia, who had consulted Hamilton under an assumed name.

Deakin had already been elected to the Victorian parliamentary seat of West Bourke the previous year, but resigned in his maiden speech following claims about unfair polling. When he sat for Hamilton, his ideas and ambitions may have been in a state of turmoil. Just weeks after the phrenological reading, he would lose the election for his seat, only to regain it by July 1880.

Perhaps the phrenologist guessed the true identity of his sitter. After all, he took a keen interest in civic and political life, donating lecture proceeds to charity, running for public office, and campaigning against capital punishment. Hamilton argued that phrenology could be used to reform 23

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Death mask of John Weechurch 1875 maker unknown plaster Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy & Pathology, The University of Melbourne

Death mask of Frederick Bailey Deeming 1892 maker unknown plaster National Trust of Australia (Victoria), Old Melbourne Gaol Collection

Death mask of Daniel Morgan 1865 maker unknown plaster Harry Brookes Allen Museum of Anatomy & Pathology, The University of Melbourne

Death mask of George Melville 1853 maker unknown plaster National Trust of Australia (Victoria), Old Melbourne Gaol Collection

portrait 51 summer 2015

the characters of criminals, or applied pre-emptively to children to prevent the fulfilment of a sinister, destructive anatomy.

But Hamilton was not beyond moral reform himself. In his most famous transgression, in the regional centre of Maitland in 1860, he was charged with inciting to exhume corpses from a burial ground. His target in that case was the skull of the Aboriginal man Jim Crow, executed a few months earlier.

Hamilton had approached the sexton of the St Peter’s Church of England Burial Ground and offered one pound if he would dig down and remove the heads of Jim Crow and the convicted murderer executed that day. Hamilton was acquitted by jury of the alleged incitement, and secretly returned at some point during the next two years to exhume the skull that was denied to him. In somewhat tangled reasoning, he used it to argue that the young Aboriginal man could not be legally culpable because of the ‘moral idiocy’ revealed by the skull, a judgment contradicted by a Hunter Valley local who knew Jim Crow and argued for his intelligence.

In the guise of Victorian theatricality, Hamilton’s collection of human remains was a powerful drawcard to his lectures. By the time of his death, he had amassed some 55 skulls or parts thereof – about 30 Aboriginal, four Maori, one ‘Hindoo’, one Chinese, and the rest European. He sourced them not only through grave-robbing, but also through gifts and trades within the networks he forged in each new town.

Three of his Tasmanian criminals were hanged and dissected, two of them at St Mary’s Hospital, a 60-bed institution for the labouring classes run by the City of Hobart’s medical officer, Dr Samuel Edward Bedford. Museum Victoria, in Melbourne, now holds the collection, and several of its non-European members, including Jim Crow, have been repatriated to country.

The only surviving photograph of this fervent collector (to our knowledge) is a carte de visite taken by Archibald McDonald, whose studio was based in

Alfred Deakin c.1922 Charles Webster Gilbert bronze on black marble base Courtesy of the Historic Memorials Collection, Parliament House Collection, Department of Parliamentary Services, Canberra

Melbourne’s St George’s Hall, Bourke Street East, between roughly 1864 and 1873. Newspaper advertisements and articles that reveal Hamilton’s movements suggest that he did not return to Victoria until the late 1860s after a stint in New Zealand, meaning that by the time he posed for McDonald he was in his late forties. Hamilton’s wavy hair had receded so far by this stage as to truly accentuate what his third wife, Agnes Hamilton, referred to as his ‘colossal forehead’. His eyes sternly meet the viewer, and in a reference to his livelihood he grasps a miniature bust of Prince Albert (who dabbled in phrenology), pointing with his other hand to the prince consort’s forehead.

Perhaps it is the combination of the droopiness created by the full beard and moustache, the severe nature of Victorian-era posture, and the heavy lines that connect Hamilton’s nose and mouth, but the expression in the phrenologist’s wide eyes is melancholy.

Although he attained a position of notoriety within the Australian colonies that sustained his profile and career as an itinerant lecturer, Hamilton never achieved financial stability. When he died in Redfern, Sydney, in 1884, he left his much younger third wife little in terms of material comfort, forcing her in the weeks after his death to advertise her own services as a phrenologist.

In Australia, the science of head reading continued to be practised well into the mid-20th century, as an arcade or showground amusement, and as a tool in the emerging science of occupational psychology. But its most Gothic incarnation swirled around the gallows during the 19th century. Phrenologists in the Australian colonies lurked near these contraptions of death, arguing that their science provided a window into the most despicable minds, and hoping that these criminals would eventually pass into their hands as prized, silent objects.

This article is derived from Alexandra Roginski’s book on popular phrenology in Australia, The Hanged Man and the Body Thief: Finding Lives in a Museum Mystery (Monash University Publishing, 2015), available now.

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The portrait writ large karen vickery on chang the chinese giant in australia The National Portrait Gallery houses five arresting cartes de visite photographs of Chang Woo Gow, known as ‘Chang the Chinese Giant’.

Dated 1871 and taken in Australia, each image emphasises Chang’s remarkable proportions through contrasting him with more ‘standard’- sized people; in two portraits, despite being seated, Chang is definitively taller than the 26

adult man standing beside him. Equally notably, an exoticised ‘Chineseness’ imbues the mass-produced portraits, with Chang costumed in elaborate embroidered formal robes, bearing a delicate folding fan and sporting a traditional hairdo of remarkably long plaited pigtail, and shaved front of the head. In one image, Chang wears impeccable European dress with frockcoat, waistcoat and fob watch, but is seated amongst three standing European men, over whom he towers,

Chang the Chinese giant in European dress with Chinese boy and three European men, one of whom is his manager c.1871 Alexander McDonald carte de visite photograph on card Purchased 2010 Chang the Chinese giant with his wife Kin Foo c.1871 Unknown carte de visite photograph on card Purchased 2010

while a young Chinese boy with pigtail and pyjamas emphasises Chang’s heritage.

Introduced to Australia in about 1859, cartes de visite were small, portable and inexpensive. They were usually ten by six centimetres and consisted of an albumen photograph printed from a negative onto paper, which was then mounted onto a piece of card.

Cartes de visite could be produced cheaply in large quantities and served as ideal items for distribution or sale by celebrated performers, as well as making photography available to the masses.

In Chang’s case, the cartes de visite were distributed and often sold at ‘levées’, performances billed as ‘an audience’ in which he exhibited himself to the public for the cost of up to three shillings. More respectable than the later ‘freak shows’ popularised in the United States, Chang was nevertheless a celebrity for his unique combination of Asiatic ‘otherness’ and gigantic portrait 51 summer 2015

proportions. So extraordinary was he that his manager forbade him to walk the streets, or be seen freely, lest a public sighting of the giant should diminish the exclusivity of the experience of the shows, and/or harm the sale of tickets and accompanying merchandise. He is also said to have always travelled with a tailor-made coffin in case disaster struck, a morbid reminder of the giant’s common humanity, despite his commodification.

Declarations of Chang’s height differ; variously described as being from seven feet eight and three-quarter inches (235.5cm) to over eight feet (240cm) tall, there are no authoritative records. He was widely believed to be the world’s tallest man at the time he travelled to England, France, the United States, New Zealand and Australia with manager, Edward Parlett. He first appeared as an exhibit at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in 1865, accompanied by his wife, Kin Foo, and a Chinese dwarf called Chung

Mow. Born sometime between 1841 and 1847, he is likely to have been in his late teens or early twenties at this time and was reported in the press to be ‘still growing’. He then toured Europe, where his multi-lingual capacities were much commented upon; Chang purportedly spoke between six and ten languages well. PT Barnum, the great showman and circus owner, invited Chang to America to appear in his shows for the princely sum of $500 per month, and Chang agreed, arriving for his second and final tour of the United States in 1880.

His sojourn in Australia commenced on 24 January, 1871, after the first of his American tours; it was of several years’ duration and included visits and appearances throughout Victoria.

He was reported to have appeared at St George’s Hall and Weston’s Opera House in Melbourne, and at the Lyceum Theatre in Bendigo where he stayed for about a month. There, he included

Chang the Chinese giant with his manager cowering on the floor c.1871 Unknown carte de visite photograph on card Purchased 2010 Chang the Chinese giant with his seated wife Kin Foo with fan and manager c.1871 Alexander McDonald carte de visite photograph on card Purchased 2010

performances for the Benevolent Asylum and contributed 50% of the box office as his charitable donation. In gratitude, the good folk of Bendigo fashioned a wax effigy of Chang which was displayed at the Easter Fair from 1877 to 1895.

The touring performance also visited Echuca, Geelong and Ballarat, before travelling north on 24 April.

In Sydney, Chang was presented with a gold watch by the mayor and dined at Government House. By the time the party arrived in Sydney, Kin Foo was no longer referred to in newspapers or publicity material as Chang’s wife, but as ‘a Chinese lady’. One of Chang’s multiple biographies, written in 1871, excises all references to Kin Foo as his wife that had appeared in the 1870 edition.

However, as Sophie Couchman of the Chinese Museum in Melbourne argues, Chang’s biographies constitute part of the publicity machine around him and, as such, are no more reliable as sources of fact than today’s mass-circulation 27

Chang the Chinese giant and party c.1871 Paterson Brothers carte de visite photograph on card Purchased 2010

magazines in their reporting of the lives of celebrities.

It remains unclear whether Kin Foo and Chang were ever married. However, whilst in Sydney, Chang met Liverpoolborn Catherine Santley; she was the daughter of a well-known publisher from Geelong and was living in Sydney as the companion to a Mrs John Rogers.

Chang was introduced to Catherine (Kitty) by Mr John Rogers, who was secretary of one of his performance venues, the School of Arts Hall. A ‘defined’ relationship did emerge in this case; the couple were later married at the Congregational Church in Sydney, then situated in the reverend’s house on the corner of College and Stanley Streets. Catherine was born in 1847, making the couple close in age. The couple had two sons and, at the end of Chang’s performance career, retired to Bournemouth where they opened a tea house; Chang also imported Chinese goods into England.

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Reconstructing the experience of performance requires a degree of conjecture, founded on historical accounts. Chang is first noted on the European stage at the Egyptian Hall in London during 1865-6, but really came to prominence at the great Paris Exposition of 1867. The Victorian taste for grand international exhibitions of the wonders of the industrial age is well established.

Amongst the trade exhibits, however, cultural and semi-anthropological displays were also popular, feeding into audience fascination with the ‘fantastic’ exotica which had long been an aspect of Orientalism.

Upon evening closure of the formal exhibition halls, the surrounding gardens became a fashionable venue for entertainment until 11pm each evening.

Food and drink were served and the audience wandered between outdoor pavilions and stages, marvelling at performances from tight-rope walkers, jugglers and representatives of nations

of the world clad in national costume.

The Chinese Pavilion was one such venue, and the wandering visitor would encounter Chang seated upon his throne or mingling with visitors to the pavilion.

After the Paris Exposition, Chang journeyed to Dublin, then to Northern England and Scotland. In 1869, he spent twelve weeks at Barnum’s American Museum before touring the eastern states, and thence to California where he appeared alongside Japanese acrobats and a group described as ‘a tribe of American Indians’. From San Francisco, Chang travelled to Honolulu and then to Auckland. He was a well-seasoned performer with a refined stage act by the time he reached Australia.

Surmising on the basis of a range of sources and contemporary accounts, one of Chang’s Australian performances might have proceeded as follows: tickets to a levée might cost up to three shillings, with a levée in this context referring to a public court assembly at which one would attend upon a person of great rank. Amidst a hushed auditorium, a tinkle of bells would begin rising to a crescendo as a musician took to the largest brass bells with a mallet. Chang would slowly rise from his throne-like chair on stage. To the rousing accompaniment of The Great Chang Polka on the piano (supposedly written by James Marquis Chisholm for Chang’s appearances at the Egyptian Hall), Chang would slowly descend to greet his audience in a ceremony referred to as ‘chin chin’, making light conversation and exchanging polite greetings with patrons who gasped in awe at his magnificently costumed person. His great hands would gently clasp select hands in the audience in greeting. As one Sydney Morning Herald columnist reported in 1865: ‘ … judged by a Chinese standard of beauty, Chang may really be called handsome. His expression is singularly mild and gentle, almost to effeminacy. There is something very courteous and engaging, too, in his mien as he walks about from one spectator to another, shaking hands with all who desire that honour.’

Chang’s Australian levées sometimes included the Australian performer and little person, Tom Thumb; the giant might nurse him tenderly in his arms or allow him to stand on the outstretched palm of his hand. Chang’s partner, Kin Foo, the ‘Golden Lily’, would also exhibit her tiny delicate bound foot, to gasps of portrait 51 summer 2015

amazement. She, too, would descend from the stage and chat graciously to visitors in English, whilst selling cartes de visite and small fans or tiny carvings in scented wood or ivory. Upon returning to the stage, Chang might take a piece of chalk and write his name on the wall of the theatre at a height of ten feet from the floor, in both Chinese characters and English. The Sydney Morning Herald of 1 January 1866 observed of Chang: ‘When he returns and seats himself again on his throne, and throws back his head with the serenity of good natured condescension, he gradually dilates before our eyes till we seem to see again the majesty and tranquillity of those calm idols in the Assyrian Court of the Crystal Palace, which, with their hands on their knees and their heads far above the level of human turmoil, seem to convey a sense of sublime supramundane life by virtue of mere magnitude of form, and features lapped in profound repose.’

And then, in the final moments of the levée, Chang was sometimes known to repeat this epigram: ‘The fish dwell in the depths of the waters, And the eagles in the sides of heaven; The one, though high, may be reached with an arrow, And the other, though deep, with a hook; But the heart of a man, at a foot distance, Cannot be known.

Yet I trust my heart is known to you. It is full of thankfulness for your kindness, and kindness is more binding than a loan.’

Despite his ‘freakish’ size and exoticised Chineseness, Chang clearly impressed with his gentleness and ‘cultured’ demeanour. His epigram, quoted above, is an appeal to the hearts of the audience to recognise and honour his common humanity. Though displayed

The Australian Tom Thumb (John David Armstrong) c.1880 Sarony & Co. carte de visite photograph on card Purchased 2014 The Australian Tom Thumb (John David Armstrong) c.1880 J D. Cooper carte de visite photograph on card Purchased 2014

for his extraordinary outward qualities, contemporaries were equally compelled to comment on his inner qualities as his career continued. Known for many instances of philanthropy through share of ticket sales to needy charities, Chang shaped his performance persona to project dignity and refinement.

Of his final years in Bournemouth, bringing up his sons and running his business, the local community noted (after his death) ‘ ... after the first novelty wore off [he] attracted no special attention.’ Indeed, he was remembered as a friendly and affable member of the community; over one hundred mourners attended his funeral, where he was buried beside his beloved Catherine who had died a few months earlier. His orphaned teenage sons, Edwin Santley and Ernest Alfred, were brought up by a friend and local photographer, William J Day, after their parents’ deaths. They proudly retained their family name, Gow. 29

The boy, the bed and the gun christopher chapman contemplates the provocative performance art of chris burden.

A young man stripped to his underwear, climbed into bed, and stayed there for twenty-two days. In a large white room with a bare floor, the single bed is pushed against the far wall. Chris Burden, aged twenty-five, wears a white singlet and pulls the white bed-covers up to his armpits. He hasn’t given any instructions to Josh, who soon devises a pattern of providing food and water and taking care of Chris’ toilet needs. The temperature is fairly constant and mild, but Chris sometimes shivers or sweats.

This was a performance art piece early in the career of an artist whose decades of endeavour expanded across large-scale installation artworks and feats of engineering. Extreme Measures, an expansive exhibition of Burden’s artistic explorations, opened at New York’s New Museum in October 2013, less than two years before his death from melanoma in 2015.

Josh Young ran the Market Street Program at Venice Beach, California, an exhibition space that supported local artists. For his exhibition in February 1972, Chris asked Josh for a single bed to be placed in the gallery. That was all. The first two days were a struggle; Chris was anxious. A year earlier he had borne a performance that lasted five days. Now, laid out here in this bed, the idea of time had changed. It stretched.

The still air was dented by the clap of footsteps, but gallery visitors kept their distance.

Chris was among a group of female 30

Intro from Documentation of Selected Works 1971–74 Chris Burden video still Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

and male students whose performance artworks were a ground-breaking force.

Photographic documentation of his performances shows how boyish he appeared, like a teenager with puppy fat. ‘He looks like a kid who could be kicking a ball in an empty lot’ was Marion McEvoy’s description in 1975, and a commensurate air of innocence pervaded his performance artwork for the graduating students’ group exhibition at University of California, Irvine in May 1971. For two weeks during the University Art Gallery’s

open hours, he rode a ten-speed bicycle in constant loops through the front door, out the back, around and back through the gallery again. This playful performance followed one just a week earlier where he was locked in a two-bytwo-by-three-foot locker for five days.

‘In some of the pieces I’m setting up situations to test my own illusions or fantasies about what happens’, Chris told Avalanche magazine interviewer, Willoughby Sharp, in 1973. The five days he spent inside the locker for his Masters of Fine Art graduating portrait 51 summer 2015

Bed piece 1972 Chris Burden video still Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

presentation didn’t evoke the sense of isolation he had anticipated. Instead, Chris found himself engaged in conversations through the ventilation grilles in the closed locker door. Art professors even held classes in front of the locker, with Chris participating in the discussions. Softly spoken, Chris would grow up to be an ‘amicable man’, as Peter Schjeldahl put it in a 2007 New Yorker profile, a ‘solidly fleshy’ sixtyyear-old ‘given to arduous enthusiasms’.

At Market Street, in the bed, days passed. A new feeling settled upon him.

Twitches in his fingers and toes softened into warm pulses. Circulatory and nervous systems hummed, muscle tissue and fat stores oscillated heaviness into weightlessness. Breath found a deep rhythm. His mind was alert, precisely tuned to the wet, warm signals washing through his body. I could stay like this, Chris thought. As the performance piece progressed, his friends became concerned, worried that he had ‘flipped out’. Towards the end, Chris felt a ‘sort of nostalgia’ for the experience, ‘a deep regret for having to return to normal’,

but he knew it was inevitable. After the scheduled twenty-two day exhibition, he got up and it was over.

Three years later, in 1975, Chris asked for a large corner shelf to be built ‘ten feet above the floor and two feet below the ceiling’ for his solo exhibition at Ronald and Frayda Feldman’s gallery on New York’s Upper East Side. This time he spent twenty-two days lying flat on the shelf, out of the view of gallery visitors, subsisting on fruit juice.

His thoughts and emotions echoed the experience of Bed piece. ‘What’s weird,’ Chris said, when interviewed

by David Robbins in 1980, ‘is that you start to like it up there. You feel power, because nobody knows what’s going on.

I don’t just sit up there and meditate.

I go to work, psychologically.’ Chris’ ‘psychological work’ was noteworthy.

Helene Winer, who ran the gallery at Pomona College in the early seventies, recalled it as ‘hyper-focused detachment’. And it was this intense detachment that Chris had needed to call upon four years earlier, for the performance piece that is regarded by many as his defining moment.

The student gallery, F Space, in Santa Ana, was twenty minutes from the UCLA campus. In a new light-industrial estate, it was named for the generic prefab building’s alphabet label ‘F’. On November 19, 1971, in this stark room, Chris Burden was shot in the name of art. His matter-of-fact description of the performance piece Shoot reads: ‘At 7.45pm I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.’ The bullet 31

was meant to graze his arm, but it left an entry and exit wound. A photograph taken just after the event shows Chris seated on a chair while the wound is dressed. Wearing a grey t-shirt and blue corduroy jeans, his youthful face glows with astonishment, utterly calm.

For Chris, art provided ‘a free spot in society’ and through his performance pieces he proposed he was ‘providing people with the opportunity to let something more in, to stimulate their imaginations’. His performance pieces are commonly understood within the broader context of the history of performance art and its social stance, antithetical to institutions and authority.

Performance artists sometimes disavowed the commodification of painting and sculpture by creating timebased pieces and using their own bodies as the medium of art. In California, the swell of the anti-establishment 32

counter-culture provided a backdrop of social change against which his work could fairly be seen as pushing social boundaries. Many of his performance pieces were also careful explorations of the connections between individuals that brought the expression of trust into sharp relief.

The experiential nature of Chris’ performances is stark, and his pithy motivation for Shoot is often quoted.

‘How can you know what it feels like to be shot if you don’t get shot?’ The continuation of his line of enquiry revealed a sense of earnest wonder. ‘It seems interesting enough to be worth doing it.’

‘Getting shot is for real,’ he said in the Avalanche interview; ‘lying in bed for twenty-two days … there’s no element of pretence or make-believe in it’. He was aiming for the communication of an experience where a sense of self is

Shoot 1971 Chris Burden video still Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

deeply present. ‘Burden’s control over his mind and body is a rigidly ascetic one,’ observed Jan Butterfield in 1975. ‘It is not his body per se which comprises Burden’s pieces – but his mind.’

I have never met Chris Burden, but twenty years ago I wrote to him seeking the loan of photographic prints documenting Shoot, for an art magazine article. The manila envelope containing the 8 x 10s was addressed to me in his casual cursive handwriting. For years I have felt an affinity with him in these early performance pieces. It’s an intuition that isn’t yet fully known to me.

An exhibition to open in mid2016 at the National Portrait Gallery, Tough and Tender, touches lightly on themes of bodily sensation, yearning for connection, and vulnerability in manhood. Chris Burden’s performance work aligns beautifully with these themes. portrait 51 summer 2015

A real tweet page 34: Commander Skyring Gang-gang cockatoo Callocephalon fimbriatum page 35: Rosie Red-tailed black cockatoo Calyptorhynchus banksii page 36: Neville Major Mitchell's cockatoo Lophochroa leadbeateri page 37: Bob Long-billed corella Cacatua tenuirostris page 38: Slim Sulphur-crested cockatoo Cacatua galerita page 39: Chicken Australasian gannet Morus serrator page 40: Tani no. 1 Australian masked owl Tyto novaehollandiae page 41: Pepper Southern boobook Ninox boobook page 42: Mulga Black-breasted buzzard Hamirostra melanosternon page 43: Penguin No. 3 Australian magpie Cracticus tibicen page 44: Christo Orange-headed gouldian finch Erythrura gouldiae

sarah engledow plays wingman to leila jeffreys.

Knowing even a bit about birds, we know they don’t get dressed. What they’ve got on, they don’t put on. In Leila Jeffreys’ photographs, every bird is naked – and entirely comfortable with it. Yet, as I look at them, I keep thinking of words like ‘raiment’ and ‘livery’. Look at the black silk attire of the red-tailed black cockatoos, hairpins of glass and amber beads, gorgets spangled with gold, scalloped and tiered satin opera capes; the tiny fluffy trousers on the boobook owl, a creature from a fable; the gannet’s breast plumage, like furled curled petals of a Chinese white chrysanthemum; the sheath over the miniscule silvereye, filaments of mythological metals – silver, gold and gamboge – wrought by fairies.

That’s just the first paragraph of the florid and digressive introduction to the book Birdland, in which I used every adjective I know.

Leila Jeffreys, represented by Olsen Irwin Gallery, is a fine-art photographer who has exhibited in Sydney, Melbourne, London, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore. She specialises in stark, warm portraits of birds, taken against plain backdrops under lights in a portable studio she invented. Mostly, she finds her subjects through her network of birdwatchers, sanctuaries, rescue centres and wildlife carers. Since her childhood in New Guinea, Western Australia and India, she’s been friends with animals; an intense dedication to species protection informs her work. While utterly contemporary, the book’s an elegant, distinctly feminine descendant of the renowned ‘Exhibit Format’ volumes that contributed profoundly to the establishment of the

American conservation movement in the 1960s.

Three elements of Jeffreys’ works are characteristic. First, in her portraits there’s nothing to compete with the birds’ own texture. In contrast to their cousins in wildlife photographs, the subjects aren’t peeking from under grevilleas or between grass blades, perched atop rocks, flying against clouds. Secondly, for the very brief, strange period of their lives that they’re being photographed, the birds inhabit a shadowless place. Thirdly, Jeffreys’ photographs are printed to huge scale, enabling us to see and conceive of birds in a way that even the greatest ornithological illustrators couldn’t and can’t offer us. Until I looked at Leila’s photographs, I never really considered the way feathers fitted around a bird, for example. Certainly, I hadn’t observed the different positions of birds’ nares, or the different textures of their ceres. Actually I neither knew what nares or ceres were, nor that some birds have them and some don’t. Of course I knew that birds had eyes, but not that they came in so many different colours. It turns out birds’ eyes – even wrens’ – aren’t just little black beads.

Fancy that!

Looking through her viewfinder, Leila can’t instruct a bird to bring his right foot forward a little, put his wings by his side or raise his beak a fraction. Yet it’s the expressiveness that viewers perceive in the birds that makes her pictures portraits. She brings a unique combination of technical skill, ingenuity, patience and empathy to her work; the results are objective and celebratory at the same time. It’s open to discussion whether her chief skill lies in coaxing a look out of a bird through her ability to form a bond; or in

selecting, from a brace of photographs, the one – it might be one she didn’t even know she was taking, at the time – that best reflects her understanding of that bird’s personality. Principally, she reveals what we habitually miss, either because we don’t register the presence of a bird at all, or a bird we do notice is too small to see properly, or doesn’t stay still for inspection. When Leila works with birds, she talks to them. Talking to wrens and finches is fairly unrewarding; all she can do with subjects like that is wait until they stare at her lens. Other species, though, are liable to respond to her wheedling; with a head tilt, perhaps, a change of stance or a glance. Some birds will offer up a range of looks, varying greatly, as her relationship with them develops. The process isn’t easy, technically; but it’s simple, emotionally; it’s honest. The moment you meet Leila, you see why the birds like her.

If I may borrow a phrase from Sir Robert Menzies – as I think I will, more often, from now on – it’s my melancholy duty to inform you officially that in contemporary Australia, one rarely experiences the enjoyment of looking at an image of a vivacious person, effortlessly inhabiting wellfitted garments of rich cloth and intense colour. Scuffing around in this endearingly casual country, we can only yearn for one of the traditional joys of portraiture: the clothes. The cut, colour and texture of the plumage combine with the stately, haughty or droll attitudes of the subjects in Leila’s pictures to comprise objects of art that are luxurious pleasures in themselves; but that also expand our joyous understanding of the world we inhabit, yet see so incompletely, in the short time we have here.

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Peter Wilmoth, age 12, with copies of Our World 1974 Courtesy the author

Paper, boy

peter wilmoth’s boy-journalist toolkit for antagonising an australian political giant.

It was the school project that got out of control. The task in Grade Eight was to produce a newspaper. Three years later I was still doing it, publishing Our World twice a week, running it off on my school’s Roneo machine. I always wondered what the ladies in the admin room thought as I ground the machine’s lever, each copy dropping into place, the smelly purple ink giving life to my little stories.

They say you’re blessed if you know what you want to do in life. I knew as a very young kid that I wanted to write, and I hoped to work for a newspaper.

There was some writing in the blood.

My grandmother, E.A. (Elsie) Southwell, was a writer and editor who, in the 1950s, collated a pioneering collection of pieces about the environment called Food, Soil and Civilisation, as well as editing textbooks on English expression and poetry. Grandma loved poetry more than I did. She would give me twenty cents if I learnt a poem by Keats or Tennyson. I trousered the cash but pretty quickly forgot the poem.

It wasn’t poetry that had me in its embrace. I loved journalism. What a world that would arrive at our doorstep each morning (there’s an old-fashioned idea). At age ten I would devour the words of the smart columnists on The Age, people I would come to work with later, Peter Smark, Robert Haupt, Peter Cole-Adams, Sally White and, of course, 45

Ming vase 1970 Les Tanner (design) and Gus McLaren (production) glazed ceramic Purchased 2004

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Ron ‘Curly’ Carter writing about football.

I could not have imagined that in a few years I would be an eighteen year old cadet journalist at The Age, sitting next to Ron on Thursday nights, compiling the football teams for the big weekend games.

I was restless to get involved, so I took this school project further. It meant I wasn’t just a writer and editor; I was also a publisher with my own little paper. Our World reported on the goings-on in one street – Haverbrack Avenue, Malvern. It brought news of birthdays, examination successes, illness and injury, and families greetings visitors all the way from Sydney. It featured any births, deaths or marriages I could find out about. It had poems, record reviews, gardening notes (by my mother) and reflections on the worlds of sport and occasionally – and ominously for me – politics.

I was thirteen when I started the paper. I was the publisher and editor.

I had a team of contributors and ‘subeditors’, all living in my street and all under the age of fifteen. No-one got paid (not that I had any money to pay them).

It was the prestige of achieving a by-line in a boutique local publication, I suppose.

So that excuse from publishers is pretty old, then. Luckily for me, everyone wanted to see their name in print, even if circulation numbers hovered around thirty-two.

Each week the pages needed to be filled, so I wrote most of the copy, and if

I pleaded with the kids I was kicking the footy with, I might get a news paragraph or even a book review out of them. I also handled graphic design (well, I outlined some headlines by hand and drew some pictures).

The topics of the stories were wideranging, from a cat having a litter of kittens to a review of the new Simon and Garfunkel or Cat Stevens album, to a news story flagging the possibility that one of my sisters was getting engaged.

(I didn’t check that one and it wasn’t true. The mood was a little bit chilly at the dining table next evening; the idea of checking and double-checking hadn’t kicked in yet).

Some weeks I didn’t have much to publish and didn’t have time to work the room, or the street in this case.

Schoolwork was taking up more of my time. Some afternoons I’d lie on the floor with my little blue typewriter and an empty page in front of me, featuring just the Our World logo (which I hand-drew).

Some weeks I felt like the late Joan Rivers, who once said of her forward diary (featuring a paucity of bookings) that the white was so dazzling she had to wear sunglasses.

So, consequently, some editions featured some pretty slim news stories.

Under the headline ‘Mrs Morrison Has A Trip’, we published: ‘Margaret Morrison made a visit by plane from Sydney, where she is a school teacher, to attend the races and lots of parties. This was a lovely and unexpected surprise for her family.’ (Kathy from up the road filed this one).

At one stage I got entrepreneurial and walked up to the petrol station on Malvern Road and asked if they would like to take out an ad. Happily, they said yes. They gave me the copy, which I hand-wrote onto the stencil sheet, appearing as a display ad on the bottom of page one. They gave me $10. It was the only money I made from my little venture.

The production and delivery of Our World was very simple. Having ‘Roneoed’ off the copies at school, I would walk down Haverbrack Avenue on the way home and deliver it into the letterboxes.

One of the houses which I included in our circulation numbers (thirty-two households officially, but I estimated readership at significantly more) was former prime minister Sir Robert Menzies, who lived up the road at Number Two. As kids, we were

constantly being asked to provide directions to his house. We used to call it ‘Havealook Avenue’, as did Sir Robert, as I later found out.

Often Sir Bob would stroll past our house and, as a five-year-old, I’d stand at the front gate and say hi. He’d grunt a hello back. We would also say hi to his long-time driver, Peter, who would sit in his boss’ Rolls Royce, or polish it. Peter seemed like a pleasant gentleman.

Haverbrack Avenue was smack in the centre of the blue-chip electorate of Higgins, the safe seat for generations of Liberals, including Peter Costello and now former Costello adviser (and current Assistant Treasurer), Kelly O’Dwyer. It was Liberal heartland. The street – with its judges, advertising pioneers (the Clemengers) and old-school families – could not have been more middle-class and, therefore, pro-Menzies.

My newspaper was a broad church and I was happy to publish viewpoints of any colour. At one point I hit up Dad for a comment piece. Dad – it must be said the crustiest of crusty Conservatives – scored exactly one by-line in the paper – a not-so-subtle piece of editorialising in favour of a return to Liberal rule from the clutches of charismatic Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

In 1974, under the headline ‘The Election’, Dad wrote: ‘With such an elder statesman as Sir Robert Menzies living in Haverbrack Avenue, it is an incentive for us all to think about politics, with a federal election due next week. The policies of Sir Robert have proven to be sound. Should they be materially changed?’

Actually they weren’t the policies of Sir Robert at all, because he’d retired from politics in 1966. But were they his policies? It was an interesting question.

Was Sir Bob still wielding political power from our leafy street? Was he an early version of ‘the faceless men’?

I was intrigued when one day my mum mentioned she’d seen various politicians visiting Sir Bob, including future party leaders Andrew Peacock and Malcolm Fraser. The visits seemed natural – the new generation visiting the old – but I chose to put a spin on it, suggesting they might have been visiting the political giant who couldn’t let go, and that he was still pulling the strings of the party he founded. The papers were referring to Menzies as ‘the leader of the Opposition’.

I wrote the story about the visits. portrait 51 summer 2015

The local paper, The Southern Cross, saw the piece and did a story on this precocious kid with the big story.

Then the huge circulation, The Sun News Pictorial, followed up with a picture story on me (with a photo of me holding up a newspaper as if selling it).

Kate Baillieu of the ABC’s current affairs program, This Day Tonight, saw it and rang to see whether she could come over and do a story for the program. Kate filmed a piece which included vision of me perched on my fence, peering through binoculars, ostensibly keeping watch on my illustrious neighbor and his political doings.

The piece went to air, introduced by the urbane Bill Peach. It had me scribbling notes into a notebook, then walking purposefully down my driveway to write it up. It had me looking very sleuth-like, even hiding behind a pole in the street, with ‘political thriller’-type music behind the images. It was all a bit of fun, I thought.

Until the next day. Sir Bob didn’t think it was fun at all. He saw the piece and was furious. He rang the ABC and demanded – and received – an apology.

The apology went to air the following evening. My parents didn’t permit me to watch it because, I believe, they thought it might freak out an impressionable kid.

I don’t blame Sir Bob, actually.

All I had to do was knock on his door to check a few facts. Even if he gave me the shrug, at least I should have tried. When I became a professional journalist five years later, that was drummed into me from day one. It was an excellent lesson, and a bruising one. Being a newly-minted teenager is tough enough without the founder of the Liberal Party and icon of conservative politics getting mad and even.

The incident caused quite a stir.

The street was abuzz. There was even an anonymous parody of my newspaper circulated (good on ‘em for the effort, but a very lame product, I thought).

Now they took to their typewriters – where were these so-called writers when I needed copy?

Menzies mentions the incident in his daughter Heather Henderson's 2011 collection of letters from her father. ‘Last week the ABC decided to run a story of a twelve-year-old boy in Haverbrack Avenue, led on by [reporter] Kate Baillieu, purporting to be his observations of people who visited our

Robert Menzies, Sydney 1963 (printed 2000) David Moore The series David Moore: From Face to Face was acquired by gift of the artist and financial assistance from Timothy Fairfax ac and L Gordon Darling ac cmg 2001

home during the weeks before the [1974] election’, Menzies wrote. ‘The boy's father came and gave your mother an apology of sorts, but the fault was with the ABC, since they were quite happy to take the lad's story without checking with any of the people he mentioned.

But what can you expect of the ABC?’ I think it was believed the experience would scar me. Actually, it didn’t. It taught me that if you’re going to play in the big sandpit, you better be ready to cop some sand in the face if you’re wrong.

I retired the newspaper because it took too much of my time. Forty years later, I have a few copies of Our World

kicking around. I wish I had more, but effective curating was never my strong point. But a curious event took place as I was writing this piece. An email with the header ‘Something you might like’ popped up on my laptop. It was from the boy who lived over the road – and who I described as one of our ‘sub-editors’. He had scanned three copies of Our World, editions about which I have no memory, and very kindly sent them over.

It reminded me of the old days when we would have a ‘news conference’ while bouncing on a trampoline, or doing bombs into his pool, or kicking the footy.

If only news conferences today were that good.

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Bill and Ted’s excellent portrait sarah engledow on messrs dobell and macmahon and the art of friendship.

Dr Edward MacMahon 1959 William Dobell oil on canvas Gift of the MacMahon family in affectionate memory of Edward MacMahon and William Dobell 2015 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program © William Dobell/ Licensed by Viscopy, 2015 The Duchess Disrobes 1936 William Dobell oil on plywood Art Gallery of New South Wales Purchased with assistance from the Trustees of the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation 1987 © William Dobell/ Licensed by Viscopy, 2015

Say ‘William Dobell ‘and ‘Archibald Prize’ in the same sentence, and odds-on, the talk will turn to 1944. That year, two artists – ‘disgruntled nonentities’ in the words of the late, beloved Andrew Sayers – sued the trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales over their decision to award the prize to Dobell for his portrait of his friend, Joshua Smith. It remains the most sensational, absurd and lamentable event in Australian art history; but in fact, the trustees’ decision having been found reasonable, Dobell won the Archibald twice more in the years to come. The subject of his third Archibald-winning portrait was a Sydney surgeon, Edward ‘Ted’ MacMahon, and coming sixteen years after the Smith fiasco, the victory was a much happier affair for all concerned.

Edward MacMahon was one of many children of a Cootamundra solicitor. Fortunate enough to have been born in 1904, he belonged to that small group of men who were too young to serve in the First World War, and established in essential professions by the time of the second. After schooling at St Patrick’s, Goulburn, he studied medicine at the University of Sydney, graduating in the mid-1920s. (Four of the MacMahon children became doctors; MacMahon’s sister Lucy was the first female anaesthetist in Australia, but she ceased to practise after her marriage.) After working for a time at the University of Sydney and the Sydney Hospital, in early 1929 MacMahon sailed to London as ship’s surgeon on the Orama. Douglas Mawson was also aboard, with a view to organising his next Antarctic expedition; MacMahon toyed with the idea of going. Instead, having obtained his FRCS in London, he operated at the Woolwich War Memorial Hospital for several years, learning from Lawrence Abel, an eminent, flamboyant man who was especially interested in surgery of the colon and rectum and the treatment of cancer.

The painter William Dobell, born in 1899, grew up in Newcastle, where his father was a tradesman. At school, Dobell was only good at drawing, and after he left, he worked at various jobs including ‘dog-walloping’ – discouraging dogs from urinating on goods displayed on footpaths. He was apprenticed to an architect and

studied art in Sydney before leaving Australia for Europe in 1929 on the Society of Artists’ Travelling Scholarship.

He had a year at the Slade school during his nine years’ absence. In London, his figurative work evolved from the gentle Boy at the Basin to more powerful, discomfiting paintings that, while not caricatures, nor portraits, were full-blown human ‘types’. Works such as Mrs South Kensington, The Dead Landlord and The Duchess Disrobes were ugly, but not entirely cruel; depressing, but kind-of funny, too. In 1936, he joined the fun-loving team of Australian artists led by Arthur Murch who were decorating the Wool Pavilion for the Glasgow Fair of 1937; it was the only time during his time away that he had any discretionary income. Classically trained, he equally imbibed London modernism; when he returned to Sydney in 1938, bringing nearly all of his English paintings with him, he managed to impress conservative and progressive art factions alike.

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By that time, MacMahon had been back in Sydney for five years. In 1933 he took up an appointment at St Vincent’s Hospital. Over the course of his career he was also senior honorary consultant general surgeon at Lewisham and the Mater Misericordiae hospital on the North Shore, where he frequently operated on the poor on Friday nights and was doted-on by the resident Sisters of Mercy (who attended him in his own last illness in 1987). MacMahon had a particular keenness and skill for operating on cancers; surgeon Thomas Hugh recalled that ‘he had a special ability to keep out of trouble surgically, 50

with an uncanny sense of how far matters could be taken safely in a given case.’ A colleague recalled that MacMahon belonged to the last generation to train when medicine was a vocation; ‘One of his great interests was people, and among the least was material gain, though a vast practice assured it. Charity and patience with him were commonplace … Saturdays and Sundays were not sacred to him but less demanding than other days’, he wrote.

For twenty years, MacMahon worked in a pioneering surgical partnership with Noel Curtis Newton, who taught at St Vincent’s Hospital in his own scant free hours – on

The Cypriot 1940 William Dobell Oil on canvas Gift of the Godfrey Rivers Trust through Miss Daphne Mayo 1943 Courtesy Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art

portrait 51 summer 2015

Sunday mornings. Outside work, Ted MacMahon was an affectionate family man. From 1950 he, his wife Elizabeth and (eventually) their six children lived at 5 Bennett Ave, one of the oldest houses in Darling Point. Later, they owned 57 Darling Point Road, the house Edmund Blacket designed for Thomas Sutcliffe Mort. MacMahon was an avid collector of Georgian and Victorian furniture, clocks and especially silver; in his shining hoard he had a spoon which had belonged to Sir Francis Drake.

For a while after he came back to Sydney, boarding in Kings Cross, Dobell worked through what he remembered, with at least one interesting consequence.

One of his Sydney paintings from 1940, The Cypriot, looks as if it could have been painted after the war. It depicts a man named Aegus Gabrielides, to whom Dobell had been close (and had painted several times) in London. Years later, Clive James wrote with wonder of how the portrait of the Greek foreshadowed the great social changes that were to come in Australia in the late 1940s and 1950s: A man whom he had loved and seen asleep…

But then he had the sudden wit to keep The clothes, and thus the heritage, in the next Picture. A window from a men’s-wear store, It doubles as the greatest early text Of the immigration. What we were before Looks back through this to what we would become.

We see a sense of nuance head our way To make the raw rich, complicate the sum Of qualities, prepare us for today.

In World War 2, Dobell served in a camouflage unit and the Civil Construction Corps of the Allied Works Council. Out of this experience, in 1943, came the quintessential twentieth-century Australian portrait: that of Joe Westcott, a loudmouthed, indolent wharfie, titled The Billy Boy. Dobell painted his fateful portrait of a fellow artist and camoufleur, Joshua Smith, the same year. Both the paintings were hung in the Archibald, with that of Smith announced the winner of the Prize in January 1944. Perhaps the portrait of Westcott would have sparked litigation, too; but at least he wasn’t a particular friend of Dobell’s, as was Smith, who had to go through the humiliation of having his features analysed against the figure Dobell had painted, which resembled, in the testimony of a medical man, a corpse in an advanced state of decomposition. The fact that the portrait was eventually judged not to be a caricature, but a good likeness, was thus a Pyrrhic victory. In the period following the hungrily reported court case, Dobell retreated to the hamlet of Wangi Wangi, on the edge of Lake Macquarie. He developed a severe case of nervous

Wynne Prize for landscape and the Archibald Prize, with a portrait of Margaret Olley, in 1948.

Edward MacMahon’s relationship with ‘Bill’ Dobell began remotely in the early 1940s, when, having operated on an impecunious Sydney jeweller, MacMahon was constrained to accept a painting of Dobell’s as payment.

The jeweller, himself, had acquired the painting from Dobell in exchange for a watch repair. Sometime later, Frank Clune brought Dobell to MacMahon’s house to

The Billy Boy 1943 William Dobell oil on cardboard on hardboard Australian War Memorial

Edward MacMahon’s relationship with ‘Bill’ Dobell began remotely in the early 1940s, when, having operated on an impecunious Sydney jeweller, MacMahon was constrained to accept a painting of Dobell’s as payment. dermatitis; he was cared-for by his sister, who swept up his shed skin every morning, but the affliction damaged his left eye and caused his left leg to fail. As he recovered physically, he plummeted mentally and emotionally.

Slowly, he built up his career again; he won both the

see the painting, and the friendship between Dobell and MacMahon began. In 1957, the year of his astounding portrait of Dame Mary Gilmore (‘This work will still be carrying my identity when my own work is forgotten’, she predicted, accurately), Dobell was diagnosed with bowel 51

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cancer, and in 1958 MacMahon performed two difficult operations on him. The men spent much time together during Dobell’s long convalescence in St Vincent’s, and their friendship intensified. In the second half of that year Dobell made a start on MacMahon’s portrait, making innumerable pencil sketches, and studies in watercolour and oil that are now owned by the MacMahon siblings.

The studies for the portrait show MacMahon in ordinary clothes, not surgical garb, although when Dobell was questioned about the significance of the splash of red in the painting he denied that it was an allusion to MacMahon’s sanguinous profession, and claimed it was simply a patch he forgot to paint over. This painting won Dobell his third Archibald, in 1959. ‘Dr MacMahon is an enormous person.

I owe everything to him’, said the artist, who was a regular in the doctor’s circle for the rest of his life and is warmly remembered by MacMahon’s sons and daughters.

From this period on, Dobell enjoyed great success and renown as a portraitist. At the age of 59, after 55 hours’ instruction, he obtained his driving licence and bought a Jaguar, which he only used to get around Wangi.

Time magazine commissioned him to paint a portrait of Sir Robert Menzies for the cover of its issue of 4 April 1960, which contained a very long article describing to Americans ‘the speed with which Australia is coming of age’ under Menzies’s ‘decade of unabashed wooing of free enterprise’. (The piece quoted a senior Australian diplomat who asserted ‘Nowadays we can talk to anybody in the world without any sense of innate inferiority.’) In 1965, Dobell was made OBE while MacMahon was made CBE. In 1966, however, MacMahon was visiting the artist at Wangi when an aide from Government House rang.

Characteristically, Dobell had neglected to open a letter

from the governor-general; MacMahon stood by as he rifled through a heap of intact correspondence, and tore open the envelope containing the offer of his knighthood.

MacMahon said at Dobell’s memorial service that his friend was ‘a remarkable man: soft, gentle, kind and considerate’. It was, perhaps, an unusual and brave tribute from one Australian man to another in 1970, especially in the punters’ corner of the bar of the Wangi pub.

When Ted and Elizabeth MacMahon opened their Bennett Avenue home for the National Trust in May 1964, the guidesheet noted ‘The drawing room is a particularly pleasing room, with its fine proportions, hand-made plaster ceiling with good cornice and centrepiece treatment, and its delicate and elegant colour scheme.

One feels that William Dobell’s Archibald Prize-winning portrait of Dr MacMahon was painted especially for this room: notice the difference in colour tone used in the study for the portrait hanging nearby.’ Whether or not Dobell kept the colour scheme of the MacMahons’ study in mind as he worked on the final canvas, MacMahon was fortunate, in terms of his own posterity, to have had one of Australia’s great portraitists on his surgery list. In weighing up the suitability of a portrait for the collection, National Portrait Gallery curators, the director and board consider the interplay between the achievements of the sitter and the success of the portraitist, in conveying a sense of what the sitter was, or is, like to be around. Because MacMahon’s portrait is a brilliant one, his life’s work will become part of the Gallery’s broad fabric of stories.

Many years after his death, his children’s generous donation initiates a new phase in the life history of the bold, benign surgeon whose image hung for decades on the walls of his historic homes.

Dame Mary Gilmore 1957 William Dobell oil on hardboard Art Gallery of New South Wales Gift of Dame Mary Gilmore 1960 © William Dobell/Licensed by Viscopy, 2015 William Dobell, Potts Point, Sydney 1960 (printed 2000) David Moore gelatin silver photograph The series David Moore: From Face to Face was acquired by gift of the artist and financial assistance from Timothy Fairfax ac and L Gordon Darling ac cmg Sketch for Prime Minister Robert Menzies 1960 William Dobell oil on hardboard Art Gallery of New South Wales Gift of Time magazine 1962 Courtesy Sir William Dobell Art Foundation

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Food for thought michael wardell on chrys zantis’ ora. ‘ΩPA (ORA) refers to time, not as a mechanistic continuum, but as a superposition of dormancy, pregnancy, bloom and decay; in its inception is a sense of natural order and of participation in the grand spectacle.’

Chrys Zantis ORA 2014-15, by Queensland artist Chrys Zantis, is not just a group portrait of a regional cooking club, but also a work about time. Time spent cooking and sharing meals, and time spent in conversation with strangers becoming friends. This twenty-two panel photographic artwork is the culmination of a year-long project working with the Beenleigh International Cooking Group, as part of the The Homesickness Project, exhibited at Logan Art Gallery in March 2015.

The Homesickness Project was conceived and coordinated by artists Elizabeth Woods and Kevin Leong and produced in partnership with Logan Art Gallery, with support from the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, and Logan City Council.

As Woods and Leong note on their 54

website, it ‘was conceived with a simple proposition: homesickness, taken broadly as a longing for one’s “true home”, can initiate conversations that not only prompt nostalgia and sentimental reflections, but can also hold important clues to essential qualities in a home, qualities necessary for individuals to feel at home within their surrounding environment, whether this be domestic, vocational, social, cultural, political, geographical or spiritual.’

The project encompassed many different components, with Woods and Leong first working overseas with artists from Great Britain, Ireland, Switzerland and Croatia, before moving to Woodridge, Logan, to work with twelve local artists. They set up the Homesickness School in April 2014 to introduce this select group of artists to their overarching concept, and to their particular form of relational art.

By discussing some of their previous projects, and projects by other artists from Australia and overseas, they encouraged the group to look at new models of community engagement.

Artists were encouraged to think beyond the therapeutic benefit of community art and craft activities, and devise projects that actively give community members a voice to

express their aspirations and concerns.

Community members could be not only the subject of an artist’s project, but also active partners in the creative process.

Logan City, just south of the City of Brisbane, Queensland, is home to one of the most culturally diverse communities in Australia, with over 215 different cultural groups, many of whom are recent migrants and refugees.

The concept of ‘home’ is not the same for all of Logan’s 300,000 residents; it is a concept influenced by both cultural and social differences. Chrys Zantis’ project with the Beenleigh International Cooking Group focused on a unique success story in our sometimes-difficult path to living in a multi-cultural society.

Zantis focused on a specific community activity, the sharing of food, to show that our essential shared values enable us to live happily together as a community,

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while still celebrating a precious cultural diversity.

The daughter of Greek parents who migrated to Australia in the early 1950s, Zantis was born in Denham, New South Wales, and has lived and worked in Logan for the past 30 years.

Since first exhibiting her art 15 year ago, she has established herself as both a much loved and respected artist and as a strong motivating character in the community, helping other artists and the art-interested public to get involved in creative projects. Her early work was greatly inspired by the feminist conceptual artists of the sixties and seventies, and is perhaps best known for her domestic teapots and cooking utensils embellished with bright pink, knitted and crocheted vaginas.

For her contribution to the Homesickness Project, Zantis naturally

ORA – Homesickness Project 2015 Chrys Zantis 22 digital photographs Courtesy the artist

gravitated towards her other great passion, cooking, and chose a community group she was already very much a part of, the Beenleigh International Cooking Group. She invited her fellow members to participate in this project by each cooking a meal that represents, for them, the notion of home. This could be a national dish that when served and shared brought back nostalgic memories of another country and culture, or it might be a recipe passed down from parent to child that was always a family favourite.

The Beenleigh International Cooking Group meets regularly to share recipes and cooking tips, sometimes hearing from invited guest chefs. The group includes members originally from Spain, Greece, Great Britain, Russia, Romania, Sri Lanka and Malaysia. Over a number of months, Zantis visited fellow members to share meals and stories, while discussing each person’s individual understand of ‘home’.

Although these collected stories were sometimes almost excessively sad or cloyingly sentimental, Zantis found common themes, despite the differences in the social and cultural backgrounds of each storyteller. The ritual of sharing a meal that is a binding element within a family or cultural group is also the common thread that enabled this collection of diverse individuals to become a group, creating lifelong friendships.

The next stage of the project was getting each member of the group to come and be photographed with the meal that they had cooked. They were photographed individually at a table set

up on a stage, so that collectively they could be joined together to form one long ‘dinner party’. Zantis then worked long hours choosing and arranging the photographs for the final composition.

A first version, favoured by some of her artist friends, was inspired by Renaissance depictions of The Last Supper with a smaller selection of the guests seating in a row and Zantis standing in the middle as the focal point.

While this worked compositionally, Zantis felt it was not in keeping with the spirit of the group or the project. This was not a ‘last supper’ before a tragic conclusion, but rather a communal celebration pointing towards a better future. Zantis was uncomfortable being depicted as a figure to be adored, standing above the rest. She was one part of a collective group and much happier being seen as the mix-master, quietly sitting behind her mixer.

Zantis also wanted the final version to represent every member of the group, as, for her, the finished work is more about their collective experience of cooking, sharing and telling stories than about producing a witty photographic composition. The final work, therefore, is more akin to a Dutch 17th century Guild portrait than a Renaissance Last Supper, with flattering images of each sitter posed and arranged to form multiple visual links throughout the elongated composition of 22 individual characters. Each panel is a portrait of an individual posed with their meal like a trophy winner at the Royal Easter Show, but collectively it is a portrait of a culturally diverse community bonded together by a common love of food.

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Recollections of a sinologist sitter

Dalu Zhao sketching Stephen FitzGerald, Sydney 2003 Image courtesy of Dalu Zhao Archibald 2003 People’s Choice winner, Dalu Zhao, with his sitter, Stephen FitzGerald Image courtesy Art Gallery of New South Wales

professor stephen fitzgerald, australia’s first ambassador to china, traces the historical course from sino-australian cultural engagement to a maturing australian identity.

“Lao Fei” Stephen FitzGerald 2003 Dalu Zhao oil on canvas Gift of Dalu Zhao 2011 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

In the 1990s, Australia became home to a significant number of talented Chinese artists, many of them choosing to live here because of the June 1989 massacre in Beijing. There was a concentration of them in Sydney, perhaps not constituting a ‘school’ per se, but they bonded and mingled as émigré artists are wont to do; they were

taken up and promoted by a number of the same gallery owners, and some of their works have suggested an interplay of influence and inspiration.

From 1990 to 2015, remarkably, twenty-five of these artists have been finalists in the Archibald Prize, with at least one every year since 1993, and a total of more than eighty finalist paintings. It’s so large and distinctive a string of works that it warranted a retrospective in its own right – the ‘Retrospective of Chinese Archibald Finalists’ – earlier this year in Sydney, curated by one of the most outstanding of these painters and fourteen-times

Archibald finalist himself, Jiawei Shen.

In an essay for the retrospective’s catalogue, former AGNSW Director Edmund Capon wrote: ‘Looking back at some of the fine portraits entered

by Chinese artists, I have also been intrigued by not only the sophisticated adaptation to what are generally although not entirely Western styles, but equally … of a subtle but instinctive aesthetic which makes the majority of these works recognisably Chinese.’

It may have been a political event unrelated to Australia that made us a beneficiary of this talent, but these artists settling here was also a manifestation of what was happening to us – becoming an increasingly open, ethnically mixed and cosmopolitan society. Dalu Zhao came to Australia, not in that first wave of post-1989 émigrés, but in 2001, and not for refuge. He came, in part at least, for the attraction of the AsianAustralian cultural environment which could, by then, be found here. In 2003, he approached the Conservator of Chinese Art at the AGNSW, Sun Yü, with a suggestion that he paint my portrait 57

Opposition Leader Whitlam’s China visitGreat Wall, July 1971 (L to R) Mick Young (ALP Federal Secretary), Tom Burns (ALP President), Stephen FitzGerald (China Adviser), Rex Patterson (ALP Rural Affairs Spokesman) and Graham Freudenberg (Whitlam’s Speech Writer) Image courtesy of the author

for the Archibald, and asked for an introduction. He knew Sun had repaired and remounted some scrolls of mine by the 19th century calligrapher, He Zizhen, and 20th century Shanghai painter, Tang Rong, father of one of my Chinese teachers. My friend and colleague, Luhua Tang, had organised this for me, and got to know Sun well. Luhua loved the idea of the portrait. She thought it would be

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fun to have a Chinese who’d adopted Australia as his home paint an Australian who’d adopted China as his profession, and she made the introduction. With scant time remaining for Archibald entries, Dalu set out to do the painting.

We had just one sitting, in my Paddington garden for a couple of hours, chatting while Dalu sketched and his wife, Xiaoxi, a talented photographic artist, took a large number of photos. Luhua suggested the portrait be titled Lao Fei – Lao here meaning ‘old’ in the sense of respect, but also a familiar, as in old friend or old mate, and Fei, my Chinese surname.

Interviewed by reporters after his painting won the People’s Prize, Dalu said: ‘He has a very interesting face and a special nose’. He didn’t say ‘big’, only ‘special’. But with big noses part of the historic Chinese caricature of Westerners, friends reacted with hilarity.

One even said my nose had now achieved recognition as a beacon in AustraliaChina relations. But my family and friends loved the portrait, and so did I. Announcing the People’s Prize, Edmund Capon said it was significant

that in addition to Dalu’s win, another Chinese artist had won the People's Choice prize at the Archibald Salon des Refusés. This was, as it happens, the same Jiawei Shen, with a portrait of Edmund himself. With his characteristic humour, Edmund noted: ‘It’s a Chinese takeover of the People’s Choice!’

I said at the time that Dalu’s People’s Prize was an important affirmation of the place and the contribution of all of these Chinese painters to the artistic life

Edmund Capon and Stephen FitzGerald at the opening of Chinese Archaeological Relics at the NGV, 1977 Image courtesy of the author Gough and Margaret Whitlam, Stephen FitzGerald, Deng Xiaoping (far right, front row) at the Summer Palace, Beijing, 1973 Image courtesy of the author

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Prime Minister Whitlam arrives in Beijing, October 1973 (L to R) Premier Zhou Enlai, Stephen FitzGerald, Tom Burns (ALP Federal President) and Gough Whitlam Image courtesy of the author

Jocelyn Chey (L) and Helen Fitzgerald 1974 Image courtesy of the author

of Sydney, a small but illustrative part of a much wider story of Australia’s coming to terms with Asia, from the White Australia in which I grew up in the 1950s to the opening of the Australian mind to Asian people, Asian influences in our daily lives, and Asian contributions to the creative and performing arts, as also in medicine, science, technology and the economy. This is a quite remarkable story of change. It’s a kind of leitmotif in my recent book, Comrade Ambassador:

Whitlam’s Beijing Envoy, and I see this change as a significant turning or maturing in our history, and worth more than all the celebration people give to historical landmark events, like ANZAC, because it’s about a society that showed itself able to move from insularity and narrow intellectual horizons and racial exclusiveness towards being an open, tolerant and accepting one.

Culture has been important to this change, and I’ve always thought of a deepening of cultural enmeshment with Asia as critical to our survival and prosperity in the broader political and economic environment, a view shared by Gough Whitlam. Before setting off for Beijing as Ambassador in 1973, I proposed that we should have a dedicated cultural officer in the embassy with the relatively senior rank of Counsellor, and Gough agreed. The first appointee was Dr Jocelyn Chey, who became then, and in many later roles, a key figure in the Australia-China story.

After his previous visit in 1971 as Opposition Leader, Gough visited China as Prime Minister in October/November

that year (1973), and in his talks with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai they agreed to inaugurate an ongoing annual program of cultural exchange. This was a time when China was barely open to things foreign, in the wake of its closing down during the (singularly misnamed) Cultural Revolution, and despite Zhou’s agreement, for some years everything we proposed for our exchanges had to be turned over and upside down and microscopically examined by Chinese officials for its political acceptability.

However, it was during that visit that Gough in a symbolic way actually launched our cultural initiative in person, with a cultural event at the embassy. We had a large new work by Sidney Nolan, commissioned for the embassy building, twelve panels of paintings conceived as part of Nolan’s much larger work, Snake. Gough was to open it at a special reception for Chinese guests, but we nearly missed that altogether because shortly before the time for the reception, towards the end of the final afternoon’s talks with Zhou, Gough and I were suddenly whisked 59

away to an historic but unscheduled meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong. I don’t think either of us thought of the Nolan during that hour-long meeting, but when it was over we rushed to the embassy to find to our relief that the guests had not gone home. So Gough launched the Nolan. Without anyone’s political approval. Coming straight from the meetings with these two figures who’d dominated the rise of modern China, I think Gough felt a particular satisfaction in being able to present, even to a limited number of Chinese people, an arresting artwork by an Australian of Nolan’s great talent and stature. The total work Snake, too large for most galleries, languished in warehouses for several decades before it was acquired by David Walsh, and is said to have been a catalyst for his creation of MONA in Tasmania.

Malcolm Fraser came to China in 1976 after defeating Whitlam at the 1975 election, and, to the surprise of many, adopted Whitlam’s China policy and 60

indeed most of his foreign policy. And he and Andrew Peacock readily accepted our recommendation for an AustraliaChina Council, to ground the whole relationship in cultural understanding and exchange, enrich our own culture, and enable us to comprehend Chinese society and other Asian societies influenced by Chinese culture. Without which, we said, Australia would be damagingly ill-equipped to adjust to a China dominant in our region. Jocelyn Chey became the Council’s founding Director, and later, from 1986 to 1991, Gough himself was its Chair. The Council has funded dozens of painters in a forty-year-long run of bridging the gaps of history and culture. I feel great satisfaction in this enduring legacy.

I didn’t buy Dalu’s portrait. However much they liked it, my family said, and I conceded, that there was nowhere in the house we could hang it where they’d be able to escape a very large image of my face. Dalu took it with him when

he moved to live in Melbourne, where he got to know Carrillo Gantner, actor, theatre director, philanthropist, and in the 1980s, Cultural Counsellor in the Australian Embassy in Beijing, one of the distinguished successors to Jocelyn Chey. When Dalu decided to go with his family for a long stay in Beijing, he left all his paintings with Carrillo, asking him

Chairman Mao Zedong, Gough Whitlam, Stephen FitzGerald, 1973 Image courtesy of the author

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Snake 1970–72 (detail) Sir Sidney Nolan Mixed media on paper, 1620 sheets Image courtesy Mona/Rémi Chauvin ©The Trustees of the Sidney Nolan Trust/ Bridgeman Images

to see if he could find buyers. Carrillo asked if I wanted to buy my portrait, and I told him my family’s initial argument was now reinforced by our move to a smaller terrace in Surry Hills. So Carrillo rang National Portrait Gallery Director, Louise Doyle, the Gallery said they’d like it, and in 2011 Dalu donated it through the Cultural Gifts Program.

The talented Jiawei Shen may not yet have won the Archibald, notwithstanding his fourteen finalist entries, but his 2006 portrait of the founding patron of the National Portrait Gallery, Gordon Darling, is on permanent display in the Gallery’s entrance hall. Regrettably, we never got a portrait of Gough Whitlam

or Malcolm Fraser by one of these Chinese-Australian painters into the Archibald. Perhaps we should try to direct one of them to Jocelyn Chey.

Stephen FitzGerald’s memoir Comrade Ambassador: Whitlam’s Beijing Envoy (Melbourne University Publishing, 2015) is available now.

Gough Whitlam at the Nolan paintings opening – Australian Embassy 1973 Image courtesy of the author

Malcolm and Tamie Fraser, Stephen FitzGerald Great Wall 1976 Image courtesy of the author

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Australia’s great internationalists penelope grist explores the united nations stories in the gallery’s collection.

Jessie Street recalled that on 25 June 1945, ‘the press and public galleries were filled to overflowing’ in the San Francisco Opera House. As delegates of fifty nations voted unanimously to adopt the 111-article United Nations Charter, ‘everyone in the Opera House rose to their feet and cheered and clapped’. In this 70th anniversary year of the UN’s formation, the Gallery’s collection tells some of the inspiring stories of Australians whose life achievements were bound up in this defining moment in world history.

Two months earlier, a twenty-strong Australian delegation had travelled to San Francisco by RAAF bomber.

Minister for External Affairs, Doc Evatt, and Deputy Prime Minister FM Forde led the delegation; Jessie Street was our only woman delegate. This group would be influential in shaping the new international organisation. They island-hopped the Pacific under cover of darkness; the Second World War was not yet over.

This story of Australia’s internationalists began with an earlier generation at the end of the First World War. The League of Nations formed in 1919 with the aim of promoting world peace and justice. Doc Evatt and Jessie Street’s predecessors in our contribution to this earlier attempt at international cooperation included former Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce, and Elizabeth Couchman (often referred to in the press as Mrs Claude Couchman).

The National Portrait Gallery recently received the generous gift of the portrait of Dame Elizabeth Couchman (1876-1982) from her family. She was Australia’s only woman delegate to the League of Nations in Paris in 1934. In her portrait, by Aileen Dent, she wears the honours she received, including DBE in 1960, for a lifetime of public service. She became highly influential in the foundation of the Liberal Party, despite never having been elected to parliament herself. Sir Robert Menzies is said to have called her ‘the greatest statesmen of them all’.

In 1934, Couchman was prominent in the conservative Australian Women’s National League (AWNL). Poised and persuasive, speaking upon her return from Europe, she argued: ‘The League of Nations has been criticised for not doing away with war in one generation … but it is no use to expect the impossible. If the League has not been altogether successful with regard to disarmament it is weaving webs among the nations … If the League went out of existence it would have to be resuscitated in some form or other as there must be some place where nations can meet on a common platform. The only way to make it strong is to have public opinion behind it, and if the League can be supported by public opinion we will be half-way towards disarmament and the day we all long for — the day of permanent peace.'

The League was both to go out of existence and be resuscitated through committed internationalism. The League Covenant’s mechanisms for resolving disputes were limited, and ultimately, unworkable, but the work

Dame Elizabeth Couchman Aileen Dent oil on canvas Gift of Susan Webster, step-granddaughter 2015 Stanley Bruce 1937 Barbara Tribe bronze Gift of the artist 2000

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HV (Doc) Evatt 1935 Arnold Shore oil on canvas Gift of Elizabeth Evatt and Penelope Seidler 1998 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program Sir Percy Spender Louis Kahan black conte on paper Gift of Mrs Lily Kahan 2006 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

of Stanley Bruce ch mc pc, 1st Viscount Bruce of Melbourne (1883–1967) would not be wasted. Bruce had been a nationalist Prime Minister in coalition with the Country Party, from 1923 to 1929. Barbara Tribe’s bronze bust of Bruce, held in the Gallery’s collection, was cast in 1937 while he was serving as both Australia’s High Commissioner in London and the Australian delegate to the League of Nations in Geneva.

In the midst of the 1930s Depression and agricultural slump, Bruce argued that League-supported agriculture, nutrition and health programs could underpin international cooperation.

In May 1939, in the dying days of the League and during the slide into war, Bruce presided over a Council of the League of Nations committee that recommended ‘a structural change to the League, which would focus its work 64

nations to promoting higher standards of living, full employment, economic, social and health solutions, cultural and educational cooperation and ‘universal respect for, and observance of, human rights’. In 1946, Bruce became Chair of the World Food Council of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the new United Nations.

But how did a nation of 7.5 million people gain such sway? Initially it was, and had to be, the superpowers that laid the groundwork. US President Franklin D Roosevelt had suggested the term ‘United Nations’ at a conference in Washington DC in 1942. Over the following two years, the allied powers met in Moscow, Tehran, Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC and in Yalta, a Russian resort town in the Crimea.

However, none expected the influence that the smaller nations were to have at the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco in 1945.

During that conference, Doc Evatt convinced the delegations of the other smaller nations of their power as a voting bloc. In the third volume of his Australian history series, Australians, Thomas Keneally quotes the New York Times of 27 June 1945, which noted that Evatt was ‘recognised as the most brilliant and effective voice of the Small Powers, a leading statesman for the world’s conscience’. Edward Stettinius, the US Undersecretary of State who had brokered agreement on the UN’s structure in 1943, observed: ‘Dr Evatt

on economic and social conditions in the world’.

Bruce’s ideas live on in the United Nations Charter. His successor, Doc Evatt, from the other side of Australian politics and another world war later, also argued that economic justice was the basis of world security. Article 56 of the UN Charter contains the undertakings that became known as the ‘Australian pledge’. It commits

Evatt’s towering intellect, internationalist ideals, dominant personality, judicial experience, rigorously principled conviction and stamina came together in those two months in San Francisco in 1945. portrait 51 summer 2015

has done more than any other person to write the United Nations Charter.

His work at San Francisco gained the admiration and respect of all nations.’

A brilliant scholar, Dr Herbert Vere Evatt (1894–1965) was a barrister and earned his Doctor of Laws by thesis at the University of Sydney in 1924. It is in these academic robes that he appears in his portrait, by Arnold Shore, in the Gallery’s collection. Painted in 1935, five years after he became the youngest ever appointment to the High Court of Australia, it is the perfect costume for a public figure widely known as ‘Doc Evatt’. Stepping down from the judiciary, Evatt ran for Federal Parliament in 1940, holding the seat of Barton for the Labor Party for the next 18 years, serving as AttorneyGeneral and Minister for External Affairs between 1941 and 1949. A liberal

internationalist, Doc Evatt wrote in a cablegram to Curtin in 1944 that the UN ‘should be a proper place for the voice and interest of the smaller powers’.

Evatt’s towering intellect, internationalist ideals, dominant personality, judicial experience, rigorously principled conviction and stamina came together in those two months in San Francisco in 1945.

Conscious of the League’s failures, Evatt argued for robust processes and a permanent International Court of Justice. Sir Percy Spender kcvo kbe qc (1897–1985), the subject of a drawing by Louis Kahan and a bronze bust by Alex Kolozsy, both held in the collection, joined the International Court of Justice in 1958 and was its President from 1964 to 1967.

Evatt had hand-picked his team, including the young John Burton (1915–

Group portrait of Australian delegates to the United Nations conference in San Francisco 1945 gelatin silver photograph Sir Kenneth Bailey photograph collection National Library of Australia John Burton 1951 unknown photographer gelatin silver photograph Gift of John Burton and Betty Nathan 2007

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Jessie Street 1929 Jerrold Nathan oil on canvas Gift of the Street family and the Jessie Street National Women’s Library 2010

2010), the subject of a photographic portrait in the collection. (Two years after San Francisco, aged only 32, Burton was appointed Permanent Head of the Department of External Affairs.) The Australian delegates attended, in Evatt’s words, ‘as many committees as physically possible’, and their system of reporting back to Evatt meant that he was able to appear in committees, fully briefed, at crucial moments. They averaged ten meetings a day – about 350 over the two months.

So omnipresent was Doc that other delegates joked there were actually ‘ten Evatts’ attending the conference.

Australia was elected to the Executive Committee and Coordination Committee that drafted the final UN Charter.

On May 7, 1945, during the San Francisco conference, Germany 66

officially surrendered, ending the European conflict; the US declared the day a public holiday. Deputy Prime Minister Forde, Doc Evatt, Jessie Street and three other Australian delegates hired a car to visit Yosemite National Park on this one day off; it was in planning this trip that a furious Street discovered that her delegate’s allowance was a third of the men’s.

Within the UN Charter, Street and the women delegates successfully lobbied to include equal rights of men and women in the preamble, equal employment within the UN … and provision for the creation of the Commission on the Status of Women.

Women represented less than 1% of the delegates from the fifty nations.

Similar to Evatt’s approach to mobilise the smaller nations, Jessie Street worked closely with Bodil Begtrup of Denmark, Berta Lutz of Brazil and Senator Isabel de Vidal of Uruguay to exert influence as a group. Lady Jessie Street (1889–1970), like Evatt, hailed from country New South Wales and was educated at Sydney University.

She had visited and observed the League of Nations in 1930 and 1938.

She had also represented Australia at numerous women’s meetings and congresses with leading international lights of the feminist cause, including Margaret Sanger, Margery Corbett Ashby and Alice Paul.

In 1929, when Street sat for her portrait held in the collection, painted

by Jerrold Nathan, she had recently co-founded the United Associations of Women. National Portrait Gallery curator Joanna Gilmour, in her article on the portrait in a previous issue of Portrait magazine, noted that the ‘rich fabrics, furs and jewels’ were likely to be the painter’s selection, as his subject was ‘more commonly found in the nononsense combo of a suit, blouse and sensible shoes’.

Within the UN Charter, Street and the women delegates successfully lobbied to include equal rights of men and women in the preamble, equal employment within the UN (despite the vigorous opposition to this resolution from the US, UK and Cuban delegates), and provision for the creation of the Commission on the Status of Women. Street assisted in drafting Article 8 on the status of women and served as Australia’s representative on the Commission on the Status of Women from 1947 to 1948.

Evatt and Street’s contributions did not end in June 1945. Three years later, according to The Greats: the 50 men and women who most helped to shape modern Australia, the French police, outside the opening of the third Assembly in Paris in 1948, almost prevented the entry of a ‘heavy, tousle-haired man in a baggy lounge suit, his tie off-centre’, who emerged from a ‘modest, late-model Ford’ and ‘shambled up to the official entrance’.

It turned out they had delayed the arrival of the President of the third General Assembly of the United portrait 51 summer 2015

Nations, Doc Evatt; he remains the only Australian to have held this position.

On 10 December 1948, presiding as the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Evatt declared that ‘millions of people … would turn to it for help, guidance and inspiration.’ Jessie Street had contributed to its drafting. Another judicial sitter in the Gallery’s collection, one also committed to human rights and who has chaired UN committees, The Hon. Michael Kirby ac cmg, remembers receiving a copy of the Universal Declaration at school in 1949, bearing the ‘blue imprint of the then newly familiar global emblem of the United Nations’. Kirby has noted that Evatt’s ‘presidency of the Assembly is the sole inscription appearing on his tombstone in

Canberra. Later generations of Australians would do well to remember Evatt’s contributions as a lawyer and an internationalist.’

Both Street and Evatt lived out their principles. In the ensuing years, both fought personal and political battles in the poisonous climate that attended the perceived threat of communism.

Later, both Street and Evatt threw their weight behind the ‘Yes’ campaign in the 1967 constitutional referendum relating to Indigenous Australians.

Its leader, Faith Bandler, said Street was ‘absolutely vital’ to the movement.

Sounding very much like Elizabeth Couchman sixteen years and a world war earlier, Evatt wrote in the program for the United Nations Festival in Geelong in May 1950: ‘The road to peace is never easy, and it is sometimes dangerous. The world desperately

needs people who will have the wisdom and courage to travel that road, and to insist that their governments make no tours around it.’

Bruce and Couchman, Evatt and Street, coming from opposite sides of Australian politics, were united as Australian internationalists who believed in the community of nations.

These wise, courageous individuals represented in the Gallery’s collection believed that Australia could help change the world. Over the last 70 years, thousands of Australians have followed in their footsteps, serving at the UN, as part of the Australian Missions to the UN, and on UN committees. While the United Nations has endured for 70 years, as Doc Evatt wrote in 1949, ‘At no stage in the world’s history will it be feasible to pause and assume the task is finished’.

Jessie Street representing Australia at the UN gelatin silver photograph Official United Nations Photo (Department of Public Information) Series 11, Papers of Jessie Street ms2683, National Library of Australia

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ON SHOW

international

Thought-provoking and poignant, and encompassing famous Scots as well as lesser known figures, this exhibition marks the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. The exhibition includes a rich variety of portraits and related works in various media. nationalgalleries.org/ portraitgallery

The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize National Portrait Gallery, London until 21 February 2016 The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize celebrates and promotes the very best in contemporary portrait photography from around the world. The selected images, many of which will be on display for the first time, explore both traditional and contemporary approaches to the photographic portrait whilst capturing a range of characters, moods and locations. This year’s winner is David Stewart, with Five Girls, a re-staging of his 2008 entry. npg.org.uk

In and Out of the Studio: Photographic Portraits from West Africa Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York until 3 January 2016 This exhibition presents 100 years of portrait photography in West Africa through nearly 80 photographs taken between the 1870s and the 1970s. These works, many of which are being shown for the first time, are drawn from the Metropolitan Museum’s Visual Resource Archives in the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, with additions from the Department of Photographs. metmuseum.org

Goya: The Portraits National Gallery, London until 10 January 2016 Portraits make up a third of Goya’s output – and more than 150 still survive today – but there has never been an exhibition focusing solely on Goya’s work as a portraitist, until this one, featuring almost half this number. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes is one of Spain’s most celebrated artists. He was an incisive social commentator and a supremely gifted painter who took the genre of portraiture to new heights. Goya saw beyond the appearances of those who sat to him, subtly revealing their character and psychology within his portraits. nationalgallery.org.uk

Vogue 100: A Century of Style National Portrait Gallery, London 11 February – 22 May 2016 This remarkable range of photography has been commissioned by British Vogue since it was founded in 1916, with over 280 prints from the Condé Nast archive and international collections being shown together for the first time to tell the story of one of the most influential fashion magazines in the world. This exhibition has been organised in collaboration with British Vogue as part of the magazine’s centenary celebrations. npg.org.uk

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Five Girls 2014 © David Stewart; Avatar 1916 Henry Lintott RSA Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture (Diploma Collection); Self Portrait 1976 Samuel Fosso The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Countess of Altamira and Her Daughter, María Agustina 1787-8 Francisco de Goya © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Linda Evangelista 1991 Patrick Demarchelier © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.

Remembering the Great War Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh 4 August 2014 – 5 July 2015

Prison photograph of Olga Radalyski 1899 photographer unknown Public Record Office Victoria; Negotiating a family portrait – a study of history, myth and identity 2014 Marzena Wasikowska; Self portrait: Man re-enters the sea 2015 Andrew Sayers Courtesy of the estate of artist; Dark Learning (act 9) 2015 Jacobus Capone; Victor Trumper 1905 George Beldam Purchased with funds provided by L Gordon Darling ac cmg 2009

national portrait gallery Sideshow Alley: Infamy, the macabre & the portrait National Portrait Gallery, Canberra 5 December 2015 to 28 February 2016 The exploits of Ned Kelly, Ben Hall and other notorious Australian criminals continue to grip the imagination, just as during their lifetimes their portraits and stories were employed for various macabre, sensational and extraordinary forms of public entertainment.

Featuring a selection of death masks, post-mortem drawings and other spooky and disquieting portraits, Sideshow Alley will consider the official, personal and commercial uses made of images of Australian convicts and criminals throughout the nineteenth century. portrait.gov.au

National Photographic Portrait Prize 2015 Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery, Queensland 9 December - 31 January 2016 The National Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition is selected from a national field of entries that reflect the distinctive vision of Australia’s aspiring and professional portrait photographers and the unique nature of their subjects. The National Portrait Gallery offers a prize of $25,000 for the most outstanding photographic portrait. bundabergregionalgalleries.com.au

Uncommon Australians McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, Langwarrin Victoria 13 December - 21 February 2016 Uncommon Australians: The vision of Gordon and Marilyn Darling showcases portraits acquired through the generosity of the National Portrait Gallery’s Founding Patrons, L Gordon Darling ac cmg and Marilyn Darling ac; and pays tribute to the Darlings’ persistence in turning their private dream of a gallery of portraits of ‘uncommon Australians’ into a tangible collection in a purposebuilt home. mcclellandgallery.com

2015 National Self-Portrait Prize University of Queensland Art Museum until 13 March 2016

Macquarie Digital Portraiture Award 2015 National Portrait Gallery, Canberra until 25 April 2016 The annual Macquarie Digital Portraiture Award encourages the development of moving image portraiture by supporting artists who work with screen-based technology. The six finalist artworks were selected from 100 entries for their compelling expressions of identity. portrait.gov.au

The idea of existing somewhere between entropy and transcendence is at the heart of the 2015 National Self-Portrait Prize.

The $50,000 invitation-only, acquisitive prize is held by The University of Queensland every two years. This year’s exhibition features 30 finalists and was judged and opened

by QAGOMA Curatorial Manager of Australian Art, Jason Smith. artmuseum.uq.edu.au

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ames Bartholomew Cummings ao (1927-2015) – but simply ‘Bart’ to a generation of Australian followers of thoroughbred horse racing – fulfilled in life the destiny foreshadowed for him in 1941 when he left school to become a strapper in the Adelaide stable of his father Jim. For Jim Cummings trained the great Comic Court to win the legendary Melbourne Cup of 1950, and in doing so charted a course for Bart who, after taking out his own trainer’s licence in 1955, crafted a career which delivered more than seven thousand winners, including twelve which triumphed in the race that stops a nation, the Melbourne Cup. For the record, Bart Cummings’ Melbourne cup winners were Light Fingers (1965), Galilee (1966), Red Handed (1967), Think Big (1974 and 1975), Gold and Black (1977), Hyperno (1979), Kingston Rule (1990), Let’s Elope (1991), Saintly (1996), Rogan Josh (1999) and Viewed (2008). To ice the ‘Cup King’s’ cake, Bart Cummings trained quinellas – the winner and the second-placed horse – in the Melbourne Cups of 1965, 1966, 1974, 1975 and 1991.

No one-trick pony, the legendary Bart trained the winners of an astounding 762 ‘stakes’ races, including seven Caulfield Cups, four Golden Slipper Stakes, five Cox Plates, nine VRC Oaks, eight Newmarket Handicaps and thirteen Australian Cups. This illustrious parade included no fewer than 268 winners of the racing industry’s crème de la crème, Group One races.

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Of Irish extraction, Bart Cummings began his career in Adelaide, moved to Melbourne in 1968 and then to his Leilani Lodge facility near Randwick Racecourse in Sydney in 1975. Bart and his wife Valmae – whom he married in 1954 – made their home at Prince’s Farm at Castlereagh near the banks of the Nepean River west of Sydney.

True to his destiny and to the traditions learned from his father Jim, Bart Cummings has inculcated his son Anthony and his grandson James with the spirit of the Australian thoroughbred industry. Today both bear the stamp and memory of Bart as they pursue their respective careers as successful trainers of thoroughbred racehorses.

Bart Cummings died on 30 August 2015 at Prince’s Farm, just two days after he and Valmae had marked their 61st wedding anniversary. He was 87. His life was celebrated at a state funeral at St Mary’s Cathedral, in Sydney on 7 September. by peter phillips

Study for portrait of Bart Cummings 1986 Bryan Westwood oil on canvas Purchased 2002

portrait 51 summer 2015