Portrait 52

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MAGAZINE OF AUSTRALIAN & INTERNATIONAL PORTRAITURE

JUDE RAE TALKS COMMISSIONS NATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAIT PRIZE WILLIAM STRUTT: A BIT SKETCHY UQ SELF PORTRAIT PRIZE AUGUSTUS EARLE: THE ACCIDENTAL AUSTRALIAN PORTRAITURE MEETS ESCAPOLOGY

AUTUMN 2016

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05 Observation point Gary Grealy 04 Shop talk Angus and the arbiters talk (photo) shop for the National Photographic Portrait Prize.

12 Augustus serendipitous Joanna Gilmour on Augustus Earle’s incidental Australian adventures.

18 City boys Christopher Chapman immerses himself in Larry Clark’s field of vision.

28 Past present Krysia Kitch celebrates Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

33 Strutt your stuff Matthew Jones on the upshot of a St Kilda Road outrage.

45 Self-effacing Michael Wardell samples the fare in the University of Queensland National Self-Portrait Prize.

50 The first nurse Tamsin Hong recounts the tale of Marion Smith, 22 Hired guns, bounty hunters the only known Australian and horse whisperers Indigenous servicewoman Jude Rae contemplates the portrait commission. of World War One.

52 Diamond doll Karen Vickery delights in a thespian thread of the Australian yarn.

56 Old Blighty Angus Trumble ponders the many faces of William Bligh.

58 Risky business John Zubrzycki lauds the characters of the Australian escapology trade.

64 On show National and international portraiture exhibitions.

68 Tribute Stevie Wright

Stevie Wright 1975 (printed 2011) Gary Ede inkjet print Purchased 2011

CONTRIBUTORS

PORTRAIT#52 AUTUMN 2016 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 Editor stephen.phillips@npg.gov.au Design brett@portrait.gov.au

joanna gilmour (“Augustus serendipitous” p. 12) is Curator at the National Portrait Gallery. matthew jones (“Strutt your stuff” p. 33) is a Curator in Exhibitions at the National Library of Australia.

Rights and permissions katrina.osborne@npg.gov.au Photography mark.mohell@npg.gov.au

michael wardell (“Self-effacing” p. 45) is the Art Gallery Coordinator, Logan Art Gallery, Queensland.

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 Twitter Join the twitter feed twitter.com/NPG_Canberra

tamsin hong (“The first nurse” p. 50) is a Learning Facilitator at the National Portrait Gallery.

krysia kitch (“Past present” p. 28) is Manager of Learning Programs at the National Portrait Gallery.

Flickr flickr.com/photos/ nationalportraitgallery/ Facebook facebook.com/pages/NationalPortrait-Gallery-Canberra/

angus trumble (“Shop talk” p. 4; “Old Blighty” p. 56) is Director at the National Portrait Gallery.

Online portrait.gov.au/magazine ATSI readers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this magazine may contain the images of now deceased Indigenous people

dr christopher chapman (“City boys” p. 18) is Senior Curator at the National Portrait Gallery.

karen vickery (“Diamond Doll” p. 52) is Director Learning and Visitor Experience at the National Portrait Gallery.

john zubrzycki (“Risky business” p. 58) is a Sydney-based author and journalist.

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illustrator alice carroll

jude rae (“Hired guns, bounty hunters and horse whisperers” p. 22) is a Sydney based artist who sometimes paints portraits.

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 Sarah Peirse 2014 Jude Rae oil on linen © the artist Image © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio

portrait 52 autumn 2016

The Art Lovers – Noah and Savannah 2015 Gary Grealy digital print Image courtesy the artist

OBSERVATION POINT GARY GREALY

W

hy Portraiture? I have always gravitated to the figurative, the human form and, ultimately, the portrait.

I must confess at the outset that my photographic hero is the American photographer Irving Penn, who was still working until his death in 2009 at the age of ninety-two. He was a master of many subjects, from still life to fashion.

However, for me, it is the portraits that are captivating; it is the simplicity of a plain background and beautiful lighting, with the subject as the hero.

This approach has been my intent over many years! I will always opt for a simple background rather than complexity.

As with most rules, this is occasionally broken, maybe at the request of a subject, or simply that I find on a rare occasion that the background adds something. It is all about the subject; they must be the hero! I want to be within an arms length of the sitter. I am looking for the character, the history in the roadmap of the face. I want intimacy between the lens and subject. Hence, a lot of my portraits are quite closely cropped.

Another element to my approach is the need to research my subject. I read as much as possible. I will view every video I can find. On many occasions I have listened to a radio interview or seen a documentary on an individual, and this has been the catalyst to contact that person to ask if they will sit for a portrait.

If possible, I like to meet with the subject prior to the sitting; generally this is only a brief hello so they have met me and I have a sense of the person and their environment. This also allows me to establish the equipment I will require for the sitting.

The process of visualising the image begins with a drawing.

With this technique, I find the composition quickly becomes clear. On the day of the sitting I want a completely resolved image in my mind; I don’t want my subject twiddling their thumbs while I play with lights. To this end, I pre-light every portrait I make. I photograph myself in the lighting style I intend to use for the portrait. On the day, the lights are set and I begin. Some sittings may require fifty frames; many take ten.

Why portraiture? I love the interaction and the collaboration!

Why portraits of artists and people from the art world? I think it is the smell of oil paint and the exhilaration of being in the presence of creativity!

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angus and the arbiters talk (photo) shop for the national photographic portrait prize.

The National Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition opens on 19 March, 2016 at the National Portrait Gallery.

The show features forty-nine finalists selected from a total of approximately two thousand entries, with these most polished photographic gems extracted by a three-person judging panel comprising Christopher Chapman (National Portrait Gallery Senior Curator), Penelope Grist (National Portrait Gallery Assistant Curator) and Narelle Autio (Photographer).

In the midst of their final deliberations in late 2015, National Portrait Gallery Director Angus Trumble sat down with the trio to discuss the methods and motivations behind the judging process, and to discover what, in the absence of flashbulbs, really makes a photo ‘pop’.

Miles and Arkie 2015 Clint Peloso Digital print Neato with Daniel 2015 James Geer Type C print

Shop talk 4

angus: Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me this afternoon.

I wanted to begin by asking you about the process of boiling down essentially two thousand entries to fifty. How did you go about it? What’s the sequence? penny: We look at all the entries on a screen. The sequence is per the order they’re submitted: you see the sets; you see each photographer’s work together if they submit it all in one entry, which is sometimes quite interesting. Then we scroll through each one and, in the first run-through, if any of us says ‘maybe’, it goes into a ‘maybe’ pile. At the end of that process we had about 120. That took us all of yesterday. That was about seven hours worth of deliberation. angus: That’s interesting. So by that means you built up a Venn diagram of ‘maybes’? Any one person’s ‘maybe’ made the cut – and from that you’ve got 125? penny: Yes. angus: Super. Were there any to which you said yes, yes, yes!? penny: There were some which elicited a much quicker response of ‘maybe’. There were some where we all just sat there quietly and nobody said anything, and we realised we were considering it deeply enough that it obviously triggered something for all of us. That went into the maybes.

Then today – it was fantastic to be

able to sleep on it because, Narelle, you were saying something quite interesting about the process of being so overwhelmed by the imagery yesterday? narelle: I think for anyone looking at 2,000 images – even people who look at photography – by the end it’s quite overwhelming. You’re not sure of what you’re judging in some respects.

I guess that’s why we put them in the ‘maybes’; we were considering them and we didn’t want to kind of say ‘yes, definitely’ at that stage, because it was about looking at everything in the scheme of things. I think it was nice just to put them in a considered pile and then sleep on it, and then come back and look at that smaller group. It was really startling, actually, how much clearer we were the next morning. angus: That was today? narelle: That was today – there was not any sitting on the fence, very much.

There were probably a couple at the end where we ‘ummed and aahhed’ a bit. Mostly we were fairly ‘cut and dried’ this morning. That was good. angus: I was part of the process last year and I remember it was 2400 or so entries. 2000 is similar, and large enough to get a sense of shared preoccupations. I remember last year it was pregnant women in natural environments who seemed to be on people’s minds. People with exotic birds, old people in bed – just distinctive aggregations of ideas. Were there any shared preoccupations this year that were similar? Or a whole new crop? I know, Christopher, you were part of the process last year? chris: There was a very ‘normal’ new thing of people with their pets; mainly cats and dogs. I reckon that probably constituted about half of the entries we received. angus: Wow. penny: The other half was the beach.

Sometimes it was dogs and cats on the beach. angus: Is there an ongoing interest in babies in strange receptacles? penny: Not so many, no. Babies – definitely lots of babies, but few of them were in receptacles. There was one baby in a basket. angus: There you are; we call that ‘residue!’ chris: The pets thing was a very notable one. Penny jokingly wondered whether we’d included in the terms and conditions that your entry must portrait 52 autumn 2016

Free range cousins 2015 Jennifer Stocks Digital print

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The little beachcomber 2015 Nicholas Samartis Digital print

include a dog, because there was a huge number. Some of the best of those have made it through into the exhibition. angus: Wow. It’s interesting. Narelle – what do you bring to the process (as a practitioner) that might perhaps differ from your colleagues? narelle: I don’t know at this stage.

I have to probably compare it to other years. I think in the end I said to them I’d be quite harsh, I think, because I’ve seen a lot of photography over the years and researched it myself. In the scope of what I do, I don’t like to repeat things that have gone before – I’m looking to tell a different story. I guess I’m looking for something that might affect me in a way that I haven’t seen before, or where I think ‘I wish I’d taken that picture.’

There’s also a bit of a technical element that I can bring, in terms of structuring a photograph, and where I think some lenses that were used are probably inappropriate to get the best of what they’re trying to shoot. Things like that. angus: Are we seeing more problematic Photoshop? narelle: There’s a lot of that. I’m a bit of a purist. It has to be for a reason, I guess. A lot of it is not for anything other than decorative reasons, and

for me that doesn’t make a good photograph. There’s still got to be something brought to the pose; an opposition, or feeling that they’re giving. I think, sometimes, I’m more of a documentary-based photographer, so portraits that I do shoot, I kind of set them up and I find a beautiful light with a nice background and the composition; and then I like the wait for the sitter to bring something to the table, and give me something extra that I can actually capture as a photograph.

It’s about capturing something that has never actually happened before; it’s that moment that we’re trying to bring forth, and I think you need to respect that the sitter should be part of that process.

Otherwise it can be a painting. If you want to structure it completely how you want, you might as well paint it. I think there’s a collaboration that always goes on with photography that’s important for my process. chris: It’s an interesting issue, isn’t it, because Photoshop is merely the retouching of our time. Various processes of modification have always existed. narelle: I think Photoshop is very valid. I’ve grown up in the darkroom portrait 52 autumn 2016

era, where we burn and dodge, and you alter a photograph quite a lot in a darkroom and I think you should be able to do that digitally. You can still burn and dodge and re-create a mood.

Too much retouching – you can take photographs too far, and I think the decorative thing of overlaying things on top of something – it’s just not for me.

I think it’s good for iPhone and your Facebook posts and stuff. angus: Were there any instances of entries that were quite obviously shot with an iPhone? narelle: Yes. It’s really interesting how quickly our brains process the eyes in a ‘selfie’. Very often we would just be able to see, from the person’s eyes, that it was a selfie, even though it may not be obvious from anything else in the photograph. It was really quite startling; I didn’t expect to be able to see it quite to that extent. penny: There’s that lack of interaction, almost; it’s different when you shoot, I think, with the camera further away, because there is marked interaction.

When you’re looking at something really close up, it’s vacant. There’s nothing happening behind the eyes. angus: You’ve boiled it down now to fifty-one. Upon reflection, do you think there’s a sort of body or shape to the selection such that people visiting the show will say ‘Aha, this group of judges has reached a particular kind of consensus’? chris: It’s a very uplifting group of images; and it’s quite a diverse stylistic mix and quite a diverse group of sitters, young and old. If anything, perhaps more so than some previous years, it’s marked by that eclecticism, I think.

We haven’t ever ... we certainly didn’t set out with any aims in mind. narelle: No preconceived kind of ideas. chris: No. We were coming down to that final, approaching fifty, which is our ideal number logistically. Again, it seemed to make sense that, as the number went down, some of the images didn’t stand up in their company, if you like. We swept through all of our short-list and the entire group again to check that we hadn’t overlooked anything. We’re pretty happy with the end results as holding together; I don’t think it reflects a particular tendency in portrait photography, but there’s a sense of positive outlook that infuses pretty much all the images in the show.

Boys and their cars 2015 Lisa Ivandich Digital print

Life dancers 2015 Elizabeth Looker Digital print

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Would you agree? narelle: It’s interesting how that’s come out. angus: Just taking your thoughts one by one as individuals, I’m interested about yesterday as opposed to today.

Today seems to be coming together with a consensus. Yesterday was separately bringing different sets of criteria, possibly, to the process.

What do you [Penny] think you bring to the process that differs somewhat from Christopher and Narelle? penny: Strangely, because I’ve been 8

Polly Borland 2015 John Tsiavis Digital print

working with this movie portraiture project, I’ve been sifting through thousands of images from the span of film history, from publicity portraits to films stills, mainly. I think I found myself being very struck by styles that were either narrative or, in some ways, glamorous. That was very clear when we came through today; I think there were ones where I was a ‘yes’ and my colleagues were probably ‘no’.

I realised, because it looks like something from the 40s, that I’ve gone there. Some of the ones that had that

really strong narrative element came through as well, for all three of us. angus: Chris – so you’ve been a judge several times? chris: Yes – I think what I always look for is a sense of self communicated very clearly; that we’re being given some idea of the uniqueness of the person in the photo. This year in particular I was paying a lot of attention to the formal make-up of the image itself: it’s integrity, visually. That’s something that we all talked about with some images – that it perhaps reflects a sense portrait 52 autumn 2016

Shogun 2015 Joshua Morris Digital print Portrait of Marlon Williams 2015 Dean Golja Digital print

of skill that a photographer has. It’s one thing to grab an arresting image that is a fleeting moment in time. It’s another to be able to do that and also have that image held in some sort of balance; not necessarily symmetrical balance, of course. When the combination of those two things comes together– a compelling subject and a very strongly constructed image – I think it’s fair to say those images stood out; I was paying a lot of attention to that. narelle: I think we were quite tough on works that were almost there, but

not quite. Just going back to what was said about an ‘eclectic’ kind of group: it’s quite possible that, because I don’t work as a portrait photographer, I guess I might be a little bit more open to an entire scope of portrait photographer.

I don’t work in it; I’m not thinking or trying to replicate what I do in a conscious way. That might contribute to that eclecticism. angus: It raises the question, doesn’t it? Did you sense from this crop a sharp distinction between people who were, in fact, strategically trying to meet

a portrait requirement, from those who were submitting an image that happened to be of a person that would fit neatly or approximately within the criteria? A deliberate attempt to address the genre, as opposed to taking advantage of circumstance? narelle: I think there definitely were a lot that we were conscious of, in a certain way. I was kind of looking for ‘the recipe’. We were quite hard on them; we weren’t excluding them but we said, okay, if you go that way they’ve got to be perfect.

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chris: That’s right –certain sub-genres that you see involving, for example, nature, a weathered face; when we were considering those sorts of images they had to really do it very well because they have become clichéd in many ways. angus: Now what lies ahead is the show, and at that point you will chose a winner. Do you have any sense at this point of any front-runners, or have you deliberately withheld that judgement? narelle: I think there’s a few that are really clearly amazing and strong images. We will definitely wait and see

what they look like in print form before we make the final decision. chris: There are a number of pictures in this year’s show that we really think are pretty sweet. penny: Not one, at the moment. I’m definitely leaving it open because I want to see the images; there are probably at least half a dozen that are up there. angus: It sounds like you, as a unique threesome, found it relatively easy to arrive at a consensus? narelle: Surprisingly easy. Especially to get it down to the 120, and then it was quite clear this morning. There were a

Sisters Isla and Elki role-play as princesses 2015 Natalie Grono Digital print

Soft and Sophia – safe 2015 Freya Paley Digital print

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few long, considered discussions! chris: I’ve done a bit of this lately and the favourite question that people ask you at the show is you must have found it so difficult. Actually, I confess, I usually find it pretty easy! Especially when you’re functioning as a group to form a consensus, and not as a single judge; I think it actually makes the task easier if you have sounding boards. penny: Absolutely. narelle: I think that’s fair. I think it forces you to be reflective. I’ve never done this before, ever. angus: This is the first time for you, Narelle? narelle: Yeah. I was quite worried about what I was reacting to in the portrait; whether it was a personal bias, and wasn’t a response either to the portrait or the quality of the photograph.

It’s very useful to be able to talk that through with the other judges. I think I would have found it much more difficult by myself for that reason. It’s good to be able to talk through ‘why’. penny: I think that lesson of ‘more eyes on it brings clarity’ is also one that can be applied more generally, including submitting the photographs.

The photographic milieu often involves working in isolation, so really it’s a lesson to have someone else look at it first. As many people as you can.

That will just enable you to be stronger. angus: Entrants submit their work, but they also submit a statement; is that correct? Did you find you were taking account of the statement or deliberately holding off? narelle: The first day we read almost none of the statements, and today we read most of them. chris: In fact, we didn’t read any statements; we didn’t read any information about who the photographer is and who the subject is. In some cases we were able to recognise either of the two, but it wasn’t until we had our shortlist that we looked at the statements. And that was really to get that extra layer of information at that point, once we’d already evaluated the image on its merits. angus: Is there anything else you’d like, individually, to say about the process, upon reflection? Narelle? Anything surprise you? Shock you? Delight you, or ... ? narelle: I guess it was really a nice surprise to find it’s such an egalitarian competition, because there are lots portrait 52 autumn 2016

of amateurs and people who may not necessarily have even shot many pictures, but just happen to get a great picture; they are in the contest among everyone else. As a photographer it’s always interesting to see what other photographers are doing, and how they’re accomplishing it and what direction they’re taking. angus: Great. It goes back to that point about 2,000 being an ample number to reflect that whole national scope, so it’s looking at a snapshot of a whole national practice. More than adequate, and I think most statistical cohorts for opinion polls are not nearly that large.

600 is ample, and that’s to ascertain the opinions of the country. Christopher? chris: I find it quite fascinating that every time I've been involved it's very clear that the final forty or fifty stand well above the rest; there’s that similar

The first meal 2015 Reece McMillan Digital print

compelling number, irrespective of the number of entries.

We've talked about that on this occasion, so that's an interesting recurring statistic, I think. angus: Even at the ‘lower’ end of the fifty-one, there’s still a standard of excellence that is beyond dispute. There aren’t too many limping antelopes at the edge of the herd, is what I’m saying. narelle: There are some really simple pictures in there, but we thought that they were executed pretty much perfectly. I think it shows you don’t have to trick it up. penny: The thing I was really struck by relates to the whole gamut of the photographs submitted; not the ones that made it through or weren’t perfect, beautiful photographs or really worked up portraits, but the overwhelming sense in aggregate. It’s something that

was mentioned during the judging: the sense that they’re photographing, most of the time, the most important people in their lives. It’s a lot of kids, it’s a lot of families, it’s a lot of love, really. It’s an extraordinary portrait of the affection that people have for each other, and how Australians experience and show that. I think that probably does come across in the final selection too, but it was really striking, interesting thing for me, going through them all. angus: Thank you very much.

The above is an edited version of Angus’ interview with the National Photographic Portrait Prize judges.

The Portrait editorial team have independently selected a range of finalists to accompany these words– this is no way reflects any judges’ decisions concerning winning entries.

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Augustus serendipitous

joanna gilmour on augustus earle’s incidental australian adventures.

In the days before Christmas 1828, a number of London newspapers published reviews of the spectacle then on offer from the panorama proprietor and painter, Robert Burford, at his premises on Leicester Square. ‘Mr Burford, whose pencil has so frequently delighted us with interesting excerpta from the regions of landscape’, and who ‘transports us to Nature’s choicest scenes whenever we wish to please our senses, or to satisfy our curiosity, has just produced a panoramic view of Sydney, the capital of New South Wales’, stated the Times on 20 December. ‘At first sight we were struck with the great beauty of the place’, it

Desmond, a NS Wales chief painted for a karobbery or native dance c. 1826 Augustus Earle watercolour on paper Rex Nan Kivell Collection National Library of Australia

Waterfall in Australia c. 1830 Augustus Earle oil on canvas Rex Nan Kivell Collection National Library of Australia

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continued, and ‘if Mr Burford have not indulged his fancy in the execution of his present work, and heightened the beauty of the scene, one of the finest spots in the universe is appropriated, by a strange inconsistency, to the reception of the very dregs of society’.

Similarly, the Examiner wondered whether Burford’s delightful panorama might ‘cause such a yearning after a residence in that attractive spot, that a transportable offence would become as common as lying, and Hicks’s Hall and the Old Bailey be looked upon merely as rude passages leading to an earthly paradise’. The Morning Chronicle, meanwhile, enthused over Burford’s ‘genius, and his industry, for enabling us of the North to have a real idea of what exists among our brethren of the South’, while another paper declared that the panorama of Sydney ‘will add greatly to Mr Burford’s high and justly earned reputation’, and that it ‘surpasses in interest any we have yet seen’.

Presented in a purpose-built, three storey high circular building designed to the specifications of Henry Aston Barker, the inventor of the panorama, Burford’s view of Sydney had the added thrill of intense veracity, with viewers entering an immersive installation that created a disconcertingly ‘real’ encounter with the curious English outpost. The idea of a colony designed for the reception of those ‘whose residence in their native land was incompatible with the welfare of 14

The annual meeting of the native tribes at Parramatta, New South Wales, the governor meeting them c. 1826 Augustus Earle watercolour and ink on paper Rex Nan Kivell Collection National Library of Australia

Portrait of Bungaree, a native of New South Wales c. 1826 Augustus Earle oil on canvas Rex Nan Kivell Collection National Library of Australia

society’ had long been something that could intrigue, bemuse or repulse England’s exhibition-going classes, and by 1828 the appetite for news and evidence of the distant dominion and its people was such that it was ideal fodder for panorama painters such as Burford and other artists engaged on the boundary of popular culture and fine art. Indeed, the colonisation and consolidation of New South Wales coincided with the emergence of panoramas as a popular form of entertainment, or what the historian Richard Altick has since defined as ‘rational amusement’, whereby showmen or commercially-inclined artisans might turn the material culture of discovery, exploration and empire-building into a sensational yet educational attraction. In light of this, what is perhaps most interesting about this particular panorama was that it was produced by Burford from drawings made in Sydney in February 1827 by the intrepid and intriguing painter and traveller, Augustus Earle, whose work concurrently inhabited the spheres of art, information and entertainment. As art historian Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones and others have explained, Earle’s work was characterised by a winning combination of empiricism and reportage with Romantic, Picturesque and comic traditions. His travels, furthermore – in the Americas, the Pacific, Asia, the Mediterranean and various other places – were conducted for personal, opportunity-and-adventure-seeking reasons, leaving his documentation of the sights and peoples he came across unconstrained by the precise, recordkeeping requirements of the state, or the predilections and instructions of a wealthy patron.

The London-born son of an American painter, Augustus Earle (1793–1838) ended up in Australia by accident in January 1825. Earle had spent much of the preceding year stranded on Tristan da Cunha, a remote volcanic island in the south Atlantic with an adult population of eight, his ordeal coming about at the end of a four year period during which he had travelled and worked in New York, Philadelphia, Brazil, Chile and Peru.

Against advice, Earle boarded a ship called the Duke of Gloucester in Rio de Janeiro in February 1824, thinking it would eventually get him to Calcutta. portrait 52 autumn 2016

When the vessel anchored off Tristan da Cunha, Earle seized the chance to explore the island, going ashore with his dog and a shipmate only to be left behind when the Duke of Gloucester inexplicably sailed without them.

‘Thus I suddenly found myself placed in a situation the most singular and distressing’, Earle wrote in a letter published in the Hobart Town Gazette in February 1825. ‘Eight dreary months did I endure on this dismal and sequestered spot, in a state of anxiety and expectation indescribable.’ During this period, Earle fulfilled the role of chaplain and of tutor to the children of the island’s pipe-smoking ‘governor’, and, given his ‘most vexatious and miserable’ situation, sought also to keep himself sane by venturing around the hitherto un-depicted island, producing a number of landscape views and representations of daily life before his art materials ran out. His output included a self-portrait titled Solitude, watching the horizon at sunset, in the hopes of seeing a vessel, Tristan d’Acunha, showing Earle and his dog, Jemmy, looking dejectedly out to sea, and we see him again in Governor Glass and companions, Tristan d’Acunha, an interior scene recording the exceedingly limited society he quitted with relief when the Admiral Cockburn, blessedly en route to Van Diemen’s Land, called at the island and ‘released me from my melancholy confinement’.

Having arrived in the considerably more varied and convivial Hobart Town, Earle stayed long enough to complete a number of works – including drawings of Hobart that became another Burford exhibit in 1831 – before leaving for Sydney in May 1825.

Enterprising, astute and adaptable, Earle evidently saw the potential of colonial society and subject matter: by late 1826, he had opened an art supply store and gallery on George Street; completed a portrait of the governor, Thomas Brisbane, along with those of other colonists; staged a well-received exhibition of his work; and partaken of journeys west to the Blue Mountains, Bathurst and the Wellington Valley, and north to Port Macquarie, Port Stephens and the Hunter. Earle had also come into possession of the lithographic press which had been brought to the colony at Governor Brisbane’s instigation, using it to produce a series of views of Sydney, along with a lithograph

of his painting, Bungaree, a native of New South Wales; this demonstrated both the suitability to the limited colonial art scene of artists versed in the so-called ‘useful’ and commercial aspects of the profession, as well as Earle’s awareness of the worth of local scenes and depictions of the settlement’s displaced and dispossessed original inhabitants. Earle’s travels in

A bivouac of travellers in Australia in a cabbagetree forest, day break c. 1838 Augustus Earle oil on canvas Rex Nan Kivell Collection National Library of Australia

New South Wales accordingly yielded many representations of Aboriginal people, resulting in an intelligent but occasionally contradictory pictorial record and a telling account of artistic activity in, and associated with, early nineteenth century Australia.

Based on Earle’s own unflattering generalisations – his comment, for example, that Aboriginal people 15

had ‘neither energy, enterprise or industry’ – it is unsurprising that some of his output conformed to ideas of Aboriginal people as mere specimens, fascinating for their strangeness, novelty, or ‘savagery', and like notions underpinning the commercial viability of peculiarly colonial topics. The watercolour Native of New South Wales, for example, made amidst Earle’s trip west in 1826, shows its unidentified subject from behind, recording the precise details of his cicatrices, dress and implements. Earle portrayed himself alongside his Aboriginal guides in works such as A bivouac, day break on the Illawarra Mountains, a result of a journey to that district in 1827, and the oil painting Waterfall in Australia, wherein we see the artist atop a Blue Mountains precipice and in the act of drawing one of his travelling companions. By the early nineteenth century, the practice of exhibiting first peoples in Europe was 16

well established, and supported by the circulation of affordable, popular printed portraits and the availability of other ways to gawp or marvel at ‘exotic’ others. Earle’s 1828 Sydney panorama, for instance, included another representation of Bungaree along with scenes of ‘several groups of Natives, employed in their exercises and sports’ and ‘there is likewise an idea given of the manner in which the natives climb trees’. The guidebook accompanying the panorama, however, described the Aboriginal inhabitants of New South Wales as ‘a miserable race’ who had ‘become so dependent on the settlers that, without what they earn or beg, they could not exist’, while Bungaree was mocked for being typically ‘clothed in a gold-laced blue coat, with massy epaulettes, buttoned up close, to avoid the necessity of a shirt or waistcoat’.

Similarly, in a malign contrast to the fine painting on which the 1826 lithograph was based, a third version

Meeting of the artist and Hongi at the Bay of Islands, November 1827 1827 Augustus Earle oil on canvas Alexander Turnbull Library Te Puna Mātauranga O Aotearoa National Library of New Zealand

of Earle’s portrait of the Aboriginal voyager and leader, printed by Charles Hullmandel in London in 1830, shows a diminished, stereotyped Bungaree, backgrounding him with empty booze bottles and a semi-clad, dishevelled woman sitting in the street.

However, though English imperial ambitions and taste for ‘curiosities’ had furnished a basis for the production of such works, Earle has been shown by a number of scholars to have utilised his prints and portraits to make his own barbed or insightful observations about the profound and pernicious impact of colonisation. In this light, prints such as the apparently derogatory lithographed Bungaree of 1830, or the various works in which Earle took care to capture the evidence and symbols of dispossession – the government hand-out blankets, the cast-off clothing, the grog, the clay pipes and so on – read as an expression of the artist’s sensitivity to and awareness of the plight of Aboriginal people. The portrait 52 autumn 2016

unique and striking 1826 painting of Bungaree, and Desmond, a NS Wales chief painted for a karobbery or native dance (c.1826), for example, are standouts in this regard. Desmond, about whom very little is known, is depicted as commanding and proud, standing firmly, even defiantly, in his country, while the painting of Bungaree is now cited by art historians as exemplary of Earle’s skill in the incisive, subversive use of conventions otherwise employed for humorous effect.

A man of Guringai descent, Bungaree (c.1775–1830) arrived in Sydney from Broken Bay in the 1790s, soon becoming an influential mediator between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities. In 1799, he travelled as far north as present-day Brisbane with Matthew Flinders and joined him again in 1802 as a member of the Investigator expedition; in 1817 he joined the voyage led by Phillip Parker King, who considered Bungaree ‘sharp, intelligent’ and ‘of much service to us in our intercourse with the natives’. Governor Lachlan Macquarie also valued Bungaree as an intermediary, setting aside land for him and his people and issuing them with farming equipment and a fishing boat to encourage the adoption of industrious, ‘civilised’ ways. As Mary Eagle, an authority on Earle’s work, has explained, the portrait recreated Bungaree’s often lampooned practice of welcoming newly-arrived ships to his country, showing him in his secondhand military hat and jacket and wearing the gorget or kingplate given to him by Macquarie in 1815, while simultaneously presenting him in the attitude of a landowner and dignified gentleman.

Earle, Eagle says, ‘was not shy of making a pithy comment’, his extensive journeying and contact with different places and cultures having ‘broadened his horizons, providing a comparative perspective for cross-cultural reflection’.

In her writing on the subject, Eve Buscombe has cited the significance to Earle’s portraiture of his American heritage, intimating that the exemplar of the congenial, itinerant artist provided by men such as his successful New England portraitist uncle, Ralph Earl, served Augustus especially well in the fluid, unconventional or more egalitarian social conditions of the frontier and the colony.

Similarly, Earle’s depictions of the Maori men and women he met during

his eight months in Hokianga and the Bay of Islands in 1827 and 1828 express the artist’s respect for a people and their culture. As historian Anthony Murray-Smith has said, ‘Earle found that although the Maori were warlike, often cruel, and sometimes treacherous, they were brave and chivalrous and also generous, faithful friends. … He praised their busy, enquiring minds, was fascinated by the complexity of their character, impressed by their artistry in carving and by their mastery of the art of warfare’. Earle’s depictions of Maori people and customs, MurraySmith continues, were consequently ‘infused with human understanding of his fellow men’. The captions accompanying the portraits and group scenes published in 1838 as the folio Sketches illustrative of the native inhabitants and islands of New Zealand correspondingly record the industriousness, goodhumour, diplomacy, beauty, affection, or leadership characterising the individuals he befriended and portrayed. Instead, Earle reserved his contempt for the negative influence exerted on Maori culture by the ‘generally low, unpolished men’ of whom the European whaling fraternity was largely composed, and in particular for the ‘unsociable’, corpulent and illeducated so-called missionaries, who were evidently less concerned with the spiritual work of saving Maori souls than with their own material wellbeing. ‘In New Zealand, the “mechanic” missionary only carries on his trade till he has every comfort around him – his house finished, his garden fenced, and a strong stockade enclosing all, to keep off the “pagan” savages’, Earle wrote.

Earle returned to Sydney in 1828 and in October that year departed for Madras, from where he made his way home to England. Despite now being in a poor state of health, in October 1831 he embarked as the ‘artist supernumerary with victuals' aboard HMS Beagle, which was to make a survey of the South American coast.

Illness forced him to leave the ship at Montevideo in August 1832 and make his way back to London. Sketches illustrative of the native inhabitants and islands of New Zealand was his last published work, appearing some months before his death in December 1838. Burford had designed yet another panorama after drawings by Earle

‘Herald or peace-maker’ and ‘Awow’ from Sketches illustrative of the native inhabitants and islands of New Zealand, London 1838 Augustus Earle lithographs Rex Nan Kivell Collection National Library of Australia

– of the Bay of Islands – earlier the same year, and the Royal Academy had exhibited A bivouac of travellers in Australia in a cabbage-tree forest, day break, one of the numerous consequences of the artist’s fruitful if unanticipated sojourn in New South Wales, and his contact with its original custodians.

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City boys

christopher chapman immerses himself in larry clark’s field of vision.

The view of the Manhattan skyline from the Newark Airport bus sets off prickly, hot shivers in me. It’s summer. Still before nine in the morning, and the peep shows and adult shops twinkle along West 42nd Street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal to Times Square. The strip is hot with solicitation and I am feigning indifference. It’s 1989.

I’m twenty-two and on my own in New York City for the first time. Hispanic boys my age and younger are hanging out at the bus terminal exits and along this strip – hustlers with regular clients.

‘Like brothers,’ says Robert McNamara in his 1994 book, The Times Square hustler: Male prostitution in New York City, ‘hustlers usually pair off and hang out together’. They become buddies, one waiting outside a hotel while his friend is inside with a client. The boys share their earnings. Most of the boys see their hustling as an incomeproducing job. Most identify as heterosexual and commute to and from Manhattan like the older men who are their clients.

A twenty-one year old hustler tells McNamara ‘clients want a young, skinny looking Puerto Rican, not a white boy’. Some of the older boys are supporting wives and kids.

Thirty-five years ago, Larry 18

Untitled c.1979 Larry Clark gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1980

portrait 52 autumn 2016

Clark photographed Hispanic boy hustlers along this strip.

His photographs are candid and observational. The depth-of-field is naturalistic, the tonal range is uniform and soft, the gelatinsilver prints are silky. In these visual rhythms he reveals a tender attitude. Clark has great empathy for the boys he photographs. He lets us glimpse the emotional need behind their bravado. His pictures can be heartbreaking in their honesty.

Writing about these images for Flash Art magazine in 1981, Lynn Zelevansky responded to Clark’s technique, to his subjects, and to his approach. ‘His hand is unusually steady and he knows and renders well the graphic and emotional qualities of the available light.’ Zelevansky saw Clark’s portraits as ‘sympathetic ones of sometimes beautiful, sensitive looking boys who are locked into a no-win situation’.

The photographs ‘don’t make judgements, they simply give evidence’.

The tensions of young manhood fascinate Clark. His black-and-white documentary images of young outsiders reveal raw feelings. He has always photographed young people, and when he is photographing boys he looks at them with deep curiosity.

In 1962 he started taking pictures of girls and boys – mostly boys – on the fringes of the oil-town, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Clark was barely out of his teens. With his Leica rangefinder, young Larry calmly described the intense and loose behaviour around him.

His amphetamine-stimulated company had already embraced him, and his photographing of them was naturally accepted.

‘I was just part of the scene,’ he told Raphael Cuir in 2007, ‘and it was very organic, it really came from a place where there was no thought ever to show the pictures or publish the pictures or anything for a while.’ In 1971 Clark’s selfpublished book of photographs, Tulsa, offered up its bruised youth utterly openly. The softly handsome and neatly-dressed kid fresh out of photography school

Untitled 1979 Larry Clark gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1980

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had found beauty in the faces of his exposed comrades.

After Tulsa, his photographs of hustlers were discussed in art magazines and in the Village Voice. Zelevansky wondered about Clark’s motivations for photographing these boys, since he had grown older and moved away from his Tulsa milieu, but Clark’s authenticity won her over.

His work had integrity, she said; it was like investigative journalism.

Zelevansky saw that the boys he photographed ‘appear to have the option of rejecting him’.

I was in New York City again in 2005. A survey exhibition

of his work was on show at the International Center of Photography. At the Museum of Modern Art research library, I spent hours looking through Clark’s artist files. The research was the basis for a doctoral thesis on the portrayal of adolescent boyhood in art, and his work was central to this theme.

‘No earthly object is so attractive as a well-built, growing boy’, wrote American youth educator Henry William Gibson in 1916. The downy hair of an adolescent boy’s cheek was often the subject of historical Persian and Roman poetry. Clark sees

Clark’s images of adolescent boys are poignant. He perceives the lingering spirit of the boy in the growing body of the young man.

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this beauty too – and its defeat.

He says his work ‘has to do with the loss of innocence, innocence lost and what happens’. Clark’s images of adolescent boys are poignant. He perceives the lingering spirit of the boy in the growing body of the young man.

In 1980 and 1981 the National Gallery of Australia acquired over eighty of his photographs – the most significant collection of Clark’s work in Australia.

A selection of these pictures is to be included in the National Portrait Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition, Tough and tender.

The exhibition presents the work of seven Australian and American artists whose photographic work reflects on vulnerability in manhood. Clark’s gentle and raw exploration of male identity rests at its heart.

Untitled 1979 Larry Clark gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1981 Untitled 1979 Larry Clark gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1981

portrait 52 autumn 2016

Untitled 1979 Larry Clark gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1981

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portrait 52 autumn 2016

Hired guns, bounty hunters and horse whisperers jude rae contemplates the portrait commission.

We spend our lives reading faces – those of strangers, intimates and everything in between.

The pleasure we take in the painted portrait is (as it is with all painting) that of re-tracing our perceptions, but portraiture offers something else. Call it what you will: an inbuilt voyeurism, an opportunity to scrutinise; whatever it is, portraits do not function in quite the same way as other kinds of paintings. The drama of likeness, characterisation and narrative tends to override the formal elements that normally structure a work. In some ways, portraiture has more in common with theatre (at the extreme, caricature meets vaudeville).

Perhaps this is the reason for its endurance, long after its purely documentary function has been lost to photography. The popularity of the Archibald Prize, which never fails to draw huge crowds, also hints at an inherent democracy in the portrait.

Everyone can read a face; everyone can have an opinion. Social status, notoriety, the glitterati – portraits are the original pin-ups, the genre tailor-made for celebrity culture.

A commissioned portrait is one where an artist is contracted to paint (or, less frequently, sculpt) the likeness of an individual or group, usually for the purposes of commemoration. This can be

a private affair, such as a family commission, but more often it is an institution or corporate body that does the contracting. The practice is steeped in history from its beginnings in the courts of Europe, and is thus strongly associated with the mechanisms of social status, power and wealth. In commissioning a work, the client usually requires certain conditions which necessarily limit the artist.

This tends to contribute to the idea that the commissioned portrait is creatively constrained and that the portraitist is, at best, a kind of spin doctor hired to present a laundered or enhanced version of the subject, or a mercenary enlisted to enforce the social status of both subject and commissioning body for generations to come.

At worst, portrait commissions might be considered the realm of the hack and the social climber.

From a popular point of view, the very thought of constraints runs counter to notions of creativity and artistic insight, but this is a relatively recent idea. Limits can present extraordinarily exciting creative challenges – ask any architect.

Acute characterisations are also assumed to be the result of intimacy, rather than a commercial exchange between an artist and a previously unknown subject.

The commissioned portrait tends to register as diminished in comparison to its more familiar counterparts, which are presumed

Ms Anna Burke MP, Speaker of the House of Representatives 2015 oil on linen Historic Memorials Collection, Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra

Large Interior (Micky Allan) 2005 oil on linen The Collection of The Northern Club Auckland, New Zealand Image courtesy the artist

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to robustly reflect the ‘honesty’ of close personal relationships. The fact is, however, that many of the most acutely observed portraits in the great collections are the result of commercial transactions, and depict individuals who were not intimate with the artist. This is the paradox: even the most intimate portrait requires at least as much dispassionate analysis as impassioned participation. In the same spirit as novelists who, often much to the dismay of intimates, mine personal relationships for their work, many of the great painters have cast a ‘cool eye’ over their subjects – intimate and otherwise. Intimacy might even confuse or compromise an artist’s work, as was the case with Francis Bacon, who preferred painting portraits of his friends from photographs, claiming that it protected them from the violence of his project.

So while the practice of painting portraits on commission continues, and indeed sustains many individual artists, attitudes such as these seem relatively unexamined in either popular or even critical commentary. I suppose the field of contemporary art practice is so broad now that portraiture, and more particularly portrait commissions, occupy only a very small, albeit stubbornly enduring corner. Although portraits comprise only a fraction of my studio preoccupations, a portrait commission can both augment my living and present an enduring challenge. My first commission was in the mid 1980s when Robyn Brady, then director of Painters Gallery, was approached by the family of Justice John Lockhart.

I had a studio in Ultimo, and Justice Lockhart would walk from the High Court buildings across the Pyrmont Bridge to sit for me during his lunch hour. He was a very good-natured man, which was just as well, as I was nervous. I can’t remember how many sittings we had, but looking back it all seems so leisurely. John certainly had no mobile phone pinging emails! Nevertheless, I did take photographs that, in the end, I felt I had relied on too much.

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It took years to understand what photography had to offer a portrait painter.

It was more than a decade before I undertook another commission, although I remained interested in painting people, not least because the challenge seemed so practically and philosophically

Often part of the job of the portraitist is to be ‘horse whisperer’ to a subject who, quite reasonably, is discomfited due to the scrutiny involved in sittings.

As a very lively ninety-three year old, however, Frank had already been painted five times, so he was an old hand at sitting for portraits.

Professor Frank Fenner AC CMG MBE 2007 oil on linen Commissioned with funds provided by Mr Anthony Adair and Ms Karen MacLeod

Study for portrait of Professor Frank Fenner AC CMG MBE 2007 pencil on paper

absurd. Nevertheless, I asked friends and colleagues to sit for me, often using a combination of sittings and photographs, partly because I felt it too much of an imposition to ask for more than a couple of sessions. In one project, I explored interiority and voyeurism by asking them to sit for me with their eyes closed; in another I was interested in the light that structures Vermeer’s interiors. One of the latter series, a portrait of fellow artist Micky Allan, won the Portia Geach in 2005. I think this prompted the late Andrew Sayers, then the director of the National Portrait Gallery, to suggest I paint Professor Frank Fenner. Andrew said he thought Frank and I would be a good match, and he must have been right because Frank and I had already got to chatting at the front door of Old Parliament House before we were introduced.

Nevertheless, he would tend to drop off to sleep with remarkable rapidity unless I engaged him in conversation. Drowsiness is something that affects all sitters, so conversation is essential – not just to ward of sleep but to retain a sense of animation and establish a rapport with the subject, especially in the case of commissions where we are relatively unacquainted.

While I very much understand why painters require subjects to remain quiet and still, I have found over time that grappling with the distractions of conversation produces better results in the long run. How this divided attention works is still a mystery to me, and although I have become more accustomed to it with subsequent experience, I do not know of anything quite as exhausting.

I usually start with a session or two making drawings and portrait 52 autumn 2016 portrait 52 autumn 2016

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taking photographs, during which time I get a sense of the person before me and try to settle on a composition. This is critical, and is governed as much by the way the subject occupies space as it is by formal considerations. The standard boardroom portrait (three feet wide by four feet high) seems to be giving way to the larger requirements of twentyfirst century individualism, but location must also be considered.

True Stories ‑ Helen Garner 2003 Jenny Sages encaustic, oil and pigment on board

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For me, the process is a kind of ‘downloading’ of information – facial structure and changes in expression – in a series of what might seem to be fairly insubstantial notations. I certainly rarely achieve anything like a ‘finished’ drawing. Once the painting is underway, sittings often involve a certain amount of destruction: work undertaken using photographic sources is broken up into a useful mess, which is later

Gift of the artist 2004 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

partially reconstituted, and then the process is repeated. It is an incremental approach that seems to lend formal clarity and material complexity to the painting, while also reducing the flatness of too much reliance on photography.

For a commission, as with more informal portraits, I will take as much time as a subject can give me, aiming for at least six two-hour sittings, ideally taking place within a month.

This is not much in comparison to the many hours commanded by the likes of Cézanne and his predecessors, but constraints also provide opportunities. All artists are opportunists, and perhaps the portraitist is also something of a ‘bounty hunter’. I’m sure Lucien Freud jumped at the chance to paint Lord Goodman in his pyjamas, breakfast being the only time the great man had available for sittings. Jenny Sages once told me, with the excitement of the hunter who worships the mighty stag she stalks, that it took seven years to persuade Helen Garner to sit for her. And you can see it; feel the thrill of the chase in the way the painting captures, in a subtle combination of gesture and expression, Garner’s sharp intelligence and critical energy – even the resistance she feels to being portrayed.

Portraits remain difficult and fascinating to me in about equal measure. Sometimes a commission will offer the opportunity to approach a portrait in broader terms. Pictorial space might be expanded to include an architectural interior or involve elements of landscape, such as the portrait of Dr Alan Finkel, which commemorates his role as Chancellor of Monash University. As a Monash alumnus he has a long association with the university, and his enthusiasm for the upgrading of the Clayton campus was a significant feature of his tenure. The challenge for me was to find a composition that acknowledged this, and integrated the figure of the chancellor.

Eventually we found a view from the roof of the carpark that includes part of the extraordinary

New Horizons building, along with the more distant Robert Menzies building, erected in 1963 on what was then mostly rural land.

Often the portrait subjects themselves will present the answer to a particular problem, and the trick for the artist is to recognise the gift. Such was the case with Anna Burke, who was elected portrait 52 autumn 2016

Study for portrait of Dr Leona Wilson ONZM 2011 pencil on paper Image courtesy the artist

Portrait of Chancellor Dr Alan Finkel AO 2015 oil on linen Monash University Collection Commissioned by Monash University

Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives in 2012. Anna was quite candid about not relishing the idea of having her portrait painted, but recognised the importance of introducing women into the ranks of the commemorated. By choosing me as her portraitist, we now have the first painting in the Parliament House Historic

Memorials Collection, of a woman, by a woman. The question of what to wear is always more of a burden for women than for men, who generally opt for the ‘uniform’ of dark business suit, and then worry about the tie. When Anna donned a remarkable outfit by Tiffany Treloar, I wondered not only how it would look amongst the ranks

of grey suits, but also how I was going to paint it! It didn’t take long to see this was the gift. It lends just the right combination of structure and colour to give the painting an edge I could never have come up with myself. It hasn’t yet been hung (at time of writing), but if I’m not mistaken it might just steal the show.

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Past present krysia kitch celebrates oodgeroo noonuccal.

Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) (1920-1993) was, above all, a wordsmith; whether in the guise of activist, poet, writer, or educator it was her facility with language that was the key to her success. Her ability to craft a potent phrase or lyric line, and utilise rhythm and changing mood to add dramatic effect enabled her to share her passions and beliefs, whether as an orator on the campaign trail rounding up support, or telling tales to a rapt audience of school children. Her poetry provided insight into the Aboriginal experience and perspective to white Australians, and she was an inspiration and mentor to generations of Aboriginal writers, performers and educators. An extraordinary woman, Oodgeroo is the subject of several portraits in the National Portrait Gallery collection, and the fact that so many are included is an indication of her place in Australian history. Her insistence on the value of cultural exchange and respect for one another is her abiding legacy.

Born Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska in 1920, Oodgeroo was the second-youngest of seven children; her father Edward (Ted) was a traditional custodian of Minjerribah, as North Stradbroke Island is known to the Noonuccal people. He instilled in her a strong connection to her Aboriginal identity and taught her a traditional way of life, hunting and collecting native foods, respect for their totem Kabool, the carpet snake, and the stories of their country.

Leaving school at the age of thirteen, Oodgeroo went into service in Brisbane, one of the limited options available for young Aboriginal women at the time.

Oodgeroo’s horizons were altered when she enlisted in the Australian Women’s Army Service in 1941 and trained as a switchboard operator; later, through the army’s rehabilitation scheme, she had the opportunity to gain qualifications in shorthand, typing and bookkeeping. During the next decade, Oodgeroo married Bruce Raymond Walker and had two children, Denis and Vivien.

It was also during the ‘40s that she first became politically involved, joining the Australian

Oodgeroo of the Noonuccal Tribe 1992 (printed 2009) George Fetting type C photograph Gift of the artist 2010 Studio portrait of servicewoman Lance Corporal Kathleen Jean Mary (Kath) Walker c.1942 gelatin silver photograph Australian War Memorial

Communist Party, attracted by the fact that it was the only party at that time that did not endorse the White Australia policy.

During the 1950s Oodgeroo took up writing seriously and joined the Realist Writers Group in Brisbane, which provided her with support as well as the opportunity to publish her early poems in the group’s magazine, Realist Writer.

By 1963 she had gained enough confidence to submit a collection of her poems to Jacaranda Press, whose editor sought the advice of Judith Wright in determining whether to publish.

Wright’s resounding endorsement led to the publication of the collection in 1964 under the title We are Going. Wright and Oodgeroo became lifelong friends, exchanging letters and poetry and affectionately calling each other ‘shadow sisters’. Success was immediate, and the publication needed to be reprinted, with

more than ten thousand copies sold. Two more volumes of poetry followed: The Dawn is at Hand, in 1966 and My People: A Kath Walker Collection, in 1970.

Along with her literary success, Oodgeroo became more deeply engaged in political activism, becoming Secretary of the Queensland Council for the Advancement of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders in 1961. Involvement in the national iteration of this organisation followed, working with Aboriginal leaders from across Australia to improve conditions for their peoples. During the ‘60s Oodgeroo campaigned tirelessly for citizenship rights, and in the leadup to the 1967 Referendum travelled thousands of kilometres, exhorting people to vote ‘yes’.

Her ready wit and intelligence allowed her to take advantage of any opportunity that was offered to highlight an issue or drive a point 29

Oodgeroo Noonuccal at Moongalba Stradbroke Island (her sitting down place) 1982 Juno Gemes gelatin silver photograph Gift of the artist 2009 Oodgeroo Noonouccal at Moongalba 1982 Juno Gemes gelatin silver photograph Purchased 2004

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portrait 52 autumn 2016

home. One such instance occurred when she was part of a deputation meeting Prime Minister Menzies, who was happy to see Oodgeroo but very resistant to the idea of holding a referendum on constitutional change. Being a hospitable man he offered a drink to Oodgeroo, who cheekily reminded him that in the state of Queensland he would be committing a crime, as it was illegal to ‘provide spirituous liquor to an Aborigine’, deftly demonstrating how conditions for Aboriginal people varied dramatically from state to state. Menzies resisted all attempts at persuasion, and it was not until Harold Holt became Prime Minister that a referendum was held and Sections 51 (xxvi) and 127 of the constitution were changed, allowing the Federal Government to make laws for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and including them in the population count.

Clif Peir’s portrait, Kath Walker, Aboriginal Poet 1965, was painted during this period of Oodgeroo’s life. He adopted a traditional approach to depicting a writer, including an open book with Oodgeroo in a quiet reflective mood, gazing intensely into the distance as if in deep thought. Although based in Sydney, from the 1950s Peir travelled extensively throughout central Australia and became known for his depictions of desert landscapes. He was a great admirer of Oodgeroo, or Kath Walker as she was known then, and asked to paint her portrait; when she agreed, he invited her to stay at his home in Oatley while he did so.

The portrait was hung in the 1965 Archibald Prize. Peir also demonstrated his interest in the conditions of Aboriginal people in another, more practical way through the donation of several of his artworks to the ‘Art Sale for Land Rights’ at Paddington Town Hall in 1970. The fundraiser provided support to Aboriginal Land Rights Councils in New South Wales, North Queensland and the Kimberley.

Seventeen years later, the two portraits

by Juno Gemes present a different side of Oodgeroo. Gone is the neat Chanel-style suit, swapped for shorts and t-shirt, and she appears much more relaxed. She is at home, at the door of her caravan in one and sitting down inside it in the other. She is also very comfortable with the photographer, for Gemes had been involved in the protest movement for Aboriginal rights over several decades, as a participant, and also recording the movement and the key players within it.

Oodgeroo’s home or ‘sitting down place’, Moongalba, near Amity Point on North Stradbroke Island, is the inspiration of much of her poetry and where she established the Noonuccal-Nughie Education and Cultural Centre, the site of her great education campaign, encouraging children from across Australia to visit her in order to learn about

Aboriginal culture and tradition. Over several decades, 30 000 school children visited her and were captivated by her vivid storytelling, gathered round the campfire. Some of these stories are included in Stradbroke Dreaming (1972), a combination of stories of growing up on the island and traditional storytelling, often imbuing lyrical descriptions of country with a moral message, the tales setting down guidelines on how to survive in the bush.

Children weren’t the only visitors; teachers were always guaranteed a warm welcome, as were academics from across the world.

Oodgeroo advocated that all Australian

children should be taught about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture.

Oodgeroo’s t-shirt indicates that although she had retired to Stradbroke Island in 1971 she continued to be involved in campaigning for Aboriginal rights. The t-shirt design was created for the protests for Aboriginal land rights that occurred in Brisbane during the Commonwealth Games of 1982. A selection from Gemes’ extensive photographic archive formed the 2003 exhibition, Proof: Portraits from The Movement 1978 – 2003 at the National Portrait Gallery, and although Oodgeroo could easily have been included in the areas 31

The Past Let no one say the past is dead.

The past is all about us and within.

Haunted by tribal memories, I know This little now, this accidental present Is not the all of me, whose long making Is so much of the past.

Tonight here in suburbia as I sit In easy chair before electric heater, Warmed by the red glow, I fall into dream: I am away At the campfire in the bush, among My own people, sitting on the ground, No walls about me, The stars over me, The tall surrounding trees that stir in the wind Making their own music, Soft cries of the night coming to us, there Where we are one with all old Nature’s lives Known and unknown, In scenes where we belong but have now forsaken.

Deep chair and electric radiator Are but since yesterday, But a thousand thousand camp fires in the forest Are in my blood.

Let none tell me the past is wholly gone.

Now is so small a part of time, so small a part Of all the race years that have moulded me.

by Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal, from My People 3/e, The Jacaranda Press, 1990. Reproduced by permission of John Wiley & Sons Australia.

Kath Walker, Aboriginal Poet 1965 Clif Peir oil on canvas Gift of Richard Brian Close, Githabul Tribe, Woodenbong 2000 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

showcasing ‘The Political Activists’, ‘The Persuaders’ or ‘The Writers’, she was featured in the section dedicated to ‘Land Rights Before Games: National Land Rights Action’.

Although based on Stradbroke Island, Oodgeroo travelled widely, in demand as a speaker both in Australia and abroad, including Nigeria, India, the United States (on a Fulbright scholarship), and as part of a cultural delegation to China with Manning Clark. She was awarded honorary doctorates by four Australian universities, and an MBE, which she eventually returned in 1988 in protest at the Bicentennial celebrations.

That same year she changed her name from Kath Walker to Oodgeroo (meaning paperbark), of the tribe Noonuccal, affirming her pride in her Aboriginal heritage and her 32

recognition of the power of language to shape thought.

George Fetting’s portrait was taken in the year before Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s death from cancer, in 1973. Living in Brisbane at the time, Fetting had the idea for an exhibition of photographic portraits of remarkable women, and Oodgeroo was one of the women he approached. He travelled to her home and spent a day photographing her. The result is larger than life, with the 110 x 88.2cm print taken up by Oodgeroo’s face, framed by her left hand. Her gaze is steady and solemn, looking into the distance, and every pore of her face and the smallest crease on her hand can be seen. Fetting describes portraiture as his ‘first love’, and in this instance he has created a compelling work, with rich tonal

range and quiet intensity, conveying strength and solemnity. In this portrait, Oodgeroo Noonuccal appears every inch the matriarch of a community she has gathered around herself.

The final word should be given to Oodgeroo, who, in her interview with Hazel De Berg in the oral history collection of the National Library of Australia, stated ‘… one day I sat down and thought, I’m sick of answering questions, I’ll write a poem about who I am, what I am, and why I am what I am. The poem is called The Past.’ In it, she ponders the relevance of what has gone before and how it continues to weave through the present and into the future. She continues to challenge us all to be aware of past events and remain cognisant of the limitations of the present, while working towards change and a new and better reality. portrait 52 autumn 2016

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Strutt your stuff matthew jones on the upshot of a st kilda road outrage.

On Saturday night information was given at the Police Station, that four mounted and armed bushrangers were committing the most daring depredations on the St. Kilda and Brighton road. About five o’clock in the evening, Mr and Mrs Bawtree were stopped, bailed up, and robbed, and upwards of fifteen other persons were also stopped that evening by the same gang.

The above newspaper excerpt from The Argus describes a robbery by bushrangers in Melbourne in 1852. Up to twenty people were held captive for several hours before the offenders escaped with their loot. The English artist William Strutt (1825-1915), who was living in Melbourne, transcribed the article and in his unpublished autobiography described the incident as one of the ‘most daring robberies ever attempted in Victoria’.

He also detailed other acts of ‘villainy’ committed in the colony, saying ‘it is clear there were elements of disorder which needed putting down with a strong hand’.

Decades later in 1887, Strutt painted a large narrative work based on the incident, Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia 1852. The painting and its preparatory sketches record Strutt’s thoughts on what was at stake if these ‘elements’ remained unchecked, while also revealing his experimentation with characterisation and composition.

The preparatory sketches for Bushrangers demonstrate the systematic and thorough approach to building pictures that Strutt learnt from his training in Paris, where he attended the École des Beaux-Arts.

The French Academy promoted a hierarchy of genres in which history painting – large, dramatic canvases of narrative scenes – were considered the highest form of art. Its house style at the time was the juste milieu (middle way), a conservative compromise between the restraint and rigour of Neoclassicism and the emotional charge of Romanticism. After seven years in the academic system, Strutt emerged as a superb draughtsman and renderer of the human figure, with an ability to compose complex narrative works in the classical style.

After a modest start to his career, Strutt decided to ‘plunge into the unknown’, and in 1849 set out for Australia. Strutt harboured ambitions to paint large history paintings on Australian subjects, but his main line of work was portraiture. His skills as a figure painter set him apart from his colonial contemporaries and he was arguably the most accomplished portraitist working in Australia at the time. He also actively participated in the 44

Melbourne art world and, with other denizens of the emerging scene, reformed the Victorian Society of Fine Arts in 1856. In 1862, Strutt returned to England and never came back to the Antipodes. He continued to paint Australian subjects, producing the large narrative works which have become his most famous paintings: Black Thursday, February 6th, 1851 (1864), The burial of Burke (1911) and Bushrangers.

Strutt worked for six months on Bushrangers and his approach was methodical. He referred to his transcriptions of newspaper articles and costumes he had brought over from Australia, ‘the very ones worn by the colonists at the time’. The preparatory sketches provide valuable insight into how Strutt composed the picture.

There are rapid outline sketches, which experiment with poses and compositional elements, and there are meticulous sketches of models and props where he obsessively perfects the clasp of a pair of hands or the crease in a pair of trousers. The sketches demonstrate Strutt’s talent for drawing the human figure and eye for detail. They also reveal how he experimented with narrative elements and characterisation, particularly with the central figures – the bushranger in the red shirt and Mrs Bawtree, the only woman in the painting. The other bushrangers are uncomplicated criminals, fixated on the cash, while the male victims are an inventory of colonial character types: the lawyer, the businessman, the vicar, the vagrant, the tradesman, the gambler. Mrs Bawtree is more than a type; she possibly represents, as art historian Chris McAuliffe has said, ‘the maiden Victoria … torn between the stability of good government and the perils of bad’.

The effectiveness of this reading depends in part on her proximity to the central villain, and the sketches show that Strutt played with the spatial relationship between these two figures and the characterisation of the bushranger. In one sketch, he separates them and has the bushranger point his rifle at the Bawtrees. In another, his face is slightly revealed as a handsome, mustachioed highwayman, a more attractive and seductive outlaw than his companions. However, in the final product Strutt pushed villain and victim closer together so the bushranger invades the space of Mrs Bawtree, and his face is now cast in shadow. Mrs Bawtree’s (and our) relationship with this figure is ambivalent and uncertain.

It would appear at this point that the future of the young Victorian colony is in the balance. Which way will she go?

The painting and the preparatory sketches appeared in the exhibition Heroes and Villains: Strutt’s Australia which was displayed at the National Library in 2015 and will travel to the State Library of Victoria in July 2016.

Studies for Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia, 1852 1886 William Strutt pencil and wash Rex Nan Kivell Collection National Library of Australia Bushrangers, Victoria, Australia, 1852 1887 William Strutt oil on canvas The University of Melbourne Art Collection Gift of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Bequest 1973 The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne

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One hundred days at 7pm 2015 Fiona McMonagle single-channel video animation, looped Courtesy of the artist; Heiser Gallery, Brisbane; and Olsen Irwin, Sydney Winner of the National Self-Portrait Prize 2015

Selfeffacing michael wardell samples the fare in the university of queensland national self-portrait prize.

A biennial, acquisitive award that sets out to highlight the continued relevance of self-portraiture, the University of

Queensland’s National Self-Portrait Prize (NSPP) questions the assumption that we as individuals are best represented by our physical features.

Faced with the challenge to create a self-portrait, an artist decides what most clearly represents the essence of self – a visual image that best indicates to others that essential, distilled self.

The winner of the 2015 NSPP was Melbourne artist Fiona McMonagle for her work One hundred days at 7pm. The exhibition and prize has been presented

by Queensland University Art Museum every two years since 2007, and this is the third time the prize has been awarded to a digital media work, albeit, 45

Plastic surgery 2015 Guan Wei synthetic polymer paint on linen Courtesy of the artist and Heiser Gallery, Brisbane

in this case, one derived from a hundred hand-painted watercolours. Inclusion in the prize exhibition is by invitation only, and the 2015 exhibition Being and Becoming was selected and curated by freelance curator, Michael Desmond.

The prize was judged by Jason Smith, Curatorial Manager of Australian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. Recognising the limitations of the single captured moment, Fiona McMonagle set out to paint a selfportrait in watercolour every day for a hundred days. As she wrote in her artist’s statement: ‘I wanted to 46

translate these ideas about time and change into this work. So, I painted one self-portrait every day at 7pm for 100 days.’ The hundred portraits are presented as a looped 16-second video animation. McMonagle set herself strict rules, limiting the palette and medium to an almost monochrome set of watercolours, painting one work every day in the studio at 7pm, and not looking at the previous works before starting each evening. Best known for her delicate watercolour portraits of suburban youth, this work is a beautiful and successful realisation of the exhibition’s central theme of

Threshold between two unknown territories 2015 Lindy Lee mild steel, ink and fire Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

‘becoming’, and an interesting and unexpected extension to her art practice. That said, the artist’s intention to reflect change through time is partly negated by the fact that each image is derived from stills of a single video recorded on the first day of the project.

Although the University of Queensland Art Museum has invited different external judges each year, this is the first year they have entrusted the selection to a curator not associated with the museum. Michael Desmond, previously Senior Curator and then Assistant Director of the National Portrait Gallery, has chosen what at first appears to be a very eclectic group of thirty artists. In a video statement on the museum’s website, Desmond explains that the strongest influence on his selection process was an intention to balance artists with a lot of life experience with those with less life experience, encompassing a contrast between younger and older artists’ responses to the ideas of change and ‘becoming’. portrait 52 autumn 2016

Whether intentional or not, the exhibition not only strikes a balance through consideration of the artists’ ages, but also of their gender and cultural backgrounds. Desmond invites us to further question how the notion of self might be a reflection of a range of variables; this includes elements such as the experience of ageing for different genders, the experience of artists who identify with their Indigenous heritage, or those born overseas and growing up in a different culture, or those born in Australia but with parents from another country.

In a series of four paintings, Plastic surgery, Chinese-born artist Guan Wei humorously documents the pressure to fit in, or ‘becoming’, from Chinese born Guan Wei to Australian citizen, David Guan. By documenting his new Australian identity with reference to his passport, his bank account, his Medicare card and his ABN number, he is still, as he was in China, a series of numbers in an official government record. Similarly, Lindy Lee, born in

Australia to Chinese parents, speaks about the split identity that results from belonging to two different cultures, in her work Threshold between two unknown territories. Lee’s large photographic self-portrait is printed on a steel sheet pitted with random holes burnt into the support, but appearing like splashes from an excessively strong acid. She depicts herself as a Zen master staring out at us with a face of benevolent calm, but the image is devoid of colour and lit with the stark chiaroscuro lighting of a Rembrandt or Caravaggio. Lee has recently begun using these burnt holes in the surface as an extension of her ‘splash’ paintings, derived from the traditional practice of Zen Buddhist Monks who splashed their paintings with ink to portray the universe’s energy and the impermanence of all things living and created. In contemplating the essence of self, Lee understands the futility of always trying to ‘fit in’ and comes to terms with just ‘being’. As she writes in her artist’s

Andu (Son) 2015 Michael Cook inkjet print on Hahnemuhle paper Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane School’s in 2015 Fiona Foley inkjet print on Hahnemuhle paper Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane On becoming 2015 Christian Thompson type C print Courtesy of the artist and Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney and Berlin

statement, ‘After years of meditation I realised that there is no single self to strive for or hang on to. This selfportrait invokes the thresholds of constant becoming that lie between the past and the future.’

In three photographic works by Indigenous Australian artists, the self is again defined as a product of two histories and two cultures. Andu (Son)

by Michael Cook, School’s in by Fiona Foley and On becoming by Christian Thompson all address the issue of racial difference and the feeling of both belonging and not belonging to two different peoples. Michael Cook superimposes his European features over an image of a member of the Aboriginal side of his family.

Fiona Foley leans her body against an ancient tree next to a wooden chair representing her school years and memories of her fears of being singled out as different. Christian Thompson hides his European features behind hands decorated in his ancestral crosshatching style.

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Smiling cabbage with self 2015 Janet Dawson synthetic polymer paint and collage on wooden tondo Courtesy of the artist and Stella Downer Fine Art, Sydney This painting is dedicated to Jan and Alan Oxenham and IM Michael

Self-portraits are, by definition, self-examinations. They are a chance to reflect on not only who you are, but also how you are going in that journey of life experience. We tend to believe in the honesty of an artist’s self-portrait more if it is flawed than if it’s perfect.

We believe that we would recognise Van Gogh or the ageing Rembrandt if we passed them in the street, but would perhaps be disappointed meeting Rubens or Durer. One of the most honest self-portraits in this exhibition is by the oldest of the thirty artists, Janet Dawson, who has depicted herself with a series of images of a smiling cabbage that began as a private joke between the artist and her husband.

They created the ‘face’ of the cabbage in 1992 using toothpicks, olives and other organic materials, before replanting it and documenting its decomposition over several months. Now, over twenty years later, she playfully recognises this smiling face in her reflection in the mirror: ‘I found it somewhat comical being faced with the prospect of making a self-portrait at the age of eighty.

So, I have mixed in the life and death of the smiling cabbage with a rueful examination of my aged self.’

This notion of coming to terms with yourself and with what birth and life has dealt you is also evident in the 48

work of one of the youngest artists, Tyza Stewart, born over half a century after Dawson. Stewart’s portrait, Exit tunnel, is presented in two parts; first there is a full-size portrait questioning our notions of conformity, by depicting a body manipulated to appear gender non-specific. The second part is an L-shaped wooden tunnel whose height and width are built to comfortably allow the artist to walk in. At the end of the tunnel is a rectangular slit like the eye-opening in a Muslim niqab that ‘may allow a viewer to be alone and hidden while they observe artworks and people in the gallery’. While inviting the viewer to explore the tunnel, comparing

Self-portrait: Man re-enters the sea 2015 Andrew Sayers oil on canvas Courtesy of the estate of the artist, Melbourne Exit tunnel 2015 Tyza Stewart oil on board, timber, MDF, synthetic polymer paint, perspex and window tint film Courtesy of the artist and Heiser Gallery, Brisbane

their own dimensions to those of the artist, there is also the suggestion of inviting you to imagine yourself looking out from within someone else’s body.

One of the most poignant selfportraits, and perhaps the most honest, is Self-portrait: Man re-enters the sea

by Andrew Sayers, who was battling cancer while producing the artwork, and tragically died a month before the exhibition opened. Sayers had only recently debuted as an exhibiting artist, following a distinguished career as a curator and arts administrator. He was the inaugural Director of the National Portrait Gallery and the judge of the first National Self-Portrait Prize in 2007.

Choosing to depict himself scuba-diving underwater references the cycle of birth and death, with all life starting in the sea; as he explains in his statement, ‘the unique marine environment gives me the opportunity to express a personal and essential truth: that we are all dependent upon the cycle of breath that is so tangibly visible underwater’.

While there is a chance a member of the public might recognise these artists if they stood next to their portraits, this is not the case with all the works portrait 52 autumn 2016

in this exhibition. Since the late 1970s, Melbourne artist John Nixon has been painting and constructing nonobjective artworks reminiscent of the works of the early 20th Century Soviet artist, Kasimir Malevich, and many of these works have been exhibited under an umbrella title of Self-portrait (non-objective composition). Nixon’s artworks are always roughly painted and frequently incorporate found utilitarian objects or scrap pieces of wood. Despite their uncompromising avoidance of ‘professional finish’, they all have an almost mysterious elegance that is inimitable and instantly recognisable as a work by John Nixon.

For this exhibition, Nixon has painted Self portrait – N, a square canvas painted with his signature orange enamel, a colour chosen in the 1990s because no other artists were known for using orange as a predominant colour. Attached to the canvas are three pieces of unpainted timber, like off-cuts from a hardware store, arranged as a letter ‘N’. For an artist like Nixon, who has expounded a singular vision that has become an identity in itself over several decades, the essential ‘Nixon’

instantly recognisable in this new work is perhaps a more accurate portrait of the artist than any imitation of his facial features could ever be.

It could be argued that all art reveals an aspect of the artist, and collectively a lifetime’s accumulation of artworks make a detailed and multi-layered selfportrait. In two installations, Judith Wright’s theatrical The things we do and Julia De Ville’s gothic Ostara and Damocles both reference elements of their personal history, suggesting that our life’s experiences and collected memories are more essential as a representation of ourselves than a depiction of the shell in which we house our thoughts. Wright depicts an old mannequin standing on a film canister, referencing the movie theatre her father had when she was a child. Behind the mannequin rises a wood tree bearing biomorphic ‘fruit’, representing her children and grandchildren. De Ville, born four decades after Wright, has developed an artist’s persona inseparable from the work she produces. She has created a hybrid world of happy fantasy that is dressed in the macabre theatrics of

Self portrait – N 2015 John Nixon enamel and timber on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne The things we do 2015 Judith Wright found objects and synthetic polymer paint on wood Courtesy of the artist; Jan Manton Art, Brisbane; Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne; Jensen Gallery, Sydney; and Fox/Jensen, Auckland, New Zealand Ostara and Damocles 2015 Julia deVille porcelain doll made by artist at age 11, sterling silver, gold plate, rubies (0.14ct), antique Victorian christening gown, bloomers from artist’s Little Red Riding Hood doll, spun polyester, linen, raven, black rhodium plate, black spinel (8.80ct), black rose-cut diamonds (5.5ct), amethyst, glass and wood Courtesy of the artist; Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne; and Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane

the Victorian fascination with death.

Her self-portrait installation consists of a taxidermied raven ominously suspended over a glass coffin containing a child/doll she made herself, at the age of eleven. Both installations are like dreams, giving us an insight into the ‘real’ artist, and to be read like a psychologist might interpret a dream.

Many of these works go beyond a traditional portrait that attempts to sum up the physical features and the personality of the sitter. Such portraits invite an intuitive reading of facial features and personality traits gleaned from the sitter’s cloths and setting.

However, these artists are given the chance to convey themselves through more than appearance and are digging deep into their psyche to reveal an inner essence. The University of Queensland’s fifth National Self-Portrait Prize does emphasise the continuing relevance of the self-portrait as a genre.

By shrewdly selecting artists to submit work for the exhibition, and allowing each artist the freedom to interpret what constitutes a self-portrait, this biennial exhibition and prize continues to be both surprising and exciting.

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Nurses looking after British and French wounded on a RAMC ambulance train near Doullens, 27 April 1918 McLellan, David (Second Lieutenant) photograph Imperial War Museum, UK

The first nurse 50

tamsin hong recounts the tale of marion smith, the only known australian indigenous servicewoman of world war one.

Nowhere in Marion Smith’s First World War service records is there any evidence of her country of birth. Yet

nestled in the records of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve is evidence of possibly the only Australian Aboriginal woman to serve during the First World War. Marion Elizabeth Leane Smith spent her first few years in Liverpool, New South Wales. Her grandmother Lucy Leanne was a Darug woman and is on record for petitioning the NSW Aborigines Protection Board in 1889, where she described herself as ‘the only surviving native woman of the Georges River and the Liverpool District’. Her daughter Elizabeth was born and raised in Liverpool, where she later married her English cousin George William Smith in 1890. Marion was born the following year.

It is not clear what prompted George and Elizabeth Smith to move to Canada with their daughter Marion. However, the turn of the century was textured by growing concerns about the welfare of ‘half-caste’ children, leading to the devastation of the Stolen Generations.

Had the Smiths remained in Australia, Marion’s upbringing would have been decidedly different.

Following her childhood in Canada, Marion temporarily moved to the United States to train as a nurse at the New England Hospital in Roxbury, Massachusetts. On the other side of the Atlantic, Germany invaded Belgium, refusing Britain’s demands to retreat, resulting in Britain declaring war in August 1914. This declaration automatically incorporated Britain’s colonies, including Canada. Marion returned to Canada before enlisting with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve (QAIMNS) on 7 March, 1917. The QAIMNS was established in 1902 and replaced the Army Nursing Service in Great Britain. At the outbreak of the First World War there were around 300 nurses in the service, and over the course of the war a further 11 000 joined the QAIMNS. These women tended to be over twenty-five years old and single, and were required to portrait 52 autumn 2016

be well-educated and of good social standing. Smith was twenty-six years old when she joined, and would have been required to complete a three year training course in a War Officeapproved hospital.

Smith embarked for France in March 1917 where she joined No. 41 Ambulance Train by the end of the year.

The ambulance trains were specially fitted to transport injured troops from casualty clearing stations on the front to base hospitals, and were in operation in France and Belgium. As the trains bumped along, nurses navigated narrow aisles and dim lighting to tend to the casualties. Troops lay in bunks arranged in three tiers on either side of the crowded aisles. Some trains also included surgical theatres for emergency operations.

Smith excelled despite the difficult conditions, and the sister in charge of No. 41 Ambulance Train reported that ‘Staff Nurse Smith has given complete satisfaction in the carrying out of her duties whilst on this Train; her work is both quickly and efficiently done. She is most capable in every way.’

As nurses were employed by contract in the QAIMS, when Smith’s expired in September 1918 she requested an extension. She then served in Italy with Britain’s Italian Expeditionary Force before moving to the University War Hospital in Southampton, where she remained until after the war ended.

In May 1919, Smith sailed home to ‘Home Farm’ in Fredericton Junction, Canada. She met a clergyman named Victor Benjamin Walls and they married on New Year’s Day in 1924 at the Smiths’ family home. There is some speculation that Walls and Smith met during the war, as Walls had also served. He had interrupted his studies at Dalhouse University to enlist with the Canadian Medical Corps, with which he served in Britain, France and Belgium.

Not long after their wedding, Victor and Marion Walls travelled to Trinidad so Victor could take up his post as principal of Naparima College, where he would remain for almost thirty years. During this time, Marion gave birth to a son and became dedicated to the school’s extra-curricular activities.

She also wrote the school hymn, which continues to be sung today.

Marion was devoted to raising medical awareness in Trinidad. When

the Second World War erupted, Marion brought the Red Cross to the country and served as the commandant for the duration of the war. For her work she was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, which is awarded to those who show ‘distinguished leadership in action’.

Upon Victor’s retirement, the Walls returned to Canada and lived in Blackville, New Brunswick. Marion died four years later on 24 January 1957, aged 66. Victor Walls remained in Blackville where he served as a United Church minister briefly

Rev. Victor B. Walls and Mrs. Walls, Trinidad, B.W.I. c.1930 photograph United Church Archives, Toronto

from 1972-73, and married Verna E. Augustine from Trinidad. Victor Walls died in Newcastle, Canada on 19 September 1984, aged ninety-two.

The small black and white photograph of Victor and Marion Walls was taken just before they departed for Trinidad. It was kept in the United Church of Canada’s Archives and found through the pioneering research of Philippa Scarlett, who first uncovered the story of Marion Smith, the only known Australian Indigenous servicewoman of the First World War. 51

Diamond Doll karen vickery delights in a thespian thread of the australian yarn.

An extraordinary photograph in the National Portrait Gallery collection is that of Ray Lawler, taken by Bill 52

McAuley in 2006. The portrait shows a pixie-like, senior Lawler emerging from shadow into a bright spotlight, clutching a lurid, green-clothed kewpie doll on a stick. The shadow cast by the spotlight looms behind the figure of man and doll; the whole effect is both

whimsical and menacing. The kewpie in the photograph was presented to Lawler after the 1995 production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll at the Sydney Theatre Company, and the play that emerged from the shadows of Australian theatre into the spotlight has gripped the national imagination and been revived on Australian stages over the past sixty years.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll premiered on 28 November 1955 at the Union Theatre in Melbourne. The play portrait 52 autumn 2016

gave audiences unmistakably Australian characters in a familiar setting, speaking with their own accents and telling their own stories. Relatively little Australian work had been produced in theatres up to this point. The Doll, as it soon became affectionately known, was a turning point in Australian theatre history and soon became a classic of the Australian repertoire.

In the 1950s, Australia was in the midst of an economic boom. Robert Menzies was Prime Minister and

the post-war immigration policy was beginning to change the nature of the Australian identity. Artists such as Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan were emerging, and Australian literature was finding a voice. Pubs were largely a male domain and closed at 6pm, leading to the infamous ‘six o’clock swill’, Sundays were deathly quiet in towns and cities, obscenity laws were being tightened and Customs could ban books.

Ray Lawler was born in Victoria, growing up in working class Footscray during the Depression and working in a factory from the age of thirteen, until one of his plays was taken up by JC Williamson when he was twentythree. Encouraged, Lawler tried acting, producing and writing, eventually becoming a director of the Union Theatre at Melbourne University, a pro-am theatre which was shared with student productions in the off season.

The Doll was directed by Englishman John Sumner, with Lawler casting himself as Barney. Sumner, whose portrait by Jim Paterson is held in the Portrait Gallery’s collection, went on to found the Melbourne Theatre Company.

The play had shared a win in the 1954 Playwrights’ Advisory Board Competition, sharing the two hundred pound prize money with Oriel Gray’s The Torrents. Part of the prize was that the board would undertake to produce the winning play, and the

Ray Lawler 2006 (printed 2010) Bill McAuley type C photograph Purchased 2010 Photograph from the records of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT) 1957 black and white photograph National Library of Australia, by permission of the AETT

newly founded Elizabethan Theatre Trust, led by Englishman Hugh Hunt, was approached. Formed in the wake of the Queen’s visit to Australia, the Trust aimed to ‘provide a theatre of Australians by Australians for Australians’. Philanthropists, corporations and the Commonwealth Government provided funding.

On debut, the play was met with an enthusiastic reception and enjoyed a hugely successful season, with The Argus stating: [Lawler has] ‘… written a play so superbly true to Australian thought and the Australian scene that theatrical conventions disappear.

Barney, Roo, Pearl and Emma are real people. We know their faces, their voices – we share their dreams, we understand their failures.’

Despite anxiety that the play set in a terrace house in Carlton and referring to Melbourne’s iconic Young and Jackson Hotel might be deemed too parochial, the play received a rapturous reception on opening in Sydney in a small theatre in run-down Newtown.

Although many first-nighters refused to go to Newtown to see an Australian play, the opening night, 10 January 1956, was an extraordinary, watershed moment in Australian cultural history.

The Sydney Morning Herald wrote: ‘Here was real and exciting Australiana with Australian spirit springing from the deep heart of the characters, and never merely pretending that Australianism is a few well-placed 53

bonzers, too rights, strike me luckies and good-os.’

The first night crowd in their pearls and satin were recorded as having applauded the set as the stage curtain parted. The Carlton boarding house, which formed the background of all the action of the play, had retreated into shabbiness from its once highly polished respectability. Ranging from an upright piano, described by Lawler as ‘purchased in 1919’, to a ‘chromium smoker’s stand won in a pub raffle last month’, the rooms were furnished more for practicality than style. Dominating the decoration were sixteen kewpie 54

dolls clad in tinsel and tulle, attached to fine walking canes. A flurry of stuffed tropical birds adorned the walls, along with a display case of butterflies and the odd piece of coral and shells from North Queensland.

The play thrust the style of European naturalism into an Australian setting.

Not unlike the American dramas of Arthur Miller in the forties and fifties, The Doll took the model of the socially conscious dramas of European naturalism and co-opted them to a local setting, authentically exploring ordinary people in their own milieu.

For sixteen years, on their annual

'History making play returns'.

The Doll company: John Sumner, Ray Lawler, Madge Ryan, Fenella Maguire, Ethel Gabriel 1957 black and white photograph National Library of Australia, by permission of the AETT

five-month layoff from cane cutting in North Queensland, Roo and Barney have lived with two barmaids, Olive and Nancy, in Melbourne in the Carlton boarding house run by Olive’s widowed mother, Emma. Roo gives Olive a kewpie doll each year when he arrives. In this seventeenth year, Nancy has married and been replaced in the quartet by Pearl, a widowed barmaid and colleague of Olive. Unbeknownst to Olive, Roo has quit and plans to stay in Melbourne. The changing times hit Olive hard.

A parable of youthful dreams coming into harsh collision with the realities of changing times and ageing, Olive’s treasured memories of sixteen summers of carefree love and good times come into brutal relief under Pearl’s more sceptical eye, and the realities of Roo’s diminished physical capacity, which has been directly challenged by a younger, fitter ganger, Johnny Dowd. The previously inseparable Roo and Barney find their once solid mateship splintering under the pressure. The simmering tension between them culminates in a bruising fight in the living room, during which the seventeenth doll, symbol of the cherished layoff season, is smashed. In the final shattering scenes, Roo, now a worker in a local paint factory, proposes to Olive. She recoils in horror and rejects suburban marriage. Devastated, she picks up her handbag and goes to work. Barney and Roo, supporting each other once more, leave the Carlton house forever.

Commentary on the play has often considered Olive’s refusal of Roo’s proposal as a failure to come to terms with reality, and an immature response.

More recently, Olive has been described as a woman with a vision of a different reality, one in which settling for a suburban marriage and leaving work to be a housewife is not imaginable. Either way, the loss for all the characters is terrible.

In 1956, after the stellar season in Melbourne, each performance of the three-week season in Sydney was sold out, after which the Trust sent the play on a tour of Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart and Launceston, followed by the regions. Sixty country towns in New South Wales and Queensland were visited in the following three months.

Indeed, demand was so strong in 1956 that several additional companies of portrait 52 autumn 2016

actors were formed, and they toured the play concurrently. It was reported in the Companion to Theatre in Australia that ‘people drove hundreds of kilometres and a man swam a flooded river to see it in the Northern Territory’.

None other than Sir Laurence Olivier invited the play to tour to London, saying, ‘It’s a damn good play.

It’s as simple as that. Good plays are not easy to find.’ The Oliviers, Sir Laurence and Vivien Leigh, had conducted their own royal tour of Australia in 1954, and contributed financially to the refurbishment of the Newtown Theatre in which The Doll played. A youthful and handsome Richard Pratt joined the Doll company tour to London as the young gun Johnny Dowd, threatening the supremacy of the ageing Roo in the Queensland cane cutting gang. The play won a best new play award for its season at the West End. The New York season was less successful, closing after five weeks.

One can speculate about the specificities of the Australian dialect being lost on an American audience, but equally, more familiar with a diet of Miller and Tennessee Williams, perhaps the play seemed less revolutionary in America than it did in England, where critics noted the respect for working people provided a salutary lesson for homegrown dramatists. Nevertheless, Hollywood produced an adaptation in 1959 starring Ernest Borgnine, Anne Baxter, Angela Lansbury and John Mills, called Season of Passion, in which the characters approach their Carlton residence by travelling on a ferry on Sydney Harbour after a night out at the Easter Show.

The film version also has a ‘happy ending’, with Olive acquiescing to Roo’s proposal of marriage as if this was what she’d aspired to for seventeen years. The only member of the Australian cast in the movie was Ethel Gabriel, who performed the role of Emma to acclaim.

The Doll has been translated into many languages, was adapted to an opera, and in 1977 the Melbourne Theatre Company commissioned Lawler to write two prequels, Kid Stakes and Other Times, which became known as The Doll Trilogy.

Though many feared that the trilogy would dampen the impact of the beloved Doll, it is generally agreed that the two prequels penned by Lawler over

twenty years later served to deepen our affection for, and understanding of, the characters in the original play. The Doll retains its ineffable power and hold on audiences.

When asked recently about whether

John Sumner 1976 Jim Paterson synthetic polymer paint and pastel on cardboard Gift of Jim Paterson 2004

he tires of talking about his best-known work, the now ninety-four year-old Lawler gracefully responded: ‘Let’s be honest at least; I think any writer is lucky to have one play or one book that people like; it’s wonderful.’

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Old Blighty

angus trumble ponders the many faces of william bligh.

The life of William Bligh (1754–1817) offers up a handful of the most remarkable episodes in the history of Britain’s eighteenth and early nineteenth-century maritime empire.

Bligh’s epic journey to Timor with his companions in a small, open boat the 3,600 miles whence they were ejected from H.M.S. Bounty on 28 April 1789 remains an astonishing feat of navigation by the stars. Bligh’s misfortune was not merely to have gone through the ordeal of mutiny aboard the Bounty, but to have faced insurrection in Sydney during his tenure as fourth Governor of New South Wales. The Rum Rebellion of 1808 damaged Bligh’s reputation, but he was vindicated in London and promoted to vice-admiral of the blue. He ended his enormously eventful career by mapping Dublin Bay. Bligh has become for us a mythic figure. There has been a bellwether 56

The Mutineers turning Lieutenant Bligh and part of the officers and crew adrift from His Majesty’s Ship, The Bounty 1790 Robert Dodd aquatint engraving, hand-coloured Purchased with funds provided by the Ian Potter Foundation 2008

William Bligh in every phase of Australian history – the martinet versus the brilliant cartographer and genius of navigation; the deeply misunderstood versus the merely blinkered man; the blackguard versus the gentleman and officer of the Royal Navy, steeped in its sometimes brutal disciplinary code; the angry tyrant versus the lonely husband and father; the victim of circumstance, stoutly defended again and again, as a matter of principle, by their Lordships of the Admiralty.

When in the mid-1960s A. G. L. Shaw drafted his measured, even cautious entry for Bligh in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and, at around the same time, Manning Clark was writing his vividly hostile account of Bligh in his Short History of Australia, the distance between these two extraordinarily different appraisals encapsulated the turbulent character of that decade. In other words Bligh was then made to fit the needs of, on the one hand, an established order wary

of rapidly developing social fissures, and, on the other, an ambitious sense of national identity from which Britain herself was rapidly retreating towards the Common Market. Thirty years later, when in 1992 Greg Dening published his Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language, Bligh furnished the material for a groundbreaking contribution to the burgeoning field of historical anthropology – and an entirely new approach to historiography itself. No doubt Bligh will continue to ebb and flow in the esteem of future generations. That is as it should be.

This William Bligh is none of these.

When the painting first came to the attention of the National Portrait Gallery in London in the early 1860s, it was proposed that William Bligh is represented here at the age of about twenty-five, several years before his marriage, wearing the uniform of sailing master, already skilled in navigation and seamanship, no doubt ambitious for himself, his men and his vessel, shortly before he was hand-picked

by James Cook to go aboard H.M.S. Resolution, on which the artist John Webber also sailed. It is not clear why the National Portrait Gallery decided then not to acquire the picture, although it seems likely that, coming so early in its history – the National Portrait Gallery was founded in 1856 – many other subjects yet to be netted for the collection were deemed more important priorities than William Bligh. At that date it may also have been decided that he was insufficiently famous, fame having been their most important early criterion. If so, London’s decision not to acquire the work ultimately paved the way for Canberra to do so, for this major acquisition, made possible by the Liangis family, could not have been a more apposite way in which to mark the launch of the National Portrait Gallery Foundation on March 12 last year.

For we, too, have commenced the next leg of a voyage that has already led to the creation of a new and vibrant institution with much to say to our ancient country (and youthful nation state) about herself and our people. There are adventures in store, uncharted oceans to ply, a sleek vessel well equipped for fair weather or foul, and a fine and dedicated crew. Having come so far, and with such committed and loyal support, we hope you will join us – and indeed encourage others to come aboard. portrait 52 autumn 2016

William Bligh c.1776 John Webber oil on canvas Purchased with funds provided by the Liangis family 2015

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portrait 52 autumn 2016

Risky business john zubrzycki lauds the characters of the australian escapology trade.

In the freezing cold winter of 1926, an Australian adventurer arrived in Kabul seeking an audience with Amanullah Khan, the Emir of Afghanistan. He called himself ‘Murray the Escape King’ and he was fulfilling a dream he had harboured since childhood – to travel the world as a magician. Aged just twenty-five, Murray had already been to Peking where he was manacled hand and foot to a railway track as the Shanghai Express bore down on him.

In Phnom Penh, the King of Cambodia enjoyed his sleight of hand so much he offered him one of his thirty wives

Murray frees himself from straightjacket in public 1928 Sam Hood glass photonegative State Library of New South Wales Personal appearance of ... the sensational Murray Australian escapologist appears and disappears 1963 RC Waterman colour lithograph Will Alma conjuring collection Donated by WG Alma, 1904-93 State Library of Victoria

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Murray the escapologist in a straight-jacket 1928 Sam Hood glass photonegative State Library of New South Wales Handcuff dive by Levante, Bombay, India 1933 gelatin silver photograph Will Alma conjuring collection Donated by WG Alma, 1904-93 State Library of Victoria

as a reward. Murray politely refused.

On Christmas day in 1925, hundreds gathered at the Gateway of India in Bombay to watch him being thrown into the murky waters of the Arabian Sea in a mailbag, while handcuffed and in leg irons. But the challenge Amanullah Khan now set would have given Harry Houdini, Murray’s idol, second thoughts. The Emir showed him the most secure prison cell in his kingdom – a cell so claustrophobic it made the Black Hole of Calcutta ‘look like a Swiss chalet’, Murray would later 60

recall. If he could escape, he could keep the bag of 5000 silver rupees the Emir had left inside. If he failed, he would remain in the cell for the rest of his life.

Without hesitating, Murray took up the challenge and won.

Nicknamed the ‘loveable rogue’ by his followers, Murray, whose real name was Murray Carrington Walters, would later boast of taking to the stage ‘in every quarter of the globe, from Alaska to Abyssinia … and from Afghanistan to the Steppes of Tartary’. When World War Two broke out he was performing at

Berlin’s Wintergarten before Hermann Goering and Adolf Hitler, who as a young boy harboured his own fantasy of becoming an escape artist. In total, the ever debonair-looking Murray toured eighty-seven countries, becoming the most travelled entertainer of his day.

Murray’s exotic exploits seem remarkable, even in today’s globalised world of popular entertainment. In fact he was treading a well-worn path established by generations of Australian magicians, actors, musicians and circus performers since the 1860s.

Backed by a brash class of showbiz entrepreneurs, Australian entertainers cornered the Asian market, bringing everything from Shakespeare to bush ballads to the stages of Shanghai, Rangoon, Colombo and dozens of other metropolises. Companies of Australian minstrels played in the hill stations of the Himalayas and in the courts of Indian Maharajas. Illusionists studied the secrets of Chinese street magicians in Nanking and Shanghai. Circus performers set up their big tops in the jungles of Java and scoured the animal markets of Burma and Bengal for tigers and elephants to train for their shows.

Australia was uniquely placed to take advantage of the insatiable demand of audiences in Asia for Western popular culture. The development of regular steamship services in the 1870s opened up new entertainment circuits that ran from the west coast of North America to the ports of the eastern Pacific, and from Australia to England via South East Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

Australia became both the final destination and the starting point for generations of entertainers chasing fame and fortune in lands they often knew very little about. Some shared their stories with biographers; others kept scrapbooks of now yellowing playbills and newspaper reviews, but the most vibrant record of those times are the studio portraits and press photographs preserved in collections such as those of stage magicians Will Alma in the State Library of Victoria and R.B. Robbins in the Mitchell Library in Sydney.

In many ways, Murray epitomised this vibrant class of entrepreneurial entertainer. Born in Melbourne in 1901, he mastered the art of escapology as a young boy after buying a pair of ‘regulation wrist irons’ from a mail order firm. To practise his routine he portrait 52 autumn 2016

Les Levante c.1934 gelatin silver photograph Will Alma conjuring collection Donated by WG Alma, 1904-93 State Library of Victoria

would chain himself to his bed at night and then throw away the key. By the time he had turned sixteen, Murray had left school and found a job as a butcher’s assistant on the ocean liner Niagara, bound for Vancouver. After a series of unsuccessful attempts at cracking the vaudeville circuit in the United States, he set sail for Singapore, working for his passage as a ship’s boy.

At night when his boat was docked in the harbour, he would secretly slip out and change out of his white ducks into a smart suit and entertain guests at Raffles Hotel with sleight-of-hand.

From Singapore he sailed to Bombay, where he saw fakirs performing magic

in the local market, before touching ports in the Persian Gulf, South Africa and South America. Disembarking in Buenos Aires, he met the celebrated Belgian magician Servais Le Roy and became his assistant for several months.

When he finally returned to Australia in 1923, Murray’s ambition was to earn enough money to go back to Asia. After spending Christmas of that year with his mother in Java, he took to the road performing before Asian potentates, gin-pickled expatriates and crowds of eager locals. In Calcutta he dived off the Howrah Bridge manacled in a straight-jacket, six pairs of leg irons and twelve feet of chains. By 1926 he

The Great Levante and his magical extravaganza c.1924 Robert Temp colour lithograph Will Alma conjuring collection Donated by WG Alma, 1904-93 State Library of Victoria

was commanding £80 a week in Penang, with The Times of London declaring him to be ‘greater than Houdini’. In London he created a sensation by escaping from a straightjacket while suspended from a crane, upside down, fifty metres above Piccadilly Circus. When he tried to repeat the act in Sydney’s Shakespeare Place in February 1928 he was arrested.

At a court hearing a few weeks later, the judge ordered him to pay a fine of five pounds or spend a month in Long Bay prison. Murray replied that he would prefer prison ‘if they can keep me there’, but later changed his mind, fearing that if he escaped he would be rearrested, thereby jeopardising his performance schedule.

Murray was not the only Australian illusionist drawn to Asia. In 1933, Les Cole, better known as ‘The Great Levante’ and widely regarded as Australia’s greatest magician, mimicked Murray’s feat of jumping off the pier at the Gateway of India, bound in handcuffs, as a large group of expats wearing solar topees and a somewhat smaller crowd of bemused locals looked on. In 1927, together with his wife 61

Esmé Levante (magician Les Levante's daughter) “How’s Tricks” 1940 gelatin silver photograph Will Alma conjuring collection Donated by WG Alma, 1904-93 State Library of Victoria Levante, world famed illusionist hopping around the world with his box of tricks ca.1920-33 colour lithograph Will Alma conjuring collection Donated by WG Alma, 1904-1993 State Library of Victoria

Gladys and their six-year old daughter Esmé, Levante began a tour of Asia and Europe that would last thirteen years. The tour included eighteen months in pre-independence India, where Esmé was billed as ‘the Daughter of the Gods, the Child Phenomena, Mentalist and Crystal Gazer’. Their travels nearly ended in tragedy when the car Levante was travelling in hit several men walking along the road at night near Peshawar in present day Pakistan. The men were Muslims and one was badly injured. When the crowd that gathered saw that Levante’s driver was Hindu, they started attacking him.

Fortunately Levante had his ‘Sword Box Illusion’ strapped to the back of the car. Wielding a sabre and with his wife behind the wheel, he beat off the attackers while standing on the running board. They eventually delivered the injured man to the nearest hospital in Kohat.

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Murray and Levante belonged to a long tradition of risk-taking magicians who travelled the world searching for new audiences, keeping ahead of their competitors by learning new tricks.

Their success owed much to the hard work of pioneering entertainers who had gone before them. Back in October 1860, advertisements had begun appearing in newspapers in Calcutta for ‘Lewis’s Great Australian Hippodrome and Mammoth Amphitheatre on the Maidan … just arrived from China’.

The cast included ‘Lilliputian Tom’, JM Wolfe ‘the celebrated Shakespearean Jester’, and Austin Shangahae [sic], who was billed as the ‘Chinese Tom Thumb’. The Hippodrome was the brainchild of entrepreneur and circus performer George Lewis. Born near Drury Lane in London in 1818, Lewis arrived in Australia in 1853, then started a circus and toured the goldfields.

After marrying Rose Edouin in 1864, the pair formed a theatrical company that commuted between Australia, India and China for nearly two decades, bringing the plays of Shakespeare and melodramas such as School for Scandal.

According to Melbourne-based historian and Lewis’s biographer Mimi Colligan, countries such as India represented a vast untapped market for all manner of entertainers. ‘You had the public servants who remembered what was happening back in England and wanted more of that kind of entertainment. Then you had the local people who were interested in the shows but could also be quite scathing of the performances.’ It was a lucrative combination. The 1873-74 season, which The Era’s Calcutta correspondent described as the ‘weakest yet’, still netted Lewis and Edouin a profit of £80,000. portrait 52 autumn 2016

The money to be made from sending entertainers into Asia was not lost on men such as Robert Sparrow Smythe and Harry Rickards. London-born Smythe arrived in Australia in the early 1850s as part of the great wave of migration that accompanied the gold rushes.

After working as a journalist, he turned to theatrical management and toured through South East Asia, India and South Africa, scouting for opportunities.

He became the first manager to take a company into Japan after the 1854 port treaty, and, as his 1917 obituary noted, ‘the first to prove the possibilities for professionals of the hill stations of the Himalayas’. His crowning achievement was organising Mark Twain’s round-theworld lecture tour in 1895.

Now remembered as the king of Australian vaudeville, Rickards started his career as a music hall singer in England. In 1871 he made his debut at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne, wearing a top hat, twirling a cane and sporting a drooping, silky moustache he twisted into corkscrews on the stage.

He returned to Australia in 1885 and 1888, before settling permanently in 1892. A year later he opened his first theatre in Sydney, the Tivoli. By the early 1900s he had a string of venues in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, which he developed into one of the most important vaudeville circuits in the world. Artists and entertainers typically spent twelve to sixteen weeks on the Tivoli Circuit in Australia before playing for six weeks on one of his affiliated circuits in India or South Africa. In addition to his ever-popular minstrel troupes, Rickards is credited with introducing Australian audiences to some of the world’s greatest performers, including the illusionist Carl Hertz (who screened the first motion pictures in Australia on 22 August 1896), the young WC Fields, the strongman Sandow and the renowned juggler, Paul Cinquevalli. In 1910, Rickards arranged for Houdini to make the first heavier-than-air flight in Australia; it took place at Diggers Rest, near Melbourne, in a Voisin biplane.

Murray was still a child conjurer when Rickards died in 1911, but when JC Williamson added the Tivoli Circuit to his theatrical empire in the 1920s he made a point of featuring the now famous escapologist in his shows.

A March 1928 review in The Sydney Morning Herald described Murray’s

baffling performance as having ‘all the magic of the Arabian Nights’. In 1947 he was back on the Tivoli Circuit, this time promising to jump handcuffed and in chains off the Sydney Harbour Bridge – a feat he never attempted. Murray’s career ground to an end in 1953 when he was diagnosed with an unspecified ‘nervous disorder’. He retired to Blackpool in England where he ran a

Rickards c.1880 Charles Turner chalk lithograph on buff paper Troedel collection Gift of Troedel & Cooper Pty Ltd 1968 State Library of Victoria

magic shop, but never quite gave up the hope of returning to the stage. ‘I want to hear again the applause of the people in many strange lands,’ he reminisced to his biographer Val Andrews in the early 1970s. ‘I want to see again the wonders of the world. I want to feel that wonderful feeling of freedom attained by the freelance traveller who can always earn his keep.’

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ON SHOW

An inspiring array of talent, passion and achievement – with many examples of triumph over adversity – is celebrated in this exhibition. Developed specifically as a touring exhibition to regional Australia, major portraits are drawn from the National Portrait Gallery collection and supplemented with works from private and institutional sources. manningham.vic.gov.au/manningham-art-gallery

Mysterious eyes: Arthur Boyd portraits from 1945 National Portrait Gallery, Canberra 4 May to 14 August 2016 A young man whose soft features betrayed the intensity of his own self-image, Arthur Boyd portrayed others with equally concentrated emotion. In this focus exhibition Boyd’s self portrait at age 25 is joined by his portraits of those around him. Through his eyes they are a reflection of the artist’s own state of mind. portrait.gov.au

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

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National Photographic Portrait Prize 2016 National Portrait Gallery, Canberra 19 March to 26 June 2016 The National Photographic Portrait Prize 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. portrait.gov.au

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Self portrait 1945-46 Arthur Boyd National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Purchased with funds provided by the Liangis family 2014; Robert Helpmann 1969 David Moore National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Purchased 1998; The lino hunter 2015 Janet Tavener; Sorry, Xerox, Sorry 2015 Joel Burrows

Awesome Achievers Manningham Art Gallery, Victoria 6 April to 16 June 2016

Portrait of Corporal James Davie Renner, 4th Division Signals Company, on a despatch motorcycle c. 1916-18 Louis Thuillier From the Thuillier collection of glass plate negatives Courtesy Australian War Memorial; John Howard and Janette Howard 2000 Josonia Palaitis National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Commissioned with funds provided by the Founding Patron, L Gordon Darling ac cmg 2000; Haunted lotus 15 2015 Ali Khadim Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane; Louis Abrahams 1886 Tom Roberts National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Christie’s Images Limited (2015)

national portrait gallery Uncommon Australians: The vision of Gordon and Marilyn Darling Tweed River Gallery and Margaret Olley Arts Centre 4 March to 1 May 2016

Remember Me: The lost diggers of Vignacourt Western Australian Museum, Geraldton, WA 27 February to 1 May 2016

Uncommon Australians 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 purpose-built home. artgallery.tweed.nsw.gov.au

The small French village of Vignacourt was always behind the front lines. For much of the First World War it was a staging point, casualty clearing station and recreation area for troops of all nationalities on the Somme. This exhibition tells the story of how one enterprising photographer took the opportunity of this passing traffic to establish a business taking portrait photographs. Captured on glass, printed into postcards and posted home, the photographs enabled Australian soldiers to maintain a fragile link with loved ones in Australia. museum.wa.gov.au/museums/geraldton

Tom Roberts National Gallery of Australia, Canberra until 28 March Tom Roberts is arguably one of Australia’s best-known and most loved artists, standing high amongst his talented associates at a vital moment in local painting. Whilst his output was broad-ranging, he was also Australia's leading portrait painter of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. nga.gov.au

2015 National Self-Portrait Prize University of Queensland Art Museum until 13 March 2016 The idea of existing somewhere between entropy and transcendence is at the heart of the 2015 National Self-Portrait Prize. The $50,000 invitationonly, acquisitive prize features 30 finalists and is held by The University of Queensland every two years. artmuseum.uq.edu.au

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ON SHOW

The New Zealand Portrait Gallery’s prestigious Adam Portraiture Award 2016 promotes the best of contemporary portrait painting from artists throughout New Zealand. The exhibition spans a range of portraiture, from intimate personal images to large scale works of more familiar subjects. This biennial award is the country’s premiere portrait competition. nzportraitgallery.org.nz Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2016 National Portrait Gallery, Washington 12 March 2016 to 8 January 2017 This competition and resulting exhibition celebrates excellence and innovation, with a strong focus on the variety of portrait media used by artists today. portraitcompetition.si.edu

Kingston Prize 2015 Galerie d’art Desjardins, Drumondville, Quebec 6 March to 10 April 2016 The Kingston Prize is a Canada-wide competition and exhibition tour for Canadian portrait painting, showcasing the work of thirty outstanding contemporary artists. artsdrummondville.com

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WOMEN: New Portraits Tolot/heuristic Shinonome, Tokyo 20 February to 13 March 2016 Crissy Field Presidio, San Fransico 25 March to 17 April 2016 WOMEN: New Portraits reflects the changes in the roles of women today and features women of outstanding achievement. Shown in 10 cities over 12 months from January 2016. Host cities include Tokyo, San Francisco, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Istanbul, Frankfurt, New York and Zurich. ubs.com/microsites/annie-leibovitz/en/exhibition

portrait 52 autumn 2016

I Love Your Hair 2013 Tim Okamura Yeelen Gallery, Miami, Florida © Tim Okamura; Evan 2015 Andrew Bernes Graham; Misty Copeland, New York City 2015 ©Annie Leibovitz From WOMEN: New Portraits Exclusive Commissioning Partner UBS; Self portrait as a reflection © Jen Mann Image courtesy of the Kingston Prize Association

Adam Portraiture Award 2016 New Zealand Portrait Gallery, Wellington until 29 May 2016

Margaret Lemon ca.1638 Anthony van Dyck Private collection, New York; Self-Portrait 1980 Robert Mapplethorpe © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; Paul Newman 1982 Neil Leifer National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution gift of Time magazine Conserved with funds from The Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation; The Rhubarb Triangle 2015 Martin Parr © Martin Parr/Magnum Photos Courtesy Martin Parr and The Hepworth Wakefield

international Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium Los Angeles County Museum of Art until 31 July 2016 This major retrospective examines the work and career of one of the most influential visual artists of the twentieth century. It provides new context for understanding the key genres that Mapplethorpe pursued: portraiture, the nude, and still life. His personal connections to sitters, his ability to manage a successful studio and his ambition to elevate photography to the status of contemporary art is demonstrated through rarely seen correspondence, books and other ephemera. lacma.org

Van Dyck: The Anatomy of Portraiture Frick Collection, New York 2 March to 5 June 2016 Anthony van Dyck enjoyed an international career that took him from his native Flanders to Italy, France, and, ultimately, the court of Charles I in London. Van Dyck’s supremely elegant manner and convincing evocation of a sitter’s inner life, real or imagined, made him the favourite portraitist of many of the most powerful and interesting figures of the seventeenth century. frick.org

Hollywood and Time: Celebrity Covers National Portrait Gallery, Washington 1 April to 2 October 2016 This show presents a selection of original cover art commissioned by Time magazine, highlighting Hollywood personalities who once graced theatre marquees across America. npg.si.edu The Rhubarb Triangle and Other Stories: Photographs by Martin Parr The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire until 12 June 2016 The Rhubarb Triangle & Other Stories is the largest Martin Parr exhibition in the UK since his Barbican retrospective in 2002. It comprises more than 300 photographs spanning the past 40 years, from early Yorkshire-based black and white photographs of rural communities to his recent international examinations of consumerism. hepworthwakefield.org

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S

tevie Wright (1947-2015), singer-songwriter, came to Australia from England at the age of nine. He sang with a couple of small bands before joining The Easybeats as lead singer in 1964, when he was just sixteen, after meeting the other band members at Villawood Migrant Hostel. With guitarist George Young ‘Little Stevie’ wrote several of the band’s early hits, including 'She’s so fine’ and ‘Women (make you feel all right)’. However, it was the songwriting team of Young and fellow guitarist Harry Vanda that made The Easybeats into one of Australia’s top 1960s rock bands, sparking hysteria at home, supporting the Rolling Stones in Europe and achieving international chart success, with ‘Friday on my Mind’ voted Best Australian Song of All Time in 2001. When The Easybeats split in 1969, Wright drifted around before spending two years performing in Jesus Christ Superstar. His annus mirabilis was 1974, when he

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released his first solo album Hard Road, containing the Vanda and Young song for which he is best known, the eleven-minute threepart ‘Evie’. A tour and a second solo album followed; Wright ended the year with three concerts at the Opera House. By 1975, however, he had disappeared from public life, drastically diminished by drug addiction and ‘treatment’ for it at the dreadful Chelmsford Private Hospital in Sydney. Although various attempts were made to get him back on stage during the 1980s, and he issued a new album in 1991, he stayed out of the limelight until the Long Way to the Top series and live tours of the same name in 2001-03. A cover of ‘Evie’ by The Wrights, a band formed for the purpose by members of Jet, Powderfinger, Spiderbait and other leading contemporary Australian bands, was released in February 2005. Wright lasted another decade before dying in hospital in Moruya on the south coast of New South Wales, where he had lived for some years.

Stevie Wright 2003 (printed 2005) Gregory McBean gelatin silver photograph Gift of the artist 2005

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