McBeath (July)

Peter Porter has one eye on you and one eye in thought. By accident or design, this photographer has captured the bifocal nature of the poet. The first time I ever met Porter was in the English Department of the University of Melbourne, was it July? I used ‘realised’ in a poem. He took exception to ‘realised’, feeling this word should be used of sculptors who ‘realised’ the form within the matter at their disposal. Not, he felt, in the way I had used ‘realised’, in the sense of a cerebral process. He was keeping an eye on my wherewithal.

Unknown (July)

Woollarawarre Bennelong (circa 1764–1813) is here portrayed by Unknown. Did Unknown travel by ship over unfamiliar waters to an unfamiliar land, with an assortment of other Unknowns? Or was Unknown a homebody, born to enjoy the luxuries of England? Their names are in registers, their letters home, their sketches and prints may be filed somewhere, known or unknown. We think we know about Bennelong, yet but for the happenstance of Settlement he would be, together with his people, Unknown. Like the settlers and prisoners, just to the left of the household name, labouring through July, with the Unknown majority.

Morley (July)

Lloyd Rees, his blind eyes an inch from plied canvas, this year will die. He’s applying paint with his hands because his fingers have lost the grip needed for brushes. Derwent estuary’s only gold, only blue, only haze. He wears a hat inside like someone from France but outside it’s broad daylight. The man who drew Tuscany in July so every line meant, in his last year pushes the colour in our faces. He, who could describe rock formations and tree particulars of Port Jackson so every edge was exact, amasses in his final months only splendour the sun imparts.

Heyer (July)

William Barak is seventy-eight years old. He wears the hat, wool coat, clean trousers, and boots of the arrivistes. Fully clothed he can meet the companies halfway. Upriver, July is cold. Life is the never-ending business of conversation: official discussions, story time, kitchen updates, pillow talk. The frame within the frame, it’s an imported practice. There has to be a wall, to hang frames, to frame land. Watercolour and gouache, ochre and charcoal, but memory dances and sings behind tiny spectacles. Life is the never-ending business of ritual: creation celebration, holy re-enactment, communal reconciliation. In his teens they came upriver.

Done (July)

Ken Done has thoughts like a tourist attraction. The Uluru side of his mind is speckled with gold, the creative side is all Harbour Bridge. One eye is ‘Banjo’ Patterson blue, the other Unaipon yellow. He leads with a chin of Reibey orange. As they say on Play School, “Today it’s the square window. Hockney without the line, Picasso without the forethought.” The catalogue remarks on Ken’s “trademark moustache”. His left cheek costs like the Opera House, his right cheek has more front than Foys. The portrait is destined for a calendar. July: ‘Me’, oil and acrylic on canvas (1992). 

Moore (July)

Dawn Fraser was liquid. Aren’t we all? Only when she went to water she was halfway down the lane before breathing out. Moorabbin Baths was dog-paddle struggle, crawling for certificates in over-chlorinated water. Peer pressure alone got me to the other side. Dawn Fraser practised daily, even in July. Her body was one with the element, unlike the sixes and sevens of her admirers. My favourite strokes were the bomb and float. I was not a contender. Out of water Dawn Fraser looked like anybody else. She had disagreeable socio-political opinions and poor colour coordination, just one of the crowd. 

Williams (July)

Fred Williams was afraid of the bush, I was told once. I’ve never known what to make of this ‘interesting fact’. Is it even true? Did he leave his Hawthorn home every month to overcome fear? Why spend a lifetime painting landscapes you’re afraid of? A Prahran art student painted Fred Williams pizza. A disc of black blobs and red straggles resembled an overladen Napoletana. This pizza was not amusing. I liked Williams. He showed me new understandings of micro fern and macro ranges. His eye spent years in beatitude examining January wreck of bushfire, July hint of early wattle.   

Batchelder-O’Neill (July)

Frances Perry knows appearances are false. The history of photography is a history of falsity. One day that will be a platitude. These thousand-image devices prove incidental, a gallery of deceit. Sufficient unto the day are the images thereof, but in the morning a new song will arise. Best be ready for its challenges, put away all appearances and attempts at appearances. Psalms repeat lines for effect: a new city rises from the rich earth. Frances Perry has births to attend to, visitations, counsels, and lectionary. It’s a kind of exile, the beautiful colonies, burning in January, frozen in July. 

Reiss-Orford (July)

Barbara Darling managed libraries. In 1983 she invited me to a conference that July. She came to my room in Parkville to make clear I was needed. It was the first time we met. She was a great one for book learning, but the person came first. Barbara became a bishop. Not that this is the person I remember, in an official Reiss-Orford photograph. The last time we met was in my room at the Community library in Cheltenham. Always her friendly smile. Barbara had a bootload of books to donate, now she was ‘retiring’ to study further Spiritual Direction.

Mourtzakis (July)

David Chalmers is no softer than anyone. Braincap holds everything in. We came out three-dimensional and that’s it, really. Why? And why free of the ground, unlike a tree that draws life where it grows? Millennia gone and going on like there’s a tomorrow, a January and July. Portraiture wonders at free-floating three-dimensionality, how chance and design produced, for example, David Chalmers, thinking about thinking while sensations keep coming with more of the same, more of not the same; about when we are more conscious of gravity as we skip across basalt, enjoying a sky a blue unlike any ocean.

Headlam (July)

Chris Wallace-Crabbe is back at work. It’s not just the eye upon the word thing but the head bent over thing, the neck loosened up for information flow, the reasonable assumption and the gut feeling. It’s not just the jacket holding on thing, it’s the leaves holding together thing, just when the composition (nowadays, the text) gets gripping. It’s the garden of the mind thing, spring or fall or just good old July, when indoors (or out) the reader goes gardening. It’s the blank canvases leaning against the wall thing, the everything is biography thing, waiting for happily other readings.

Brack (July)

Barry Humphries was mametic, memetic, mometic, mumetic, sorry mimetic. The choir ladies of St Mark’s Camberwell didn’t have words for him, nice ones. He transferred his animus, as mimetics do, to Moonee Ponds, the Camberwell of the West. He was unforgiving and unforgiven. John Brack perceived Collins Street the same, closing time a file of drab convention, chilly as July. The Yarra may’ve been walled but Collins Street was still a Brackish backwater. Barry, on the other hand, was a symphony of pink, a rattle of pearls, a hat of blue roses. Later, Brack regretted. Who was he to judge?

A sketch for this marvellous portrait by John Brack (1969) held in the Art Gallery of NSW.

Smart (July)

Margaret Olley was a house. Oversized hats and calico cats. Turpentine tins and raffia bins. Cootamundra vases and six-pane glasses. Garden vista greens, golden Chinese screens. Wooden drawers and carpeted floors. Paint tube tops and teapot slops. Art book towers and arching flowers. Crimson textures and statue extras. Jeffrey Smart had nous. None of that colour and movement, no utter clutter and home improvement. None of that fauvism, arts-and-crafts chauvinism. No adornment. His pencil outlines a wistful face. Simplicity of no thing, a place where there’s nothing we need to prove. Seventy-one. July sometime. Margaret Olley, out for the day.

Histed (July)

Dame Nellie Melba frequented Ikea. Or its equivalent, back when Burnley Street was her turf, her laugh, her woop from rooftops. Bricks were thick and chimney smoke backdrop on July nights. Sing them trash was the rule for her countless comebacks, a dying cadence, a comic turn. Home, sweet home was the photographer’s studio, the portraitist’s salon, the density of rehearsal, plunge of crimson curtains. Home was blue pencil marking moves in the score, the deft control when the tenor looked tipsy, first night aplomb, last night signings, the plaudits falling from the gods like confetti. No place like home.

Lindsay (July)

Lionel Lindsay has us believe he’s a jester. In ‘Chasing Lionel’ Colin Holden records, “He enjoyed Spanish food sufficiently to collect recipes and even smuggle plant seeds back into Australia past the noses of customs officials, only to use the home-grown products in cooking for Sir Robert Menzies, one of his patrons.” Colin visits Lionel’s sites. In Salamanca he finds a 1533 convent Lionel made watercolour in 1928, saying the artist “was often guided by an unerring instinct for recognising the unusual or distinctive.” Colin, who died this July, was the same, and like Lionel, a fellow of infinite jest.