Author

 

Summers were spent wandering the bluestone lanes at sunrise, shifting found objects into unusual positions, for effect. A derelict car was covered in a kapok blanket. Hard rubbish went Renaissance. David and I set up table and chairs in a Pigdon Street roundabout for breakfast. We played Perec with commuter traffic, in the days before we’d ever read Georges Perec. Our favourite word was “Author!”, which we would direct at anything that met full critical approval, fairy floss crepe myrtle at a wrought fence, Etruscan-looking graffiti, a cloud in the sky. Days were spent at respective digs making vast collages from 1978 magazines and trashed art books, to a soundtrack regularly interspersed with the first Dire Straits album. I fully imagine many of those cumulative masterworks are still in one of David’s meticulous files. His father, Ian Victor, was a well-known educationalist, also known for his sartorial elegance, both strong influences on David’s life. With friends we would go to jazz shows, peculiar and/or marvellous art shows, excessive student theatre. Talk was always perceptive and silences peaceful. Gradually David left Melbourne, but over time there were visits and dinners in China Town and messaging, back when postcards were a thing, opening ‘Dear Hearty…’ and ‘signed Handsome’. One of his public triumphs was the John Glover show at the National Gallery of Victoria and elsewhere (2004), another his book ‘Dempsey’s People’, which arrived in a big parcel on the doorstep in 2017. This week I read ‘A Tear in the Glass’ by Mary Ryllis Clark, an intuitive memoir of Melbourne curator Nina Stanton, and googling Nina Stanton I discovered that David had been awarded a prize in her name in order to extend his education studying in royal houses of England. All of which made perfect sense, unlike the news received in my ABR (Australian Book Review) mailout two days later reporting “the death of David Hansen, art historian and public gallery director”, with a reprint of his brilliant, timely, and essential 2010 essay ‘Seeing Truganini’. This is the way we receive the news these days, at several removes, electronically. Memories and loss come to the fore, as they will. Seeking further information online I was stopped by sites wanting me to prove I am not a robot, a case of the digital Renaissance turning into soft rubbish. I did at least gather that ‘Handsome’ passed away on the 13^th of January 2024 in Geelong. I keep thinking of how many single- and multi-syllabic pronunciations of Geelong we would have tested, back in the day, the day apparently being that time when we wander Carlton bluestone and wave at the rat race driving their insane Volvos and Datsuns in the direction of, if not fame typically, at the very least a small fortune.