The Dressmaker's Daughter (21 page)

W
alking into our bedroom one evening after I had been pelted with eggs from a bucket, my husband said resignedly, ‘I told you not to go.’ Drying yellow egg dripped down the front of my black ponyskin coat.

I had been to a protest against the Vietnam War. This one took the form of a sit-in on the steps of Parliament House. Because I had children and a husband who couldn’t be left alone for long, it wasn’t possible to take part in a sit-in that went on for days and nights. I decided to make scones and to take them into the demonstrators. It was a form, I suppose, of my mother’s adage ‘A little help is worth a ton of sympathy’. And perhaps it resembled the way my mother would lash on her apron after hearing of the death of somebody she vaguely knew and say, ‘I will make that woman some shortbread.’

I baked a basket of scones, filled them with butter and jam, and took them in a taxi to the steps of Parliament. Soon after, the basket was empty and I ran into a friend,
Ian Smith, a potter. He had an old black van, which he had painted with the statistics of the deaths from bombings during the war, the tonnage of the bombs, and a description of the effects of napalm. There was a big crowd around Parliament and it was hard to get through to where he had parked his van in a lane beside the old South Australian Hotel. We struggled into the van and, as Ian started to drive, a man shoved a bucket up near my face at the open window. He tipped it onto me as I shouted to Ian to keep driving. At first I couldn’t understand what was happening. The eggs were broken and fluid with shells and yolks mixed up so the whole mass could be thrown or poured easily. Luckily they were not rotten.

People hit the van with their fists and boots and I wound up the window. When Ian pulled up outside my house, I got out and walked inside to face the music.

This war divided our families and friends, as it did families and friends all over the country. Men who were called up to fight went into hiding. Years later it was with one of these men that I had a long and wretched affair.

One of my closest nursing friends, Joanie Pitcher, went to Vietnam with a surgical team. She left Australia as convinced of the correctness of the war as I was of its wrongness, and came home even more convinced than ever. We kept our friendship by never discussing the subject after our first foray into it.

A philosopher, Brian Medlin, who had a Chair at Flinders University, sometimes opened his lectures by draping the Vietnam flag over the lectern and saying, ‘Now let’s talk some real philosophy!’ Brian led many demonstrations against the war. It seemed that hardly a month went by without a demonstration being held. There was some sort of network that let people know when the protest was to be held. People had to have permission from the police to march, so it may be that it was announced in
The Advertiser.
My friend Antonia Chaffey, a painter who had shown work in our gallery, was walking along beside Brian, who was driving his Mini Moke down Rundle Street on one occasion, when she said, ‘On your feet, Medlin!’ He got out and let somebody else drive.

It was on one of these endless demonstrations that I got weary of protesting. We were passing Myers and I thought, ‘Nothing we are doing is making the slightest difference. I need a new stove.’ My mother had offered to pay for a stove so I went in and bought one and got a bus home.

Sometimes, but not often, I took my children to demonstrations. Caro says she can remember walking in one when she was about three years old. I had a queasy feeling that it was perhaps sentimental to take children because they did not understand what we were protesting about and it could be seen as a way to pull at the heartstrings of people standing on the sidelines watching us pass by.

One day a man leapt out of the crowd, snarling like a dog, his face suffused with hatred. He was crouched and almost barking with fury as he ran along beside us. I had never seen hate before.

The war went on for years and still people marched against it. When I was in my first year as a student at the University of Adelaide, an announcement was made on campus over the loudspeakers that the Vietnam War was over. I was beside a low stone wall near the bookshop. I looked around. Nobody did or said anything. It was as if they had not heard or did not know what it meant. I thought of the hundreds of students who had gone to prison rather than fight in the war, the protests, the suffering of those men who had gone to war and the suffering of their families, and the suffering of those who had gone to prison rather than go to war. The same prisons that criminals went to. One of these people had told me, as we sat in the students’ café, that he had been sent to a low-security prison farm after some months in a jail, and, while he was working, a boy came along beside the fence and spoke to him normally. It had a tremendous effect because until then the man had not realised how ashamed he was to be a prisoner. The boy speaking normally to him had made him understand his shame. And yet he had been in prison for his principles.

W
e called our new North Adelaide gallery ‘Llewellyn Galleries’ and had a bronze nameplate put on the white wall beside the black iron gate. This gallery was bought with my name on the deeds after Caroline’s godfather, Kenneth Stirling, suggested to Richard over lunch one day in our Dulwich gallery that they buy Kym Bonython’s gallery and the house next door, which had just come on the market. (Kym had bought a bakery in Paddington in Sydney and had made a huge new gallery there. He had put his North Adelaide gallery on the market with the house next door for sale, too. If you bought one, you had to buy the other.)

Kenneth and Richard had been friends from schooldays, after meeting at Scotch College when they were boarders. Kenneth came from a small town called Marree in the far north of South Australia and Richard came from Finniss, a small town in the south of the State. Together they had formed a company called Finniss Marree and it was with
money they both made on the stock exchange from a mining company Poseidon, for which Kenneth was the accountant, that we bought Kym’s art gallery and the house next door in North Adelaide. Kenneth had sold some of his shares at fifty cents each to all his friends who wanted them – from his cleaning lady, to his relatives, to one and all. They came on the market at over twenty dollars each and soon reached thirty dollars. Richard, the children and I were holidaying at Aldinga Beach in a rented house, which we did every year. On the beach one morning, Richard opened
The Advertiser
and said, ‘I am a wealthy man.’ Ever sceptical about the stock exchange, because Richard’s father had lost his mother’s inheritance after investing in shares in a tin mine in Malaysia, I scoffed and would not believe him. ‘It may be money on paper,’ I said, ‘but it is not real.’ But it was real all right, and overnight Kenneth became a multimillionaire. And Richard, while not reaching those realms, did make a lot of money.

Suddenly we no longer needed to have busy bees, but hired a decorator and had the house repainted and carpeted. Suddenly we were swish. We had gone from a two-roomed flat behind a drycleaning shop at a bus stop to a swank house with French wallpaper. But it didn’t cure my grief, which continued to stalk the house like an invisible fog. Malevolent, sinister and deadly.

Kenneth went on to become one of the State’s great public benefactors. He set up a university radio station
called 5UV because he wanted people in the country to have access to education. He gave millions to conservation. He hired an architect and had two houses built, one at Mitcham and one in the bush at the beach near Aldinga. That was all he spent on himself, his wife Bronte and their two children. The rest he gave away. He could not get rid of it quickly enough.

Then one day, a few years later, aged forty, running across the River Torrens on the university footbridge on 5BX Canadian exercise, he collapsed and died. Caroline was about eight. Not long before, he had said to me on the telephone that he would come out to lunch one day, as he sometimes did, to visit her and that it had been some time. He said to me: ‘There is plenty of time.’

The late Sixties and early Seventies were an important time in South Australian art history and Richard and I were lucky in that we stumbled into the business on the brink of huge changes. For instance, I saw some photographs by Grant Mudford in a
Vogue
magazine and invited him to have a show at our North Adelaide gallery. Alison Carroll, who was a young curator of prints and drawings, told me years later that she thinks this may have been the first time photography was exhibited in a commercial gallery. Soon after this, Ian North became the curator of photography at the National Gallery of
Australia. I asked him what it was like beginning a national collection of photographs and he said wearily, ‘Jilly, it’s like inventing the world.’

Alex Danko, the local, young, funky DaDa artist, had a show with us that included a colossal ceramic penis. Worried that the Vice Squad might be called, Richard decided to invite them out to give an opinion on our legal position. They came, viewed the object, and one said mildly that they would only come again in response to a complaint from the public. If they did, we knew we’d be closed down and we’d have to go to court. So they advised us to put the penis in a separate place in the garden and to tell people they could view it if they wished but it was at their own risk. We didn’t like doing this as it seemed censorious, but to be safe we followed their advice and we had no trouble at all.

Syd Ball, the Adelaide artist, brought colour-field painting to us from New York where he had worked in Rothko’s studio. Syd told me he had cleaned Rothko’s blood off the walls (because that was where Rothko had killed himself).

Ian North said to me recently, ‘It was an open, fluid time because no-one knew which way it was going to fall – in the tussle between late modernism and the beginning of conceptualism.’

The National Gallery was being built in Canberra and James Mollison, who was its first director, came
over on a buying trip to buy from us and to visit some of our artists in their studios to see their work. Later, when James went to New York, he asked Hugh what he would like him to bring back. Hugh said a T-shirt with ‘Hugo the Bikie’ on it. At that time Hugh was about eight and had some huge second-hand bikie boots that he clomped about in, up and down our long passage and in the gallery, getting ready to ride a bike when he was old enough. I thought it was a good thing at the time that he had this passion because by the time he could ever ride a bike he may well be over the idea. Peter Timms, a young curator from Victoria, was a hero to Hugh because he had a big motorbike and he took Hugh riding through the Adelaide Hills. Hugh loved it. James brought back two T-shirts from New York. One was purple and on it was printed what Hugh had asked for, and the other was for Caro, and on it was printed ‘Caroline Angel Baby’.

The National Gallery had two buyers in Adelaide and one day one of them, David Dryden, came to visit our North Adelaide gallery, where I was minding a landscape show. I told him he ought to go over to the Dulwich gallery to see the print show by Geoff Wilson based on the faces of playing cards and that he would not regret it if he bought the whole collection for the National Gallery. He did this then and there. The work was dazzling. Nobody does colour like Geoff Wilson. I once told him
he uses colour the way my mother used it when she smocked and he said it was one of the best things ever said about his work.

We had dinner parties for almost every show, and if the artist was from interstate they stayed with us. An artist from Melbourne and his wife were demanding house guests and also wouldn’t help me hang the work. They had me waiting on them and so I laughed when Richard said to me on the night of the opening that he would not be going out into the gallery with them until he was good and ready. By the time I pushed his chair out there, the artist was in a fine panic and I was touched by Richard’s loyalty to me. He may not have been able to physically help but he did defend me.

The late John Stringer was another curator who came to buy from us. He came to a colour-field show to buy for the National Gallery of Victoria and had dinner with us. Sometime after this, I rushed into John’s office in the new National Gallery of Victoria one day and asked him if I could use his bathroom to change my clothes for an opening. He looked startled and uncomfortable but he agreed. It was only afterwards that I saw I had taken a liberty. But to me, it had seemed that if we had been hospitable, we could expect hospitality in return, even though I had not taken into account the fact that government offices are not quite the property for curators to offer largesse.

Hugh remembers as a child walking along the edge of the moat outside that gallery and falling in. He told me that later when he and I had stood with Richard inside the gallery, watching the English performance artists Gilbert and George singing ‘Underneath the Arches’ over and over, I said to him, ‘Be quiet, Hugh. This is important!’ Since then I have wondered if Gilbert and George really were as important as I had thought then, but Richard and I had respect for all serious artists and while time has made some of these people fade away and made us more sceptical, respect was the only attitude to have when artists filled sculptures with blood, which slowly began to spoil, the stench filling the gallery. That particular artist was Jim Crowley, who, the night before his show was to open still had not brought his work to us. He was a young artist, wild, intense and radical. As Richard and I lay in bed the night before the opening, wondering what would happen the next day when the public were due to come, I suddenly had a realisation. Jim would be instantly one of the most famous artists in the world if he killed Richard and me, put our bodies into the gallery, and let the people come to visit this, his work of art. I became more and more convinced that this was the reason we had no word on the work coming. There was no work. We were to be the work. Richard said that I was mad but I went into our young neighbours’ house and asked if I could sleep there, which I did. Early the next morning, in my nightie I
walked gingerly into our bedroom and found Richard alive, mocking me. Then Jim pulled up in a truck and began to unload the sculptures and paintings. One sculpture was of the Pope sitting on a lavatory bowl. Another was a sheep’s heart with a bottle of blood hanging beside it. And there were other wild works, which in our ardour we then proceeded to try to sell. A few months later, Jim and his wife drove to Perth and on the Nullarbor Plain, his young wife’s small dog jumped from the back seat into the front of the car and Jim swerved, the car crashed, and his wife was killed. The next event was Jim throwing carnations into her grave. Death following art.

Before Kym sold the North Adelaide gallery to us, he had cancelled all the artists he had booked for the coming year because he believed that the whole corner site with the house and gallery would be bulldozed and used for a new building. Because we intended to keep it running as a gallery, I went to Sydney in a hurry to book artists. (Galleries, like publishers, must book work for shows ahead year by year. Sometimes, because of sickness or a faltering, a show is cancelled and it is then that an artist might be offered a show at short notice if they have work ready, but otherwise it is all booked months ahead.)

In a series of coincidences that perhaps only the Bunraku puppet master can explain, when I needed to
travel to Sydney there was an International Country Women’s Association meeting being held in Adelaide and Grandmother Llewellyn could not come and take care of Richard and the children as she usually would have done because she was billeting a delegate at her home. So suddenly we needed a carer in a hurry.

A landscape photographer who was a friend said that he knew a fellow American who was a student at Flinders University and that she might like a short-term job. She was a drama student and she played the violin. Her name was Becky Roberts and she was twenty-three. Her family had come out on what they called ‘a family adventure’ while her father was Professor of Public Medicine at Flinders University.

She rang the doorbell about a week before I was to leave for Sydney. Richard was in bed and I brought her in and introduced them. She wore black, thick stockings and a short skirt. I took her shopping on Norwood Parade and explained what food Richard liked and what she would need to do to take care of him. She would not have to do any nursing because the district nurse had been booked to come to wash and dress Richard and to put him to bed. But Becky would need to be with Richard at night for safety and in case he needed his legs moved, as they sometimes got cramps.

I flew to Sydney and my mother had both our children stay with her.

In Sydney, I stayed with Jenny and David Isaacs in the Glebe house that had belonged to Donald and Cynthia Brooks. The Brooks’s little son Simon had been murdered in the park next door a few years before. The child’s clothes were in the bottom of a chest of drawers in the room in which I slept. Terrible in their eloquence. At that time the murder remained unsolved but the police finally charged a man after a similar murder of a girl in Melbourne. Very recently Donald told me that he and Cynthia were to go to court soon to try to prevent that man, who was convicted of the crime, from being released, in case he harmed more children.

While in Sydney, I met the sculptor Bert Flugelman, whom I was sent round to see by the painter Guy Warren at the Tin Shed Workshops at the University of Sydney. I booked shows with them both, as well as with David Rankine and some other artists. Daniel Thomas, the curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, took me to dinner. Earlier that day, he had shown me over the gallery renovations, which had not yet been opened to the public. A man of unbounded enthusiasm and ardour, he loved art and artists in a way I had never seen. (Later he became the director of the Art Gallery of South Australia.) ‘The gnat has swallowed the elephant!’ he remarked to me when he heard that we now owned the big North Adelaide gallery.

Our new gallery was opening on the morning I flew home. It was 9 September 1972. I took my suitcase down the brick path to the door and wondered where to put it. Lynn Collins (an old friend to whom I had written for a year before we met while he was living in London and making work for a show with us at our Dulwich gallery) was there. I looked around, lost for what to do and he said, ‘You now own this place, Jilly. Put your case in a back room.’ I did and then took a broom and swept the front path, suddenly aware of the symbolism.

We had the children with us for most of that day of the opening and Richard had hired a photographer to make a record of it all. Robert Boynes, Annie Newmarch and Clifford Frith comprised the group show. Richard sat in the front office where long ago he had debated modern art with Kym when Sid Nolan’s African show was on. (At the time, Richard had told Kym he didn’t believe there was anything in this modern-art thing. I had slunk in the background embarrassed. Yet we had formed an acquaintance of a sort with Kym and ironically we had set up in competition of a modest kind. Kym had sold the work of more-famous artists and we, at our Dulwich gallery, had sold younger, more avant-garde artists’ work more cheaply. At about the time we bought his North Adelaide gallery, Kym arrived in the back garden of our
Dulwich house to talk over the final details of the sale. I was washing Richard’s hair with a hose and bucket. Richard had a towel around his shoulders, shampoo in his hair. I quickly rinsed off the suds and towelled his hair. It was a measure of Richard’s poise that he found no difficulty in being seen like this. One of his great attributes that I admired most was that it did not matter who the person was, the old woman at the bus stop with four teeth, or a person of fame, he was at ease with all. It had been Mrs Niece from the bus stop where we had had the drycleaning agency who had given him amusement. On very hot days, Mrs Niece, in answer to Richard’s question of what was she going to do to bear the heat that day, would say, ‘I’m going to have a few beers and lie down and watch the cricket until I pass out.’)