Page 44 - Studio International - October 1965

city-people call loneliness is to him a form of freedom.
'Australia has nothing that is virtually frightening,
nothing that a sensible man could not combat. We
have no savage animals, we have no predators that
Africa has, we have no savage peoples. we have no
endemic diseases. We have nothing that an ordinary
healthy man cannot combat'.
Drysdale was born in England, though he went out
to Australia shortly afterwards, and he was in Paris as
an art-student before the war. So he has an easy,
un-anxious relationship with Europe and never tries,
as some returned travellers do, to browbeat the stay­
at-home. At most, he will twit his fellow-Australians
with the lingering puritanism of their official attitudes.
'As a European offshoot we've inherited the climate of
Greece, the light of the Mediterranean, the colour of
Italy and Spain, and yet we live in it with the fearful
expectation of a congregation gathered to hear Knox or
Calvin thunder from the pulpit . .· Once again, the
country sets a better example, in his eyes, than the
town: ·a man in Hall's Creek can walk with his face
to heaven and a bottle of beer in his grasp on a Sunday
morning, but in Onslow or Carnarvon the street is
searched by anxious looks, and guilt enlarges the pro­
portion of the bottle to astronomical size. For whose
benefit, do we act so plain and then so strange 7'
It would be misleading to think that in such matters
Drysdale relies on memory. No one is a keener or more
strenuous traveller, and few people in Australia have a
wider acquaintance: Drysdale is. also. a gifted writer
whose travel-notes are the envy of many cl professional
topographer. Sometimes his travels have to do with
the prehistory of Australia: after one such trip he wrote
that 'If Depuch, or Gallery Hill, of Abydos existed in
Europe or any other civilized part of the globe, they
would be preserved with as much respect as the caves
of Lascaux and Altamira·. (With this point of view
anyone who has seen the films sponsornd by th0t
most intelligent of airlines, QANTAS, will heartily agree.)
But fundamentally Drysdale is a student, and a painter,
of people. And I cannot end better than by quoting
once again from his interview with Gecffrey Dutton.
for what he has to say i:; as relevant to his paintings c:s
to Drysdale himself.
Thursday·s CIJ1/j see the canvases prepared as carefully as an Old 'I can't think I could ever paint a thing because I
Oil on Can\'a,
20 X 16 ,n Master's and realise the immense patient care with thought it was pretty or impressive. An impressive
which his paintings are built up stage by stage. Crafts­ affair like the Sphinx in Egypt, I would never paint it.
manship of that sort can, of course, be a substitute for But, my God, you watch a mob of shearers coming out
any more vital activity: but, as Drysdale said himself, of any shed, the groups that form in the early mornings,
'the idea of being able to just learn how to paint and with the dewy grass and men wandering their feet
then apply it to subjects is something which I think is through the grass, getting into a knot in groups wonder­
absolutely abhorrent, because it means that the ing whether they could declare the morning black
business of handling paint overrides anything that because there's too much damp on the sheep, all the
you might think ... It's what you have in your mind tricks and the humanities and the mad nonsense of it
that determines the way you do it. That's why it's not all, I don't know, it's something that is part of you.
easy to paint. It's hard to paint. There's no known tech­ The old men that always hung round the sheds in the
nique to make it easy·. old time, old men who had virtually finished with life
'What you have in your mind': Drysdale lives in but needed the happiness and comfort and the talk and
Sydney, and has never lacked for money (his family the cheer, men who all their life had been on the boards.
had pioneered the sugar industry in Australia, among they would just come along and volunteer to do just
other things), but whereas most Australian painters are little jobs, anything, so long as they could sit and yarn
cityfied people who think themselves into the Australian and talk, sharpen blades for men shearing stud sheep.
past by an effort of the imagination, Drysdale annexed Those are the people that are fascinating. You can take
it as part of his childhood and youth and has never your society people. However beautiful they might be,
forgotten it. He doesn't use it (as Nolan does, for one) to me they're ephemeral. These others aren't. They're
as a source of poetic metaphor. Nor does he use it by the kind of towers that reach out. The survival thing
way of archaism, as a retreat from the present. Least of that means something. These are the lessons learned
all does he dramatise it in terms of loneliness: what at the knee ... · ■
162