CHARLES WOOLEY
On the underrated genius of painter Lloyd Rees
O n Monday, I was invited to the opening of NAIDOC Week, a nationwide celebration of Aboriginality, at Risdon Cove. It was a bright blue, freezing morning with snow on the mountain and a thick Bridgewater Jerry drifting down the river. I watched the raising of the Aboriginal flag from a hill above what we know as Risdon Cove, but which the original inhabitants called piyura kitina.
Kartanya Maynard, a young woman with a lovely voice, sang a haunting song in palawa kani. I didn’t know the words but was touched by their implicit meaning. This was a lament for everything lost, a song about dispossession made all the more affecting by the beauty of the place and the stillness of the winter morning. It felt as if the world held its breath in sympathy while the words of her eulogy rose into the cold, clear air.
The Black War, as historian Henry Reynolds called it, began at Risdon Cove in 1803. There are conflicting recollections, but as far as I can understand a large party of Aboriginal hunters pursuing wallaby blundered into the first English encampment and the troops, fearing they were under attack from superior numbers, opened fire. Three Aborigines were killed and for the original Tasmanians this is seen historically as the beginning of the end.
At school in Launceston in the ’50s and ’60s I learnt that when King Billy and Trucanini died, that was the end of a race of people. It was simply convenient to draw a line under a dark episode. It did seem strange, though, that I had school friends with dark skin and Aboriginal features, and even stranger they weren’t allowed into the local milk bar after sport. “Youse are all right to come in, but not your black mates,” the shopkeeper told us. “We’ll have no bloody Abos in here.” Launceston in 1964 might as well have been Mississippi.
There was a student who was blue-eyed with Aboriginal features. It was a tough school – I was beaten up for winning an essay competition – but Michael Mansell was clever, adept and seemed to fare reasonably well, though I bet he wouldn’t have been able to get a Coke from the Mowbray Milk Bar.
In the ’70s, when I returned to Tasmania to work as a young reporter on the ABC’s
This Day Tonight program, I interviewed Mansell, who was by this time a Tasmanian Aboriginal activist. After the show, the switchboard was jammed with angry callers, all of them declaring, “He’s not an Aborigine – he’s got blue eyes”.
I’ll never forget Mansell’s reaction: “When I tried to be a good whitefella, they said I was ‘a bloody Abo’. When I stand up as a Tasmanian Aborigine, they say I’m a whitefella. You can’t win.”
Against the odds, Mansell graduated as a lawyer and became a campaigner for his people. He hasn’t won all that he would wish, but his gains have been remarkable.
I thought about him and my other “bloody Abo” schoolmates as Maynard was singing and the flag was rising. Could I have done more? Probably. But we were only kids. Really, all we could do was take the Cokes outside the shop so our mates could drink them in the street.
The light was superb at Risdon Cove on Monday, while across the river at Salamanca, under the shadow of the mountain, Colville Gallery was preparing a celebration in memory of Lloyd Rees, perhaps Australia’s greatest painter of light. The Lloyd Rees Art Prize celebrates his genius and the wonderful Tasmanian light, which he captured so brilliantly when he lived here late in his life, in the ’80s.
My favourite Rees painting is the luminescent Morning on the Derwent, a vivid impression of our river’s easterly aspect revealed without detail but light. I’ve been told Rees was losing his sight when he painted this work, but surely at that moment he had never seen so clearly.
We own that painting. It was bought by the State Government in 1983 and is held by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, but for some unfathomable reason it is in storage. A significant treasure such as this should surely be on show. Certainly, that was the opinion of the judge of this year’s Lloyd Rees Prize, Janet Holmes à Court. “Of course it should be,” she told me. “Lloyd Rees is one of Australia’s most significant modern landscape artists and he lived in Hobart when he painted one of his greatest works. People would come here to see it.” The West Australian mogul and arts patron gave the prize to northern Tasmanian artist Philip Wolfhagen, whose sombre, atmospheric paintings adeptly capture the murky predawn and the lonely last light in the northern midlands in country I have long haunted in pursuit of trout.
Wolfhagen will surely deserve a spot on the wall beside Rees. But that can only happen after TMAG finally sees the light and puts Rees on permanent display.