Mum was shamed. We kids were mortified. But there was worse to come, because Dad was irritated and determined to press the point. Fine for him, safely shod in his rubber thongs, but for the rest of us, shrunk back into a knot of ignominy, it was awful. After trying several dud approaches – including the point that, thanks to our recent wading, at least our feet were clean – he made a breakthrough. He told the attendant we were from Queensland and suddenly all resistance ceased. It seemed that for yokels from the tropic north they’d make allowances. We were in!
It was a victory nearly wasted: I was so embarrassed I could barely absorb what lay before me. And this is how I came to be acquainted with Henry Moore. For many minutes I lurked behind his Draped Seated Woman, hiding my grievous feet, trying to regain some composure. The sculpture could have been a parked car for all I cared. Still, I had time to take it in after a fashion, and there was something consoling in its mass. Its curves were confusingly voluptuous. It was, as Mum had promised, terribly modern, but there was a quality to it I later recognized as humane. I didn’t just take shelter from it, I took heart. And from there I set off to see what else I could find. I roamed free.
In the great hall I craned to take in Leonard French’s much discussed stained-glass ceiling. It would have been great to lie on the floor to see it better, but given recent events I didn’t dare. From there I wandered the courts and galleries, seeking out local legends like Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin whose colonial images were familiar from school. I lingered at Russell Drysdale’s The Rabbiters, the title of which sounded traditional and whose colour range looked old-timey, but it struck me as weird, almost haunted. Was this modern? I didn’t know. But I couldn’t stop looking at it. In the halls of the European masters I was all at sea. I stopped only to take in works that were monumental or whose artists were famous enough to ring a bell. Like Rembrandt, whose Two Old Men Disputing brought to mind a pair of cricket fanatics in an aged-care facility, still going on with their infernal statistics in their PJs. It was a picture you fell into. You could look at it for the rest of your life and forever wonder what the story was.
There were many things I didn’t understand, stuff that made me uneasy, stripes and splashes and globs on pedestals that had me scratching my head. There seemed to be no limit to what people could think of, and that was a giddy feeling. On and on the galleries went. And on and on I trekked, until finally I yielded in dismay, backtracked like a sunburnt Hansel and found my clan hunkered by the entrance, spent and waiting.
Passing back by the water wall to the familiar world, I had a dim sense I’d seen something special. I knew I was no genius but I didn’t want to be ordinary and if I’d learnt anything from the excursion it was what people could do when they saw past the everyday. There was no single experience that made me want to live by my imagination, but I don’t doubt the pivotal effect this visit had. Within a year I was telling anyone who’d listen that I was going to be a writer.
So it was a treat, this summer, to return to the NGV, no longer a new sensation, now an institution. There have been changes. The palazzo-style building on St Kilda Road has been rebadged as the NGV International and the handsome Australian collection has been rehoused in the Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square, across the Yarra. Recent renovations have afforded the old building more exhibition space, and on the day I arrived I found the halls teeming with visitors.
From the exterior it’s still quite a daunting building, but happily the museum-going public is not as easily intimidated as it once was. That sullen philistine reverence has fallen away. Children and their parents run their hands delightedly up the cascading sheets of the water wall and even if, in the years since my first visit, the aesthetic effect of the piece has become hard to distinguish from the display windows of Chinese restaurants, it’s a pleasure to see ordinary folks reaching out, making contact, claiming the place as they enter.
Inside, the democratic spirit continues. Not only is admission to the permanent collection free, children are welcomed without reservation. The morning of my visit, kids were lined up to ride the glittering brass carousel ensconced in the building’s central court. In the great hall, where Leonard French’s monumental stained-glass ceiling remains, they lay on the floor, pointing and writhing. It was a joy to see a grandmother shuck her shoes and chase her charges from one end of the hall to the other in her horny bare feet.
Sadly, the ceiling itself hasn’t fared well with the years. Its scale remains impressive, and like the water wall it’s earned a public fondness, but caught at the wrong moment it looks like the world’s largest crochet rug ready to be spread across the knees of a giant philanthropist.
Henry Moore’s once controversial Draped Seated Woman is still there, too, handy as ever, though smaller than I remember, and there’s something about her pin head and blank face that now seems disrespectful. Close by in the new sculpture garden is Pino Conte’s Tree of Life, which features an infant clinging stubbornly to its mother’s breast. This babe could be any age. The mother’s arboreal trunk is sensually rendered but her mass is implacable. It’s a lovely, muscular celebration of the life urge and if I were to bring one of my grandkids to the NGV, this would be our first stop.
In the labyrinth of the European galleries, noticing for the first time what a solid collection of religious art the museum has amassed, I came upon Titian’s Monk with a Book and saw what a worldly fellow he is. Where a pious man might prefer to be seen looking heavenward, our friar has been caught seeking some action closer to home. Do I sense a woman in the wings, a visit from the bookies? Rembrandt’s Two Old Men Disputing is still there, luminous as ever, and further along, in the gallery dedicated to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works, I met a new acquisition – Jean François Sablet’s gorgeous portrait Daniel Kervégan, Mayor of Nantes. The revolution-era burgher is rendered with rare sympathy. His is the face of a plain, trustworthy man with tired, soulful eyes. Here is the sort of citizen-leader the communards must have dreamt of. But in this world-weary visage there’s no hint of the Terror to come.
With the familiar past behind me, I rested over a pot of Darjeeling and reflected on the changes that have come to the museum. Apart from the structural additions, about which I have mixed feelings, the most telling improvements are social. The courts of the David Shrigley show were thick with kids drawing responses to the work. The spillover from the Jean Paul Gaultier carnival was evident upstairs as the young and curious coursed through galleries, snapping and texting as they went. The temple of art no longer spurns the young and uninitiated.
Within the collection, the most telling change is the growing prominence of Asian art. When I was a kid, Australia had barely begun to emerge from the moral murk of the White Australia Policy, and the NGV’s holdings remained trenchantly Europhile. At the entrance to the Asian collection is a smouldering piece by an Indonesian artist, Haris Purnomo. Orang Hilang, a work of remembrance for the disappeared activists of the Suharto years, has the happy effect of inoculating the occidental viewer against narrowly ethnographic expectations. Yes, the galleries feature works of tradition and antiquity – like the Jin Dynasty Guanyin and many precious ceramics from Japan and China – but there’s a keen appetite for contemporary exemplars and Purnomo’s piece helps set the tone. Here, an old man with a limpid stare and a telling scar at the base of his neck wears the names of the missing like wounds. Words are too dangerous to utter. His mouth is covered. His eyes and the patchwork of plasters speak for him.
Despite its naked political intent, it’s a beautiful object, and of all the paintings in the building it’s the one I saw people linger over longest.
I stayed the entire day and saw but a fraction of what was on offer. Following the spent kids and their guardians out past the water wall, I thought again of that boyhood visit. I first entered the NGV barefoot and cowering, but I was so taken with what I saw that I forgot to be embarrassed. I strode out of the place like a man in boots.
ACKNOWLEDGE
MENTS
Some of these pieces have appeared previously, often in earlier forms: ‘Havoc’ in The Monthly; ‘A Walk at Low Tide’ in Edgelands, the catalogue for an exhibition by Idris Murphy and Paul Martin, Warburton Gallery, Glasgow; ‘Repatriation’ in The Monthly, Prospect and Ecotone; ‘Betsy’ in The Good Weekend; ‘The Wait and the Flow’, adapted from an interview with Tim Baker, which appeared in his 2007 book High Surf; ‘In the Shadow of the Hospital’ in Granta; ‘The Battle for Ningaloo Reef’ in The Bulletin; ‘Letter from a Strong Place’ in Overland; ‘Holy and Silent’ in The Independent Monthly; ‘Predator or Prey’ in The Good Weekend and Turning the Tide; ‘Using the C-word’ in The Monthly; ‘Lighting Out’ in The Bulletin; ‘Stones for Bread’, first given as a speech at the 2015 Palm Sunday Walk for Justice in Perth, later published in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald; ‘Remembering Elizabeth Jolley’ in Indigo; ‘Sea Change’ in The Good Weekend, New Statesman and on BBC radio; ‘Barefoot in the Temple of Art’ in The Economist/Intelligent Life.
Les Murray’s ‘Poetry and Religion’ is quoted with the kind permission of the author (published in Collected Works, Black Inc., Melbourne 2006). The publisher acknowledges the dual copyright licensors for ‘Trouble You Can’t Fool Me’: written & composed by Frederick Knight & Aaron Varnell, published by Sony/ATV Music Publishing Australia; ‘Trouble You Can’t Fool Me’ (words and music by Frederick Knight/Aaron Varnell) © Irving Music, Inc./Universal Music Publishing Group, all rights reserved, international copyright secured. Reprinted with permission. Peter Matthiessen’s Blue Meridian is published by Harvill Press, London, 1995.
ALSO BY TIM WINTON
NOVELS
An Open Swimmer
Shallows
That Eye, the Sky
In the Winter Dark
Cloudstreet
The Riders
Dirt Music
Breath
Eyrie
STORIES
Scission
Minimum of Two
The Turning
FOR YOUNGER READERS
Jesse
Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo
The Bugalugs Bum Thief
Lockie Leonard, Scumbuster
Lockie Leonard, Legend
Blueback
The Deep
NON-FICTION
Land’s Edge
Local Colour (with Bill Bachman)
Down to Earth (with Richard Woldendorp)
Smalltown (with Martin Mischkulnig)
Island Home
PLAYS
Rising Water
Signs of Life
Shrine
HAMISH HAMILTON
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First published by Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2016
Text copyright © Tim Winton, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Cover design by Alex Ross & John Canty © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Text design by John Canty © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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ISBN: 9781760142377
THE BEGINNING
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Tim Winton, The Boy Behind the Curtain
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