Before I Forget Read online

  That was my brief encounter with the savagery at the heart of the continent, the interior which lay at the back of the seaward-looking cities. It was imagined as vast and empty but, every now and then, it would lash out, killing and maiming, breathing fire.

  I wanted get some idea of what that country looked like. In the frank and open discussions engendered by booze at staff parties, the young doctors would explain Australia to me. If the Chinese communists ever got here they wouldn’t survive, no way. Only a true Aussie could survive in the outback. (While those Australians knew about the brutal realities of the interior, they were forgetting China had some brutal realities of its own.) I do believe that the back country was the city dwellers’ mythical place, and I found Patrick White a more reliable guide to the continent than the doctors, as we were in fact talking about fiction. I read Voss and Riders in the Chariot, and I read them like you would read the catechism if you were converting to Catholicism. I also loved D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo. I had read Lawrence in the 1940s, as you did in the ‘40s. I was uneasy about his take on sex even then (I mean before the feminist revisionists got stuck into him in the 1970s). Translated into a film, his book Sons and Lovers had a vitality and colour that I did not pick up on as a reader. However, now that I was in Australia, Kangaroo seemed relevant. His exploration of the unions, the left and its hugely complicated factions rang true: very little of that had changed. But what really stays in my mind is how Lawrence was overwhelmed by the massive wild stretches of beach leading out to immeasurable oceans. Impenetrable barriers to stop you getting back to wherever you came from. That novel could almost make me forget the naked virgins sacrificed and no-orgasms intercourse in the Plumed Serpent. What the fuck was he on about?

  The truth is I wanted to stay on in Australia for at least another year. Like Lawrence, like my mother, I could see a grandeur in Australia and, to my surprise, I came there to an acceptance of myself as a person in terms of my work. Much more so than I ever had in my own country. Oddly, I was understood to be a painter. I say oddly because Australia, back then, had an even worse reputation than New Zealand for unequal treatment of women. In the eyes of those Aussie painters my drawing made me an equal; I had personhood bestowed upon me. I can’t say the same applied in New Zealand at that time.

  But Fraser wanted to go home. He had done his dash, a remarkable sprint from a man close to death only three years before. There was no argument, we were going home. He deserved that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Meeting Rita Angus

  The time during the early 1960s when Fraser and I had returned to Porirua from Australia seems defined by a meeting with Rita Angus on a train platform: the politics, the art and Rita’s influence on my search for a way of being in the world.

  It is my most abiding memory of Rita, like a scene from a film. The set is the Wellington Railway Station and I am on my way to a meeting of the original ban-the-bomb committee. Descending from the train, I am so obsessed with saving the world that I am surprised by Rita. When you are surprised by someone you think you know, that is when you truly see them for themselves. Her spontaneous welcome involved her whole body, rather like a Burmese dance: delicate, instinctual. These movements were like the signals a bird you’ve come to know uses to communicate, illustrating for me how close Rita was to the natural life. The world had not corrupted her. My great-aunt Mary-Ellen’s clarion call was: ‘Pretend nothing!’ Rita didn’t even have to think about it. This lack of pretence is what gives her work its purity, her colours and her conversation a crystal-clear meaning.

  Memory is notoriously haphazard, unreliable, vulnerable. I originally remembered meeting Rita at the Architectural Centre in Wellington in the 1960s. But then I recalled, no, I had first met her in 1950 in Bill Sutton’s studio. A student at the Canterbury School of Art, I did not know then that the studio I was living in was where Rita had lived in the 1930s. It was 97A Cambridge Terrace, by the Avon River. I would like to think of that coincidence as a sign, the sort of magical thinking I normally despise but, like most people, rather fancy when it suits me. I had also been involved in granting Rita an Arts Society Travelling Scholarship in 1958. I represented South Canterbury on the central committee of the Arts Society of New Zealand. Their meetings were held once a month in a government building in Wellington and the artist Juliet Peter insisted I be at this particular meeting.

  Juliet was also on the committee. She and Roy Cowen were close friends; they were distinguished potters, printmakers and painters. Fraser and I would share with them the excitement of opening their kiln, accompanied with drinks and lovely harmonious talk. And Juliet was the godmother of my eldest daughter, Augusta.

  When there was some debate at the meeting as to who would get the scholarship, Juliet and I made sure it went to Rita. Pat and Gil Hanly have both since told me how miserable Rita was in London, that really we did her no favours. I don’t doubt the truth of that, nevertheless, one can be miserable but still benefit from an experience. I think Rita found it very valuable, otherwise why would she have so pressured me to go to London to spend at least six months studying there?

  But I did not really know Rita in 1958 when she went off to England. It was only after meeting her on the train platform that we became close. At the time, she was an artist justifiably angry at the National Art Gallery. She believed that they were relegating her to little old lady status – a little old lady who painted flowers, prettily. She was pressed into the company of five other older women who were in fact flower painters. Those five women had all of their works accepted – that was, five each – for the annual exhibition. Rita, who submitted five, had only three accepted. She was indignant. She wrote a meaningful letter of resignation to the gallery.

  Rita had a powerful instinct to protect her creativity. She was her own boundary rider, making sure any intruders threatening her territory were in her sights and she used that instinct to smell out dangerous philistines. At this time she believed the National Art Gallery was being condescending to her. This was not Rita being paranoid, it was Rita facing facts.

  Those five women were all exhibited together, hung slightly to one side, clearly in a group. Separate and not equal. Male artists openly sneered at them. Don’t get me wrong, both Julie King, professor of art history at the University of Canterbury, and I did admire these flower painters. They did not deserve to be labelled genteel ladies fiddling with paint in bourgeois security. However, Rita was not a flower painter. And she was obviously superior, not only to those women painters, but to the men who were exhibiting international-type art at that time.

  Rita and I brooded over this injustice for some time. Juliet came to the rescue. She decided that Rita and I should organise an exhibition for the Architectural Centre. We decided that the sexes should be represented equally. Now the male artists who I approached were enthusiastic about the show, but did not fancy Rita in it. They felt, I think, that it tainted the sense of the modern, the new, the different. But when the show was over, Rita was clearly the star and the male artists, to give them credit, recognised this. There was much talk about jewel-like colours, integrity, thoughtful construction, et cetera. From this time on Rita’s unique position in New Zealand’s art world was established.

  Working with Rita, I was impressed with how practical she was. She understood society and how it functioned. She knew, as we would say today, how to network. She was the one who got an ambassador to open the exhibition. She was the one who decided that we should have very good wine and select bits of food. She knew whom to ask from the embassies. As you can well imagine, the opening was a great success.

  Rita shared with John Cage the belief that it was the doing that was the pleasure, the reason for being an artist, not the end result. Rita worked in the traditional way of oil painters: the perfectly prepared canvas, the general idea sketched in with the charcoal, and then the turps washes. After that, the painting proper began. To be immersed in the actual process, that was the satisfaction of creativ
ity. Rita lived in and through the paintings she was involved in. Like the punk Johnny Rotten, she repudiated any efforts on the part of the establishment to have her serve their ends.

  But where was I? I had reconnected with Rita on the way to the ban-the-bomb committee, at a time when politics filled my Wellington world. Everything in my upbringing had led me towards protest: my family background, my boarding school Teschemakers, my art-school days in Christchurch, and my own defensive nature. (I have covered all of this in Something for the Birds, the first part of my autobiography.) Back in New Zealand, a great deal of what I saw and heard, and what was assumed to be common sense, seemed to me errant nonsense. Here we had grown-up men lolling about drunkenly, roaring through the football games. It was called having a good time. Sometimes it was called relaxing. I didn’t fit into this mindset at all. However, there were plenty of other people who didn’t fit into that mindset either. We were fertile ground for the protest movement.

  On that particular ban-the-bomb committee you had to represent something. I discovered to my horror that I represented the mothers of Porirua. I am quite sure that the mothers of Porirua knew nothing of this. It was a matter of acute embarrassment because I was well aware that having two babies in no way qualified me for such a title. Ten babies, maybe – twelve and you might have a look in, a chance to wear the crown of Mother of Porirua. This was the sort of predicament I used to get myself into, and that Rita so thoroughly enjoyed.

  Sometimes Rita would visit us at the hospital. I would pick her up at the Porirua Railway Station. We would then have drinks, wild conversations about art, about politics, about mental illness. Many of the artists, like Rita, who were part of The Group in 1930s Christchurch, were also members of the peace movement. Rita took her participation in that movement seriously and this affected her life when the Second World War broke out. She refused to be involved with war work and thus ran the risk of going to prison.

  Rita showed a lot of interest in the involvement I’d had with the No Maoris–No Tour protests before we left for Australia; my role had been to hassle people on the main drag of Wellington to sign our petition. I won a prize for getting the most signatures against the planned all-white tour to South Africa in 1960. (Some months ago I heard a story that I think is very funny, that I would have enjoyed telling Rita. I went to a hairdressers in a select area of Remuera and there was a small, handsome black woman from South Africa sweeping the floor. We started talking and she told me a story from, say, thirty years ago, before she came to New Zealand. She came from a tribal area outside Cape Town. One day she went with a group of young women into Cape Town and they saw a big notice about a football game, and guess what, the All Blacks were playing. They said to each other, ‘Oh, great, the All Blacks are playing!’ They all went along to the game, but were surprised when they couldn’t see any blacks playing in the game at all.)

  I would also tell Rita stories about driving into meetings with Ken Douglas, the head of the Drivers’ Union, or the chap who was the head of the Watersiders’ Union. I got to know them, at least a little bit, and greatly admired how politicised they were, how well intentioned. As we all came from Porirua, we shared the driving and, incidentally, our take on society as it developed. I remember that the watersider guy was an extremely good man, burning with indignation about the Mandy Rice-Davies scandal. How the story contained an ugly truth involving the cynical exploitation of young attractive working-class girls groomed by cynical pimps for the trade, for rich men. ‘Why,’ he raged, ‘can’t they use their own daughters and sisters, girlfriends, use them in high society for those sexual transactions they demand for themselves?’ Ken was a sophisticated union man and on the committee could, with charm and skill, expose the often disguised intentions of someone’s agenda. Both of them were motivated by an instinctive understanding of justice and common decency. By this I don’t mean they weren’t well read, I mean they had something extra which fired them up and kept them consistent. A vigorous simplicity defined their intellect and they certainly were effective and informed committee members. I was neither effective or informed. I know now committees are not for me and sadly the ban-the-bomb committee had to endure, for a whole year, my erratic learning curve. Briefly, my problem was that I was convinced we needed to examine the roots of human aggression, a subject more suited to the philosophy department than to the committee. They either tactfully dropped me or I resigned – I can’t remember. Rita loved to hear about all that.

  Some people have suggested that Rita was not a feminist and not particularly interested in the politics of an equal society. I would say she was a feminist. She was very enthusiastic about the idea of equal numbers of men and women in our exhibition. She was well aware that men controlled the politics of the arts in New Zealand. Some women from the same generation as Rita seemed to think that being a feminist meant you didn’t like or admire men. Of course, Rita very much liked and admired some men and very much liked and admired some women, as did I. This was not the issue. What we were talking about was wanting equal rights for men and women in society. Rita was politicised and her involvement in the peace movement was proof of that.

  During the revival of interest in Rita Angus’s work over the last ten years, some writers have painted distorted pictures of her personality. Underlying all this I feel is a misunderstanding of the actual life that a painter must come to live. What might appear eccentric to those leading a conventional life are often the only practical choices for the painter. Usually lack of money leads to improvising with clothes, housing and food.

  Artists think up their own stylish, imaginative ways to make do. A great example is Betty Curnow turning exotic tea towels into a beguiling shirt. Then comes Rita Angus, turning the creator of the shirt into a magical record of hard-edged and frugal times. Much later comes Anna Miles, who deconstructs Rita’s painting back to the tea towel. Anna’s lovely and powerful work follows her own contemporary mindset, provoked by a line of thought back to the beginning, provoked in turn by looking at Rita’s painting.

  The need for privacy to think and work often results in a rigid routine, which may eventually lead to a defensiveness towards intrusions from the outside world. This way of living evolves from a commitment to art and not from a perverse desire to be different.

  So what is my problem? I feel that with the attention Rita has recently garnered a sort of blurring of her persona has taken place. It’s where the emphasis goes. I myself would put the emphasis on the abiding values that sustained her art practice: a belief in social justice and an ability to view other people as persons first, rather than through the lens of gender or class. This thinking informed her painting, and it was Rita’s lifestyle that so influenced me. I felt that Rita and I shared a mentality that extended to the subject matter of our art. Our paintings dealt with subjects we personally knew and understood. Through painting, we sought solutions to our problems where we were, laid out before us rather than somewhere else.

  Rita’s painting was integrated into her life. That is what I learnt from her. I began embracing what I was inevitably involved with, transforming the routine stuff that I was moving around all day. Children’s drink bottles, toys, lunchboxes, kittens and dead birds. Drawers overflowing with clothes, and then us human beings momentarily occupying this space. It was a declaration of acceptance. And I had to learn that there would be problems with this. There were uninspired gaps between the moments of illumination. Gaps I had to learn to paint through.

  Carrying Emily, my third and last daughter, I discovered the pure pleasure of pregnancy. How women could become addicted to having babies. I felt remarkably healthy, happy and contented over that period. Curiously, as with the births of Augusta and Alex, fecundity increased my appreciation of the visible world. It contributed to an enhancement of my environment.

  Fraser and I left Wellington in 1966 for Kingseat Hospital in Auckland. Rita died in early 1970. At Kingseat I had Emily right about the time Rita’s health declined. I was bolt
ed to the spot. I didn’t visit Wellington before her death and although I do remember that she came to Auckland, I was unable to get into town.

  Rita had always felt that unless I got away, in the Chekhovian sense, the pressure to conform would defeat me. The script handed out to doctors’ wives was particularly unrewarding. We were expected to pay dearly for the privilege of marriage to the new high priests of Kiwi society.

  What Rita feared happened. There was the new baby, and the pressures on Fraser at Kingseat were exhausting. I missed my old friends in Wellington. My father also died around that time, and I found that without any conscious awareness of it a rock-hard resolution had been forming in me. Rita’s faith in me had fed my resolve. Her way of life demonstrated for me how to live as an artist – that painting was a way of life.

  I Dreamt About the Day My Father Died, 1981-82.

  This is the painting of my father as the Bog Man. In the painting I am trying to fly but can’t quite get off the ground – Max and I are in danger of being run over. With us, Lenin and his sister Marie, crossing the road in Trieste, represent the paranoia of the old solider who believes that the communists are plotting to take over the country. And then there is my daddy being sucked up into the sky – into heaven? Or being converted into tiny jewel-like creatures that are falling into the bottom of the sea. Maybe – the Bog Man was the spitting image of my father as a dead person.