DEATH

“I think the art world caused this.”

Coffins weigh more than you expect. Adam’s is heavy, although he leaves it mostly empty, his body battered and made small by illness. Behind me, the critic Andrew Frost jokes it is full of gold bars. No one laughs. The comic Mikey Robins strains and weeps silent tears. Neither of them has seen Adam in years. Few in this clutch of pallbearers have.

Adam’s is a funeral of friends who have become acquaintances, spurred back into friendship by death. Catharine Lumby, who has written the obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days earlier, arrives late and finds a seat beside Robins. A soft-pack of Kleenex rests between them. Charles Waterstreet, the barrister who will give Adam’s eulogy, is later still and picks his way through the pews under the cover of a piped hymn – always too tall, and especially now.

Adam’s final drug dealer, who sold him the narcotic pain reliever OxyContin from a fibro house on the Great Western Highway, turns up during the second half of the service. He has stringy hair and a stringier girlfriend and is forced to sit with the journalists. This is more than dull symbolism: in the final years of Adam’s life, drug dealers and journalists were the figures he saw most. Adam had decided he needed them more than he needed friends.

“Adam Cullen was a damned inconvenient friend,” begins Waterstreet, who had won Adam the suspended sentence he never lived to serve. “He died in the middle of the Olympics. Typical.”

In his rounded-off diction, Waterstreet pays tribute to the character Adam had hoped to be. He makes generous comparisons to William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson, the writer-pistolmen who became more important to Adam than other artists, of whose freedom he was acutely jealous and in whose fame he found his own justification. Waterstreet races when he hints at what killed Adam, as if the lawyer in him feels it must be said but that still he would rather not be saying it.

“It was not heroin or drugs that pulsed through his veins, it was turpentine and paint,” he says. “He died with paint in his veins and lived his life with a colourful purpose, out loud, proving nothing was as it seems, but underneath it was often the opposite.”

He describes the crippling shyness Adam carried since birth and hints at the burden of a success Adam never quite believed he had earned. He makes sense of the inevitability hanging in the room: the fact that Adam was always going to die young.

“Adam was exhausted. His health and the stress of his life, of court, just sucked him dry,” Waterstreet says. “You can map his ascent into the heaven of professional life – and descent into the hell of drink, drugs and addiction – and his re-ascent into heaven in his later years: before the Archibald with David Wenham and the smiling, fresh-faced boy wonder he was … later becoming the swashbuckling huntsman, always a gentleman, that he presented.”

The eulogy – even as it is being read – has the title of Waterstreet’s weekly Sun-Herald column typed at its top.

*

It was Sunday when I called his father, Kevin. The third-last day of July 2012. There was no need to ask the question. I had twice tried Adam’s phone, but there was no space for new messages. There never was. “You know, don’t you?” Kevin said. “The police are there now. And the ambulance. They’re – they’re going to take him away.”

Kevin started to cry. Tears welled up in his vowels and ended his sentences in muffled yelps. He had been with Adam two days earlier. “He agreed to go into rehab on Monday,” he said, struggling to force the words out of his mouth. “We left some money for him.”

I agreed to call Adam’s friends and tell them he was dead. Kevin dug around for numbers. In the end, there were only three. Adam’s life had contracted hugely in the decade since he moved to the Blue Mountains, outside Sydney. His last two relationships had broken down. Friends had drifted away as he became more difficult, as the course of his life became more obvious and its conclusion more inevitable. Adam spent a career creating a character for himself – a wild man, kept alive by capricious talent – but eventually he tired of the role he had spent all that time writing. He no longer had the energy to ape the person he was supposed to be.

“I couldn’t really see Adam just disappearing away into ignominy,” Kevin said, having put down the phone for a time to compose himself. “We will never know what was in his head. Except his mother will know; Carm will know.”

*

St Rose of Lima in Collaroy is a modern church with ceiling fans and a font that looks like a suburban water feature. The walls are blonde brick and the roof is held up by exposed rafters. A wide-eyed rendition of the stations of the cross runs up one wall, like the souvenir from a holiday to Mexico. Posters advertising World Youth Day are stuck to another. Two years ago almost to the day, Adam’s mother, Carmel, was mourned here. He attended primary school opposite, with the art dealer Jason Martin, who today would carry his coffin. The Berith Street house in which he grew up is less than a block away, although he had no memory of coming here as a child.

It looks for a while that Adam will not fill the pews, that the folding chairs set to one side will be left empty. But by the time the first hymn tumbles through the church speakers, the room is brimful. It plays in an out-of-reach register to a mouthing congregation. The great round jaw Adam inherited from his mother sings out from the O’Loughlans in the crowd. At the front of the hall is a print of Growler, the dog Adam never tired of mourning. “He died peacefully,” forgotten relatives say of Adam, waiting for the sermon, having not seen him for years. “He was a terrible sufferer.”

Turning over in my head is a line from an interview Adam gave the Bulletin a decade earlier, his definition of art: “It’s the only profession in the world where your employer wants you to die.” I think, in this strangely griefless church, it is perhaps the most honest description he gave of his career. I count up the art dealers in the room: there are four.

*

In his welcome, Father Michael Hwang reads a series of platitudes to a still tearless crowd. “His life is a canvas that is now finished,” he says. “His life was his masterpiece.” An odd collection of pictures plays through a projector: a newspaper shot of Adam leaving court after pleading guilty in his weapons case; a painting by him of Mussolini; another work called “Holy Sordid Experience”, its clothed terriers dancing beside a child’s buggy and the words “God is away on business, he has joined the Mob”. There is a photograph of the party held at the Bayswater Brasserie after he won the Archibald Prize and another, published in Time Out magazine, of him brandishing a revolver, wearing like a toupee the echidna carcass he has pulled from a tanning bath.

His second cousin, the actor Max Cullen, reads from the book of Ecclesiastes, cat-faced and dishevelled, looking slept-in and surprised as he always does. He is wearing a tie on an open-necked shirt and a pair of glasses on a length of cord. Leaving the pulpit, he waits two beats, as if for an unseen dramaturge. He turns on his mark, running back with one finger extended: “The word of the Lord.”

It becomes clear just how important the Archibald Prize was to Adam. It is mentioned in the priest’s welcome, the homily, the eulogy. The Archibald was how Adam made friends, particularly as he distanced himself from the world. Many of his subjects are here: Robins, Waterstreet, David Wenham, Max. Nelson Woss, who sat for Adam’s final Archibald portrait with the kelpie from his film Red Dog, is among the mourners who will repair to Una’s schnitzel house in Darlinghurst for slabs of meat and oversized beers after the wake. The painter Gareth Sansom, who sat for Adam in 2010, will attend a smaller gathering on top of the Cullen, the Melbourne hotel founded on Adam’s name and a collection of his art.

Outside the church, his father seems impatient with the holy water. “Cop this,” he says, flinging the aspergillum at the coffin. “Cop this, mate.” Mourners start to build up near the hearse. Kevin takes my shoulders in his hands and tells me to wet the coffin. “Have a sprinkle,” he says. “Wash him clean.”

The hearse draws slowly up the drive, followed by Kevin. These final unrehearsed moments have the precision of a military ceremony. Nothing is said. Press flashbulbs explode as the car turns into an empty street. Adam’s body disappears wordlessly into the suburbia of his childhood. Kevin stands at the gates. He reaches across to hold the hand of his new partner, a man now profoundly alone.

*

At the wake, in a hall behind the church, old women offer cans of Guinness and tepid cocktail frankfurts with tomato sauce. By chance, students from the neighbouring primary school have been studying Adam in art class. Their wonkily painted Ned Kellys are pinned down one wall, a final rejoinder to the long-prosecuted charge that children could do what Adam did.

The wake is a conversation of two questions, played out in small circles, tinged with gentle shame: “When did you last see Adam?” and “Do you know how he died?” The first is answered mainly in years, the latter with silent looks. “The paper said he died in bed,” says one cousin. “So, does that mean an overdose?”

In the end, Adam did not need to overdose. Drugs had been working quietly on his body for two decades. At times, more loudly. He was weakened by narcotics and made wretched by drink. His organs were ravaged. He could no longer eat solids. In his bathroom, he kept a collection of hospital bracelets hanging from his mirror, like an adult’s baby book, each discharge a strange kind of rebirth. He did not need to overdose; he was already dead.

*

A few days before the funeral, Ian Howard, an important early teacher, posted a message on an online memorial. It was in Howard’s New Art Forms course that Adam had produced the work which would most define him as a young artist: a performance in which he chained a pig’s head to his ankle and dragged it around until it began to disintegrate and his fellow art students began to revile him. It was this creation of distance and revulsion that formed his worldview. He felt bitterly that he had been rejected, all the while making work that asked people to reject him.

“Adam respectfully kept in touch – sometimes through generosity, sometimes through need,” Howard wrote. “In a deliberately supporting statement to the magistrate who was hearing his drunk driving and possession of guns charge, I wrote: ‘Adam Cullen has been a “risk taker” in his image making for decades. From the successes, his contribution and reputation stems. Never has this risk taking been reckless of his own or anyone else’s safety or wellbeing. Adam often tests himself but never others, except in the sense of an audience being the willing observers of a confronting work of art.’ Of course I lied about Adam never being reckless about his own safety and wellbeing. It seemed the right thing to say at the time … perhaps now, it was not.”

A week later, Adam was the last item in the parish newsletter. A man thoroughly eulogised was, finally, a series of bland acknowledgements. He talked a lot about “aesthetic residue”, about what he would leave behind. His last marks were not ones of sadness, however, but mild inconvenience:

Last Friday we said farewell to Adam Cullen, Kevin & Carmel’s son. A big thank you to Josie Vescio and the St Rose school community for making their hall and grounds available for Adam’s wake, to the parishioners and office staff who provided the food and drink for the wake and to Year 6 from Wheeler Heights School for the artwork tribute to Adam they set up in the hall.

*

The first time I met Adam, he told me he was going to die. That was four years ago. He was forty-two. “I know that I will be dead,” he said, “because I’m so busy dying.”

We were standing in his bedroom, beside a sheetless mattress. Down from a burst pillow floated just above the floor. From the door you could make out a stack of dishes ossifying in the kitchen. Death was mentioned without drama. Nor was it said in sadness. He was answering, unprompted, the questions of his own racing logic. “I would never kill myself,” he said, although the question was never asked. “I’m not fucking gutless. I get depressed, but I’m not fucking gutless.”

The bed had a wet smell, like rain had got into a dusty room. It was piled with curios: animal skins and merchandise from shooting clubs. A Templar helmet sat where the pillows should have been, memento of a trip to Spain.

“Everything moves towards its end,” Adam said. “As soon as you’re born, you’re busy dying. And I am dying. I suppose I’ve just been smashing my head against the wall of existence for just a little bit too long.”

We spent a few hours that day in Adam’s glass-fronted studio, overhanging the Grose Valley, on the edge of Wentworth Falls. He paid a landlady in paintings for the smallish room that looked out at dark bushland and the glinting suburbs of the city’s approaches.

For me, the studio came to symbolise his mind. On one wall was the private in Adam’s life: a missive he claimed a girlfriend had written for him when he came out of hospital, sketched in what was unmistakably his hand. “I can do this,” it read. “I have no fear. I am a great painter.” On the other wall, the part of him society saw: an assured signature, painted in block letters on an otherwise blank canvas. These were the two parts of his anxiety – the tension that had become his life – above which a pink swastika was sprayed on the ceiling. The room was almost always empty, nervous with spilt paint, stacked occasionally with canvases. And when he stood there, which he did almost every night, there was nowhere to hide from the world as it rushed in through the glass.

To prove on this first meeting the conviction he felt about his own death, Adam unbuttoned his shirt to show me a scar that twisted the length of his torso. His stomach looked like an overstuffed carpetbag, stitched poorly at the fastenings. He forced his thumbs into drain holes on either side of his abdomen – ports from the operation that a year earlier had removed his gallbladder and much of his pancreas, and which had healed as enormous pockmarks burred by infection. I asked him what had happened, to fill the silence more than anything. “Acute misfortune,” he said. “I think the art world caused this.”