IAN FAIRWEATHER’S first exhibition in Australia was held in early March 1934, days after the Scottish-born artist’s unannounced arrival in Melbourne. Fairweather, who for the previous seven years had sojourned in Canada, China and Bali, was penniless and living at the Mission to Seafarers. By good fortune he called at the Leonardo Art Shop in Little Collins Street with a roll of paintings. The owner, Gino Nibbi, sent him to see the artist William Frater, whose office was nearby. Alan Sumner, Frater’s young assistant, later remembered Fairweather as ‘dapper, extremely polite’, ‘beautifully dressed in worn out clothes…sandshoes and no socks’.1 The paintings were shown to Frater, then to George Bell and Arnold Shore, who welcomed Fairweather into the progressive camp of Melbourne’s art world. An exhibition in Cynthia Reed’s shop was hastily arranged.
Fairweather fled Melbourne six months later, but the friendships established with these artists remained long after; and he would repeatedly return to the idea of Australia as a place where he might find a safe haven and paint undisturbed. The combination of artistic affinity, financial possibility and attractive geography – a remote island nation linked to the British Empire and yet part of the tropical south – kept pulling him back to Australian shores. Twenty-nine years after Fairweather’s first landfall, in Broome in 1933, the Sydney Morning Herald’s art critic declared him ‘Our Greatest Painter’.
Ian Fairweather has a legendary status in the history of Australian art. His majestic paintings, with their complex harmonies and strong psycho-spiritual dimensions, are the product of rich life experience and a single-minded pursuit of art. Early on, Fairweather realised that painting demanded everything of him; he could not work to earn a living and paint. Life, he wrote to Frater in 1938, ‘is not long enough for both – I must just paint and hope – one cant be two things at once’. Fairweather believed in chance and fate. Painting was his ‘dancing partner’ for life. Everything else was secondary.
Yet Fairweather’s life proved newsworthy, despite his need to live alone, at a remove from conventional existence. Headlines regularly described him as an ‘Artistic Hermit’ and ‘Recluse Artist’, a ‘Gentle Nomad’ and ‘Hermit Painter’. The various episodes of his life are extraordinary, even bizarre: his flight from Darwin in 1952 on a self-made raft and survival after being reported lost at sea and his obituary published; his return to Bribie Island a year later following his chance discovery of the island during an earlier fateful journey by boat from Brisbane; reports of sell-out shows in Sydney and people queuing overnight in order to acquire a painting by the ‘island hermit’; the uncompromising austerity of his strange ‘birds nest’ huts, made from bush materials, without water and electricity, which were later condemned by the local council; and his endurance of privation, poverty and discomfort, even once his fortunes had improved, right until the end of his life. What appear as extreme choices were for him natural and necessary by-products of an all-consuming devotion to art.
Fairweather’s fierce determination to be free of attachments to material things and the demands placed on him by other people shaped his decisions and actions at every turn. He was over sixty when he settled on Bribie and started on his best work. His absolute dedication to the act of painting drew admiration from many fellow artists. Margaret Olley, Roy Churcher and Lawrence Daws, who lived nearby, became supportive friends. From the 1960s a steady stream of writers and artists made the pilgrimage to the island to pay their respects, among them Murray Bail, Pamela Bell, Ray Crooke, Donald Friend, James Gleeson, Robert Hughes, Milton Moon, John Olsen, Mike Parr, Ann Thomson, Patrick White and, from England, Patrick Heron and Colin MacInnes – each of them aware of the unique demands that creative work imposed, but none of them able to detach themselves so completely from the comforts of conventional existence.
In the years since Fairweather’s death, interest in his life and art has continued, propelled by publications that have drawn on the artist’s letters. Nourma Abbott-Smith’s Ian Fairweather: Profile of an Artist (1978) – based on conversations with Fairweather about his life conducted over eighteen months in the early 1970s, but also including long excerpts from his letters to H. S. ‘Jim’ Ede – was the first attempt to chart Fairweather’s life in print. Earlier, the photographer Robert Walker had received a grant from the Australia Council to support research for a book on Fairweather, drawing on his extensive conversations with the artist over a long period.2 While the book never eventuated, Walker produced a large body of photographs, the most extensive visual record of Fairweather’s life on Bribie Island. Murray Bail’s Ian Fairweather (1981) was the first comprehensive study of his art. Bail accessed the letters written to Ede and diligently pursued Fairweather’s correspondence with Frater and Lina Bryans, with Lucy Swanton, Treania Smith (Bennett) and Mary Turner of Macquarie Galleries, gleaning from them what he could to construct Fairweather’s life in art. Later, letters by Marion Smith were uncovered by curators at the Queensland Art Gallery and incorporated into the revised edition, Fairweather (2009). Short quotes from the letters added flashes of Fairweather’s personality and his gift for phrasing to Bail’s tight and lively text.
Building on the work of Abbott-Smith and Bail, A Life in Letters assembles half of the Fairweather correspondence known to exist and for the first time gives readers access to the full texts of letters. Writing to his sister Queenie in 1963 about an article in the Bribie Star (‘Bribie’s World Famous Artist: How Ian Fairweather First Came to Bribie Island’), Fairweather remarked with a sense of pleasure and triumph: ‘for the first time I am speaking in print for myself ’.3 A Life in Letters allows him to speak in print for himself more fully than ever before, deepening an understanding of the artist Robert Hughes, writing in Time in 1995, judged ‘the best abstract painter – though “abstract” does no justice to the imagistic subtlety of his work – that Australia ever harboured’.
By any standards, Fairweather’s life was exceptional. He was a man of his class and time, but he also worked to repudiate many of the values he inherited. He was a ceaseless quester, and a troubled observer of the colonial and post-war worlds he moved through. The letters are valuable as social history, for their views of changing natural and social environments; as an account of ageing; and as testimony to friendships and, against the odds, the enduring bonds of family. They are marked by quirky humour, black sometimes, but lifted too by an endearing gaiety.
Readers will be surprised by the large correspondence with members of Fairweather’s family in England and Jersey: Queenie, the sister to whom he was closest in age and temperament, and her daughter Rosemary; sister Aline who, like Queenie, showed early promise as an artist; brother Arthur, an engineer, who since 1912 had worked in Bolivia and spoke fluent Spanish; Harold, the brother closest to him in age, who lived in France; Pippa, the daughter of Fairweather’s eldest sister, Winifred; and Ian Alister, son of his eldest brother, James, who from 1959 lived in New Zealand. For one who chose to place his kin at arm’s length for almost the whole of his adult life, these letters reveal an unexpectedly close concern and connection with family that intensified with age. Rosemary, who would become the primary beneficiary of Fairweather’s will, planned to publish the letters her uncle had written to her mother. That first hope for an edition of letters was never realised.4
The extent of Fairweather’s involvement with the Chinese language is another revelation. The artist’s extended periods of living in China (in Shanghai in relative comfort and later in Beijing in abject poverty) are documented in early letters to Ede and Frater and are recalled in later letters to Queenie, who had also lived in China for a number of years. With an ear for languages and a curiosity about the world (he had read about Japanese and Chinese art in a POW camp in Germany), Fairweather enrolled in Japanese classes at the School of Oriental Studies, University of London, when he was a student at the Slade School of Fine Art. Before long his interest gravitated to Chinese, which remained a fascination for the rest of his life. After a failed attempt at a new beginning in Canada, where his brother Neville lived, Fairweather set sail for China, inspired by a book of Chinese grammar brought with him from London and also, we may guess, tales told to him by Queenie.
Unlike the majority of expatriates in China, Fairweather lived with rather than apart from the Chinese, learning the language in the process. Decades later on Bribie Island he took up translation in earnest to pass the time, assuage his interest and bring in a little money. He enjoyed ‘Research’ – looking up individual words in his dictionary and conjuring meaning from classical phrases. It helped with painting: ‘often I just cant start up on a cold engine but can always do a bit of Chinese and rev up on that – Also can cool off with it if I get too worked up.’ Like painting, it was, he said, ‘an eternal mystery’. Generally, he sat down at a table to translate but stood up at his bench – his ‘holy of holies’ place – to paint.
The letters shed light on Fairweather’s identity and evolution as a painter. The standards he set for himself were formidably high and he lived constantly with the fear of failure. The rising sense of desperation as he sought suitable conditions in which to paint and grappled with artistic problems, often destroying paintings in the process, is harrowing to read. In some letters, as Bail has noted, he is ‘almost incoherent with despair’. But there is excitement too as he comes at last into his full creative stride in the later 1950s and into the 1960s, the years of his greatest success. The letters offer insights into Fairweather’s use of materials, his bold experiments with different, often unconventional media and his awareness of the complaints made about the instability of his paintings. He took nothing for granted and conceded little in acknowledging success or praise. The letters are statements of struggle, experimentation and failure, not of achievement and self-satisfaction. And at the height of his creativity, an innate modesty is expressed in his disbelief in and distaste for reviewers’ high praise.
In correspondence extending from 1915, when Fairweather was twenty-four, to his death in 1974, myriad topics are touched on, some in passing but others recurring in various forms for most of his life. While the surviving letters offer a remarkably detailed (if selective) account of his adult life, there are obvious gaps in the record. Apparently no juvenile letters exist. The first letter in this volume – and indeed the only known letter written to his mother, who died in 1944 – is a brief postcard written from a POW camp in Germany. There are no letters to his father, a former military surgeon who had a distinguished career in India and died in 1917, while Fairweather was still in captivity; or to several of his siblings, all of whom are mentioned in the letters.
Among the surviving items relating to Fairweather’s early life are portraits he created of his parents: a scratchy, realistic profile of his father, and a softer more stylised representation of his mother, possibly made when he was at the Art Academy in The Hague or at the Slade soon after. Both are striking remembrances of parents from whom he was estranged for the first decade of his life and who were later unsympathetic to his need to pursue an unconventional, artistic path.
Fairweather was the last of nine children, and from the age of six months until his tenth year he was brought up by his Scottish maiden aunts – his father’s sisters – while his parents lived in India until well after his father’s retirement. After the family was reunited and moved to the island of Jersey when Fairweather was eleven and his eldest sister thirty, he had a difficult time adjusting to parents who entered his life virtually as strangers. Reluctantly he eventually followed his father, and many of his brothers and brothers-in-law, into the military. He fought in the Battle of Mons at the beginning of the Great War, but was captured almost immediately along with his regiment and imprisoned.
Fairweather’s wartime experience, which included lengthy periods of solitary confinement following repeated escape attempts, was a turning point in his life. A shy, quietly spoken but determined and obsessive young man, he would live for the rest of his days resolutely on his own terms, outside the conventions of the milieu into which he was born and the expectations of society more generally. At intervals throughout his life he would seek escape from worlds that he perceived were collapsing around him. He was an outsider and an exile, and, as Ede observed, a most difficult man to help.
For all the sustained interest of the letters, there are silences. Little is conveyed about an emotional life or close friendships. There are allusions in a few letters, hints to prompt speculation, but nothing to indicate how any desire for intimate relationships was resolved in his life, if it ever was. While the letters attest to Fairweather’s sociability, definite enough but not profound, the prevailing theme is of an austere self-sufficiency, with his fellow human beings kept at a distance. Intimacy, if it existed at all for him, seems to have occupied a secondary place. In a passing observation he comments that growing up in the care of ‘the old aunts and sickness’ gave him ‘an unnatural aversion to old age and physical contacts’. This, perhaps, is a clue to what he recognises as his solitariness and singularity. The letter is the medium of communication that came to suit him best.
The correspondence details complex and often unhappy relationships, even with those who were his greatest supporters – moods of anger, bitterness and stubborn contrariness that arose from extreme anxiety at times of personal stress. For all his standing as a gifted painter, he was a querulous, opinionated and sometimes alarmingly eccentric figure.
One disturbing manifestation of Fairweather’s suspicious disposition is his repeated disavowal of authorship of works irrefutably painted by him, and his distrust of the art world generally. Fairweather painted at night in a studio lit only by the soft irregular light of kerosene lamps, making it difficult for him to recognise his own works in photographic and printed form, or on the walls of the Queensland Art Gallery, where in 1965 he saw for the first and only time a large number of paintings from different phases of his life hung, framed and lit in a white-cube environment. Robert W. Smith, who arranged that exhibition under the direction of Laurie Thomas, recalled that Fairweather was bemused by what he had seen, ‘almost unbelieving’. While he was subdued, there was a sense of gratitude too – though in subsequent letters the usual crabbed assertions of interference with his works were made.
As Fairweather lived much of his life alone, matters that might have been challenged in the course of daily social interaction perhaps took on a different aspect. The letters suggest periodic episodes of depression and paranoia, what might be understood today as symptoms of a bipolar condition. Associated with the paranoia (perhaps a manifestation of it), but also with roots in the British imperial culture in which he was formed, are strains of misogyny, racism, anti-semitism and class prejudice. These are expressed casually but vehemently and will be abhorrent to contemporary readers.
Fairweather was a child of the Raj, the product of a family that defined itself in terms of its service to the Crown. Later he too felt the pull of India and was drawn to the associated colonial worlds of the American Philippines, Portuguese Timor, Dutch Indonesia and British Borneo. His own experience, however, was of living in local neighbourhoods surrounded by native languages, cultures and environments, and in circumstances that most people from his background would have found impossible. He was in his own way reacting against the lives of his family and forebears, the ‘broken bits of empire’ of which despite himself he remained a part.
If India, China, Bali and the Philippines gave him a sense of a larger world and a more complex identity, he was equally shaped by the insular world of Jersey – a place of exposure to nature and the elements and to the remarkable historic remains of dolmens and Martello towers. This helps explain the later allure of Bribie, an island close to but apart from the Australian mainland.
Part of Fairweather’s Scottish and English heritage, and of the late-Victorian and Edwardian Empire in which he was reared, is the wealth of cultural references that permeate his writing. His letters reveal a sensibility shaped by the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, Shakespeare and the major English poets, Dickens, the nonsense rhymes of Lewis Carroll, Gilbert and Sullivan, and popular song and literature.
When he was not painting, translating or writing letters, Fairweather was reading: ‘I love books’, he wrote. ‘Even when they are bad – if I have the patience they can take me out of this world’. His reading was eclectic and opportunistic, ranging from crime thrillers and science fiction to works of religion and philosophy. In literature he found validation in Carson McCullers’ misfits of the American South, and the freewheeling iconoclasm of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Dharma Bums.
Fairweather’s letters are a paradoxical expression of sociability, especially in his last years: a way of keeping in touch with friends and family, selectively and on his own terms. Often composed late in the day and into the evening, they are conversational, telegrammatic, seemingly disconnected as Fairweather moves from thought to thought, yet collectively display a marked fluency, coherence and connectedness to the wider world – to politics, literature, history and the arts; to religion, philosophy, Eastern mysticism and Tibet; to mountain climbing and adventure travel, sensational news, technological innovation and entertainment (especially the cinema, but, in hints from an earlier life, theatre and music). These ‘conversations’ were often stimulated by books sent by the Bribie Island library, magazines such as Time, the Atlantic and the science-fiction magazine Galaxy to which he subscribed, and in films until deafness diminished their pleasure.
Running through many of the letters is a love of the natural environment and wildlife; and in the end a profound sadness about the changes visited upon Bribie Island following the opening of the Bribie Island Bridge in 1963, which brought an end to its status as an island. In his determination to live simply, to be as close to nature as he could, relying on himself and what he could do with his hands, Fairweather was in the vanguard of environmentalism.
By virtue of his birth in Scotland, his formative years in London and Jersey, and his long years sojourning in China, the Philippines and elsewhere, Fairweather is identified uneasily as an Australian painter, even when he is also considered one of Australia’s greatest artists. It is interesting to speculate what the trajectory of Fairweather’s life might have been had he come to Australia in 1926 as proposed in the migration nomination filed by his uncle Sydney (sometimes Sidney) Hood Thorp, who had arrived in Townsville in 1886 to try his luck. Thorp became a successful businessman and mayor of Charters Towers; but he died suddenly in late 1926 and the application lapsed.5 This failed attempt perhaps lay behind Fairweather’s early description of Australia as the ‘never never land’ and his later determination to persist with the idea of travelling ‘down under’.
Whatever measure of peace and harmony he found in Australia, Fairweather never thought of himself as Australian. While he found solace in his grove of Bribie pines, came to love his pet goanna and his friends the butcherbirds and kookaburras, rejoiced in the song of magpies, and acknowledged that the kangaroos and emus had come to represent home, in many ways the country felt alien to him. He was always, he said, an expatriate.
Late in life, as two short-lived attempts reveal, he pursued the idea of returning home to live out his days in London. There, decades earlier, he was an artist in the sights of the British art world, a self-proclaimed ‘disciple of Turner’ who, with the help of Ede and others, had in 1934 gained a foothold in the Tate Gallery. Later he exhibited at London’s Redfern Gallery alongside such luminaries as Walter Sickert and Patrick Heron and was noticed in the press by critics such as Anthony Blunt. But, as he recognised, his work diverged from that of his British contemporaries.
In Australia’s public galleries and in exhibitions about its art, Fairweather’s works, with their complex materiality and powerful sense of transcendence, sit uneasily within the narrative history of Australian painting. Hung alongside oil paintings by Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan or Fred Williams, or by Margaret Preston, or his friend Margaret Olley, his paintings look out of place. They have no horizon line, like Aboriginal bark paintings or the Indigenous art from Central Australia that was yet to come. Writing to Jon Molvig, Fairweather complained about picture frames: ‘I feel a painting like a tapestry should hang on a wall and not pretend to be a window’.
Fairweather offered no compromise or apology for his approach to art and life. Sometimes in his letters he blurred the lines of business and friendship. For the young Marion Smith, who helped type the manuscript of The Drunken Buddha, he became something of a teacher and guide with his forthright, unfashionable commentary on literature, art and the news of the day. In each phase of Fairweather’s life there were a few key correspondents on whom he depended for support of one kind or another. That he was not entirely a recluse becomes clear in the record of quiet sociability attested to by friends and visitors over the years of his life on Bribie Island, and in particular in the later years – including locals Bill Stewart, Alroy Fleming and for a time Lawrence Daws, and holiday neighbours such as the Massie family, with whom he enjoyed good conversation over dinners, drinks at the pub and bracing games of chess.
Some unsent letters written when he was in his eighties and in frail health, and addressed to an assortment of nieces and nephews, were found after his death. These last words acknowledge the enduring connections of his family and his British heritage. A family history written by Alexander Fairweather in 1898 records the achievements over more than three centuries of family members as agriculturists, merchants, doctors, lawyers, teachers, military men and seamen. Ian Fairweather brought distinction to his family as an artist. Following a most unlikely life trajectory, he achieved that distinction in Australia, living and working in his self-made home on Bribie Island.
_____________
1 Robert Walker interview with Alan Sumner, 4 March 1976.
2 Australia Council, payment advice, ‘Travel expenses for Ian Fairweather Book’, Robert Walker Collection, National Art Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
3 Bribie Star, Complimentary Souvenir Issue for the official opening of Bribie Island Bridge, vol. 2, no. 9, 19 October 1963, p. 8.
4 Rosemary Waters to Murray Bail, 12 August 1979 and undated letter.
5 Fairweather’s maternal uncle Sydney Hood Thorp (1862–1926) was a mining agent and sharebroker with substantial business interests in Ravenswood and in Charters Towers, where he became mayor in 1909. In 1926 he nominated Fairweather, an ‘ex-soldier’ then living at ‘Marina Bulwark Hill, St Aubin, Jersey’, to migrate to Australia.