IN PREPARING this book, we accumulated more than 700 letters written by Ian Fairweather from 1915 until his death in May 1974 and from those selected 354. The survival of so many letters in public and private collections is a testament to Fairweather’s standing as a man of unusual distinction and his attainment as a painter.
We made considerable efforts to track down previously undiscovered letters. A few were located in public collections in the National Library of Australia, the Public Record Office Victoria and elsewhere. Advertisements were placed in magazines in England and in Australia but yielded few responses. Julie Ewington and Angela Goddard, former curators at the Queensland Art Gallery, uncovered important new letters, their efforts in part inspired by this publication; late in the day, a large run of Fairweather letters came to light in the Orange Regional Art Gallery in New South Wales, and two letters to Fairweather’s brother Arthur were uncovered in family papers on Jersey. Inevitably additional letters will appear over time as holdings of personal papers are sorted and gradually find their way into the world. This selection aims to present a definitive record of Fairweather’s epistolary life based on the body of known letters, within the constraints of a single volume.
Letters have been selected to provide shape and detail to the arc of Fairweather’s life as an artist for whom all activity was secondary to the practice and discipline of painting. Care has been taken to choose letters that are satisfying to read individually but also have a role in revealing the narrative threads that bind together the painter’s life – travel, hut construction, translation, reading, family and of course painting – allowing the reader to dip into the book or read it from beginning to end. As far as possible we have tried to avoid repetition. In later years Fairweather had bursts of letter writing, with similar events being described to different correspondents, often with different inflections and always incorporating other information. He never wrote the same letter to different people; they were, as his friend Clark Massie observed, ‘conversations at a distance’, when Fairweather was alone but evidently needing human company.
Consideration has also been given to the overall balance of correspondents, notwithstanding that certain individuals tended to play a large role in Fairweather’s life during particular times and then for a variety of reasons move out of it. We sought to represent Fairweather in his various moods and travails, to maintain a narrative thread of key events and achievements, and to represent as coherently as possible his most significant friendships and relationships.
Editing Ian Fairweather’s letters for publication has presented many challenges. While his handwriting is generally legible, even pleasing to read in the calligraphic texture it presents on the page, his spelling and punctuation are eccentric – consistent only in their inconsistency. Throughout his life, Fairweather’s spelling veered from perfect to idiosyncratic phonetics, even within a single message. Conventional sentence structures and paragraphing did not apply and punctuation, while extravagantly scattered, was the product not of convention but of waywardness. Commas and full stops have their place but the stop and dash, freely and frequently applied, signalling conversational pause, is Fairweather’s punctuation of choice.
The editorial principle adopted was to present the letters as they were written, intact with Fairweather’s misspellings and idiosyncratic punctuation so long as there was no serious impediment to reading. Where possible we have retained Fairweather’s picturesque phonetic spelling. In cases where Fairweather spells a word correctly and incorrectly on different occasions, we have adopted the correct spelling and in cases of consistent misspelling, for example ‘beech’ for ‘beach’, we have silently corrected it. In a few instances where there is uncertainty about a word or letters in a word, it is recorded in square brackets. Proper names have been consistently capitalised throughout. Out of consideration for readers, dashes have replaced stops when they appear mid-sentence to prevent a sense of rupture within a sentence and to suggest a pause in thought; otherwise dashes have been retained as a marker of Fairweather’s epistolary style, and indeed his wit, conveying his characteristic voice. Where there is no punctuation in the original but a new sentence or idea clearly begins, extra space indicates the pause or shift. Chinese characters appear in the transcriptions as written by Fairweather, with footnotes providing pronunciations and meanings. Fairweather’s use of the Wade-Giles system of romanising Chinese characters has been retained, with Pinyin, the system generally used today, introduced in the notes.
Dating and arranging the letters chronologically presented the greatest challenge, since Fairweather’s full dating of his letters was only occasional and then highly variable. His preferred methods over many years were contrary, though probably not deliberately so, as there is no indication that he was concerned either with posterity or publication. His variable methods of dating or not were indications of his living in the moment, the days and nights not necessarily marked by calendars or clocks or of conventional hours of waking or sleeping but rather by approximations – a day and a month but no year, a festival such as Easter or occasionally a month inscribed with a question mark. The editorial challenge was to sort through the letters and to interrogate the internal evidence for indications of a date: if not always an exact one, then at least a year. This information appears in square brackets, occasionally with a question mark if there remains a lack of certainty. Where they survived or were unsmudged, postmarks were illuminating (though the challenge was to match these correctly with letters from which the envelopes had often become separated). The editors were assisted by Murray Bail, who had assigned dates to many of the letters written to Ede, Bryans and Frater; by those recipients who annotated their letters from Fairweather with the date they were received; and by consulting surviving letters written by correspondents to Fairweather. While every effort has been made to establish an accurate sequence, in some cases final confirmation will require new information to come to light.
Ian Fairweather’s letters yield a mass of apparently random detail: flashes of memory of people and places recalled from childhood, his peripatetic wanderings in the world, and the many small details and routines of his daily existence. Since Fairweather had no ready access to research materials or people from his past with whom he could confer, and he carried his knowledge in his head, sometimes his factual recall is approximate. To make sense of this sometimes skewed but immensely valuable biographical detail and to correct the record, footnotes have been provided throughout, with a short factual note appearing at the point of first reference but not repeated thereafter. References to literature, films, people and events have been provided to suggest Fairweather’s education, erudition and the diversity of his interests. Birth and death dates have been provided for family members and for artists when they are first mentioned, but not for the large cast of incidental characters whose details can be readily checked elsewhere by readers. Biographies of correspondents appear at the foot of the first letter to that correspondent. The separate chronology provides more detailed contextual information to aid in understanding and appreciating the letters.