As a child I was dragged around the artless void of Australia in the fifties. Always the strangers in town, my parents were Salvo ministers, somehow surviving and always hoping to do a little good in the dusty hard drinking towns. Drawing helped me escape the dreariness. I drew; my father preached. My art was a secret pursuit, boys didn’t ‘do’ art, it was a strictly girls affair, especially at school.

TV was a city thing. A visit to Melbourne for the ‘56 Olympics saw us crowding around shop windows just to stare at the blurry B+W screen. Film was sinful. I escaped at sixteen and secretly saw Cliff Richards in ‘Summer Holiday’. It was my first movie. There was a lot more to life than I had realized.

Eleven schools made me a crap student, always the new kid not knowing what was going on. After high-school I worked an office job where I truly learned boredom. I resigned after eight months, went back to school and somehow became an art teacher. My teaching career lasted one year. I was meant to fight in Vietnam, but the arrival of Gough Whitlam stopped all that. Reprieved, I decided, with my partner Heather, to see the world. Two years later I was back in Australia working as a builder’s labourer tossing bricks from a scaffold.

We had travelled through Southeast Asia, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran,Turkey, Crete, Yugoslavia, Italy, Israel on a shoe-string, then bicycled through Britain, Europe and Scandinavia. (see 'Travel Writings' below). Returning, we hand-built a mudbrick house in Daylesford, Victoria. It was all we could afford. No power, no water, no sewer, no telephone. Getting power on was a momentous milestone in our lives.

Later, building became a means to support my arts practice and family and to survive as an artist.

Until 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq I was content to make, sell and teach ‘art’. A backyard run-of-the-mill, hands-on artist/teacher had become politicized.

 The internet in rural Australia was (and still is in many parts) non-existent. With no arts network or support, I decided to ‘collaborate’ with my audience. I now invite direct participation during my exhibitions. Contribution of verse, script (often not English), drawing, tagging and painting has been added by viewers to my images. And I have appropriated this artist/audience dialogue into my arts practice.

  As 'studio artist' things have changed. Audiences are no longer passive. Boundaries assumed in the past are beginning to blur.

 

   TRAVEL WRITINGS

This transcript was typed in 2008 from the original handwritten diary from1974.   
Travel writings.pdf 
'GETTING OUT OF AUSTRALIA' -  forgive the first couple of  paragraphs, it was 1973
Travel2
'PORTUGUESE TIMOR'
Travel3
'INDONESIAN TIMOR'
Travel4
'MY FAVOURITE ISLAND AND JAVA'
Travel5
'SINGAPORE AND MALAYA'
Travel6
'THAILAND AND KNIVES'
Travel7
'INDIA AND NEPAL'
Travel 8
'PAKISTAN - A 24HR NIGHTMARE'
Travel9
'AFGHANISTAN'
Travel10
'IRAN'
Travel11
'TURKEY - THE FUN CONTINUES'
Travel 12
'GREECE - OUR FAVOURITE COUNTRY'
The about trip took  6mths, after this we:

Feature Image