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Merv’s World

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The subtitle of Black, White + Colour is ‘A Biography of Mervyn Bishop Australia’s First Indigenous Professional Photographer’. And of course that’s true, important and commercially sensible to bill the book that way. But its contents provide a more complex if still wonderfully coherent account of what it is to be Merv and the contexts and events which have helped shape him. In my related blog I’ve referred to this as ‘the warp and weft of culture, in plural form, the magic of its assembly and the extraordinary variety of its products.’

I’m particularly interested in this because it has provided a lesson I have had to learn myself, many times and sometimes to my cost.

Naturally you must read the book for a proper account of Merv’s world. (Off you go and buy it. HERE.) Treat this as a taster with a slight twist of emphasis.

• • • • • • • •

HOME

This is the map from the book which describes the road trip Tim and Merv took together to help prepare it, revisiting old stamping grounds and relations, the sites of some of his photographs, RSL and Bowling Clubs — landmarks of north-western NSW, a very special, interesting and not much visited part of Australia. The grey nomads pull in at Goodooga’s springs and might buy an opal or two at The Ridge, but they’ll whip past the steel shutters of Walgett and not spend too much time at Bourke. Byrock’s population is 50. Maybe. It used to be the case that one of them would be a teacher.

This is remote country, and the distances between settled points can seem vast, in fact it might seem that no one lives here, but that would be quite wrong.

Merv was born in Brewarrina (known to anyone who knows it as ‘Bre’, pron. ‘bree’). The Barwon, which when joined with the Culgoa becomes the Darling, teeters along between Walgett and Bourke in great whorls now often barely damp. Bre is half way. Above Walgett the cotton farmers have stripped out the rivers’ flow. When they were left wild this stretch of the Darling was home to an important paddle steamer trade. At Bourke you can still visit the wharf where the steamers used to tie up, now usually 10-15 metres above water level. The Wandering Jew was one of the last to operate. It caught fire at Bre in 1914 and sank.

150 years ago Bre became a hub for that commerce. It had a bank, a courthouse, two hotels, two stores, a regional administrative office, a school. Today it has a population of about 800, from some points of view 30 fairly sparsely settled blocks in the middle of nowhere, but big enough for a swimming pool and a Catholic primary school as well as a government one. Leo Schofield was born here in 1935. His father was one of the publicans.

And it has its fish traps, Bhiamie’s Ngunnhu, Bhiamie being the creator figure of this region’s mythos.

Most of the straight-line barrier in the photo is a comparatively modern contribution. The rest could be 40,000 years old which would make these traps one of the oldest human constructions in the world. That’s the claim. But there is no doubt that the river and its traps — already a fluid junction of several First Nations groups: the Ngemba Weilwan, the Murrawarri and the Yuwaalaraay — would have been major drawcards for festivities, food gathering and other forms of socialising for the dozens of clans spread through what today we think of as northern NSW. A mix of peoples.

In 1886 the Aborigines Protection Association established a mission near Bre on a reserve of 5,000 acres 10 miles east of the town and on the opposite bank of the Barwon. The very first mission in New South Wales, it kept operating until 1966. If you want to know a bit about what it was like [in 1954] you can read Dr. Ruth Latukefu’s recollections here.

Bre Mission kids, sometime between 1932 and 1937: the Reverend Canon A. Leyland Bird

The mission was established initially to deal with/ accommodate/ respond to the number of Aboriginal people camping round Bre and their ‘intemperate behaviour’. It soon became marshalling yards for the problems (and non-problems; just sent, or taken) drawn from an area ranging from Tibooburra, 10 hours drive west from Bre today, to Cobar and Lightning Ridge, half the distance in different directions. The mission was — not my term but a Royal Commission’s — ‘an enforced concentration of Aboriginal people’, a concentration camp. And in that camp were ‘Aboriginal’ people, or ‘Indigenous’ people, or ‘First Nations’ people. But whatever you want to call them, it is a bit like saying ‘European’. They had different languages, different cultures and lore, and different Countries none of which were at Bre. They didn’t always get on. Why would they? A mix of peoples.

Bre was also home to some of the powerhouses of the Aboriginal world. Essie Coffey might be the best known, but Steve Gordon and Tombo Waters lived there as well. Big names, strong leaders of renown. Part of the mix of peoples.

One of my own Bre stories is a memory of giving a talk to the staff at the school where at the time Michael Chamberlain, post-Azaria, was teaching. If he lifted his head once from his newspaper during the time I was speaking I didn’t notice, suggesting that as well as unwonted celebrity he was a man of keen judgment. Part of the mix. Places may be small but they are not without characters.

• • • • • • • • •

Mervyn’s father Minty was the lovechild of a travelling [Punjabi] merchant, Baroo Fazldeen, and Mervyn’s grandmother, Suzannah McCauley Bishop. Suzannah’s mother is listed as Aboriginal in her marriage certificate to Robert Bishop of Melton Mowbray, England. Her father is identified as a labourer named John McCauley, likely an Irishman according to family DNA results. On Mervyn’s maternal side there is a similar pattern of Aboriginal women and White men. (p. 24)

Such ancestries are not uncommon in parts of Australia, especially where there were disproportionate numbers of White men and White women.

• • • • • • • • •

Merv’s mother, a woman who wore a hat when she went out, had a camera, a Brownie Box which Merv started using at 11. He bought a camera of his own when he was 12.

‘We were uptown Blacks’, Merv says. ‘We knew we were kind of special but we didn’t chuck it around saying “We’ve got this” or “We’ve got that”. We would have got a slap.’ But, nonetheless, ‘I think we [Merv and his sister Cynthia] missed a lot of the stuff the other kids copped, racism stuff in town.’ (p. 40, 41)

SCHOOL

Mervyn did well at school in Brewarrina despite a full plate of other interests. ‘Margo Collins and I used to run neck-and-neck for the top of the class,’ said Mervyn. ‘If I came first, I’d get five pounds from dad and if she came first she’d get five pounds from her stepdad. They used to bet on us.’ (p. 51)

But when Merv was a student there Bre Central topped-out at Year 9. After that for Aboriginal boys the trades were an unpredictable possibility, for girls domestic service might have been feasible. For smarties and if you got a leg up, a bank or an office job might be available.

Both Merv’s mother and father were ambitious for him. But it was the interest of the vicar of the local Anglican church where Merv was an altar boy which might have been decisive. At the age of 14 he was sent off to the Holy Trinity Boys Hostel in Dubbo so he could attend the local public high school. Bits of money were put together from various sources — including the efforts of the Dobbyn family — to find the £60 per term boarding fee plus the other costs associated with going to school. He had two mates there from Bre, but of the 60 boarders he was the only Aboriginal kid.

At 14. Late morning on your own catching the steam train from Bre to Byrock. With some patience that would hook you up with the daily diesel from Bourke to Dubbo where you’d arrive in the early evening, home a day away … already an adventure and you hadn’t even started.

And Dubbo: Queen of the Western Plains, with a river and a zoo. Population in June 2021: 43,516, of whom an unusually high 86 per cent (including Glenn McGrath, various famous rugby league players and Dave Mason and the rest of The Reels) had been born in Australia.

Dubbo is on Wiradjuri Country, and at the census 16 per cent of the town’s population described themselves as Aboriginal. In summer that proportion rises as folk come down from the river towns further north to get out of the heat. This is not always to everyone’s taste including that of the local Aboriginal population.

The first two public buildings erected in Dubbo were the police station and the gaol. The Old Gaol remains a major tourist attraction, ‘an appealing oasis in the midst of the Dubbo CBD’ to quote the brochure. Eight men were hanged in its courtyard: a Dane, two Chinese, three Irishmen and two Aboriginal people. A mixture. ‘Rolf Boldrewood’ (in fact Thomas Alexander Browne) wrote Robbery Under Arms while he was Clerk of Courts there.

When I was a regular visitor you could get excellent coffee at Scotty’s in the main drag. It may now be Ha Noi Corner. The Hog’s Breath Cafe where I mistakenly ate once, and I think once only, closed in 2021. It’s the same sort of muddle of cultural influences, borrowings and exchanges that can surprise you in a middle-sized rural centre.

• • • • • • • • •

Merv ‘went into some sort of meltdown’ in his Leaving (11th and final year) exams and failed four of his six subjects missing out on the prospect of a job with the ABC. He went home to Bre.

WORK

He got a break.

Early the year after he left school he was offered a job at the ABC in Sydney, “a general dogsbody” sort of job. Not quite out of the blue, but a pleasant surprise nonetheless. Three months later, bored, he applied for a job as a photographer at the Sydney Morning Herald and got it. Subsequently he had some formal training in a part-time course at the Sydney Tech. Tim Dobbyn, the author, quotes Harry Millen who originated, devised and taught the course as saying, ‘It was most strange to have an Aboriginal in the class.‘ As might be assumed, his work took him to all sorts of places including to the social pages. On page 76 of the book there is evidence that Merv has been snapping at a cocktail party in Rose Bay. The women in the pic look like they may also be thinking, ‘It is most strange to have an Aboriginal in our lounge room.’

Merv had been a prefect. He wouldn’t have cared. He would have giggled about it later as he produced a delightfully embroidered recount.

A colleague at the Herald: “None of us ever thought of him as Aboriginal . … there was a real camaraderie there.” (p.77) This somewhat ambiguous quote is paired with a ho ho story that turns up everywhere in Blackfellaland. In the darkroom — “Hey Bishop, are you there? Are you there Merv Bishop? Smile so we can see you.” Dominance is sometimes spectacularly unaware. And dumb. And wet.

Like run-ins with the police on the basis that he was the Blackfella in a group who were otherwise White; or the continued occasional refusal of service in a bar. And it could turn around. I don’t know that he could count the number of times he has been called a ‘coconut’ or similar. (‘Coconut’? Black on the outside, White on the inside.)

Eight years after beginning at the Herald he took ‘Life and Death Dash’ (see below) the photo which won him the Press Photographer of the Year Award. Mervyn was a C-Grade [pay grade] photographer when he took the award-winning photo and would be a C-Grade photographer when he left three years later in 1974. … Even absent the contest win, it seems incredible that Mervyn would not progress to at least a B-Grade level by 1974. “There was a glass ceiling for Aboriginal photographer Mervyn Bishop at the Herald,” Merv said. (p. 87) Later Tracey Moffat asked him why he didn’t stack on a turn. “I had to maintain a sense of propriety in the hope that maybe other Aboriginal people would be able to gain employment there as well.” (p. 89) I had entered the assimilated world of the White institution. There were very few Aboriginal people in any profession and hardly any that I could share my experience with in Sydney. My Aboriginality was in different places, but there was no place for it at the Herald. (p. 188)

He left, and applied for a job as a liaison officer with the newly established federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs. The interviewers were concerned about whether he could relate sufficiently to Aboriginal people living on reserves and in impoverished communities. “Have you had much to do with Aboriginals? Mervyn recalls being asked. (p. 91) Eventually he was employed as a low-paid clerical assistant to take photographs.

During these years he had married Elizabeth Johnston whose mother believed her English ancestry could be traced back to the days of the Magna Carta. She asked Merv one day how much money it would take for him to walk away.

ART

The thing is, Mervyn was never in the art world, he was a photojournalist. (Tess Allas, art curator and champion of his successful nomination for the Red Ochre Award for a lifetime achievement in the arts by an Indigenous person. p. 150)

The ’80s for Merv were a period of mooching round between different jobs, a number of which were tenuously associated with education. He began hanging round Tranby College, ‘a space [in Glebe, very inner Sydney] for Mob to gather, share stories, and gain further skills and knowledge through community programs, events and accredited training’. He needed the use of a darkroom for a project he was working on, and of course he would start chatting because that’s what he does. Merv is a world-class chatter. He and Andrew Dewdney, an English academic who was working at Tranby at the time and who had become a mate, were putting up an exhibition of student work in a shopping centre. One of the panels included a print of the Whitlam/ Lingiari photo. Merv said, ‘That’s my photo,’ He wasn’t upset about it being used. It was more pride. (p. 120)

Dewdney … argues that the Tranby experience enabled Mervyn to look back on his archive and reassess his own work and heritage. ‘He could look at that collection not merely as Joe Photographer but as an Aboriginal photographer.’ (p. 130) ‘[Tranby’, Dewdney says] ‘was where he was challenged around his cultural heritage and Aboriginality.’ (p.119)

His first major show was ‘In Dreams’ in 1991 at Sydney’s Australian Centre for Photography. Tracey Moffat was asked to curate it. ‘I thought I have only seen this one great image of his. But [when she started digging through all the material at Merv’s home at Oatley] I found this treasure trove of images.‘ (p. 131)

The show opened the day his wife died. Tim [Bishop, Merv’s son] said the ACP was packed that night and if you hadn’t known his mother had died that afternoon you wouldn’t have caught on. ‘I truly think that some people have a calling, and one of Dad’s cards that he plays so well is that of a showman … to this day I don’t know how he was able to do it. ‘ (p.133)

‘In Dreams’ toured 17 Australian venues and went to England. ‘So much of becoming known as a photographer has to do with being established within the history of photography. This means getting your work seen in an exhibition, and, more importantly, being published as well written about.’ Sandy Edwards reviewing the exhibition in Filmnews. (p. 135)

There were some more landmarks along the way, including some international recognition and a solo exhibition at the AGNSW. But two others stand out vividly.

The first was in concert with the NSW State Records office. Susan Charlton, its Creative Producer, recognised this image as one which was also held by the Records Office during one of the more exotic turns of events in Merv’s life: his story, illustrated, at the Sydney Opera House with him narrating. William Yang, Chinese-Australian artist, with his hand on the wheel.

This is Merv’s maternal grandparents plus flowergirls on their wedding day at Angledool in 1925, colourised and with birds inserted.

The Records office had 1000 images which had been collected over the years from the Aboriginal Welfare Board which they wanted to develop into an exhibition.

This was the mission: ‘Though the policies of successive governments aimed to dismantle their culture, Aboriginal people have always found ways to reunite with family and community and to create contemporary links to their culture. Today the Board’s written records and photographs are valuable for the leads and clues they may provide to help in this process, creating a new purpose and place for the photographs within contemporary Aboriginal life.

‘Decades after the photographs were taken, they still produce mixed emotions for Indigenous viewers — from the delight of seeing rare evidence of community and culture to the sad reminder of loss and separation. Because of these sensitivities, the entire exhibition process involved the consent, advice and support of many strands of the Indigenous community, including the NSW Department of Aboriginal Affairs for guidance and protocols; an advisory group for ongoing input and support; and the approval and contribution of individuals and communities represented in the Board’s photos.​​’ (From the catalogue which can, and should, be viewed HERE.)

But the real stroke of genius was to have Merv along not just to take photos at this extremely popular and important activity (over two years visiting 17 regional centres), but to just be himself, greeting, introducing, facilitating. What a VERY good idea.

The second was a commission to take portraits of 22 of Sydney’s Aboriginal Elders for the Australian Museum. ‘I always think: Do a picture that they would like as much as me.‘ (The Bishop Theory of Art, p. 176) And this proved to be the case. Here they are: huge, but warm, relaxed, comfortable, feeling at their best, representatives of a living vibrant culture.

‘In this startling image, composition, contrast, and Aboriginal social commentary combine. It is a classic example of photojournalism that has since transgressed its original context and come to insinuate the impact of religious missions within Aboriginal Australia and, in particular, on the Stolen Generations.’ AGNSW art note

Merv: ‘There was only one Blackfella there that day and he was behind the camera.’

THE BARRICADES

‘Mervyn didn’t charge the barricades,’ [Hetti Perkins, a distinguished art gallerist says.] ‘Instead he went under or around them to get where he needed to be.’ (p. 200)

Mervyn’s story is … a caution against easy assumptions at a time when race and racism occupy large swathes of public discourse. He cut his own path, defying at times the expectations of both White and Aboriginal people. Mervyn is often celebrated as a chronicler of Indigenous Australians but sees his body of work as much broader. He resists drawing too large a message from his life and his images, yet he inescapably stands as an Australian treasure. (Tim Dobbyn, the author, p. 9)

The National Capital

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‘We desire to have a city that will be the Gotham of Australia … [and] in a few years will rival London in size, Athens in art and Paris in beauty.’ King O’Malley in 1904, an American masquerading as Canadian so he could be a member of the Australian parliament, taking on the job, as Minister for Home Affairs, of designing and developing a capital for Australia.

1907: The minute containing Sir John Forrest’s report to parliament on a site for the national capital.

Dalgety, about 150km south of the ACT, got the initial nod for the site of the new capital but the NSW government wouldn’t cede the land. Too hard and expensive to build a rail connection certainly, but also too far from Sydney. Canberra was second choice from eight options.

The word ‘Canberra’ may be a corruption of Ngambri, the name of one of the four Indigenous tribal groups living there prior to the disruption and assumption of their lands. Or it may mean (in Ngambri) ‘space between a woman’s breasts’, the breasts in this instance now called Mt Ainslie and Black Mountain.

Alternative names proposed at the time included: Austral, Aurora, Captain Cook, Caucus City, Cookaburra (😬), Dampier, Eden, Eucalypta, Flinders, Home, Hopetoun, Kangaremu, Myola, Meladneyperbane, New Era, Olympus, Paradise, Shakespeare (🤔), Sydmelperadbrisho, The National City, Union City, Unison, Wattleton and Wheatwoolgold. Probably lucky some of those didn’t get up.

1927, the opening of Parliament House by the Duke of York.

Not the Duke of York, but almost certainly with more claim to the land.

Imagine. It would have been a very strange life. Government from a paddock. Note the comparative absence of trees.

Building of the new ‘old’ parliament house commenced in August 1923 and was completed, after what must have been a constant series of construction and other challenges, early in 1927. It was not designed by the Griffins, Walter Burley and Marion Mahony, but it could have been. Very Chicago School: clerestories, very strong horizontals, interesting sight lines, furniture matching walls matching floors matching fixtures matching ceilings. Passionately symmetrical, built round the two houses — Reps and Senate. Snug, I thought. A building very easy to warm to if not to heat.

The old King’s Hall with King George V standing guard.

The view via this transect through the House of Reps frames the War Memorial (invisible here) perfectly.

John Smith Murdoch, Australia’s first Commonwealth Government architect, did design it in what was called the ‘stripped classical’ style. Good job, but it was only ever intended to be temporary. It does seems like a lot of work and effort for a temporary building.

The Prime Minister’s Office, to my eye perfectly fit for purpose. Bob Hawke’s voice is heard.

The Prime Minister may have had ample space but a run-of-the-mill MP and three aides would work in an office smaller than this, about 4m x 2.5m. Shall we say limited confidentiality which, who knows, may have been a good idea. New Parliament House where more than 5000 people work on sitting days has nearly eight times the floor space of the old one.

Labor gets a surprisingly good go in the displays, away, that is, from the John Howard Library. And, yes, that is The Australian Constitution being kicked downstairs.

Always was …

• • • • • • • •

‘You won’t find a whole settled essentially stable community that is so smug, so bourgeois, so comfortable, so well-educated. I mean this may be fucking paradise. I’m not saying it is. But it’s as good as it gets.’ (Jack Waterford, staple of the Canberra Times, legend. And I know just what he means. It has occurred to me every time we go there. All those facilities. All that cycling and jogging.)

It can be quiet downtown.

Although there will usually be a jogger to add to the vibe.

It will also be socially aware, generously so.

With plenty of thoughtful instruction.

• • • • • • • •

In his very good book about Canberra, Paul Daley suggests ‘the role of a [national] capital is to host its legislature and judiciary, its memory (the National Library of Australia; the national archives, the galleries), its conscience (the Aboriginal Embassy and the National Museum of Australia with its vast collection of Indigenous remains and relics) and tell the story of disastrous events that almost derailed a fledgling federation (the Australian War Memorial).’

In a recent visit we made the most of these, especially its memory.

One of the reasons for our visit was to have a look at ‘Fit to Print’, the exhibition in the National Library curated by Mike Bowers of press photos printed from glass-plate negatives (one chance only). A very generous selection and display from the 18,000 or so held by the Library in its Fairfax Collection. All round 1930: another time, another life.

Moments caught at a performance by Inge Stange’s dance gymnastics students, Sydney 1933. ‘This type of physical education is better adapted than almost any other for inspiring inner cheerfulness and new courage to face life in these uncertain times.’

William Lygon, 7th Earl of Beauchamp and, for a time, Governor-General of NSW, with some chaps at Bondi. ‘I doubt’, he observed, ‘whether anywhere in the world are finer specimens of manhood than in Sydney. The life-savers at the bathing beaches are wonderful.’ Using certain information about his activities which could only be described as salacious, his enemies were able to move him on. Smith’s Weekly noted that when his wife divorced him at the time ‘it came as little surprise’. But, bless him really. He’s having such a good time.

The National Library also had its customary display of ‘treasures’. I liked these two among others:

At left, Major Mitchell’s sextant; and above, Banjo Paterson’s ‘Diary used as a notebook’ open at a draft of ‘The Wind’s Message’. Not his finest work, but ‘The Man from Snowy River’ is just over the page.

And … you can look at Leonard French’s glorious windows while you’re having your coffee.

National Library: 9.7/10. At least.

And then there was the Gallery. You must go to the Gallery, but it was looking and feeling a bit Brutalist, just a tiny bit stuck around 1980, those enormous rooms bullying their contents which examined closely seemed like they might be second choice. The new Gaugin, the new Monet, the new Munch: not my favourites anyway, but the sort of thing you might mention when you are talking about examples of the absolute range of an artist’s work including when they had a go at something that didn’t quite work.

Best thing downstairs by a mile —

What a very great painting that is. And what a cultural landmark. It was time.

Upstairs was ‘Golden Summer, Eaglemont’ in its very fancy frame. A Mention Honorable at the Paris Salon of 1892 is noted. I’m confirming golden and not just because it’s the Dandenongs in the background. This was the title piece (called ‘Golden Summers’ at the time for some reason) for the best exhibition of Australian Impressionists ever mounted, NGV 1985. I remember it indelibly.

Also upstairs was this, ‘Bush walkers’ by Freda Robertshaw painted in 1944.

Intriguing. So carefully painted, and so formidably un-bushwalkerly. The figures, frozen from inception to completion, would not have been capable of walking anywhere let alone in the bush. Could they be aliens perhaps? Which is not to deny the considerable interest of the painting. I’d be happy to look at it carefully …hmmm, four times a week. Evidently the same genre as Charles Meere’s iconic ‘Australian Beach Pattern’ (which can be found in the Gallery of NSW) from just a bit earlier. Similarly carefully painted. Statuary, with a sea made of actual glass. That ball, suspended forever. (You might note the hint of domestic violence in the deep background. Us Aussies! Always up for a laugh.)

Just incidentally it is on record that Englishman Meere really didn’t like the beach, and he may have painted himself into the picture as the chap at left looking at least thoughtful (perplexed?) if not entirely discomfited.

Also on display was an exhibition of contemporary ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints, the best known example of which is Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa‘. In his Hawaii Snorkel Series Japanese-American Masami Teraoka offers his own take on the slightly libidinous shunga tradition. His ‘View from Here to Eternity’ is below. The placement of the woman’s head provides a challenge.

There was also this glorious ‘Lotus Table’ by A&A Design, 1200mm in diameter and made out of ‘custom-dyed rye straw’.

The Drill Hall gallery had a very large exhibition of conceptual art which we think we are unable to explain except that some conventional thinking is involved as well as aesthetic appreciation. I liked it but not as much as a series in the same place by Simon Gende, an artist from PNG. (When did you last see paintings exhibited by an artist from PNG?) Even more exotic was that the theme of the series was the attack on the World Trade Centre and subsequent events stalking, capturing, killing and burying Osama Bin Laden.

This is ‘Twin Towers’. The legend in always so attractive Pidgin at the bottom says ‘Tupela balus bumpin Twin Tower long America USA‘. ‘(‘Two planes [balloons/ birds/fellas] crashing into the Twin Towers which belong to/in America USA.’)

In the museum, one-third closed for a new exhibition when we were there, we found the last day of Pompeii, so to speak, a good deal made out of not very much but with its moments …

and a pink van plus Holden. Good. And someone taking a somewhat decontextualised selfie.

It is a city — now, so very much not in 1927, and not really till the 1970s — of public art … (You can tap on these pics to see them better.)

and edifice. Hard to move without bumping into, or at least experiencing, an edifice.

The Gallery (bottom left), the High Court building (‘Gar’s Mahal’) overwhelming two galahs as it does its users, the massively over-engineered Bowen Place pedestrian underpass, and the mysterious ‘Commonwealth Place’, the outcome of a competition, from front and back, itself just in front of John Dunmore Lang Place. John Dunmore Lang, a Scotsman, a Republican and an Australian patriot who didn’t live to see Federation. I don’t know what he’d make of Canberra today. His Place is largely a blank of struggling lawn.

But just along from here is Reconciliation Place which does have a range of features including these standing stones each of which incorporates some First Nations art.

As appropriate the art is representative of different traditions and cultures, quite easily recognisable like the one on the left. But I have never seen Gwion Gwion (at right) with all their complexities anywhere other than the Kimberley. Perhaps a courageous decision.

And trees. Trees trees trees. Hundreds of thousands of them. One of the great arboreal projects of Australia. What a wonderful thing. Especially thinking back to the bare paddocks of 100 years ago. It was autumn of course and there was ample evidence of the extent of alien deciduous planting …

and the absorption with monocultures, a version of town planning aesthetic concerns dominating the truths of ecology, but at least they’re trees.

A bit of the National Arboretum from its main pavilion.

Perhaps the most signal image from our trip was this: round 9pm, Lonsdale St as downtown as you get, temperature minus 4, queuing up at the Messina gelato bar for ice cream. You might imagine otherwise, but you don’t miss out on a thing in Canberra.

SYD

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Yes. ‘Sunday’. Ken Done. Dominant in its gold frame at the public threshold of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The attached note says: ‘Sunday was painted from a beach house on the Wyargine Point in Sydney Harbour that Ken Done calls “The Cabin” nestled into the landscape of Rosherville Reserve and overlooking picturesque Chinaman’s Beach. … While Sunday was painted from and inspired by this setting, Done says it’s not a direct representation. It “reflects a feeling that shows the joy of being in this space. The pattern of the clouds, the boats, the people on the beach … it is a feast. And if colour is a language, then the language for Sunday is joy.”‘

It would have been unthinkable not so long ago. Ken Done? Not to be taken seriously. A bit awful really. Hopelessly commercial. For tea towels, place mats, cheap scarves, possibly swimwear; and for people who don’t know anything about art.

But, frankly, how absolutely correct that placement is: Sydney as it would like to see itself and sometimes is. Gorgeous.

The Harbour was covered with scales of sun glitter, the bridge exhibited itself like a formidable flexed (and symmetrical) bicep, the Opera House was perched on Bennelong’s Point like a ruffled cockie. And then in the evening there was the breeze, an erotic whisper, the fag end of the Southerly Buster massaging your sensibilities and because it is summer leaving dainty beads of humid sweat.

Melbourne to live, but Sydney for a visit.

We’d come as the final leg of the Tour de Siblings to celebrate my 75th birthday — we’re all getting on — and this was to see 90 year-old Dorothy. I thought we would stay at Kings Cross. I hadn’t been there for a while and the station is handy. It was also just a walk to her church in Waterloo where we would meet.

I had some uncertainties about the accommodation I’d booked and paid for. It had been very hard, impossible actually, to get in touch with the property owners to find out, for example, how we would get in. So I was disappointed rather than flabbergasted to arrive at a laundrette with no obvious place to sleep or make a cup of tea. I had two ideas in my pocket. The first provided a room but with no view and we needed some offset for our distress. The second — the Hotel Indigo, warmly recommended — had everything we needed including wide perspectives through our windows over Woolloomooloo to the city.

The Cross has tidied up and gentrified since I last looked, especially the Potts Point end (which was always pretty schmick).

In the 1930s buildings of this sort

were replaced by buildings of this sort

with entrances like this.

Art Noveau Deco run wild. [There now Graham. Okay now?] And after nearly a century they’d still be good those apartments.

Just for the memories.

The Gazebo, the ‘Gazza’, once a hotel and for a long time my Sydney accommodation of choice, now apartments and a distinctive building visible from many points of the skyline.

I knew this was the El Alamein Fountain but thought it was located in Anzac Square. I now discover that acre of paving and concrete is the Lambert Peninsula National Park and think that to be a bit weird.

The walk from the Cross to South Sydney Uniting ambles its way through the tree-lined streets of Darlinghurst and Redfern full of blunt but picturesque Georgian cottages tight to the footpath. Every 100 or 150 metres there are hole-in-the-wall places with a dozen boxes or stools on the footpath where people eat pain au chocolat and drink coffee. Runners pad past in their leisure wear; torsos often naked for the men, nearly so for the women. Buff bodies everywhere. Gay couples (in the week before Mardi Gras) lean in to each other, sublimely indifferent to public interest. These streets are theirs.

There are cities in the world that would kill for areas like this. There are other cities which would kill them off promptly and decisively.

Dorothy is 90, a sweetheart and a bit of a dag. As well as that she is the Reverend Dorothy McRae-McMahon, resolute pioneer of the place of women in the church, the author of a dozen popular books of liturgy, and a warrior — without necessarily meaning to be so, it came to her as naturally as breathing — for the rights of the downtrodden.

She has a gift for saying and writing things that people can connect with, especially those living with trouble, helping to ease their pain. God has spoken to her mysteriously but directly. Her certainty of that is complete. You can make of that what you will but in her line of work it is practical.

For many years she was the minister at Pitt St Uniting in the heart of the city. But now she is a parishioner at South Sydney, a most remarkable church on the southern fringe of its inner suburbs. The church property is 100m from Redfern Park where the Rabbitohs used to play, and more saliently where Paul Keating gave the Redfern Address, still a vivid reminder of what all Australians should know, remember and take to heart: “It was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol.”

The church’s congregation is unusually diverse: in terms of sex and gender; in terms of affluence; in terms of cultural and ethnic background; in terms of education; in terms of health and wellbeing; in terms of drug of choice (which might be Ceremonial Grade matcha). Dogs, kids, people in off the street looking for some shelter just absorbed into the mass which I remember on my visits as being striking for its relaxed intimacy. Stuff going on all over the place, but still having a purposeful shape, capped off with a shared feed.

That’s a church service. But a year ago. Various parts of the church building are being renovated because the Sydney sandstone of its decorative front has turned out to be porous and flakey. The service I went to most recently was held in a community centre a short way down the road. But just the same sort of thing. Everyone publicly welcomed by name, the minister providing the homily but not a lot else. There were a dozen ways to contribute and perhaps 20 people did, reading lessons, providing notices, or mentioning people and their situation to be remembered in thoughts and prayers.

One reason I wanted to use this photo is because Andrew Collis is in it. It is shared magic, but he’s the magician. Slight, quiet, but both deft and definite, he is such an admirable presence. There is not the slightest sense of disorder, nor is there anything about these services that is dumbed down. A lot of the ideas discussed are chewy and testing.

The text for that Sunday’s thinking out loud — like everything else, so carefully prepared — was Luke 4: 14-30, a curly one made more so by the reality of its rendering.

Jesus goes home to Nazareth and at the synagogue reads from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed.” He rolls up the scroll and sits down. You can see it. This is direct reportage. Then he says, ‘It’s me. You heard it here first. I’m the one.’ After the ‘That’s Joseph’s lad though isn’t it? I thought he was a carpenter’ moment, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”

There follows a bit of to and fro where Jesus seems to be demanding to be a prophet but without honour in his own country. The history of prophecy, he suggests, is that people like Elijah and Elisha largely ignored local issues and did their best work elsewhere. But “when they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.” A sharp turn, about which you’d like more detail for full comprehension. However, and what might or might not be the moral of the story: “But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”

It’s a story with its share of puzzles, but this day it seemed to be about courage in the midst of adversity, about adhering to your principles, about being honest and open regardless of the consequences. And that would all fit.

Andrew has been there for 10 years and I imagine the fact that there is a garden and chooks in a chook pen at the back of the church might be at least indirectly down to him. I grow in confidence when I look at the list of the church’s working groups: Arts, Mirrung Garden, Hospitality, Ministry Development, Property and Finance, Safe Church, and the ‘South Sydney Herald’ a monthly with a circulation of 10,000. How do these things grow out of such apparently sparse resources? Andrew has been there for 10 years, but for only a few weeks longer. I hope another hero emerges.

This might be the modern church everywhere. I don’t know. I’m not an adherent. I don’t as a rule go to church. But this is the ultimate Anti-Trumpism, alive and well. However modestly, ‘Great’ in actuality rather than as a word on a red cap. This is lived and productive and sustaining diversity, equity and inclusion — the much maligned DEI — and proof that it can happen at least somewhere and be beneficial for all concerned.

• • • • • •

Finally the gallery seems to have been tarted up. There’s better stuff in the new building; there has been some re-hanging among the Victorians for the first time in living memory; the Asian section has been re-imagined. My arts correspondent tells me there is a new director. This turns out to be only prospectively true. July. So it wasn’t that. Just time for a bit of house-keeping, and the revelation again of the superior quality of the AGNSW’s Indigenous collection.

A fine way to finish. Ginger Reilly at his best: Nyamiyukanji, the river country with gnak gnak, Ginger’s Jukurrpa, in the foreground.