Notes. This was decade of exile and impending and immanent global ecological and financial catastrophe.

There was important new research on ecological crisis and its solution from Dr Suzuki and others. There were intensification of new types of consumption. A more rapid rondo movement of styles and changing fashions which move at a whirlwind pace. There came about a penetration of advertising, media and TV, etc into every crevice and cell of society from the child’s bedroom to the local hotel. Everyone was exposed to thousands of media messages per day and night. It becomes a credit card society with many people and nations going into massive debt. Enormous debt is now everywhere. Citizens in first world countries attempted to live their life as an unending kind of party.Simultaniously there occurs the growth and expansion of super malls and superhighways.It is the age of the WWW and a revolution in information and entertainment. It became a jet seting culture.Ontologically everything starts to become more abstract including the nature of money.

Photos of the artist (with daughter Anna) from 80’s and 90’s

The ecology crisis looms. Political horizons darken .The decadence of the Howard, Bush and Blair years is with us, which puts progressive hopes back twenty years. At every turn western leaders use double think to communicate and totally betray their societal interests. The economic crisis deepens and unfolds with its Capitalist contradictions. The drug culture penetrates further into society reaching even remote Aboriginal communities. New and expanding illegal drug products are manufactured and distributed through burgeoning organised crime networks.The whole culure becomes drug infected. The conservative bulk of the petty middle class of settler societies and countries find themselves surrounded by crisis, which conflicts with every conservative, ideological petty middle class position. They swing psychologically ever further to the political right, but find no answers. Consumerism becomes ever more problematic and consumers are at last forced to bite the bullet of their historical predicament. The push for global capitalist solutions creates global dilemmas and global crisis. Many citizen attempt to avoid thinking about the big picture of life as much as possible and live as much with shallow cultural diversions.

Many concerned people were seeking answers and were reading Chomsky on Linguistics and politics. J.R Saul had important things to say about how the pragmatism of consumer society was creating an unconscious attitude towards its problems. The head and consciousness of society was disappearing. Western society was stumbling forward like a headless, over satiated, consumerist cadaver.

David Attenborough’s photographic naturalism invigorated jarred sensibilities over the last twenty years with images of pristine wilderness and its animal life.

Students are reading post modern philosophy and literature from Barthes to Baudrillard from Julia Kristeva to Jacques Lacan, etc and were scratching their heads. Others were curious about M .Bakhtin and Medvedeva and 20’s style Russian formalism. Others are getting more from Susan Faludi’s book Backlash. The Feminist Movement was being derailed by conservative forces across the globe. In literature, the magic realists from South America appeared and forced aesthetic re-evaluation of Realism, especially Marquez, who slipped under the post modern ideological net. The brilliant young Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson make their mature appearance to reassert radicalism, etc.

In particular, I concur with Jameson’s thoughtful work on financial and cultural patterns from his brilliant essay titled ‘Culture and Finance Capital’ in his book ‘The Cultural Turn.’

To accomplish anything in the arts one needs skills and mastery of language. Skills give us the innovative elasticity to accomplish what appears vividly in our imagination. In fact in the ancient world the word for art (arete) meant a special skill. It was like ‘techne’ to the Greeks. Having skills means we can forget about the ‘means’ of creativity and automatically concentrate of the main themes and subject matter of our art. All the cultures of the world admire skill. It also requires an imagination that aspires towards a certain kind of excellence.

They say that ones (unchosen) neighbours give us a rough approximation of the typical and the average in our community and also of the wider society. The people that we meet on our travels and in friendships and in our occupations, also fill out average aspects of the human comedy for us..

To do a series of self-portraits over the years forces us into continual self-reflection of whom we are or pretend to be. I did not seek out exceptional individuals to paint their portraits but sort of bumped into them on my journey through this chronicle. I met thousands of unique and talented and important people, but didn’t paint them. Life’s time span is short and art is extensive.

Self-portraiture presents a lot of difficulties. The creative spirit which starts a self-portrait immediately ‘faces off’ against prime creative energies as George Steiner sort of put it. Self- awareness then challenges our own perceived awareness of ourselves at our particular stage of life. As one paints the living forces gyrate and gel and sometimes congeal into frozen images of ourselves in time.

Self portraiture is the most difficult of arts genres. One has to play a lofty demystifier of self identity and other identities. The temptations to egoism or its opposite of self abnegation are equally strong. Masochism and sadism can rear their needy heads. Objectivity proves illusory. Subjectivity is a maze with many uncertain entrances and exits. Narcissistic flattery lingers in the wings. Great portrait painters of the past watch over your shoulder. Rembrandt is there, as is Van Gogh, and a dozen others to observe ones efforts with a sceptical and ironic smile. ‘Not good enough, boyo, not good enough.’ They slowly shake their heads at your awkward efforts.

The self portrait is a supreme challenge for an artist to accomplish.

One can also watch oneself aging on life’s journey and recall the emotions of the time.

1985 Notes. Days of sophistication, sub defuse and continual cultural Explosions. New kinds of catharsis and nemesis. Extensive journeys. The drug culture intensifies. Important Women’s Protest movement. Young family days. World Oil Crisis 1973.

The Bretton-Woods Agreement from 1971 was important. It was when the US Greenback became more significant for world currency and trade than gold equivalents with complex results. One aspect of the present global financial crisis begins from there. It helped the US at first and then it started to undermine its powerful Imperialist position much later. Ralph Nadar wearing worn puritan shoes appears on the scene and shows how the corporate world can be held legally and ethically to account.Culturally on TV and in film The satirical Yippies sent up the absurdities of the system. with humorus aplomb.Monty Python and its neo-Dada comedy burst onto the scene and changed our imaginative lives.I can still feel that stimulus there in my Chinese illustrations for my m.s ‘The Ninth Immortal.’

There was a revival and extension of new feminist ideas. Building from older ideas from Betty Friedan and Simmone de Bourvoir and the anthropology of Margaret Mead. Many were reading fiction of Doris Lessing etc. There appeared the new, major, qualitative critiques of the path- breaker Kate Millet. The more philosophical Shulamith Firestone (great name). Gloria Steinem, Julie Ellis, Germaine Greer, Anne Summers, Ann Curthoys and many others. It was a time when radicals had large posters of Angela Davis on their walls. Everyone knew of the Karen Silkwood controversy. When women were arrested at protests at nuclear communication sites in Australia, they would all give their name to the police as ‘Karen Silkwood’.

The early Feminists in Sydney were creating new songs to express their concerns about the pill such as the following sung to an old bouncing Irish tune.

Don’t you know the date today?
Don’t you know the date today?
If you want to get in the family way
Listen to father Riley!

My first initiation to overseas travel was to India with very little backup money. It took me about ten years afterward to create a fictional protagonist who could even begin to stand up to the sensual, physical, and mental challenges and onslaught that is India. Even then this quixotic male character that I created was a bit insane. I loved and hated my Indian sojourn, but it helped me steel myself for more overseas travel. If one can survive the vast human comedy that is India (at street level), then one can survive anything.

In India, I was reading R.K.Narayan and Kashwat Singh and many other important writers I was starting to work towards a multicultural aesthetic.

Notes on travel and cultural meaning

Travel can have positive and negative aspects for artists, writers and cultural workers. On one hand it opens oneself up to new experiences of a diverse kind but on the other it can also encompasses the disembodied travellers’ eye and heart, which is separate from events and to some extent privileged. The traveller visiting Third World countries has a passport and can leave at any time. Travel transverses time and space and forces one to change and to sort out essentials to one’s imagination and to one’s being.

I believe that new humanist art must attempt to absorb and take in the experiences of third world countries if it is to refocus on ontological essentials and start to create meaning. Or, it can just question with sterile dialogues and formal codes and be satisfied with theoretical cul de sacs that go nowhere in particular. The more feeling minds and thinking hearts there is among the world’s population, the more chance there is of finding authentic global answer to cultural questions.

Quintessential Issues

Much of my art over half a century and more recently my interest with Multiculturalism of many kinds has been concerned with finding essential human and artistic truths. These evocative images are addressed to present and future generations.

I take strength from Shakespeare’s vast creative oeuvre and how it reflects the energetic unfolding of a very rich human comedy. So from Brecht’s perceptive statement, that authentic art is about ‘the pleasure of the possibility of change in all things.’ I also support Berger’s view that important art and literature ‘reminds us’ of ‘something essentially human’ and important that we had thought we had personally ‘forgotten’. All important art and culture carries these overt and covert awesome messages within its language of codes, and the important human receivership of those codes is what brings it to life. Art creates a mercurial ‘counter world’ to the palpability of objective living. It is also important to remember George Steiner’s insight that authentic art ‘reads being anew.’ and this is a demanding imperative. Roger Garaudy and Northrop Frye and others were important in seeing the structures of myths and their evolution, and how they could be used creatively in one’s own art.

Art and culture is only as limited as the human imagination.

As I’ve written elsewhere, we are alive for one important historical moment. We, as artists, writers and cultural workers have to try creatively to capture energetic presences and their coming and passing out of being ‘moments of becoming ‘as Fuller calls them. We feel, intuit and understand these awesome magical and enchanting processes within creativity. To then pass the best affective, passionate, sensual, enchanting, witty and intelligent messages on to new generations, who will face a humongous threatening horizon of imposing and unresolved dilemmas, that have resulted from our ideological attitudes, actions and laziness. Even the products of cultural waste and excess that has been bequeathed to them as vast rubbish dumps of infantile fantasies and of the worst deformations within the human spirit.

This crisis is now expanding exponentially .New cultural answers are needed, which in turn means new types of radical and conservative cultural counter worlds have to be brought into being

In the 6o’s everything exploded. It’s amazing how much visual and passionate energy comes through from my artistic images from those days of rebellion in the 60’s.

In the Sixties many of us revolutionary students were primarily doing massive amounts of reading; of Fanon, Sartre, Berger, Williams, Schaff, Wright Mills, de Bourvior,Packard, Lefebvre. Garaudy, Northrop Frye, Marcuse, Brecht, Caudwell, Fisher, and many others. Llya.Ehrenburg’s five vol. Memoirs ‘Men, Year and Life’ became available from 1963 onwards. This work showed a richness of the Great Experiment in culture of the young USSR and also in Europe during the 1920’s. Ehrenburg seemed to have known everyone. From Picasso to Einstein. His portraits of people was fascinating.

Many individuals forget that the sixties was also a great period of translation and it became possible to read in English for the first time the works of Brecht, Mayakovsky, Lucas and the great French, Russian, and German poets and many others. In Anglo Saxon countries it was a period of gestation and of catching up with the culture of Europe .. Powerful literary works from J. Heller to H. Fast (who wrote Spartacus and Peakskill, USA, etc) were available. The former work of Catch 22 went off like a bombshell across world culture. Translations of Kazantzakis became available and especially his new version of ‘The Odyssey’; Modern Man in Search of Freedom. East European Poets Holub and Herbert. Influences were far wider than Uni courses on Joyce or Proust. The experience of one great achievement in art of literature or film, etc, also didn’t cancel out the reception of the next literary or artistic work, but added to it (as in the 20’s). They were not subsumed and negated as they are today. Because of the kenosis of work that follows it; there was time in the 60’s to digest them all. There was time to read all the great classics of literature etc.

Eric Fromm suggested to us radical students and others, new ways of loving and Edward Said showed us the full extent of Western cultural colonisation over so called third world countries.

Culture today is more like a massive traffic jam or vehicle accident at a busy intersection, where every participant who experiences it, then wanders around in an over satiated daze, and cannot focus on one major thing and feels depressed and empty within.

The Vietnam War protests focused attention on a number of cultural and political questions. It offered a centre for analysis and commitment in a world tearing itself to pieces.

New Drama Theory was coming out of the US and elsewhere. Small record companies and tiny publishing houses were leading a new wave of experimental and tradition music and publishing. These were later eaten up by the big businesses a decade or two later. There were new humanistic films being shown at a few selected venues such as those of Satyajit Ray from India, along with films from Japan, Italy, Greece and France, etc.

Access to foreign films played a large part in the radicalism of the sixties. Citizens and students discussed films in depth after they were shown in heated discussions in coffee houses and at parties they continued to analyse them, and didn’t rush off home to put on the next DVD stimulus, which would be forgotten by morning. It was an age of New Left Reviews and new publications across the world and a rethink of the political role of all the arts.

A neo romanticism appeared in the form of the headband conciets and bead dangling Hippies to confront WASP ideology head on. After Woodstock nothing would be exactly the same again.

Foreign music was also a powerful influence such as Theodorakus, Maria Farandoui, (with John Williams), Miriam Makeba, Country Joe and the Fish, and many others. This was later added to by exciting experiments in electric folk from Steeleye Span, Penetangle and Fairport Convention and other important groups.

There a revival of interest in Irish rebel music in Sydney. The folk revival in Sydney was started by Gary Shearston, Alex Hood, Kevin Butcher,Chris Kempster and Hendo and his handsome wife Marian and many others. It was Kevin Butcher who started doing the rounds of coffee houses and uni sites as possible singing venues .In Melbourne, Paul Marks and others sung black protest music across the country and we copied them. In Adelaide, the unfortunate singer Tina Lawson died young and didn’t realise her potential. The Sydney Push was still active in pub land from ‘The George’ to the ‘Fourth and Clyde’ in Balmain (now a real estate office).These centres were a place of radical dissent for rebels coming from all over Australia. Pete Seegar popularly performed and mentioned ‘new, young upcoming singers’ of importance such as Bob Dylan; Tom Paxton and Phil Oaks. Phil Oaks travelled on tour with radical cartoonist Ron Cobb. In Sydney there were radical vibrant groups such as the Radiation Quartet, located in a radical coffee house down near Haymarket near China town that sung powerful protest songs with the assistance of Jeannie Lewis, etc. Together in full voice they would all sing passionately.

Men and women stand together!

Do not heed the men of war!

Make up your minds

Now or never

Ban the bomb forever more…!

So the ideological seeds of a larger protest and ideological movement were being sown from about 1965 onward. This combined all the above features and more that are loosely outlined above.

There was the emergence of Lesbian and Gay movements and their challenge to orthodox gender roles.

Many of my activists friends from this period are now dead. These were heroic days for cartoonist and the film maker Bruce Petty. Many friends and activists died in this next decade from drug overdoses, suicides and car crashes, as they lived their lives at 170 km/hr hour. The sixties gradually lost much of its heroic quality and became more existential. The best energies went into the emerging feminist movement

ll periods of history are different and have their own distinct and various truths and nuances, that are unique to the people who lived through them.

In the early sixties I was deeply involved with political battles starting with the Aldermaster Peace marches and the ‘Ban the Bomb’ movements in Australia. Later, I also joined the campaign against racism of Apartheid in South Africa. It was also the period of Civil Rights and a better deal for Aboriginals. Older protestors in those days wore suits and ties to demonstrations. I became regularly committed to left wing causes and I had an early involvement with the Australian Aboriginal struggles, ‘Hands off Cuba’ campaigns the anti-Vietnam War Moratorium movement. The early seventies saw the beginning of the Green Bans against mindless development across Sydney with Jack Mundey and his wife Judy. I had a passionate interest in the complex Great China experiment (that still continues). I assisted the birth of the contemporary New Left and the feminist movement, the ecological battles, and later the great challenges of Multiculturalism.

It’s been a long and interesting journey .Through all the changes on my life’s adventure I kept sketching and reading the world’s best literature and studying art, culture, and history and was open to many influences. As a participant and chronicler, the unfolding of events of the sixties did not leave me unmoved. The music from the period from singer like Tom Paxton still transports me straight back in time to committed young friends and our ‘demos’. It was also a time of emergence and accessibility of World Music and Visual Art.

Notes. This is the period of ‘The Stern Report’ of the severe global ecological crisis, but also of the achievements of the Genome Project and mapping of human DNA (albiet owned by private company copyright) the expanded use of the internet and the WWW great accomplishments. But also a time of significant ecological losses. A vast world of increasing inter connectedness in communication, but also of nation/state capitalist competitiveness for export markets, raw material and energy sources, that could lead to expanded military conflicts. The Pax Americana model of national relationships that ruled the world is now under threat. Culture from after the WW II until today is now being challenged by China, India and Asia with very ancient and very different cultural traditions.

New Aspects

China now has the largest number of internet users in the world-totalling hundreds of millions of people. 150 million Chinese have now entered the middle class. More people in China have been lifted out of poverty than any other civilisation or time in history. The Chinese will soon be the new power brokers on the block of history and they will still recall the wrongs dealt out to them by Western Empires. The rise of contemporary China brings both new hopes and dangers as does the decline of US Imperialism.

So this is a period of intensified crisis and paradigm shifts, where none of the earlier models of capitalism still apply, and yet, established power and privilege still remains in the hands of the power elites in the Western World, who created the crisis in the first place. They live within a culture of constant greed, waste, unending envy and ephemeral diversions.

How does a Multicultural artist deal with these problems of ‘paradox’ and ‘complex seeing’ in their art. It means that he or she will need a ‘philosophy’ or ‘philosophies’ that will function like a special light to find their way through these darkened complex fractured entities and processes

This is a world where nothing is what it appears and may indeed be its opposite, or as Shakespeare put it so prophetically and accurately in the C16th in his play Timon of Athens and in Sonnet LXV1; it will reflect a culture of paradox where ‘black is white and white is black and foul is fair as well as its opposite; and wrong is right; base and noble will be confused; old and young will change beds; what is cowardly will appear valiant and vice versa. Gilded honour will be perverted, and the urge to perfection will be distorted, human strength will be enfeebled and made dysfunctional, folly will be ubiquitous. No one will understand true simplicity and goodness as it will be caste beneath a shadow and always accompanied by a deep type of illness. Art will be made ‘tongue tired by authority’ as the bard puts it.

Essentially, Shakespeare gives us many things, but also a full vision of what human estrangement looks like in society.Our task is to update that model. (see appendix 1).These aspects are opposed to human beings finest sentiments and their humanity; but today all this has intensified and become a gigantic, malignant malformation.

The world is now full of a pox of contraries due to collapsing Capitalism. There has also been a culture of sophisticated avoidance within Post Modernism and Cultural Theory.

This selected ideology has also contributed to a culture of confusion. The embrace of Post Modern and Post Structuralist culture has contained little interest in ‘the human’, ‘the passionate’,evolving ‘fate’, nor anything which extends themes or subject matter related to’ love or amore,’ each of the deeper truths, tragedies, predictions of new, workable revolutions, healthy comedy, wise intuition, nor is there very much awareness of any major insights into life or reality or new kinds of ‘goodness or beauty ’nor is there an enchantment with existence itself.

Today, the paradoxical process of inversion of reified means and ends is being intensified. across the culture of the whole globe.

It could all end with the prophetic Catch 22 maxim ‘that only by destroying the earth could they finally save it!’

What we do need in our search for constants and essentials is an aesthetic or what the Germans called ‘weltanchauung’ or an aesthetic of worldly insight, or universal, tough- baked knowing which fits our new situation.

How far does one go back in a personal chronicle? I was born to Jack and Mary in late December as World War II raged. I came out of hospital on Christmas day in 1942.

The 50’s were decidedly different from the radical decade that followed it.

We all enter the human comedy from some oblique angle. It’s so enigmatic to glance back at photos of oneself in early youth, so ill prepared for the ‘trip of a lifetime’. Vulnerable to all the arrows and slings within a tough society, as I was living in the tough Western suburbs of Sydney. One became street wise very, very quickly. To establish a place in the pecking order, I had to fight with my fists, or anything else that I laid hands on. In this world I learned to run very fast.

Representational art works from the Period of the 50’s.

Background Sketches.

Australia like other unstable, pioneering and experimental Settler Societies has changed absolutely since the 1940’s, when I could recall the times when the steam trains puffed in and out of Central and Strathfield stations in Sydney, a time when the magnificent teams and rows of finely bedecked Clydesdale horses puffed their misty nostrils in winter morning effusions as they dragged and pulled the wagons of wooden beer barrels along Parramatta road into the city centre for the hotels of inner Sydney. A time when Sydney traffic moved to their distinctive heavy click, slip and clatter with the green and cream trams in fine and wet weather. Dank and dark toned, sooty Sydney, under rainy weather in those days was a very moody place, indeed.

There was a child who went forth
Everything that he saw, he became… Walt Whitman

With the help of my parents, I often retreated to the country for schooling and holidays. Then later in life I could leave from places like Balmain and Paddington to the country for sanctuary during many of vicious cultural wars of the times..These were hard-hitting for anyone with a sensitive nature, who asked essential questions and who could only survive some of the ideological wars by living outside on the periphery of urbane centres with its ideological control by avante guard, Post Modernist and other movements from the 1970s onward.

Growing up in Auburn and later going to Granville Technical School, I also became talented at art and a champion athlete and soccer player. I even playing striker representing the under 14 Sydney team in the mid fifties, when I was thirteen years of age. This made me very fit and gave have me a lot of confidence. It’s all important stuff as one looks back.

My artistic work and other creative projects have echoed a fascination from the age of twelve and thirteen years with the possibilities of Modernism when I was a student at Grannie Tech in Sydney’s West. I was assisted by enthusiastic art teachers such as Keith Mould and Ken Reinhardt, who were skilful and important modernist art educators in that conservative and xenophobic time in the Menzies era. A period I recall of innocence and brutality, but also of extensive ignorance when the rest of the world seemed so far away.

In my emerging Cornish Chronicle, I see a young teenager with ruffled blond hair who used to sell newspapers to Premier Jack Lang in Auburn outside the railway station in the fifties. I later painted a portrait of ‘The Big Fella’ in 1975 (see Portraits fig 3;).

My father fought in the Australian army against the Japanese in New Guinea and Borneo in World War II and looked like the actor Errol Flynn. He was a handsome, thin, dashing soldier in a great army coat in those days of the 40’s.

Back to the 40’s and it was another world. Even the colloquial language used was different. ?”

It was a world where time took so long to pass. From the age of ten, eleven, twelve years of age seasons slowed down to a snails pace. From the arbitrary division in those days of roughly between the right to wearing short trousers to that of long trousers. In a conformist society everything was regulated.

A different time but a world of tough, raw and resilient people.