I went with Simon on 2 June to the Art Centre of Sydney to talk about the show and the following Monday the gallerist cancelled it, it’s still not clear why but it probably came down to an assessment of financial return. I was looking after Ming and Omer for much of the following week but did go to the framers to cancel the second lot of pictures for the show and got a partial refund (see photo below for one of the items in my bedroom above my desk; this would eventually be sent to Japan to hang in the family home there). On 9 June I went into town to drop off some negatives at Pixel Perfect so I could get proof sheets and maybe see about possible prints, and also went to Myer to buy trousers. In the afternoon I continued looking for newspaper cuttings for my planned album and miraculously found what I was looking for in my filing cabinet. In addition to the clipping about Emily Kewish and the footballers I found three cuttings about her brother-in-law Robert James. Emily was RJ’s sister.
It was a surprise to locate the clipping after all the years spent trying to forget the pain of losing my way, and I also continued on my endeavours to assemble a collection of photos for albums to send to Japan. For these I would need captions, and I found relevant material in the filing cabinet, communications between my parents and their niece, who seems to have taken over my filial duties in my absence during the nineties.
In the evening I took some things over to Ming’s place and sat with her for an hour or so chatting, she is currently on a quest to discover facts about her grandfather, he was a Communist from way back but was abandoned by the Party causing a good deal of grief for his family. He survived until 1999 however and Ming is his residual effect, she is dogged in her quest. I admire her fortitude and know because of the tears that his story creates sometimes the journey is not without its difficulties. Her case is different from mine in that the people of her parents’ generation are still alive, many of them, so she is in the possibly fortunate possibly unfortunate position of being able to speak with people who knew her grandfather, who was born in 1922. My own grandparents were born a generation earlier and my mother’s father died in 1954, the year mum and dad got engaged. Joao Luis was left behind in Melbourne when the family migrated to the Big Smoke of Sydney so I have only the sketchiest memories of my paternal grandfather.
I found the photos of my parents’ engagement party which was held at a house in Glen Eira Road, Caulfield. It was the Deans’ old house and for financial reasons Bea, my mother’s mother, was forced to sell it after husband Harry died, probably because he didn’t leave her enough money to live on, dad never forgot this failing and was skimpy with money all his life, I have lists of expenses in typewritten form, from mum and dad’s time in Queensland where they went to live out their last years.
That apartment will be in my album there are many gorgeous photos taken from the balcony overlooking the estuary. A long way from Wattletree Road, Armadale where Bea went after selling the house she’d brought up her children in. The following map shows the two locations, the southernmost one being the old Dean house and the second northernmost one being where Bea ended up living near the train line, I remember the sound of the train at night when my brother and I slept over at Bea’s house on the rare occasion mum took us south by intercity train during school holidays.
I submitted a picture to Bonhams for a valuation in preparation for sale at auction on 12 June, a Danish painting my great-uncle Elmer owned which was bought in New Zealand, probably on order as Elmer was a proud Dane. I had put the same painting up for sale on Facebook Marketplace but got no queries, it’s a landscape showing a house and trees, quite a dark tonal realist oil painting that I’d had cleaned about a decade ago when I lived in Qld.
The day before I found hundreds of precious photos I had thought had been lost irretrievably, photos from the 80s and 90s that are a part of me and that represent the first stage of artistic practice in my era of wage-slavery. Photography has this ability to free the artist because instead of needing a studio you can carry your studio with you (“camera” means “room” in Italian) anywhere you want to take your roving attention and its accompanying processing brain.
I stuck hundreds of photos into an album.
In 2019 when I bought the albums it had been four years since I’d moved south from Queensland. Now, in 2023, it was seven years since mum died and three years since moving to Botany that I finally got organised so that I could take on a huge task. To stick one photo or label down you need four corners, each of which has an adhesive back, and for the refound photos I used more than two packets, each packet containing 1000 corners.
The big news of the year emerged on 14 June when Ada’s baby was born at 49cm and 3.7kg after 26 hours of labour. They induced on the Tuesday and it hurt too much so in the evening they stopped and resumed the next morning. After going to the delivery room the child took minutes to emerge. Everyone greatly relieved. Ada’s mother kept me apprised of events on Messenger so I was up-to-date at all times. I told family and friends and Tony Macris videoed me on Wed night to have a chat which was nice. My brother said, “So smol” and my cousin Clare said that mum would’ve been beside herself with excitement. Clare also said that the child has long, artistic fingers and passed the news of the birth onto her brothers. I had ”likes” from family in Portugal as well as “congratulations” from people in Sydney who I’ve met over the years. I was just relieved that the ordeal was finally over and that mother and baby were ok.
In the photos the child looks healthy with lots of dark hair and a forehead that looks like his father’s. Yukiko told me that his eyes look like his mother’s when they’re open, in the photo I had it was hard to see the eyes, but his nose looked strong. I had one photo of the child on Ada’s chest just after parturition and another photo of the father holding baby. There was also a photo of the infant solo with his eyes closed.
I had an email from Bonhams on the same evening regarding the Danish painting, I was looking to raise money because of the expenses I’d had in terms of framing. Bonhams declined as in Australia they only sell Australian art and my painting was Danish. It wouldn’t suit their London auction protocols as it wasn’t valuable enough to ship. They gave me the contact details of two local auction houses that might be interested and I sent an email to one of them the next day requesting an estimate of value.
A kind of settlement came on 16 June when I went to the ultrasound clinic with Omer and Ming who discovered that she would have to have a termination. I’d finished the big photo album that I’d been making. Apart from the trip to the city it took about three days straight just sticking down the thin little transparent plastic corners. This was part of a larger project in which I was organising family photos to make an album for Japan, using prints in a chest of drawers that had been sitting untouched in the studio since I moved house in 2020. In fact I hadn’t done anything with the photos since mum died in 2016, that event still quite fresh in memory I felt as if I’d never get over it. On the day I came home from the city with Ming and Omer I stopped off at Pixel Perfect to get proof sheets, then at home had a look through and made another trip to Chippendale to order things printed. On 17 and 18 June I went through digitised slides on my computer and placed a large number in a USB drive so I could get them printed too.
At around this time 85 Bay Street Botany was up for lease (see pic), a wood cottage they’d had workmen in to paint and spruce it up the front verandah. The guy who’d previously rented the house was a scavenger he’d collect junk from who-knows-where and place scads of it on his front lawn. I’d sometimes grab something on my way past, plates or wine. I wondered what had happened to make the tenant leave his home.
Ming got home from the hospital on the same day as Ada, and the next day I drove to Davidson Auctions in Annandale with two paintings I inherited from Uncle Elmer. Space is at a premium in my house, I told the valuer, received my receipt, and got in the car on busy Parramatta Road to get home. Omer had destroyed my front door lock so on this day (20 June) I called locksmiths, some I’d been in touch with hadn’t replied, and I found a place in the CBD, sending photos I took of the front door. Joe from the locksmiths suggested a Samsung, I told him I didn’t care as long as it doesn’t break, and he laughed.
He called up a bit later as I was preparing lunch and asked if he could come out straight away, and I consented. He installed the lock and adjusted it so it would be easy to open, then showed me how to program it including the biometric function. I tried paying with a credit card but it didn’t work so we tramped upstairs and did the transfer on my computer, I told him I don’t do mobile phone transfers because I hate technology it always lets you down. It turned out he knows a friend of Joe Toubia’s and as I drove out to visit Ming he was crossing back over the road to talk with my neighbour standing in the driveway with someone.
On 21 June I paid my car registration which had gone up since the last time. I thought about all the car insurance ads for this company or that company and how clever they are with their little dramas, their music, and their pitches. I knew that ‘Gruen’ was coming back on the TV in 2023, it’s a favourite show of mine I love the way it dissects commerce down to its component parts it’s so incisive and informative. Trust the ABC to run such an oddball show, a show purely about TV adverts.
The day before I had had a revelation finding an old school magazine of Methodist Ladies’ College from the 40s mum had a poem and a drawing in it, the drawing had the map of Australia as a cloud and the poem, which was published when she was just 16, done in the style of Rupert Brooke. Naturally mum apologised to the poet in her subtitle, polite as always. The poem is about things she loves and it had me in awe, I was standing in the back bedroom on the first floor thinking about all the opportunity lost when this woman was made to run a gift shop all her life selling knickknacks to bored housewives instead of creating things. I’d also about this time put up scans of some ink drawings, cartoons mum made in the 50s and people were amazed, I had so many comments from friends and acquaintances. I felt a deep sense of regret as well as outrage. I sent the cartoons to Japan later on.
Some days before on 16 Jun Simon had just sent an application to Laerk Space in Newtown and had spoken on the phone with Annie the proprietor. He was aiming for an exhibition and said it might be possible to hold one on 6 July and on 26 June he messaged saying that she would be away on that week and that perhaps another week in July might work. I had my hopes up for an opportunity to show work publicly. What I stopped waiting for on 21 June was the name of my grandson, Anri, Henri 安浬 a lovely peaceful name full of hope. Henry’s great-great-grandfather’s name was John Henry Dean, he was known as Harry he died in 1952 and I never knew him but he was by all reports a lovely man. Henri is made up of “calm” (an) and “nautical mile” (ri) so “a calm stretch of sea” but on the weekend Ada complained to her mother about the baby not sleeping so Yukiko went over to her place to help out.
In my quest to give Japan a family album I asked a cousin in Portugal, Maria Celeste Bernardo, to provide names for a bunch of snapshots dad had put in granny’s records. I don’t know why he put them in a folder labelled with her name since she’d left Joao Luis in 1962 and then lived with us in Sydney but there you have it, I guess it was just dad’s way of keeping things organised, things that even tangentially belonged to granny had to be stuck in a folder labelled “Phyllis” and I wasn’t about to complain I had the snapshots after all.
Maria Celeste got back to me with names for about 30 photos, and I stuck the labels down on the morning of 24 June in preparation for making the album. I still had to get photos back from Pixel Perfect and anticipated they’d come the following week but that turned out to be premature.
My friend Basia came to stay in early July I picked her up from the airport on the first of the month. We had long chats and looked at my photo album (the one recently made, not TEFA). On 4 July we drove to Annandale to drop off two paintings I wanted to sell, visiting the auction house, then I dropped her off at the university and drove home. I also got an exciting email from the courier company used by the retailer of the clothes I bought for Henri online. A funny thing happened with this purchase that took up a lot of my time, I did the PayPal thing wrong and was debited on my cheque account twice because PayPal doesn’t work like regular banks. I felt it was my fault but when I think about it the messaging from PayPal was deficient.
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