End of year memorial: December

At the beginning of Dec I ran a stall at Hopsters Xmas Market which was useful as it taught me what works and what doesn’t in terms of display. I also applied to a couple of other markets and also to some galleries. Getting to Hopsters in Enmore was a trial as my train line wasn’t running and after the bus to Redfern I had to catch another bus to get to Newtown. I arrived early before the Hopsters doors had opened and was the first seller inside. 

One thing I would do differently (and I write about all this on the Esag blog) is carry less stuff. Because signage is key and my signage was terrible, there was anyway no reason to carry so much because most people never got to see it, they didn’t even know the bulk of the paintings were there. If I do another market, for example in The Rocks, I will be better prepared.

Coming up to the end of the year I did a series of all-nighters, staying up late watching Netflix. This allowed me to think outside the box and I rehung the flags, putting two of them upstairs in the studio (see pic below). The new arrangement allowed me to hang other things in the first floor hallway that are more suited to a confined space.

I kept on making art even though I was spending so much time watching TV. The TV jag was a remnant from my youth, I remember sometimes in Vaucluse staying up all night to watch the crap TV on at 2am but making it right through til dawn, and because I had consequently fond memories of this way of spending time it was easy in 2023 to do the same thing but this time with the more entertaining Netflix. I caught a series of great shows and discarded a whole lot of other stuff that didn’t suit me at 3am 4am 5am. At 6am I tended to tune into the ABC News channel.

On 4 December Think Renewables called me briefly to set a day for the installation, and this was organised to be done on 2 January. By the middle of the month I was optimistic the installation would go ahead due to the generally dry weather we’d been having. 

It’s not going to cost me anything at the outset. What happens is that the government pays a subsidy to them on my behalf and then I pay a monthly fee to a money handler named Plenti by putting money in my transaction account, which they debit. The guy who came around to get the sale is named Charlie, a Brit. He described how my quarterly electricity bill could be reduced after installing solar panels. He also said it would be double the cost if I got a battery, so I’m not getting it.

My quarterly electricity bill has gone up 100 percent in the last two years – even though the government said that electricity bills would go DOWN if they were elected – so it’s now worthwhile getting panels put in. 

I applied to a New York art show on about 9 Dec and was accepted so on 11 Dec paid the fee. I was busy around this time applying for space in galleries. The Holy Art show would be in March so I’ll write about it later once it gets closer to the time. On 15 Dec I contacted George Yuan a photographer I know and organised to go out to Ryde to pick him up so that I could get him to make better photos of paintings I wanted to show overseas. I later changed the plan and said I’d pick him up in Redfern, which is closer to my place.

The Holy Art show is one show but I also was accepted to have a poster put up in London on the Underground and for this purpose needed a good quality photo of a different painting. I got accepted by London gallery Boomer Gallery and they’d put up framed prints of works of mine in a show they are holding in January.

On 16 Dec I went to the opening of Tiliqua Tiliqua’s Christmas Small Works show where I had two works. It was a good crowd tho I arrived too early because I noted the wrong time when I saw the mention on social media. Plenty of people turned up and I had some good conversations with other artists including one young man who is also interested in brutalism. I showed him my website where I have a series of posts on brutalist buildings in Sydney but he didn’t get in touch after.

Around this time I updated my Bluethumb page and added a page with an outfit called Arte Laguna which is based in Venice. Bluethumb charges nothing for listings but takes a cut of sales, Arte Laguna charges for listing but … doesn’t take a cut of sales? I’m not sure but in any case it felt good to know that I had my work out there especially as I’d had such bad experiences getting help updating my name domain in previous years. I also set up an Etsy page.

I had a hilarious tragic experience on 18 Dec because I had to get bank statements so that my accountant could do my tax return for me. I’d shut the account in question in Sep ’22 but he needed to know transactions prior to that point in time. I offered to send him the statement for the bank account to which the proceeds were sent but he said “No” that wouldn’t be enough.

I knew that my online banking interface had no information in it so I took advantage of the fact that I was going out to drop by at the bank branch locally. I waited on a seat for 40 minutes then the woman who’d come to help me made a fuss about authorising me to even receive said statements. My mobile app didn’t work when she pinged it from the computer on her desk in the customer service area so I grabbed my trusty driver’s licence and waved it around long enough for her to snatch it out of the air. She scanned it in the keyboard, making a very nice swishing sound, then did not reject me, on account of which circumstance I was relieved. She finally did some tapping and typing mousing etcetera after which (and it took a good two to three minutes with me waiting literally with baited breath for her to say “No”; I’d already been refused by my accountant why not her as well, I thought to myself as I sat there trembling) she asked me straight-faced if I wanted the last statement – the one that would say merely “Account closed” – and I almost swallowed my tongue I was so dumbfounded, then managed to restrain myself enough to say “No”. In the end she printed out two pieces of paper with the requisite information. When I got home I emailed them to Woinarski, the accountants, feeling as though I’d just broken into Fort Knox.

On the same day I applied to another gallery for 2024 making Dec the busiest month for admin work since I’d started painting. I shouldn’t be down on Hopsters Market but it was so funny standing there watching people at Kath Harding’s stall across the aisle turn, look at my mess, and immediately turn back to look at her superbly presented works. I took important idea away from it, especially one tip: BE OBVIOUS. Signage is key, and in big letters so people don’t have to squint. 

The gallery I applied to on 18 Dec is Tiliqua where I was in the Small Works show they’d been mentioned to me by DRAW Space in Newtown, an outfit who’d refused my approach three days earlier. DRAW Space is artist-run but they seem more cliquey than welcoming of new talent, more like Articulate Project Space in Leichhardt, with whom I’d also been in touch. Commercial galleries can get a bad rap but at least they don’t have this closed-off feel about them sure they might reject you but at least you don’t feel like you’re taking a liberty by emailing. 

With all this admin work creative practice took a back seat, so it was a good time I think to take stock. I took stock at the end of the previous year and put making art on pause for weeks. It looks like it’s becoming a tradition because as I write my creative output has entered a hiatus. Instead I’m promoting what I’ve already made. I even sat down with an agent and though he didn’t say anything about my work specifically – he said it was good when prompted at Tiliqua Small Works opening – during a conversation with a mutual friend I was able to “feel” how my work had impacted him. I added this “feeling” to my other recent interactions and let it settle. I’ll let these intimations stew in company for a while, then maybe ask our mutual friend to solicit some more explicit feedback from this charming New Yorker with his poetry friends.

On 18 Dec I got good news having again been accepted to do a solo show at Tiliqua. I spoke with Basia about it and she kept on referring to the framing, I wanted to talk about the art but I guess I brought it upon myself when I answered “More framing gah” in response to her first clarion of congratulation. It costs money to exhibit, and this is especially difficult for emerging artists like me who might not sell as readily as prominent artists.

I’d actually been at the framers there on the same day as news came through because one of the items I’d reserved for son Vivian hadn’t survived being placed on the floor upside down. In fact one panel slipped off the hinge. As it was destined to jostle around in shipping I asked the framer to work out a way to make sure it arrived in Yokohama intact.

The Enmore show would be 30 Jan to 5 Feb so I didn’t have oodles of time to get everything ready, but I wasn’t really pinched either. In any event I didn’t need to get much framed for this show because Tiliqua has metal walls so a lot of what you hang can be hung with magnets. I wanted to do another stickering program as well, so made a mental note to make a design for the sticker. My friend Paul who did the bulk of the previous stickering was still out of town but would be back by the beginning of the year so I could ask him for help.

I got a shock early in the morning on 19 Dec when a WhatsApp message came from Arte Laguna prompting me to apply for prizes. I’d paid the fee after all. Unfortunately what I had not done was read the fine print. I answered the message saying that I didn’t want residencies, without being aware that more than residencies was on offer. I went to the relevant web page and quickly sketched out two applications for monetary prizes for projects that could be completed with the assistance of companies. It took 15 minutes and I sent a quick “Thank you” to Sara who’d sent me the text resuscitating my chances. I thought it would be wonderful to be paid for making the kind of art I like doing, at least an amount of money equal to the amount I had been spending. Early on 21 Dec Sara sent me another SMS and I went to the website and started a chat with an operative about my application, being now sure it was done properly. The hidden person told me that “Yes” it was all good so I rested easy once more.

I made a design on MS-Word for a sticker for the Tiliqua show using the same template as the one used for the show in November. I wanted to change the colours but also keep some elements of the design so that if people saw the sticker they might react positively on the back of the success of the Laerk Space show. Well, it was successful for me in any case, especially since I had capitalised on it to make winning pitches to The Holy Art in London, Gallery 59 in Goulburn, Tiliqua Tiliqua in Enmore, and Boomer Gallery in London. 

Small steps. I told Annie from Laerk about this and she asked for me to send the details in an email. At the time of writing this chronicle I hadn’t done that. I was so busy. I had to look after a friend’s Airbnb, I had been brought onboard as an admin for a Facebook group, and I was trying to organise a creative meetup for Eastern Suburbs Art Group. This last item was proving especially hard as I am a man and most of the people who want to make art are women. The idea of going to an unknown man’s house – convenient for me because then we didn’t have to worry about space, tables, parking etcetera – seemed like a major hurdle for the people who might benefit from the idea of doing art. I’d found someone with a group of acquaintances but she was busy over Christmas and wanted to meet before asking her friends to come to a meetup, even making an appointment for coffee was complicated.

As for me I was staying up all night doing admin work. On the night of 19 Dec I was emailing at 3am with Boomer Gallery who accepted two of my paintings for their ‘Dreams and Nightmares’ show. The next night at 2am I was again in conversation with their rep on the subject of framing, I decided to send digital images which they would then print and frame.  On the night of 21 Dec I was again in communication with Boomer re the transmission of images for the show (see below).

Social animals VIII, 2023.

Social animals III, 2023.

Wind chimes, 2023.

On the night of 20 Dec I found out I had been accepted by Artistcloseup magazine to feature, again with an associated upfront cost to me. I paid and then decided that the next day when Henry came over as well as getting photos of artworks (already shown) I’d ask him to get a photo portrait I could use for the magazine and the blog, which he did.

They’re gorgeous, he’s so talented. The man is a genius, managing to take a whole series of portrait photos each of which looks different. It’s incredible how much knowledge went into making the photos. 

Including the portrait photos the whole exercise only took about an hour. I picked Henry up from Redfern Station and dropped him back off there so he could get home. He sent me the photos via zip file from his computer.

I completed the Artistcloseup application this evening after getting home from a poetry reading. It took less time than I thought it would but then again I thought I did a poor job. They ask you to choose one of two templates with questions. You then answer the questions and submit the answers along with photos and links to portfolio shots. The final question is a section where you can write notes for the editors and I filled this out almost apologising for my efforts. I looked forward to getting back the first draft.

I also signed a second contract on this day for the solar power installation because they decided that they couldn’t do the job for the cost initially proposed. It was a difference of about $50 a week so I didn’t make a fuss about it. I thought if I did then the project would be unnecessarily delayed though I didn’t much like being asked to pay more money.

On 22 Dec I went out to Tiliqua to talk about the solo show and found out I wouldn’t have to get lots of paintings framed as they have some walls with metal backing. This allows you to use tape and magnets to hang unframed works, you attach little bits of tape to the tops of each panel and then when it’s dry apply a magnet to hold the panel in place.

I also discussed the World Pride show they’re having in Feb, which I’ll be in as well, happy about this news I hadn’t known before this day. When I got home I prepared more material for them, including photos of marriage equality rallies I’d been at in Sydney leading up to the 2017plebiscite. Later I dropped off boxes full of groceries to friends as I had too much following my trip to Ingleburn. In the afternoon of 23 Dec I went to the framers as a painting they’d rehinged was ready to pick up. I wished them a happy Xmas and brought ‘CAPitalism’ home, planning to send it to my son as it has an automotive theme. In the evening I did laundry.

I was still staying up late but not all night like before, I went to bed on 24 Dec at about 3am and got up at 9am the same day. I had an appointment to meet another friend in the city to drop off cucumbers – I had more than I could possibly eat – and saw someone reply to a comment of mine implying that I should lean into Christmas. The ghosts of the dead are with us, she sort of said, I don’t remember exactly what she said, oh here it is, she said, “we can feel the presence of those we’ve lost, reminding us that love transcends time and space” there was even an emoji in there. I took it on-board and promised myself to increase my follower count on X by one over the “festive” season, at least then I’d have something to show for myself.

When I was in the city I also stopped off at Central Station to check the ticket situation for my trip to Goulburn and found there’s a train on 4 Jan leaving at 7.15am with the trip taking about 2.5 hours. I was less optimistic about the weather for the solar install however as it rained heavily on Xmas Eve so I didn’t buy a train ticket.

Christmas Day I felt like an atom bomb had gone off in my soul. People were sending wishes and I didn’t know what to think. One guy I know put up a poem he’d written and it was so nice but I just didn’t accept its premise, the world was so riven by conflict and it was impossible to see a way to resolve everything. I was the little boy who put things away in the kitchen while mum was cooking when they were still needed, I had an inveterate need to tidy up, to put things in their places. I waited for the feeling to arrive, the one everyone needs on Christmas Day, I waited and waited unwashed my teeth uncleaned my belly empty. At least I had a cup of instant coffee I’d started drinking the instant left over from 2022 when a friend had organised a film shoot at my place, I didn’t want to spend money on fresh-ground coffee until January when I had more money in my cheque account. I was a wreck, but maybe this is what Christmas is about, a time not of plenty but of scarcity, when circumstances bring home the reality of life.

I thought of how Christmas reminds us of family. We might have lost family. We might be separated from them. But at this time of year we remember those times when it was together, the shared moments, the rubbing up against someone familiar. Like Mary and Joseph in the barn, a family together in a strange place, surrounded by unfamiliar things. They say that religion was once made up of a family, the head of the family, the wife, the son, the daughter, all being with each other in their own ways, the old animosities flaring up the silences the quiet remonstrances the messages sent without words I think of my daughter and her son their relationship she dotes on him he relies on her for everything even for comfort when he gets scared like when he saw my face and started crying. Family means something even hatred can give comfort when the alternative is just absence of feeling, I remember the cluttered kitchen bench where the telephone sat at home in Vaucluse where mum did her shop books, what kinds of things were on that bench behind the telephone recipe books, bits of wrapping paper maybe, receipts perhaps who knows all that junk.

These are the memories.

This is reality.

Now. Until the end.

I contemplate watching Netflix to distract myself something French Brazilian American people walking through rooms to meetings purposeful driven they have a reason to walk through those rooms I wander downstairs to get another cup of coffee I just happen to be in this room because this is where the kettle is the jar of instant the milk in the fridge. I make a cup of coffee and drag myself without purpose upstairs to my desk and write about sitting in front of the TV like a zombie because 2023 was the year I gave up reading I enjoy watching a political thriller from France especially because the French didn’t like it on Christmas Day I talk to no one entirely alone by myself sustaining myself on fragments of meaning little pieces of a puzzle I’m trying to solve what does it mean to be human how should I live where why celebrate what exactly in this world of punishment constant bombing shells whistling out of the air missiles whoosh what’s the point of religion if it can’t save us from this punishment we remember past punishment and yet repeat it love the crime scene shots in police procedurals the cop cars driving up beacons flashing the tape the pathologist coming over to the body talks with the inspector some sense finally after all the violence when will it ever stop.

On Boxing Day I got to see a photo of myself by artist agent David Hochberg (below) that he’d taken at my place before Xmas. It had been around the time of the Tiliqua Small Works Show as I’d first met David there.

In his Facebook caption he said it was a “recent” work but in fact – and I mentioned this at the time the photo was taken – the screenprint above my head was made in 1981. Not recent at all, very ancient indeed, dating to the time when I was still young and gorgeous. Never mind I do like the way my shirt agrees with the print. I still had to go to Tiliqua to pick up the artworks that hadn’t been sold, but first on 27 Dec I was going out to Bondi Junction to meet Suzanna Kertesz about a creative day we were thinking to organise.

I mentioned the visit to Simon Kahn who called me on Boxing Day at my suggestion, I desperately wanted to tell him everything that’d happened in the past few weeks because since he’s not on any social media I feel entirely cut off from him and he was the reason I got into painting in the first place. He was at work when he called but kindly listened while I listed events, then I asked him about his January show. The gallery had mucked up the tile for promotion, spelling his name wrong on the JPG, but he said they wouldn’t fix the problem until a week before the show on 10 Jan. If you’re in Sydney at that time the opening is at 5pm at Level 1, 115 Regent St Chippendale, a nice central location. One day only for the show so that’s the day you have to be there if you want to see Simon’s wonderful things. I felt sort of relieved once I’d spoken with Simon as I’d wanted to do so for a while and I’d been promoting my work for most of the month. I had done some painting in Dec but not much, most of my time had been spent on social media watching for leads and then responding to them. Should I have communicated with Simon more and if I had would he also have applied to some of the same things I applied for? I couldn’t know.

With so much happening in the first half of 2024 I thought on Boxing Day that maybe I should take a rest with all the promotion and start painting again, but once you get into the groove it’s hard to change. Doing things online becomes sort of enjoyable even with all the daft buggers out there spoiling things for reasonable people. The thing about painting is that even though it’s fun to do you do it alone, whereas with promotion you’ve always coming into contact with different people in one way or another.

I met with Suzanna Kertesz on 27 Dec in Bondi Junction (and got a haircut while I waited for her to arrive). We discussed a creative meetup with her group and made plans for 14 Jan in Newtown. In the evening Tony a friend contacted me and said he’d come over on NY Eve to have something to eat. On the same day I got a rejection from an art gallery I’d made an approach to. I’d had a sort of relationship with them 15 years ago as I’d bought art there, but my approach this time didn’t go well. At this stage in the year I was feeling a bit saturated with all the thinking about 2024 even though one approach wasn’t successful I did have two solo shows lined up, so the sensation of failure that troubled me with my old contact was offset by a sense of purpose. In fact I was having thoughts about making art with a different intention, my plan being that this time I’d have specific exhibiting opportunities in mind, whereas before I’d just been in pursuit of my ideal when I was making art. In the beginning art was something I did when I was alone. Now it had become something that I did with the cooperation of others.

Which method of creation is better is a matter for observation and discussion at a later date, with any luck I’ll address this issue in next year’s memorial. With any luck.

One thing was certain, even if I wasn’t successful every time I approached a gallery or applied for a prize it still felt right. Painting and writing poetry are what I was born to do, and nobody’s opinion of my work was going to change that. If I sold everything put on show or if I sold but one painting each time I opened up my practice to the public, it made little difference. 

I learned something else about myself in these final days of the year, that I am sort of addicted to text, and respond very positively to sustained and long narrative strategies by other writers. I was scrolling through Instagram at one point early in the morning on 28 Dec and I came across an ad for a marketing service that uses “Reels” on the platform, and it struck me that I find nothing less appealing than a movie or video with clips of text over it as subtitles, it’s far too slow I get impatient and want to know what’s to come next, I certainly do not want to watch another damn movie fr Chrissakes. This is just me, I’m entirely different from 95 percent of people who use Tik Tok in preference to Facebook, give me a long textual post to read any day of the week, you can keep your stupid movies thanks very much if I want movies I’ve got Netflix.

Happy New Year. To celebrate I want to reveal a project outline that will accompany me in 2024, it’s a series of paintings of dead family members. I want to exhibit the portraits alongside the photos mum got blown up and framed so that she could hang them on her apartment’s walls. I can also include sonnets I have written about some people who are now dead. I will call the show ‘Baker’s Dozen’, a term that was common when I was young, it belongs to the era of the Depression which is my mother’s era, she was born in 1929 the year of the Crash. 

And here’s something else to make a baker’s dozen (there are 13 blogposts in this annual review): the chart showing in graphical form the pageviews on ‘Happy Antipodean’ for 2019 to 2023. In case you’re wondering Annie from Laerk Space hadn’t got back to me by the afternoon of 28 Dec, but I messaged her in the evening.

As far as you’re concerned, if you’ve read this far, if you’ve read one or more of these End-of-year Memorial posts I sincerely thank you but hope that you’d go so far as to leave a remark, a “Like” or just Something that will tell me that you’ve been here and seen this. And I hope that 2024 is remarkable for you. Not just good. The Best.

End of year memorial: October

I went to Pixel Perfect on 3 Oct to pick up prints of photos I’d asked for. The photos that I wanted to put into albums dated back as far as 2007. Once I started doing the work on my dining table having sorted out which packets of prints went together it was a thrill. I felt as if I was seeing the images for the first time, they sprang to life and I got the feeling that I was walking down the street 15 years in the past. These photos are different from TEFA but led into TEFA.

With some of the photos the way I worked with my digital camera was to stroll through town snapping away and trying to get the photos to blur. In fact on a particular day marking one of the batches of photos I started out by going to an art show opening at a commercial space that is now closed called Stills Gallery. I travelled there on the train from where I lived in Campsie. 

I took photos of the crowd listening to the presentation given by staff, standing in a circle of patrons, and because the interior of the building was dark the photos tended to blur. I guess looking back – but I cannot be certain because I made no record of the event – that this functioned as a revelation. Once I got outside to walk back to the train I took more photos but this time I tried to make the photos blur, and I was successful so that now I have hundreds of blurred images taken on my Canon PowerShot A530 showing average Sydneysiders walking down a range of city streets – I couldn’t however reconstruct my itinerary if I wanted to, and I do want to – just minding their business being completely unaware (in most cases) that their image – though blurred often into incoherence – has been captured for all time. Even if they were aware at the time there is almost no chance that a memory of that event has remained in their memory. The photos are the only trace that exists outside my mind and even in my mind there is most of all a blank, hence the lack of a record in memory of the route that I walked to get back to the station.

I completed two albums in two days and ordered more albums online. It felt good handling the photos, hundreds of them, and used my printer upstairs to make labels to go on the fronts of the albums, describing what is inside. 

I also did something different as well, busying myself thinking up new ways to use longer poems in artworks. In the past I’d made “paramontages” – synthetic combines of photos and poems printed at the print shop, all on one sheet – and now I invented a new way, combining photos, poems and watercolours, each panel in A5 size so that they could be framed together as four individual points of reference. I put the panel containing the text at the bottom on the right to make it easier for people standing in the room to read the poem. I thought this would be a good way to get general approval for my longer poems, ones that people who’d seen some of the complex paramontages had rejected. 

It was great to have this epiphany, and to put the relevant files on a thumb drive so that I could take them to the print shop, which I did on 6 Oct, the same day I drove into town to buy ground fresh coffee.

End of year memorial: September

To make ‘The Enormous Family Album’ (TEFA) I brought down a small desk from the back bedroom on the first floor. I needed the desk to accommodate my computer, on which I had the titled files that had been used to make many TEFA prints. I’d plug my ancient laptop computer into the power and scan through file names looking for the right one, then write up a label on paper and paste it into TEFA because sometimes the only information I had about photos was in the file or folder name. 

I started doing this work on about 3 Sept when I carried down thousands of photos and dumped them on the dining table. I worked every evening doing photos (4 corner sticky tabs each photo) while watching TV, or at least I had the TV on in the background providing noise and company while I worked otherwise in silence. I think that I got the story straight, my aim to help the photos tell the story of the Dean da Silva Kewish Caldicott families – my family names, the ones I grew up with – so that I’d have something to pass onto the Yokotas and Matsumotos.

Yokota is my son’s last name, Matsumoto is my daughter’s last name.

I am the last of the da Silvas in Australia, the name subsuming Dean, Caldicott and Kewish. But Australia rejected us and we went elsewhere to establish families, me in Japan my brother in the US. The album is a chronicle of disaster stemming from my father, a malignant narcissist who, when he realised that both his children had run away out of sheer terror, went back to Portugal to find a replacement family there, even though growing up he had NEVER said a single word about any of them out there in a homeland he always seemed to despise because he seemed to hate his father. Dad used to make fun of my grandfather on account of Joao Luis’ bad English and he ridiculed things like temper tantrums not making any effort to understand “why”. Things like racism.

My Japanese family calls my father “P-chan” with “P” standing for “Peter” and “chan” being a familiar diminutive used noncommittally in Japan to refer for example to children or boyfriends. There’s nothing else to do, he’s part of our lives forever or at least for as long as anyone gives face to his memory but he NEVER once in the nine years that I lived in Japan made the effort to visit us where we lived. He could go to Portugal to stay for months to meet with family there but his own grandchildren didn’t get to see him unless WE travelled to a place that was convenient for HIM.

A sick joke.

Not a father.

The problem that P-chan offers is that everything had to be on his terms, he never met you even half-way. It was “my way or the highway” with P-chan, he was right and everyone else could go to hell. No wonder we left him alone. 

When I was working at Yamatake one time I was sent to the CEO’s office to do an interview and Ido-san was brusque if not dismissive. I slated this down to office politics because my work unit had sort of fallen into the class of being sponsored by a man in the company at a senior rank who’d been a competitor of Ido-san’s before Ido-san became CEO, and old animosities die hard I understand that. At the end of our ten minutes together he said that I should go back to Australia so my father could see his grandchildren. Ido-san knew my father they’d done business together. But though I would eventually go back it wasn’t voluntarily. 

I have spent most of my life trying to maintain a sense of agency.

TEFA started in late May and finished in early September but in reality because of the triggering nature of the exercise it’d been going on since 2019, when I went out of my way to buy dry-mount photo albums and sticky corners. I’d had them gathering dust in a cupboard.

On 8 Sept the day after sending TEFA to Japan I had regrets and wished I could’ve spent more time making it because I felt like an opportunity had been lost. My purpose in making TEFA had all along been – like with ‘Reminiscences’ – to capture and preserve. It seemed important to me because once a person is dead their memories are also lost unless they have first been captured somewhere in some recorded form, like a family photo album or a memoir, or else handed down via spoken stories. I’d lost so much when mum died, every week there were things I wanted to ask her but couldn’t. I didn’t want other people to feel my loss.

I missed my mother.

I was hard on dad in TEFA.

I miss my mother.

On 8 Sept I wrote a poem about memory, by this time in my life I had lived so long and had done so many things that it felt natural to talk about driving in the car in the mid-80s. I put nothing about that Ford Laser in TEFA, there were many things that I had left out. I comforted myself with the knowledge that my family would at least look through the album and discuss it, perhaps, among themselves. It seemed like the appropriate way to deal with life.

On 7 Sept I went to Sydney Contemporary and met with Mark Ferguson, who I knew from back in the 1980s, he was a friend of a work colleague. Nowadays he’s like me much involved in the art world, perhaps more than me. I got my invitation to the show from a northern rivers artist I bought collages from in about 2013. I don’t know where he got his invite from he told me but I forgot. On the way back home I caught the bus on Regent Street, here’s the cars streaming down the road from the CBD with their lights on, as they come over the rise their lights shine in your eyes momentarily until they pass by and go on toward Henderson Rd.

A busy stretch of road the council has just improved by inserting into it a new set of traffic lights for a pedestrian crossing south of where the photo stabs. The photo was taken looking north, the bus comes up the hill and pauses taking on passengers ready to progress down the road, I get on  the bus and ride it all the way to Botany and then get off it at my street, I’m usually the only person to get off there. Regent Street is quite another kettle of fish there are usually dozens of passengers waiting to get onto any number of different buses but I wish they’d put in a train line.

On 20 Sept I subscribed to X (formerly Twitter) it’s a bit of a process you have to add a form of ID, I used my diver’s license. The camera on the PC tries to take snapshots of the back and front of the card, it takes a bit of time to get things aligned properly. The reason I did this is because I saw a news item on the Guardian website saying that Musk would make all users subscribe and since I knew someone else badly wanted my handle I got in before it could be taken away. 

On this day Adelaide held her 100 days’ celebration at a restaurant in Yokohama (see photo below). I didn’t have any new videos to share so sent snapshots to some people instead. One friend said that Henri will be a chick magnet when he’s bigger.

I started ‘Dark alphabet’ on 22 Sept and finished the watercolour part two days later, thinking to add collage. I asked for advice on Instagram but got no response. By the end of the month I’d finished the entire thing and had it laid out on the floor for contemplation it was a mammoth task but I pulled through, the Posca marks I did in one session one after the other all 24 panels.

On 26 Sept I went to the framers to specify the items for the exhibition, there were 13 of them and I paid a deposit. The exhibition would be held in early Nov, with the opening party on the 2nd. 

My visit to the framers was to pick up some things I’d specified for my own use, and included things mum had drawn in the 50s and 60s. One of these things is a set of evening party cartoons that I got framed 4-up (four in one frame) and sent to Japan. Another was a set of drawings as photocopies for a fashion designer named Chris Jacovides (see pic below).

I chose a pink fillet for this item to add a feminine refinement, and a gold-and-black frame to give it distinction. Mum was a reader of fashion magazines all her life, I grew up with copies of Vogue hanging around the house (as well as House & Garden), and she sold fashion in her shop. I remember vacuuming the change room which was surrounded by dresses, not a curtain (the dresses were the curtain), the soft drapery of the garments adding mystique to a daily chore during school holidays. Mum was an inveterate communicator and had been the school magazine editor in her final year, she had also worked as a commercial artist for some time after matriculating. I do wonder if she was paid for her drawings or if she did it as a favour to a friend.

There were other items including a drawing of my brother when he was about 3 years old, and a photo of mum aged about 18. I have these in the hallway on the first floor where there were spaces. Another item still to pick up as the month turned over was a photo of P-chan as a small boy (see photo below).

End of year memorial: August

On 1 Aug I bought an Elanor chair from Plush because Ming said I needed an armchair in the living room downstairs, and Simon from the art group worked in a furniture store. Simon helpfully made up a quote and emailed it to the Esag account so I paid a deposit. Much cheaper than the place I’d been used to getting furniture from and from whom I’d bought my couch, plus with only a deposit needed on order I didn’t do too much immediate damage to my credit card. I’d just gotten a refund because the night before I orchestrated a purchase of clothes for Adelaide. One of her retailers had a sale but stupidly I picked the wrong colour for one item – a top – so had to cancel the order as international orders with Lucy & Yak cannot be changed. This is what the chair looked like when it was delivered (not in Aug) after a time lag of about 12 weeks. I put it here in Aug because I didn’t make a note of it when it arrived. You can see it looks a bit like a bear (Ming’s description).

The art show came together and on 2 Aug I paid the rental fee to Annie the gallerist. Simon organised for us to go to the gallery the following week to discuss preparations, and I asked Simon when Billy Lake’s works could be collected (she planned to go away). I did some weeding on 4 Aug because the yellow nutgrass threatened to spread in my lawn which had grown ragged with lack of care. On 1 Aug I’d also picked up the Etch-A-Sketch I’d purchased on Amazon for Henri, this was a request from his mother, who remembered using one of these toys when she was small, and on the 5th I realised I’d need to go and buy more coffee. I still hadn’t heard from the print shop or from the framers (both of them) but on two days around this time I had a couple of conversations with Adelaide and her mother about where Ada and Ryo and Henri should move to to be closer to Yukiko, who was providing critical support for the family. They canvassed possibilities including renting or buying an apartment.

On 8 Aug I went with Graeme Cordiner of Sydney Friends of Myall Creek to visit the shadow minister for Aboriginal affairs at Parliament House, which was interesting. It was a bit stressful getting through the security apparatus but I survived unmolested. The building is under renovation so I entered through underground and walked upstairs to get to the lobby where I waited. After leaving Graeme on Elizabeth Street following the meeting I caught the bus to Newtown to get my coffee, then on the way back home went to Broadway Shopping Centre to pick up mail. I also bought some low-carb snacks there. The letter in the mail when I got home was a nice surprise because it seems that the insurance company under which I’d cashed in my life insurance policy had decided to change the way they calculate the value of policies so I would receive extra money.

I spoke with Ada and her mother on 9 Aug and saw the activity gym I’d sent for Henri on 24 Jul. When it had initially arrived in Japan the bolts for putting it together had been missing so I’d been forced to go to Kmart again, contacting the service desk in person and asking, with the help of a photo of the receipt Ada sent, for what I needed, which the clerk behind the counter kindly supplied. I picked out some more soft toys with attachment rings and mailed them off. When they arrived in Yokohama Ada put the thing together and I saw a video of Henri playing with it. It’s hard to classify the feelings I have when looking at my grandson, he seems sort of unreal possibly because I don’t have to look after him, though when Yukiko and I do Zoom convos with Ada and Henri it can go on for a long time; luckily Ada has a Zoom account.

I got so busy for the rest of Aug what with the art show (see pics below) and making a family photo album that I called ‘The Enormous Family Album’. The art show ran from 17 to 20 Aug inclusive and I was in the gallery each day giving out room sheets to potential customers. We had one woman who showed an interest in Simon’s work but though she came in twice and sent her husband once the transaction never materialised.

End of year memorial: July

On 4 July I started using the new TweetDeck again because the classic version was ballsed-up and on 8 July I worked out the secret of Nabokov’s ‘Ada’ having read widely and having, in recently weeks, spent time with ‘The Blacklist’ a crime drama starring James Spader. The next day Basia went to the Blue Mountains and I dropped her off at Central Station. A few days later she went to Newcastle to be with friends so I had more time alone. I got a file from Stephen Whiteside a cousin on 14 July it was a set of reminiscences of about 20 pages made by great-aunt Madge including scenes from her childhood in Victoria in the teens of last century. It was especially poignant as it contained stories about my Henri’s great-great-grandfather Harry Dean, who I never met, along with rendered ideas about what it meant to be a child in the first half of the 20th Century. I sent the file to my family in Japan as well as to my brother and cousins then I set about organising the family photo explanations mum had made for me in 2008 or 09 when I was still in Sydney or when I had just moved to Queensland to look after her I think it was both it took a long time to get the captions made.

I understood things about myself so it was clear to me why I’d had to wait from July 2016 when mum died until July 2023 to get around to observing at close hand these photos and the associated text. It also took some work because mum’s handwriting is not always clear, and I spent a couple of days transcribing, saving the document to PDF before sharing with family and friends. Cousin Trish Allen told me that Madge’s recount had been made on the instigation of Uncle Geoff but as a young man – it had been finished by about 1979 – I never knew of its existence. Trish told me furthermore that it was Madge’s document that had started her (Trish) off on her own project, a short family genealogical history of the Deans. 

As well as ‘The Enormous Family Album’ (TEFA; see later in this memorial) in July 2023 I finished organising mum’s reminiscences, making an album. The photos below are from the album in question.

Above, what mum called her “domestic goddess” shot. Mum and her brother Geoff made these imaginative scenarios using a family camera. This is fabulous, like a Cindy Sherman.

Above: mum and her mother Bea in the CBD of Melbourne in the 50s.

Above: mum on her birthday one year looking grumpy.

Above: mum dressed up as a fairy for a school event.

Above: mum with snapdragons.

This project actually started in 2008 when I was living in Sydney before my move to Queensland. I had some family photos mum had sent and had photocopied them onto A4 sheets sending them back with an order to mum to write notes about each of them. It took a lot of prodding over a number of years – it wouldn’t have happened unless I kept nagging mum to sit down with a pen and write about each photo – before she completed this task, presumably in odd moments. It was when she was living in Beach Parade in her groundfloor unit; I do remember mentioning the task to her on occasion if I went over to make dinner (which I did every evening you must keep in mind).

It was in July that I got the notes in mum’s lovely fluid handwriting and transcribed them into an MS-Word file, then made an album with, for each of the photos, (1) the photo (2) the handwritten notes on blue or yellow paper and (3) the transcription. When I was making TEFA I also added to the ‘Reminiscences’ with sticky corners the appropriate photo in each case so the final product is layered and complex with artefacts betraying the existence of a process of construction that happened over time, in fact a number of years. I even didn’t order (much like TEFA) the photos chronologically, just leaving them in the order in which they presented themselves to me as I was making the thing. This contingent surprise might be destabilising for a reader, I appreciate that, but the degree of discomfort that such a state of affairs inspires in the casual peruser of the Reminiscences must be allowed to invoke the degree of discomfort that TEFA and the album inspired in me.

It wasn’t easy to go back there. You have to keep in mind that, as I mention elsewhere in this memorial, I am the last of the Joao Luis da Silvas to live in Australia. After me there will be nobody, the children and grandchildren growing up in other countries. This sort of displacement involves naturally a degree of pain. Something must’ve happened to make this situation real, it isn’t out of a sense of perversity (or maybe it is) that I left in disarray the order of entries in mum’s fantastic Reminiscences, that I allowed casual contingency to put its mark on TEFA, which has now BEEN SENT TO JAPAN as it is there that it can have most meaning. Fewer people in Australia are able to understand TEFA and the Reminiscences. The race of readers located potentially in Australia has been almost exterminated by forces beyond my control. Obviously if I had been able to preserve the traces of that forgotten people I would have done so, but it was not to be. They have migrated. I am part of a race of travellers. Where we will eventually end up is a matter for Fate and the Gods of jet propulsion to decide. It is not my choice any more.

The thing about the photos was that mum had never explained details of her life as she lived it  before moving to Sydney in 1962. Not with any with much completeness. In fact I had prior to reading her notes only the most basic knowledge of her Depression and War years. I find it hard to accommodate the feelings of disappointment I feel when faced wtih this lacuna, and ask just how hard would it have been to colour in the gaps in us boys’ knowledge of a formative time for the person we relied on most in our lives? Perhaps mum was ashamed of her associations in the years around 1945 when she was reaching maturity. Perhaps dad was jealous. Certainly from reading the notes I can see that she was an intelligent and spirited and independent-minded person. Perhaps dad was jealous of her boyfriends so she couldn’t talk about anything related to that time. I just regret that I didn’t do more while she was alive to preserve the past as documents.

On 19 July I contacted one of the clothing suppliers I had paid for goods to be delivered to my daughter because the package hadn’t arrived. In fact I’d left the wrong address when making the transaction online. The next day I went to Broadway Shopping Centre to get the car washed and picked up the rest of the Rousseau posters I’d bought. I also did some grocery shopping, bought petrol and picked up a newspaper to read while I waited for the car washing to finish. I’d gotten to the end of season eight of ‘The Blacklist’ and was feeling strangely melancholy, I had in fact brought along to read N Mailer’s ‘Harlot’s Ghost’ but in the end compensated for the feeling of boredom I had by reading a couple of stories in ‘The Australian’ it was enough to fill up a quarter hour or so of unclaimed time.

I dreamed of Pixie O’Harris on the night of 23 July and also of cutting shapes out of paper with scissors, shapes so complex I wished for finer scissors. When I woke up I realised that all those years ago my silent pleas for help had gone nowhere. I used to visit Pixie on the way back from mum and dad’s house on Sunday night going back to St Paul’s College where I lived in 1981. I would sit for a long time talking or not talking and I remember that Pixie must’ve gotten annoyed with me when I didn’t leave, they were probably tired by late evening and wanted free time before going to bed, but I just sat there looking morose. It occurs to me that Pixie never asked me if I still wanted to study literature, I did not want to, I wanted to be a painter, but it was necessary to complete the Arts degree to appease dad and because if I chose to be a painter it could only happen with the support of my family and doing that would’ve potentially involved dad spending money, something he had a natural aversion to. 

Nobody thought badly of my father I think though some family members had reservations (Uncle Geoff and cousin Chris’ wife Paula said things within my hearing once or twice). These were reservations that on occasion one of them might discuss quietly with me I seem to remember, but the general sense of most people in my world at that time – so long ago memories flit about like butterflies in a storm – is that people thought that dad was a good father when he was a manipulative gaslighting bully who always got his way. A malignant narcissist is more likely to tend to shut down discussion, at least serious discussion (jokes aside) by controlling the tone or direction of the conversation. If my art teacher said nothing when I told him I had to keep doing French because of the timetable clash in Year 11 then nobody in the family was going to risk incurring my father’s wrath by mentioning the fact that I loved drawing and was talented and that I should be given the chance to find my future in art.

Even in 2023 my dreams point me in the way I should have gone all those years – decades of boredom, failure, and suffering – all those years ago, those years! How hard it was how hard I tried to fit the mould set out by my father intent on making me into his own image. Of course I crashed. I burned, and now I need three different medications daily just to stay something like normal, and small exertion makes my heart race like I’m being pursued by a bear, and I cannot drive on many roads out of fear. I certainly won’t risk flying by plane to see my grandson so have to wait until the family comes here so that I see his little face. I routinely have to put up with people’s prying questions about this inability to fly – for why would a grandfather absent himself from his grandson’s side? – and I have to think up strategies to enable me to avoid such routines, they make me feel like a freak or as if I am disabled. Not that there’s anything wrong with being disabled (which I am) it’s just that I barely cope with this type of scrutiny from probably well-meaning humans. I get along better with dogs.

The irony is that if I tell people of my suffering they immediately try to downplay its severity, possibly on account of my circumstances. Yet this is who I am. I am a man who has been everything but mortally damaged by someone whose first duty was in fact to protect him just like I protect my own children, and now my grandson Henri whom I babysat from overseas in July via Zoom.

Yukiko, Ada, Henri and I did a four-way Zoom conversation on several occasions in July sometimes with me singing songs such as ‘Waltzing Matilda’ making him fall asleep. Another favourite – from my point of view at least – was ‘C’era una volta un piccolo naviglio’ which I learned when I was a teacher with COASIT back in 1985 teaching primary school students Italian. I still had the song on mute in my head to use whenever I wanted, so it came in handy because Henri didn’t like to be left on the floor alone and uncared-for. He likes to be with people.

End of year memorial: June

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.

End of year memorial: May

On 1 May Simon told me he’d entered a piece for the Waverley Art Prize, he’d just been unsuccessful getting hung with the Sulman finalists. I took items to the framers in Alexandria on 10 May, I’d just done another series for the show and we needed some things to photograph to send to the gallery for promotional purposes. The framer said they’d have them done by 31 May.

Ming and Omer came over on 11 May to eat dinner with materials they brought with them, so I had a treat. They also picked up a doona because the weather had turned very cold and I dropped them back in Wolli Creek after we watched ‘Clash of the Titans’.

I didn’t do any painting at this point in time but instead found a creative outlet writing poems. I also started to go through the drawers-full of photos mum had left when she died, there were thousands of them. I got out the albums I’d bought online in 2019 when I had been tidying up the library in the old apartment in Pyrmont, I still had the sticky corners for photos in a box on a shelf in the cupboard. Going through old photos was traumatic and after I did it for about two hours I was completely exhausted and stopped for several days.

On 26 May one of these off-days Amanda Edds the framer came to drop off some things she’d finished, including an old family heirloom, an embroidery made sometime in the 19th century probably, it’s a shame that mum never mentioned it because now it’s complete and preserved in acrylic and with its own lovely gold frame but it has little context apart from its unique Biblical elements. Well, unique in a way particular to my generation because I’m sure lots of women in the 19th century spent time making Biblical quotes as embroidery. I also got back a flag, a blue Peter, which great-uncle Elmer’s workmates had given him when he retired, he was a tugboat skipper I think, in Auckland Harbour. I put it in the first-floor hallway at this time but later in the year it’d move to a better place upstairs in the studio where it is further away from viewers. It needs space to be seen properly.

I bought more hooks because Ming was still putting things up on her walls and needed some. Amanda put in some D-rings for Ming under my guidance, two lovely watercolours Ming’d made in 2021 and that she wanted to have on her walls now. I gave Ming two photo frames that Amanda also put D-rings in so my friend could hang a photo of her grandmother on her wall, as well as a landscape showing where her grandfather’s house had been in Hunan.

On 27 May I was unable to fit into the trousers I wanted to wear for the day because I’d put on too much weight, so told myself it was finally time to get more pants. I was due to pick up the exhibition watercolours from Frame Today in Alexandria also, so promised myself to go later into town to buy clothes but in the end I did not go.

This is the embroidery a quote from the Bible Deuteronomy 33.27, it’s very warlike a section about a boy called Asher, the pictured verse goes like this:

The eternal God is your refuge,

    and underneath are the everlasting arms.

He will drive out your enemies before you,

    saying, ‘Destroy them!’

Wow, back in the old days the Dean women were tough (if it was a Dean it might’ve been a Kewish Macarthur Mcguigan etc). This is part of the Old Testament, it’s part of the Torah. I’m amazed and wonder who this woman was who left such an object. The chapter goes on to say:

So Israel will live in safety;

    Jacob will dwell secure

in a land of grain and new wine,

    where the heavens drop dew.

Blessed are you, Israel!

    Who is like you,

    a people saved by the Lord?

He is your shield and helper

    and your glorious sword.

Your enemies will cower before you,

    and you will tread on their heights.”

Who was Asher? “Asher was the eighth son of Jacob, and his name means ‘Blessed’ or ‘Happy’” eventually Asher and his brothers, angered by Jacob’s preferential treatment of Joseph, sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt where he went on to reach a high station. It’s sort of like ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ except no photo or video record in those days not even the very ancient technology of newspapers.

What interests me is the idea of prophesy, the fact that before Moses died it was decided by God that the Israelites should live in Judea, like who on earth could know that long ago? When I visited Israel in 2019 with Ming I became at least somewhat informed where before I’d had no parameters upon which to base my understanding of the region, we also went to Amman and then on to Istanbul. Back in Sydney having moved house I stuck the explanation I made on my desktop computer to the back of the embroidery using stickytape, a thoroughly modern technology, newer than newspapers. This was on 28 May and wasn’t done in a vacuum as I also attended to providing context for other things that had arrived from the framers, typing up labels and sticking them to the backs of other items also.

Some of them had been made a (long) time before, including a drawing made in June 2014 on paper with crayons. In the ensuing years it got destroyed with all the moving of houses so when I turned back with the intention of having it on my wall I had to use a JPG that I’d providentially put onto my computer and that I could use to make prints out of.

There were other prints that were from an even moment, in fact 2007/08 when I was settling back into a rhythm in Sydney after my catastrophically disastrous Japan sojourn. Now, in 2023, I typed up labels to go on the back of the works that had originally been made in Photoshop then had luckily been saved to JPGs.

Also on the Sunday I went to have lunch with Omer and Ming, Omer cooked zucchini and tuna pasta. Then I shot back home to meet with other friends, Yianni and Christine, the latter of whom had left her husband’s motor scooter to store in my garage. 

Christine had wanted to come over to start it up to keep the battery viable. Initially we couldn’t start the thing but then Yianni said why not look up on the internet to see if there might be instructions and we found a video which told her to hold down the brake while operating the ignition switch, and it worked so we wheeled the thing out to the street and Christine ran it for about 20 minutes. Christine and I talked about my new items as well as old ones including Pixie’s abstract in the middle bedroom on the first floor which Basia hates. 

On 30 May I went to pick up the hooks from my post office box and got the car cleaned, then drove out to Bexley to drop off some things. I promptly went home and ate food then Ming called and asked me to pick up printer ink from the shop, so I drove out to do that and dropped off in addition some spare hooks when Omer met me on the street so that I didn’t have to park. Unfortunately in the evening my regular Tues shows weren’t on due to the French Open taking up bandwidth so I instead watched ‘Bull’ and ‘The Inspector Lynley Mysteries’ on one of the Ten Network digital channels.