The image above popped up in my Farcebook feed the other day, and triggered a headlong rush down memory lane. You see, forty years ago that was actually my job. In 1982 I applied to become the “exhibitions trainee” at the Adelaide Festival Centre Gallery, a position that was co-funded by the Arts Council of South Australia, and was successful despite attending the interview in a frilly white blouse, handsewn raw silk skirt and spiky black patent leather shoes. The reason I got the job? It was because when questioned as to where I would take an exhibition “in the country” I responded “to the agricultural show”. Dear me.
Looking back I now see just how ridiculous that answer was, and how little my interviewers actually knew about country life. Let me explain. Now that I no longer wear black spiky shoes (or frilly blouses for that matter) I know that country show time is all-consuming if you’re part of a small community. In between brushing that show steer until its coat shines, cutting your best dahlias and baking a cake to support the “hall exhibition” you’re probably also helping various small children prepare their exhibits of polished shoes, shell collections and “best animal made from vegetables and toothpicks”. If you’re riding on the day you’ll be up at 4am braiding manes and tails and giving your kit a last-minute once-over. I stopped participating in our local show when I began travelling to teach as a means of putting food on the table but early in the thirty years I’ve been living in Mount Pleasant I’d be organising the children and their various enthusiasms, loading sheep onto the trailer, picking a trugful of vegetables (somewhere behind the fridge there’s a dusty ‘Champion Vegetable Exhibit’ ribbon from the mid 1990s, though it’s more likely lining a mouse’s nest) and filling water bottles to get us through the day. The last thing on my mind would be the desire to visit a travelling exhibition amid the hurly burly of show day.
In 1982, however, I had no clue, and along with housekeeping duties for the Adelaide Festival Centre Gallery and various other exhibition spaces hosting events when I was appointed (in the middle of the Adelaide Festival of Arts that year) which involved such tasks as dusting forty or so stage set maquettes with a sable watercolour brush every third day I was given responsibility for organising an exhibition that would tour eight shows on the Eyre Peninsula. I designed a tunnel-shaped tent that I could erect without assistance and was given shape by lengths of white plumbing pipe and held taut by guy ropes at either end. Artist Tineke Adolphus (renowned for her intriguing inflatable tents made from spinnaker cloth) was commissioned to sew it, adding a rainbow serpent to the exterior and giving it nifty zipped semi-circular panels at either end so that it could be a “walk-through” experience or sit with its back to a prevailing wind if that were necessary. The Jam Factory loaned a collection of plinths for the tour and we borrowed works in ceramics, paper and textiles from various collections including the Crafts Councils of Victoria and South Australia for “Wrought from the Earth”. I was so committed to the proposal that I even purchased several objects myself (notably some blossom jars by Anne Mercer and a vase by Peter Andersson, both South Australian ceramicists) and included them in the show. I still treasure those pieces.
My initial contract was for a year and the idea was that my time would be divided equally between the Arts Council and the Festival Centre. In those days they’d “paper the house” for dress rehearsals/press previews in the theatres, so when I wasn’t driving a small truck along a dusty road or erecting a tent somewhere I made the most of those evenings. Silver Harris, the inaugural Gallery manager at the AFCT tasked me with purchasing a camera so we could properly document exhibitions and somehow this led to me becoming an occasional behind-the-scenes in-house photographer with the luxury of shooting rolls of film backstage when international visitors were rehearsing. In between she’d have me filling fifty brown paper bags with sand and candles and dotting them around her garden in preparation for her dinner parties. I wish I could find a photo of her somewhere…Adelaideans of the 1980s may well remember her sailing along on a be-ribboned bicycle, long red braids streaming behind. At the end of the first year I was offered a full-time position at the gallery, as well as one with the Arts Council. My roving heart (I’ve always liked wandering) chose the latter and by 1984 my position there had become pretty much the one described in the image that opens this post. Somehow I managed to develop a program of touring exhibitions and workshops to the regions, and from time to time I would commandeer the board room at the Arts Council to install exhibitions of work by regional artists in the city.
Looking back I have no clue how I muddled through all that. Administration is not my jam, and if something is filed in a cabinet then (in my mind) it no longer exists. My tiny office was a sea of paper piles, wall charts with complicated drawings and scrawled notes and a doodle-covered blotter. The only person in the building who had a computer was the finance officer and all of us (bar the general manager) had to take a turn staffing the reception telephone during lunch hour. We numbered twelve so it became a fortnightly experience, fielding calls and poking about with various “hold” and “speaker” buttons on the telephone. I remember often working quite ridiculous hours, driving all night to a location, pitching an exhibition, packing it back into the truck and then driving through another night to the next venue, but it was splendid fun. I learned to tie some seriously good knots, too.
Early in 1986 I was looking for new digs, having moved out of the 1950s apartment I had been inhabiting in St Peters. It was a lovely space, light-filled and situated above a shop (a travel agency that seemed to specialise in one-way tickets to Nicaragua and do most of their business after dark), but the noise of the main road never abated and it became unbearable. Creepy men knocking at the door at 2 am (apparently the former inhabitant had “worked” from home) hoping for an appointment were also becoming increasingly tedious. I’d been given a Border Collie pup on one of my regional tours of duty and almost the first thing I taught her was the command “speak up”. She shared my bed (along with a small brown cat) and it became a habit to whisper the command as soon as I heard feet clanging on the stairs. She would head to the door, barking and growling very effectively, but both of us liked our sleep and so it was time to move on.
An advertisement for a housemate in the classified section of the Adelaide paper caught my attention, and so began a friendship that has lasted to this day. On the day we met we were wearing the same colours (I had a purple t shirt and a black skirt, she was wearing the same style of skirt but in purple, and with a black t-shirt). There was a small, traditionally dressed Latvian doll on the mantlepiece which was instrumental in revealing our common heritage and I recall being utterly enamoured of her cornflower-blue painted kitchen walls. She was fine with the dog moving in, but uncertain about the cat…however such are the charms of Burmese cats that she acquired one herself later that year and has rarely been without one since. My new landlord was a skilled printmaker and freelancing that year, and so she joined me for a couple of outback tours.
The first was an exhibition of painted and printed t-shirts that we took on the East-West railway line with the R.I.C.E. (Remote and Isolated Children’s Exercise) team. They used to travel out to Barton and Tarcoola and several other fettlers camps in a special carriage hooked on to the Tea-and Sugar Train, providing activities for children in the outback, and a welcome social occasion for the teachers there, who would usually join in an evening meal on the train. We were allocated a carriage of our own, in which we hung an exhibition at one end and set up a print workshop at the other. We slept in swags on the floor of the exhibition space, leaving Port Augusta the night before our first stop. The banging from the shunting as more parts of the train were hooked up that night had us rolling about like caterpillars flicked off their cabbage leaves.
Our stop at Tarcoola is indelibly etched in my memory. Our carriage had been unhitched and we were to stay there for a few days while the R.I.C.E. people headed further west. The resident teacher took one look at the exhibition, abandoned the entire school (15 students) to our tender mercies and betook himself to the public house for the duration. In our innocence we had neglected to bring a first aid kit, so found ourselves bandaging the inevitable consequences of inexperienced students gouging holes in linoleum with sharp objects by applying scraps of toilet paper and masking tape to their punctured fingers. It wasn’t pretty but I think they all survived.
Each of them went home at the end of the day with a satisfactorily printed T shirt, and we went off for a wander around the mullock-heaps (Tarcoola had been a gold-mining town).
Yasmin Grass sitting on a hill near Tarcoola. I was in a phase of emulating David Hockney’s photo-collages…
I have no clue what it was that I am pointing at in this image*, but I wish my teeth were still as white (and as numerous).
We also took the printing project to Maree on the Oodnadatta Track, on a separate journey. There we installed the exhibition in a vacant house on the edge of town, and throughout the day various townsfolk wandered in, many of them leaving with a t-shirt they had printed themselves (some in rather questionable taste, but who am I to judge?) I still have a small sample shirt I made to demonstrate the process, featuring my dog Mucki, who was travelling with us at the time. My eldest moko was pottering about in it just the other day.
We stopped in the township of Hawker on our way north in order to interview a local artist who was producing detailed gouaches of bark textures from eucalyptus trees, I think because their work was being considered for an exhibition. The conversation flagged a bit and I found myself asking about the tattoos on their knuckles…and quite seriously enquiring more precisely about their method as they explained that they had done them while “confined”, using India Ink and pins. I’m hoping they didn't hear her shrieking “you seriously asked about what kind of pins?!” as we drove away.
I won’t elaborate on the text other than to say that the fingers of the left hand held a pithy epithet referring to sexual congress while the other was another vulgar four letter word, this time describing a part of female anatomy that does not usually see much daylight. I imagine several of you might be horrified were I to spell it out here, even though Geoffrey Chaucer, often described as the “father of English literature” had no reservations in that regard. What I do not understand is how that word came to have a derogatory meaning, when (with the exception of those of us who were surgically removed from our mothers’ bodies**) it is the portal through which we enter the world, and a warm, comfortable destination that more than a few heterosexual males seem keen to revisit and spend time in…but perhaps that is a conversation for another time.
This picture might reasonably be labelled “innocents abroad”. (I think Yasmin’s mother had made us the hearts.)
*In case you’re wondering about the lurid clothing, the photo was taken some twelve years before I rejected synthetically coloured clothes.
**I’m not quite sure where the apostrophe should go in this instance but doubtless one of you will enlighten me
In case you need more reading material (despite having come this far), let me point you to some other writers whose words I have been consuming this week
There is still time (we have an extra month!) to join in the ‘present’ project at Fabrik,and for those of you stitching along with me on a journeycloth, there are a few more videos behind the “wall”.