Pictures 1969

Catalogue / Memoir
Introduction Pictures Objects Animations

PICTURES are both finished and ephemeral works made for animations.

1949----   1950----   1951----   1952----   1953----   1954----   1955----   1956----   1957----   1958----   1959----   1960----   1961----   1962----   1963----   1964----   1965----   1966----   1967----   1968----   1969----   1970----   1971----   1972----   1973----   1974----   1975----   1976----   1977----   1978----   1979----   1980----   1981----   1982----   1983----   1984----   1985----   1986----   1987----   1988----   1989----   1990----   1991----   1992----   1993----   1994----   1995----   1996----   1997----   1998----   1999----   2000----   2001----   2002----   2003----   2004----   2005----   2006----   2007----   2008----   2009----   2010----   2011----   2012----   2013----   2014----   2015----   2016----   2017----   2018----   2019----   2020----   2021----   2022----   2023----   2024----   2025----   2026----  

First humans on the moon, first day at art school

Tracing ancestors' footsteps

Flying free

On July 20, 1969, TV screens flicker in shop windows.
Pedestrians watch first humans walk on the moon.
I walk to the National Gallery Art School.

1969 Hand Drawing (self)
Pencil on paper.
Tom Roberts collection, Melbourne

 

Swapping notes with Ben Fenessy
about our experience as students
at the National Gallery Art School.
Watch on Youtube:

 

The Art School is in the basement of the Melbourne Museum and Library.
The same blue-stone building where I went for night classes from high school.
The same place Tom and Lillie went to study art.
Now a cafe open to the public.

Lenton Parr, the new Head of School, interviews me. He enrolls me that day as a full-time day student. I didn't have an appointment or anything. I just walked in off the street. There were some shenanigans going on at the school and a lot of students had left. They wanted more students and I wanted to be there.

I was lucky to have a scholarship and lucky to have no boyfriend to distract me from getting the marks I needed to get one. I was lucky to have my school friend Leonie. Leonie got me through.

At high school Leonie and I had been loners. We realised we were different. One day I stood up in class and announced that we were 'inverted snobs', with no interest in being judged by what people define as 'normal'. We were encouraged by certain teachers, like the historian and activist Humphrey McQueen who taught us History. He supported us when we wagged school to join protest marches.

From a young age I struggled with reading, writing and maths. Leonie and I were determined to leave home and study. Her home and mine were places of conflict so leaving home was a must, at any cost. We wanted to study English, French and Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. So we spent our final year at High School speaking French, writing diaries in French, reading and discussing the History and Philosophy of Science, and the politics behind the English, Australian and American literature we were set to read.

We lived and breathed our studies. We became experts in exam techniques, written and oral. We analyzed written exam questions thoroughly and answered them exactly as needed, and more, with loads of references from all our extra reading. We kept our imaginary examiners interested. We wrote to charm them. Before our French oral exams we learned colloquial phrases so we could sound like we knew more than we did. We listened closely to recordings of native French speakers and learned to speak fast with confidence. Leonie and I were the only ones from our school to win Commonwealth Scholarships to study for a Bachelor of Arts at Melbourne University, and we became fearfully proud of ourselves. We didn't have many friends but that was OK. We had each other and we had books to read.

At the time of the lunar landing I was in the middle of studying at university, and loving the intellectual challenge. But I knew I wasn't an academic. I knew I was an artist and wanted to go full-time to the art school. I actually wanted both worlds! I was in two minds about a lot of things at that time, and happy to just jump in and have a go at living different lives. Somehow I was able to be both a student at university and at art school, and a wife, a mother and teacher. I breast fed my son during lectures.

Things were different then. The scholarship I got when still at High School meant I could study university subjects for pure interest. No strings attached. There was no expectation of following a profession, unlike with the funding offered to people who wanted to be teachers. I imagined that as long as I could be free to think, write and make art, I would be happy working as a model, a house cleaner, a part-time teacher, and wife and mother, and not be pressured to conform to other people's expectations. Little did I know.

As my teacher Bea Maddock later told me, "Being an artist is a risky business."

 

 

1969 Blue Nude.
Pen, ink, blue wash on paper.
Made in life drawing class,
National Gallery Art School, Melbourne.
Ex Wesley College art show.
Private collection, Melbourne

 

At the National Gallery Art School Murray Walker taught printmaking. He taught me how to polish copper plates and engrave the soft metal with a burin. I was at this time also making animations, encouraged by Lenton Parr our Head of school, to explore connections between dance, drawing and animation, for understanding the natural world. So this little engraving is an exploration of how fronds of plants are moved by wind and water currents.

1969 Fronds. Copper engraving
Whereabouts unknown

 

Grandpa Ca had died and I lived for a time with Nora and her boarder David Carter, a glaciologist just returned from Antarctica, writing up his thesis.

Nora told me her mother Louise named her after Nora in Ibsen's play, The Doll's House, and that Louise hosted Fabian Society meetings at their home in the Kew Gardens. This made sense of Nora's position in my family, and of books she gave me to read and critically discuss with her, books by George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Rudyard Kipling, and others.

I still have those books. I dipped some of them recently apologised to my young, know-all, arrogant self, for taking on that superior attitude. I was in my 20s and thought I knew everything.

"Foghorn" was the nickname Nora's family gave her. I remember her voice well: a strong, deep sound I image could pierce through miles and miles of London fog. She described her voice as contralto.

I had got a scholarship to University of Melbourne and studied Philosophy, English, Italian, Fine Art, and History and Philosophy of Science, and also Fine Arts at the National Gallery School of Art.

 

I meet Carmel Bird in the Goding's house in Mount Waverley. Ian Goding was my boyfriend, our fathers were ham radio friends and I would often hang out there. I didn't know then how Carmel knew the Godings. I took it she was a family friend. Later I learned she taught Ian's sister Merri at the private school she went to - Presbyterian Ladies' College, Melbourne, I think it was.

It was just me in the house that day. I was in the basement sharpening pencils. When I heard the doorbell I ran up the stairs and led Carmel down to where I was. We spent the whole afternoon together. I drew her portrait with a newly sharpened 6B pencil. It seemed to us the logical thing to do. I felt perfectly at ease with her confidence and willingness to explore creative possibilities with an unexpected situation.

Carmel hardly spoke. I remember drawing the profile of a proud, steady-eyed, green-eyed creature with masses of golden hair like the mane of a lion.

If the drawing turns up among the things that came in the shipping container, I will place it here. If it doesn't I'll try drawing from my memory of it, with a 4B pencil.

I hope I find the drawing. I'll keep looking. In the meantime here's an animation I made years later with Carmel, with a figure that looks to me like Carmel as I remember her when we first met. I made it from a photo Carmel took and posted to me from Barcelona when I lived in Launceston (her birthplace). The photo shows a statue of a woman with the same look I remember seeing in Carmel that day we first met. More on that work later...(in 2021)

Sailing Girl prints and animation
Co-authored with Carmel Bird
For Flying Carpet
Women United In One Work2021

 

Here's an entry from my diary, for Saturday, 15th November 1969, to share with you something of how our teachers at the National Gallery Art School worked to expand our understanding of what art could be, beyond 'high art', academia and fashion:

Yesterday I worked for William Kelly [an artist I modeled for] for the last time until early Jan., 1970. He and I talked most of the time. He spoke to me of the importance of "Roadrunner" on T.V., Robinson Crusoe. As well, of course, Zen Buddhism. To understand our culture, these are things to be familiar with. You only begin to educate yourself when you leave school, he reckons. He and Lenton Parr can only now, he said, afford to proudly read such things as Martian novels! [Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles]

Kelly said something interesting too about young painters. All they know is that they want to paint, right? They couldn't know what it is to express something in paint until they've learnt their "ABC". And he spoke of "Abstract". Most of us at school, have taken Leach-Jones literally about the importance of this, and paint non-figuratively. Non-figurative painting isn't just another way of explaining "abstract" as Kelly's work, any good painter's work is above all abstract. The painting is a material, concrete object, but at the same time abstract.

A young painter must understand what "abstract" is all about, he suggested, whether this be figuratively or non-figuratively. He would like to see some of us painting bowls of fruit, or gum trees as well as the non-figurative stuff while we learn our ABC.

There was a transport strike, which I'd forgotten about, so I went and had tea with Merri and Queen's [college]. Ian came later and we went to Kathy Weiss's concert performance at Melba Hall. She was wonderful, playing Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich, Ravel. We went to her place afterwards and celebrated it all.

 

1969 Ian Goding playing Elgar 01
Pencil on paper.
Artist's collection, Sydney

 

1969 Ian Goding playing Elgar 02
Coloured pens on paper.
Artist's collection, Sydney

 

1969 Noel. Pencil on paper.
Artist's collection, Sydney

 

 

EVENTS

1969: Mining company Poseidon NL announces the discovery of a major nickel lode at Windarra, Western Australia. By the end of the seventies Australia is producing approximately 11 per cent of the world's nickel, the biggest producer being Western Mining Corporation.

1969: Standard gauge railway is completed, creating a complete and unbroken line from Sydney to Perth.

1969: Mount Newman begins iron-ore production, transporting over 30 million tonnes of ore annually through Port Headland from the world's largest open cut iron ore mine.

1969: The principle of 'equal pay for equal work' is established by the Commonwealth Arbitration Commission.

1969: Hair is performed in Sydney.

The Australian Almanac, Pub. Angus & Robertson 1985

 

Written by me, Lisa Roberts/Euphausia superba (Antarctic krill), on

20/04/2026

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