Unstill Life: Art, politics and living with Clifton Pugh

368 Pages·2016·2.77 MB·English

by  Judith Pugh

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First published in 2008
Copyright © Judith Pugh 2008
The publishers have made every effort, without success, to contact the
copyright holders of the images that appear on the back cover and on page 28.
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Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
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Joseph Kinsela, with love and gratitude.
Clyde Cameron, with admiration.
Clifton Pugh, Rosemary Ley, Jan McKemmish.
In memory.
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
CONTENTS
1 Place 1
2 Family, before fame 8
3 Background 15
4 Portraits, in a marriage 29
5 Our art world 40
6 Retrospective 52
7 Guests, visitors, inhabitants 63
8 Violence 72
9 To be the nude 85
10 Power 95
11 Infl uence 105
12 Grass roots 114
13 War stories 125
14 Dunstan 137
15 1972 149
16 Loss 159
17 Strategy 169
18 Victory 182
19 Tone 190
20 Character 202
21 Abortion 214
22 Going on 225
23 Double dissolution 236
24 Grounded 248
25 Alive 259
26 Home 266
27 United Kingdom 281
28 Travel 291
29 1975 301
30 Consolidation 311
31 Party 325
32 Leda 341
Sources 352
Picture credits 353
Acknowledgements 356
Index 358
Image rights unavailable
1
Place
Sometimes on a hot, clear summer day, when the sky is high, there
is at Dunmoochin that astonishment of sudden revealed beauty. Then
the grass, the fi ne pale clay, the stones, the eucalypt leaves melt into
a shimmer of light, so that the detail of each element is lost in a haze
of palest pink and yellow and silver grey. Clif painted this one year
when we were very happy, when everything seemed possible, healing
even, and love itself. The show sold out, and I’ve never seen any of
the pictures again in auction catalogues or galleries. Perhaps their joy
remains with the families who keep them.
But mostly, the word for Dunmoochin is delicious. Its charm is of
domestic scale; tiny fl owers and birds, the trees a comfortable height,
the spaces between them laced with delicate grasses. There is always the
sweetness of the air and the song of magpies, easy walks on the gentle
hills.
It was such an ordinary day, delicious, when I drove up the pale
clay road from St Andrews and for the fi rst time onto the road through
Dunmoochin. The painter Margot Knox had told me about a place for
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Unstill Life
rent belonging to Myra Skipper. Myra and Margot knew I wanted
to return to the bush; we’d met when I lived in Research, Margot
agisting a pony with me, Myra, one day on her way back from a
painting trip, stopping to use the loo.
The cottage snuggled into the ground, cosy and welcoming. But
as my housemate and I walked around and talked about it, I knew
I would live on top of the hill. I explained this to Jan. She asked if there
was a place there to let. I didn’t know. The extent of this certainty was
limited. I just knew that I would live on the top of the hill. Up we
drove, to fi nd a rambling mud-brick house with an external gateway
consisting of a nineteenth-century entrance door. It had a stained-
glass surround and a bit of tin on the top to keep out the weather.
It was meant to be built in to a house. Door-as-gate worried me; it
always would. I understood that I’d live there, but further enquiries as
to what this meant were impossible: no one answered our calls.
I’d been teaching for some years, untrained, doing arts after leaving a
law degree at Melbourne. But in 1970, after a bout of glandular fever,
I was a full-time student again, sharing a house in Greensborough with
two fellow La Trobe University students. I had been senior resident in
college, at twenty-fi ve a few years older than Jan and Penny. They’d
come in wet and upset after a demonstration against the Vietnam
War and we’d made friends over cocoa and dry towels in my room.
They thought of me as conservative, and I suppose they were right,
although my reluctance to demonstrate was to do with doubt about
its effectiveness, coupled with distaste for crowds. I prefer broader
strategies, and directly to infl uence the political moment. But their
commitment made me want to act. I wanted to see Australia out of
the war, but my main concern was with schools. I had been teaching
in the poverty-stricken state-school system in Victoria, and wanted it
to change.
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