1970s

Night sky 1974

Cobwebs 1975

The Past master 1976

Autumn 1978

I was a sickly child with very bad asthma and regular chest infections, but a diligent student. I played sports to build my strength, and was a good sprinter. I studied art in high school until Year 10, but was not allowed to go further than that. I was fortunate to have the poet Flexmore Hudson as my English teacher all through High School, and won the Matriculation English Prize at Adelaide Boys’ High School in 1973. This was largely for my extracurricular reading and the development of a small portfolio of my own poems.

I left school and home on the same day, when I was still 16, and set about finding out about life. My first job was cherry picking, but I was fired for being subversive (ie asking questions about the sprays used on the fruit). I had to walk back to Adelaide from Cherryville (or was it Uraidla?).

I was quite ill with bronchitis and pleurisy a few times in the next few years, and was still a chronic asthmatic. I lived in a number of student digs and sharehouses, all the time expanding my number of paintings: some were quite good, and I sold quite a few over the next few years, but now I see they were woefully erratic. I lost interest in poetry as I got further and further into painting. I hosted a few of my father’s solo exhibitions in his studio gallery, and managed to learn quite a bit more than I had already by watching him paint.

Eventually I went to live out at Saddleworth, then at Ashton in the Adelaide Hills, where I had a wonderful studio on the side of a valley. I did some good paintings there, and finally satred to get over my health issues.

I moved back to the city, doing what jobs I could, house painting, more fruitpicking, then thought of establishing an arts magazine to publish and promote the work of so many aspiring artists and writers I knew, around 1978, which was the year I held my first exhibition, in my own studio in Norwood. With help from my brother, Michal, who was by then getting his sci-fi and fantasy drawings published in fanzines, we produced four issues a year for two years in a black and white format. We had quite a large circle of people involved, some generating advertising funds, some doing distribution, and a number of sub-editors dealing with differents arts.

After a year or two I was able to get some funding through divisions within the Department for Youth, and not long after started to get funding from the South Australian Arts Department and then the Australia Council. We worked very hard for very little, doing everything manually, in the era before computers and typesetting – that came along in the 1980s, after 8 issues.