WW | living treasure

Margaret Olley, 84, at her studio, a fl ower-fi lled interior full of a lifetime of collectables and clutter that inspire much of her work. remarkableThe Margaret Amid the eclectic clutter of her home – the source of inspiration for much of her lifetime’s work – iconic Australian artist talks frankly to David Leser Olley about life, work and growing old.

his is a rare moment. A gallery, shortly after his and satirist … although cool summer morning in octogenarian client’s sell-out exhibition. it must be said Humphries prefers to paint the winter of a national “It’s becoming increasingly dangerous. here, not eat, because he considers the house treasure’s life. This time There are now only tracks through the a health hazard, which it is. a year ago, Margaret clutter to where she wants to go.” A lunch invitation has already been issued Olley was stark naked in Being told this is one thing. Actually to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the day her living room, painting seeing it for oneself is another. Every room before The Weekly arrives with biscuits and and smoking, the strains of ABC Classic in the house groans with dusty catalogues, pink Asian lilies, Sydney radio broadcaster FMT rousing from her little transistor radio. piles of letters and photographs, fresh and Alan Jones has come bearing flowers and Today, the grand dame of Australian wilting flowers, rotting fruit, paint brushes, lemon tarts. A few weeks prior to this, art is dressed like a bag lady in the bottles of turps, cigarette butts, encrusted NSW Governor Marie Bashir dropped by dappled light of her Aladdin’s Cave, surfaces, not to mention a staggering array for a meal and before that, the governor- ashtrays still overflowing, her unfinished of exquisite sculptures, icons and original general, Michael Jeffery, came calling. canvases winking from every room, the works by masters and – in some cases – “The last time I cleared the table was for house a miracle of delicious, riotous, friends. And, in between all this debris and the governor-general,” Margaret says now, untameable chaos. treasure, in a darkened corner, a single proudly. (In fact, everything was just dumped “Have you done your homework?” bed where the 84-year-old artist sleeps. into newly acquired laundry baskets.) “I she asks shortly after my arrival. “I’m so “You are surrounded,” she points out cleared it all. I do it every so many months, pleased, because an awful lot of people to me, “by Degas, , a Bonnard then I find all sorts of lost items. I found don’t [before they come].” drawing, Rupert Bunny, Matisse over money. I found all sorts of things.” Margaret Olley might well ask there, Toulouse-Lautrec, early Justin A psychologist might choose to understand about homework, but on the subject of O’Brien, Fred Williams … I’m just going this apparent havoc by looking at her parents, housework she has no moral authority around [the room].” Joe and Grace Olley, who moved house whatsoever. This celebrated former hat We are in the living room, a sideshow many times, but refused to discard anything. factory of hers in Paddington, Sydney, alley away from the famous mahogany They might also note that, in November is a mess of such gigantic, outlandish dining table where the good, the great and 1980, a fire swept through Farndon, the proportions that her friend and dealer, the regal (real as well as self-appointed) family home in Brisbane, destroying many Philip Bacon, now worries for her safety. come to talk and feast – writer , of the treasures of Margaret’s life. “Her clutter. It’s the bane of my life,” artist , art critic Robert Hughes, As her biographer, Meg Stewart,  he tells The Weekly in an interview at his conductor Richard Tognetti, comedian noted two years ago, when her book, AMENDOLIA/HEADPRESS. © MICHAEL

2 | WW MARCH 2008 WW MARCH 2008 | 3 Left: Margaret and friend Barry Humphries at the Gallery of NSW, with the portrait of her that won the 1948 . Barry is holding Meg Stewart’s biography of Margaret. Below: Margaret, 26, with William Dobell in 1949.

“HER PAINTINGS ARE A REJOICING OF THE MOMENT AND THE SHAMBOLIC NATURE OF LIFE ... THAT IS THE GIFT SHE GIVES TO US IN HER PAINTINGS, IF WE SUBMIT TO IT.”

Margaret Olley: Far From a Still Life, was you to “tidy up”? “Hmm,” she says, might be someone [a member of the press] published, “Margaret rarely talks about the her rheumy eyes inspecting me with a looking at me looking at the painting. fire, [but] her losses resulting from it crop ferocious intensity … “my sister is the “I went away at the same time as Bill up again and again in conversation. For only one who says that remark.” [Dobell] won the prize and the press many years, it was a subject she simply And what is your response to her? followed me all the way. It was my first wouldn’t discuss. Not even sympathetic “Later … or I haven’t the time at the brush with the press. It went on for years, friends dared to bring it up.” moment. I mean, I would rather paint than until I got quite annoyed with it and found Today, when asked whether this cope with rubbish. It’s a question of, ‘You myself saying, ‘And I also paint’. I was stubborn refusal to throw anything can spend your entire life cleaning the known as the Dobell model and I would out stems from the fire or her parents’ house or doing other things’, and I would say, ‘And I also paint’.” example, she replies, “It would all add rather do other things, although I do have Margaret Olley had an eye for the up to that … [but] if people would only a cleaner who comes once a fortnight and visual from the time she was a little girl stop writing letters to me … [about 250 all she does is the floors.” growing up variously in the Tweed Valley a week] … They just come piling in and Does she blanche when she walks in? (she was born in Lismore in 1923), in sometimes I can’t cope.” “No, she’s Greek. She’s very good.” Tully in Far North Queensland and in And yet what grist for the artist’s mill – Brisbane. It was all there for the taking – a “magic cave of beguiling chaos”, as fellow AH, YES. MARGARET OLLEY. How does the blue butterflies and bottlebrush, the painter Jeffrey Smart has remarked, “Like one do verbal justice to such a powerful alamandas and Amazon lilies, the frangipani an exotic bird she has spread her motifs for force of nature? Over the decades, some and poincianas, the sugar cane fields and her paintings all about her – she doesn’t of ’s most gifted artists have tried the uncoiling currents of the Brisbane need to travel far to find a subject.” to capture her – not entirely with success – River, indeed, nature in all its rhapsody Barry Pearce, curator of the Art Gallery on canvas, among them , and involuntary instruction. of NSW, believes the “sublime jumble” of , Ian Fairweather, Judy Although she produced her first book the artist’s home resonates perfectly with Cassab and, of course, William Dobell, of drawings and collage in primary school, her personality, one which celebrates the who won the 1948 Archibald Prize for it wasn’t until 1943, at of 20, when ordinariness of daily life. “Her paintings his Rubens-like study of her. she’d enrolled at the are a rejoicing of the moment and the Margaret liked the Russell Drysdale in Sydney, that this daughter of a nurse shambolic nature of life,” he tells The one the best, the William Dobell the least, and Methodist farmer came permanently Weekly. “I think that is the gift she gives not because of the inscrutable Mona Lisa under the spell of painting. A lifetime of to us in her paintings, if we submit to it.” half-smile Dobell gave her, but because it awards and one-woman exhibitions followed, In other words, there is far more method turned her into a reluctant public figure. but it would take a retrospective at the Art to this madness than would at first appear. (More than 40,000 people flocked to the Gallery of NSW more than half a century “The whole house is a subject,” Margaret Art Gallery of NSW in 1949 to inspect later – in 1996 – for her to receive the explains to me now over freshly baked the painting.) kind of recognition she truly deserved. mince pies. “You see, everybody else looks “I couldn’t look at it for years,” she says “[Margaret Olley] is a painter of tenacity at all the piles of rubbish. Well, I don’t see now. “It took me years to really come and distinction,” noted , that. I just miss it.” around the corner [of the gallery] and make director of the gallery, “certainly not one  © NEWSPIX/NEWS LTD/3RD PARTY MANAGED REPRODUCTION & SUPPLY RIGHTS. RIGHTS. MANAGED REPRODUCTION & SUPPLY PARTY © NEWSPIX/NEWS LTD/3RD Do you get annoyedA if people ask sure no one was looking. I thought there to be diverted by any fleeting fashion. 4 | WW MARCH 2008 WW MARCH 2008 | 5 Left: Margaret poses in front of Russell Drysdale’s 1948 portrait of her. Above: Artist Donald Friend in 1987, a close friend of Margaret’s, whom she once proposed to. “I NEVER LIKED BEING OWNED. AND I NEVER HAD THAT NESTING URGE.” [She] is a part of that tradition, from most hateful thing about the whole become depressed. You generally lead up Vermeer in the 17th century to Morandi episode was he gave me crabs. I never to it and it is just the final straw.” in the 20th century – two of her most said who the father was, but … in my The final straw had come for Margaret admired artists – which finds inspiration, drunken, muddled mind, when I first around Christmas Day 2001, when the beauty and a rich spirit of humanity in the found out I was pregnant, I weakly and bushfires were ravaging Sydney and she most familiar of subject matter.” momentarily thought that asking Donald was about to entertain friends for lunch. Today, sitting in the theatre set of her to marry me was a solution. If he hadn’t “I had all the food at the ready,” she was living room, with the light pouring in from got into bed with me at Hill End that to explain later, “but then I felt I just her untamed garden, Margaret is more night, I never would have suggested it.” couldn’t do it.” alive than ever to the embrace of nature. Margaret’s alcohol-fuelled years have As Margaret fell into her dark pit, “People no longer listen to nature,” she been well-documented – from how she she was deprived of the comfort painting says. “If you want to learn anything, began having “a few nips” as a young had always given her. “I couldn’t paint. you’ll find it in nature. Like relationships. woman in order to overcome her chronic I had no energy. I wanted to kill myself.” One plant sometimes can’t grow beside shyness, to the manner in which her So now, when it hovers, I ask, what another plant. They require different dabbling accelerated into wild, drunken techniques do you employ? “Instead of nourishments … so they have to be episodes throughout the mid- to late-1950s. taking half a pill at night, as the doctors separated. Some like more sun or more (“I could drink anyone under the table,” she suggest, I take a whole one. I thought it shade and that’s the same with people.” once boasted.) Her painting deteriorated to had kicked in yesterday [the effects of Margaret speaks from deep experience. the point that some people thought she’d the pill], but maybe I overdid it.” Her life has been a free-spirited ride never paint again, until in 1959, with the through much of the 20th century (and support of certain friends and Alcoholics MARGARET OLLEY has probably been on into this one). Despite numerous love Anonymous, she finally won her battle with overdoing it most of her life. Painter, affairs – big and small – with people such the bottle. She has not touched a drop since. property owner, philanthropist, salon as art critic Laurie Thomas, former art “It’s either you or me,” she told herself at keeper, bon vivant, inveterate traveller, gallery director Hal Missingham, artist the time. “It’s either you or me.” she seems to run on rechargeable batteries Russell Drysdale (after the tragic suicides However, her depression, which was to not available to most other mortals. of his son and wife in the early 1960s), emerge 42 years later, was another thing, In 1971, at the age of 48, she visited, in wealthy bisexual English baronet and and today, on this cool Christmas Eve, one one stretch, Bali, Hong Kong, Kathmandu, painter Sir Francis Rose, and, of course, can feel its quiet, baleful presence in the Benares, New Delhi, Tehran, Isfahan, her most enduring love, interior decorator room. “Ever since the [sell-out] exhibition Persepolis, Athens, London, Paris, and theatre director Sam Hughes, with whom [in Brisbane in late 2007], I have been Marrakesh, Fez and Madrid, only to she lived for nearly 10 years, Margaret has hovering,” she tells me. “I went off and then decide she would do the whole trip never married, nor had children. had a good painting day [yesterday], but it in reverse. Why? So she could see the “I never liked being owned,” she declares hovers about at this time of year.” same places in winter. now. “And I never had that nesting urge,” A pregnant silence fills the room. Fourteen years later, she took a although she admitted on publication of her “You’ve come to a point of drawing teeth, six-month course in Egyptology, before biography two years ago that she had once haven’t you?” she suggests. Not at all, I setting out for Egypt via Perth, South asked her great friend, gay artist Donald reply, without confidence, hoping not to Africa, Zimbabwe and the Greek islands, Friend, to marry her. Despite Friend’s love break the spell. “I’ve been helped out,” only to then fall dangerously ill in Crete and regard for this “tender, stubborn, she continues eventually, “by Professor with meningitis. Instead of heading back intelligent, proud, simple and complicated” Gordon Parker,M who runs the Black Dog to Australia, she waited until she’d woman, he declined the offer, much to Institute [a facility specialising in depression]. recovered sufficiently in order to press Margaret’s subsequent relief. He sort of saved the day. He got me off all on to the pyramids. “I was determined “I’d had a drunken night with a man these things I was taking and put me on to get to Egypt,” she tells me now.  NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF AUSTRALIA. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA. AUSTRALIA. OF LIBRARY NATIONAL AUSTRALIA. ARCHIVES OF NATIONAL and ended up pregnant,” she said. “The something else … You suddenly don’t Today, at 84, she is still an

6 | WW MARCH 2008 WW MARCH 2008 | 7 Left: Margaret Olley’s Poppies and Lemon Squeezer, 2007. Below: Margaret in the “yellow room”, her favourite part of her famously cluttered home.

“OLD AGE IS A BUMMER. I THINK YOU’VE GOT TO BE STRONG TO BE OLD.”

irrepressible presence, surging down Duxford right hand to remove a melanoma. It was countless people – friends and strangers alike Street, Paddington, with her shopping just before she was due to give a public – whom she has spent hours counselling for trolleys, parting crowds at opening talk and complete a number of paintings their addictions. “I have a lot of people on nights with her walking frame – dubbed for the Brisbane show. “I just sat with this my list I have been trying to help for years,” “Moses” and coming replete with horn, [left] wrist up, painting away,” she says she admits now. “That seems to be far more cup holder and ashtray – attending and now, unconsciously imitating Renoir, who rewarding than doing a day’s painting.” hosting famous dinner parties, and, of perhaps did his best work late in life with So you don’t just live to paint? “[No], course, painting like there’s no tomorrow. brushes attached to his arthritic wrists.) I live to help. Well, you’re a miserable “Hurry, last days,” she has often person if you can’t help somebody else … remarked about herself, as if this life of MARGARET OLLEY has been known – people think I’m right of right. I’m not hers were a closing down sale. And why and adored – for many qualities during really. Sometimes I’m a pure communist.” not, when you consider that many of her her lifetime. As one of Australia’s most Her friend, Barry Pearce, agrees. “She’s beloved friends, painters many of them – generous philanthropists, she has been a socialist inside a right-wing figure. She Donald Friend, Ian Fairweather, Moya responsible for funding – or personally will help anyone. And by sheer persistence, Dyring, Russell Drysdale, Jean Bellette, donating to galleries – artworks worth more she has come through as a genuinely great Jocelyn Rickards, David Strachan, Justin than $7million. She insists she is only doing individual in the story of Australian painting. O’Brien – are long since departed. what her parents taught her was right and I adore her as a person and that adoration “I’m a realist,” she says now. “If I want proper. “[The amount] is of no importance,” runs through everything I have to say to do something, I’ve got to do it this year she says. “[My parents] gave and gave and about her painting.” or I’ve got to do it today. I mean, by the gave, not only to us, but to other people. And so, in these “closing down sale” grace of God, I’ve only got so many years I’d like to make [giving] contagious.” days, it is friendship and art that Margaret left, because the very end you don’t want To some observers, Margaret’s generosity Olley lives for as she follows the light to know about. of spirit might sit oddly with her strident shifting from one room to the other – “And the reality is, no matter how well political conservatism – her support for the through the love and clutter of this you are, or how ill you are, you really only monarchy, her long-standing opposition eccentric, fabled house – enabling her to have today. I mean today is the only day to welfare and arts bodies such as the harmonise with colours and create ravishing you’ve got. Yesterday, well that was an Australia Council, her Depression-era still-lifes that few, if any, Australian interesting one, but it’s gone. And tomorrow belief in the politics of self-sufficiency – painters have ever been able to match. hasn’t come yet, so you only ever have today.” and yet, today, she welcomes the election “I am 84 and still wanting to improve,” When I suggestM that there’s a grace and of a Labor government nationally and in she says finally, sounding almost surprised gratitude in this philosophy, she replies, every state and territory, as well as the at herself. “I hope so. I could fall down on my old departure of John Howard from the political Have you created your masterpiece, I knees and be grateful for so much. I’m scene. Only problem is she can’t quite wonder. “No, I have a few other things grateful for being here. And where would reconcile the appointment of a former rock I want to do. The thing is the enjoyment

we be without friends?” singer, ie, Peter Garrett, to the position of of doing. You’re always hoping that the ESPOSITO/FAIRFAX. BRENDAN COURTESY OF PHILIP BACON GALLERIES. ARTIST, THE THE PERMISSION OF WITH REPRODUCED I ask her whether she thinks there’s arts minister. “I’d like Maxine McKew to next will be better than the last.” anything to recommend old age. “Old age have the job,” she says. “I think she’d So it’s the striving? “Exactly. It’s like a is a bummer,” she replies. “I think you’ve make a wonderful arts minister.” plant. I mean, seed grass will lie dormant got to be strong to be old.” Bullish political views aside, it is until that slab of cement cracks a bit and (Just prior to this interview, Margaret Margaret Olley’s humanity that constantly then it will work its way up through the had both hands put in plaster because of a shines through her life and through her art. crack to the light and start growing. It’s

broken left wrist and an operation on the Anyone who knows her well can reel off the will to live, isn’t it?” ■ POPPIES AND LEMON SQUEEZER,

8 | WW MARCH 2008 WW MARCH 2008 | 9