National Treasure
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NATIONAL TREASURE A poetic Writer and poet Barbara Blackman brought up three children, nurtured her artist husband Charles’ gift, made their home the hub of Australia’s art circle and, she tells DAVID LESER, made her blindness a life corridor to a different sort of existence. Barbara Blackman greets me at her funny lot,” she says half-mockingly. “You two hours later, she gathers up cucumber, Canberra home wearing dark glasses and can’t cook the dinner, wash up, have a avocado, spring onions, walnuts and basil a Chinese cotton dress embroidered with shower, go to bed and make love unless from the fridge and begins to slice, spoon purple butterflies. A clump of walking you’re watching. I think it’s hilarious. I and crunch together a salad to accompany sticks guard the entrance. “Do come in,” think when the lights go out and you all the fish soup lunch that she has somehow she says, as she proceeds to escort me fumble and bump about ... it’s hilarious. managed to conjure up that morning. across her Persian carpeted dance floor I mean when there was a power strike in “People are so overwhelmed by what and into a room filled with music, fragrant New York recently, I had this wonderful they see,” she continues, “and they’re the smells and dappled light. “This is my idea of getting bus loads of blind people people who are dangerous for me to go English chest and my little teapot with and issuing them, one per household, to out with, because they might push me hyacinths,” she says, “and here,” leading run the houses until the lights came on.” under a bus or something. They’re so me upstairs, “this was my father’s bed, So you’re laughing at us? “Absolutely. preoccupied by the visual. ‘Down step, and here is my gallery of photos ... ” I think the fact that you utterly distrust up step, don’t trip ... ’ I’ll get myself there, The fascinating thing about this your hands ... sometimes I give talks and I tell them. Never broken a leg yet. guided tour is that Barbara Blackman is I say, ‘Hold up your hands. Apologise to “How do I know how much milk to btotally blind, and has been for more than these beautiful, intelligent parts of your pour into a cup? I can feel the change in half a century. Having said that, it would body that you don’t trust and don’t love the weight of the jug. You people have got be wrong to suggest that this disability and don’t use.’ Why are things only real to look and see how much milk you’re somehow renders her sightless. if you see them ... ?” putting in. How do you know when shoes If truth be known, this 75-year-old And as if to prove the point, she walks to fit you? Do you look to see if they fit ...? former artist’s model and muse, salon the kitchen to prepare coffee – taking the jar “If 30 people describe a painting ... Well, keeper, oral historian, writer, poet and from the fridge, measuring three spoonsful there are 30 paintings. You think you’re all-round national treasure, can see into the plunger, boiling the water, lighting seeing what other people are seeing. You The remarkable better than most of us, except the world the gas, frothing the milk, retrieving freshly are not. It’s part of your visual addiction.” Barbara Blackman, she sees is drawn from a combination of baked cake from the tin, taking the plates, at home. At 75, she is sound, touch, smell, visual memory, cups and saucers from the pantry ... doing here are some people whose lives as active as someone deep intuition and rich imagination. All it all by touch and spatial awareness. read like epic novels. They tantalise half her age and these provide her with, as she says, the Can I help you? “No,” she says matter- Tour imagination with stories of loss, refuses to look on gift for “seeing from within”. of-factly. “I have a pantry of the mind.” despair, adversity, courage, love, wisdom, ▲ her blindness as any “You sight-addicted people are a And just so there’s no doubt about that, non-conformity, a sweep of history ... PHOTOGRAPHY BY LORRIE GRAHAM. BY PHOTOGRAPHY kind of handicap. 82 THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S WEEKLY – JANUARY 2005 THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S WEEKLY – JANUARY 2005 83 Barbara Blackman’s is such a life, and not merely because, for 27 years, she was the wife and central muse of one of Australia’s greatest painters, Charles Blackman, the man she fell in love with just as the last light was fading from her eyes. That on its own could easily provide the stuff of fiction – the way she inspired arguably his greatest works, the Alice in Wonderland paintings, by having him listen with her to Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece on a talking book machine; the way they were to defy convention in the late 1940s by living together before they married; the way she could “psychically reach out”, intuit what he was painting and how he would, in turn, read to her, becoming her eyes; the way she managed to raise their three children without being able to see them; the way she and Charles partied long into the night with fellow painters, writers and musicians in what must surely have been one of the best salons in Australia during the post-war period; and then, of course, the way in which she eventually “resigned” from their marriage because she could no longer stand his alcohol-fuelled descent into oblivion. Charles and Barbara, with their children (from left) Auguste, Barnaby and Christabel, and So, yes, there’s enough here to tell a (opposite) Charles in his Sydney studio in 1996, with one of his Alice in Wonderland series. momentous story without mentioning “My mother read to me, which was a great bond between us. She was a wonderful, patient and loving reader. She loved reading to me.” what happened before and after Charles with Aboriginal people in south-east came to inhabit the world of women: six back to this inquisitive creature about 6/4/98 less reading than English or history. Still, Blackman erupted into her life. Except Queensland, making maps for the Lands grandmothers in all, one of them real, the their wartime experiences. It was the My dear Judith, she needed her friends to read to her, that would be the easy way out, and for Department. It was to this country that rest elected, adopted, foster, step ... and, beginning of a lifelong addiction to So you think that being deaf as all posts, which they gladly did. Barbara Blackman the easy way out has he returned when he learned he was of course, her own mother, Gertrude, with other people’s stories. blind as all bats, we should never meet Barbara became part of a burgeoning never seemed to be an option. dying. “He had a stroke and knew life was whom she lived in various communal “My life course was set,” she was to again. Dear friend, a kiss is still a kiss, cultural and intellectual life which was very limited,” Barbara says, “and so he houses and private hotels. observe later, “to become one of the last a hug is still a hug ... We have had to challenge the straitjacket of 1940s arbara Patterson started life, walked out of the house, leaving the front Even at three years of age, Barbara’s great letter writers ... and later oral good times, Judith, and it will be all Brisbane. She edited the literary youth literally, as a survivor. Sixteen door wide open, and he took my mother eyesight was poor. “After my father died, history interviewers.” good to the last drop, no matter what magazine, Barjai; flirted with communism; Bdays after her birth – in Brisbane and me down to live out his days with I immediately went into hospital under (In later life, Barbara would conduct bits fall away, went to public lectures on Carl Jung; on December 22, 1928 – her twin sister, Aborigines on Bribie Passage. That was my observation. I could never read very hundreds of interviews for the National I send you my love, Barbara attended poetry readings at the Ballad Coralie, died. For years it produced in earliest memories – campfires, clapsticks, much to myself. My mother read to me, Library Archives. She would also manage Bookshop; frequented the notorious Pink Barbara a dark vision of herself. “It used fishing, smoky bars ... ” which was a great bond between us. She to maintain, over more than half a century, By the time Barbara was 15, she had Elephant Cafe; and befriended a veritable to be an overriding thought for a long The death of Barbara’s father was was a wonderful, patient and loving reader. correspondence with Judith Wright, the started experimenting with her own who’s who of Australia’s emerging talents time,” Barbara says now, “that she emblematic of a generation of Australian She loved reading to me and I loved being deaf Australian poet.) prose styles and begun writing poetry. – poets Barrett Reid, Charles Osborne [Coralie] would have got it right and that women who had lost their menfolk in read to.” One surrealist effort saw her published in and Judith Wright; philosopher Jack I’d got it wrong; that she wouldn’t have World War I. Barbara is old enough to As Barbara’s sight began to give way, 15/3/98 the ABC Weekly.