{"id":4653,"date":"2022-02-23T17:59:56","date_gmt":"2022-02-23T07:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=4653"},"modified":"2022-02-23T17:59:56","modified_gmt":"2022-02-23T07:29:56","slug":"feathers-orr-albury-drysdale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2022\/02\/feathers-orr-albury-drysdale\/","title":{"rendered":"GUEST POST: The Feathers, by Stephen Orr"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"The<\/h1>\n

Author Stephen Orr’s recent relocation to Albury has reignited a fascination with, and connection to, Australia artist Russell Drysdale. In this guest post, Stephen writes about Albury, about Drysdale, and their connection to Stephen’s novel\u00a0Incredible Floridas<\/em><\/a>.<\/h1>\n

Read on below.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Feathers<\/h1>\n

\"Albury'sWalking along Dean Street, Albury (Dean Street<\/em>, 1939, graphite on paper), I stop outside a brew house, ignore the drinkers (still Drysdale\u2019s drinkers), watch a few feathers caught in a pavement tornado, think it strange, then move on. This fascination with detail, like Drysdale, the details becoming finer and less obvious as you get older, learn to see between the cracks, higher in the trees \u2013 three Albury locals, one old bloke, another, his son, perhaps, busy on his phone. A Colonial-era bank baking in the sun beside a vacant lot, a trolley left uncollected; the 1928 red-brick ex-Tax Office (they\u2019ve moved to better digs, of course); the STOP signs under the stop lights (just in case); the impossibility of making a right turn, anywhere. Details. Late summer sun through plane tree canopies; old Albury with its wide streets, lovingly-kept Federation villas and Santa Ana medians, an epidemic of dogs (as finely clipped as the lawns). Sleepy evenings, like some sort of Australian Savannah, Georgia, the crickets in the creek, the possums in the roof, the long shadows and even longer conversations over fences, a mid-century idyl to which long-time resident Russell Drysdale keep returning.<\/p>\n

\n

Since arriving in Albury, I\u2019ve been searching for Drysdale everywhere.<\/h1>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Incredible<\/a>My obsession, of course. Having based my 2018 novel Incredible Floridas<\/em><\/a> upon his life, his art, a sort of deep-mown song of praise (mowers, all weekend, wherever you go) to the artist who is to me, the most Australian, the most maybe-what-we-are, or at least, were, and isn\u2019t that good, anyway? All because I started seeing Drysdale as a simple man, stripped of artifice and horsehair brush, standing alone in one of his ochre landscapes, waiting, listening, his early years defined by privilege (Queensland sugar money, \u2018Boxthorn Park\u2019), a suggestion (as he lay in hospital, sketching) that he had a knack for capturing form, the years of struggle, the painted-over canvases, the successes, the man whose prints hung in every dentist office and living room in Australia (I can still remember), before the tragedies (his son, Tim, and wife, dying early), the feting, the awards, his death in 1981, then time, and its vagaries.<\/p>\n

But all that aside.<\/h1>\n

Stranger, still, for me, to work out I was living five minutes\u2019 walk from his wife\u2019s family home (\u2018Banff\u2019), and a few streets further, Mercy Hospital, high on a hill overlooking town. It was here \u2018Tass\u2019 would walk (when the hospital was farmland) along Cowper and Poole Streets \u2013 along a path through a paddock (according to Drysdale\u2019s daughter, Lynne) with a bull that was a cow \u2013 to an old barn where he produced some of his earliest works as he shot the breeze with Donald Friend. Strange. I never planned to follow in Drysdale\u2019s footsteps, rattle the same rafters, drink at Brady\u2019s Railway Hotel or the Star (did he drink here?), the places where he saw (unstretched) cockies coming into town for supplies, or to take their family to the movies (Going to the Pictures<\/em><\/a>, 1941, oil on canvas). Or, most famously, draw soldiers waiting at Albury Railway Station.<\/p>\n

\n

But life has a way of connecting you to the people and places you once dreamed or read (or wrote) about, whose paintings you admired, songs you sang. As I walk, of a night, along Kiewa Street, as Drysdale did, the old oaks or elms or whatever they are, Albury High, a regional Versailles glowing in a hazy dusk, proclaiming its pride in the nearby bank-manager (as they were) suburbs. His footsteps. His thoughts, perhaps.<\/h1>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Often the real thing\u2019s nowhere near as good as the imagined, but here in Albury, it comes close. A furious little city, its people protective of something special. But perhaps too insular for an artist as world-minded as Drysdale back then, and now. Tass and his family tried their luck in Europe, but then came the war, and a premature return to Australia, and Albury. And it wasn\u2019t long after that Drysdale (rejected from the army three times because of a detached retina) started noticing the build-up of troops around town. He\u2019d been told, stick to the painting, that\u2019s what you\u2019re best at. So in 1942 he started sketching, then painting, troops waiting for trains in the 1881 palace-of-rail at the end of Smollett Street. According to Bruce Pennay: \u2018Drysdale humanises the war by placing the soldiers mustered at the railway station within the bleak impersonal surrounds of the huge building.\u2019 1942. Eighty years ago. But as I walk around town there\u2019s no sense of those times, of Drysdale, of Australian history in the making. But maybe I\u2019m missing it?<\/p>\n

\"AlburyFigures in landscape persist, and that\u2019s what Drysdale was on about.<\/h1>\n

\u2018Nobody seemed to be interested in the marvellous old towns and the clap-board buildings and the kind of life that people led \u2026 they\u2019re pretty monumental some of those people; they were the people I\u2019d known and I was terribly impressed with their stoicism in the times of adversity.\u2019 Cricketers and listening boys and The Station Yard<\/em><\/a> (1943, oil on canvas); flowers for Lynne and the 1944 drought sketched for the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em>; Sofala, Ow Dan, and soldiers, plenty of soldiers (and pubs). As this mirror to ourselves, to our pot bellies and frocks and Sunday shoes, frosts over. So maybe we need to rediscover the old artists, and writers. But how, when we\u2019re lost in American Dreams? How? When Drysdale and White and dozens of others are apparently old-fashioned, lacking diversity, and relevance. But I don\u2019t see it this way. Tass and his mates are still alive. That\u2019s why I felt the need to write a novel about them. To keep it going. The same streets, the same kids, the same dreams, the same sicknesses and deaths and suicides and babies and fears tossed around our heads during the long, hot, humid nights. The same few feathers in the same little whirlwind.<\/p>\n

Stephen Orr\u00a0has published eight novels, a volume of short stories\u00a0and two books of non-fiction. He has won or been nominated for awards such as the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Miles Franklin Award
\nand the International Dublin Literary Award.<\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Author Stephen Orr’s recent relocation to Albury has reignited a fascination with, and connection to, Australia artist Russell Drysdale. In this guest post, Stephen writes about Albury, about Drysdale, and their connection to Stephen’s novel\u00a0Incredible Floridas. Read on below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-for-fun"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4v1Of-1d3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4653"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4658,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4653\/revisions\/4658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}