For the working artist today, those who aspire to make their mark on the vertiginous world of modern art, it’s all about establishing “your own creative brand”…the essentials of the trade in the 2020s means having a social media presence (selling yourself on Instagram, Etsy, personal blog, etc), growing an audience online, creating a portfolio of your work, networking with fellow creatives, perhaps joining an artists’ collective, attending art events, parties, anything where you can market your “unique” creativity. The two 20th century Australian artists—Ian Fairweather and Arnold St Claire—who are the subjects of this piece would in no way conform to the above contemporary artist stereotype. The two were non-conformist in their “career” trajectories, each producing distinctive work from the standpoint of the outlier artist, far removed from the conventional pathway of the successful artist.
Painter of unique pub murals: Not much is known of Arnold St Claire’s early efforts in art, but by the mid-1960s the resident of Campbelltown on Sydney’s southwest fringe was making a minor ripple as a budding artist, having been a finalist in both the Sulman and the Archibald Prizes. St Claire’s forte was large-scale murals and watercolour paintings. Already, in his (brief) artistic career, St Claire was showing a tendency to veer towards the eccentric and the unexpected, in the late Sixties he held an art exhibition in a Gordon (NSW) butchers’ shop, exhibiting some 35 paintings on display, surrounded by hanging carcasses of fresh meat. The Australian Women’s Weekly magazine in an article of the day dubbed this unusual cultural juxtaposition, “Culture — Among the Cutlets!”
But it was in his mural work that St Claire found his true metier. The interior walls of hotels provided the canvas for a good deal of his art, like the Railway Hotel (now demolished), a local watering hole in Queen Street, Campbelltown. Another interesting series of the artist’s murals can be found in the bar of the Criterion Hotel in Gundagai, NSW. St Claire immortalised Gundagai’s greatest natural disaster—the Great Flood of 1852 which killed more than 80 residents and just about swept away the entire town—rendering it into the story of the famous biblical flood scenes painted by Michelangelo. St Claire replicated the exaggerated forms and contorted poses of the mural’s figures in the manner of the great Florentine master. Other walls in the bar are decorated with murals depicting 19th century bushrangers who were associated with Gundagai and its environs, such as Captain Moonlite. Payment for the Criterion artwork was in the form of “all-inclusive accommodation” (ie, food and drink in ample quantities for the visiting artist). Another St Claire project around this time was a commissioned Christmas religious mural which he painted on the facade of the Symond Shopping Arcade in suburban Strathfield.
St Claire turned his deft hand to sculpture as well. His best known work in the medium was a sculpture of epic proportions, a spectacular seven metre-high statue of a rearing horse ̷a̷ ̷. This colossal, three-tonne equine carving adorned the forecourt of the Tourmaline Hotel in Vineyard (NSW), becoming something of an iconic landmark in the local district. St Claire created this free-standing sculpture as a gift for a Hawkesbury horse trainer friend of his (later the statue disappeared, current whereabouts unknown).
Though widely popular with people—considered by his acquaintances to have been quite a “wag”—St Claire was increasingly afflicted by the diseases of alcoholism and mental illness. Sometimes, out of such adversity, from harrowing personal experience, comes the lucidity to create something exceptional𖤓. In St Claire’s disturbing experience it seems to have prompted the realisation of the artist’s magnum opus. Admitted to the Parramatta Psychiatric Centre (now Cumberland Hospital East), patient St Claire painted a series of epic murals, floor-to-ceiling, on all four walls of Ward 8 (completed in 1971–72). These are murals of stunning originality, replete with bold colours and vivid imagery. The subject matter ranges from images of eastern religions and mythology from different cultures including Australian Aborigines to selected scenes from history ̷̷b̷ ̷.
⇧ Cumberland Hospital “Mural Room” ⇩
Arnold St Claire’s talent for art and his life was tragically cut short…the troubled Sydney artist was one of many patients subjected to the controversial “deep sleep” therapy notoriously and fatally administered by medical practitioners at Chelmsford Private Hospital, subsequently dying of pneumonia at Hornsby Hospital in 1974, still only in his forties.
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The bush hermit artist of Bribie Island: Ian Fairweather’s life journey took a different turn to that of St Claire’s, in fact it took many different turns ̷c̷ ̷. Born in Scotland, for the first two-thirds of his life the restless Fairweather had a peripatetic existence, roaming from one country to another across the globe. Wherever Fairweather stayed, he painted…profoundly influenced by Chinese calligraphy, several of the Mandarin-speaking Sinophile’s 1930s paintings done in China are among his best. Despite the dislocating lifestyle of constantly moving and not taking root in any one place, Fairweather still managed to do business, arranging for the exhibition (and sale) of his paintings in London (Tate) and in Australia (Macquarie Galleries).
The expat Scot finally anchored himself down on Bribie Island (S/E Queensland) for good…it was here that nomad Fairweather transformed into hermit Fairweather. The reclusive artist settled into a minimalist lifestyle for which he would become famous, both within Australia and abroad. The eccentric and often cantankerous artist constructed a rough, no-frills grass hut for his living quarters and pursued a spartan, frugal life in isolation, shunning crowds and publicity. For art materials, he scrounged together items wherever he could find them – cardboard, newspaper, toothpaste, (inferior-quality) house paint and the like.
From early in his career Fairweather started to use gouache ̷𝓭 ̷ paint—sometimes mixed with watercolour—a change prompted by discovering that he was allergic to oils. ‘Nutmeg sifters (Singapore)’ (ca.1941) is instructive in demonstrating this quality of opaqueness in his paintings, often applied to fragile or unstable surfaces (in this case, to thin cream tissue). This unorthodox method was very much the norm for Fairweather, in fact, in his entire career he only ever completed four works on canvas – in the 1920s.
Fairweather developed a painting style that referenced a smorgasbord of diverse cultural influences. The early inspiration from European cubism and abstraction was fused together with later influences gleaned from his extensive travels – including Chinese, southeast Asian, Aboriginal and Oceanic art. Increasingly, Fairweather’s compositions veered towards the abstract, the apotheosis of which is probably his 1958 painting ‘War and Peace’ with its layer upon layer of thick brush strokes, considered a work of “full Monty” abstract expressionism (usually though, in his abstract works Fairweather preferred to retain a human element in the painting).
Fairweather spent his final 21 years in the seclusion of his disorderly and bare-basic Bribie Island hut, mostly productively churning out paintings until illness precluded his capacity to paint. A measure of fame (and some decent renumeration) did come Fairweather’s way but characteristically the bush hermit artist seemed to remain indifferent to it. Almost immediately after he died—the same year as St Claire, 1974—the local council moved with indecent haste to burn the famous artist–recluse’s grass hut home.
𖤓 this is commonly labelled “tortured artist syndrome”, a widely ascribed theory which purports that great creativity/an artist’s best work occurs when he or she is in the grips of mental anguish or suffering
̷a̷ ̷ modelled on the conformation of a champion racehorse, King Tourmaline
̷b̷ ̷ in 1989 the then medical superintendent at the hospital wanted to whitewash St Claire’s unique mural room paintings but after the staff protested on mass, he relented
̷c̷ ̷ including service in both world wars – with an ironic twist: in WWI Fairweather spent almost the entire war as a POW of the Germans, whereas for a good portion of WWII he was O-I-C of a POW camp for Italian prisoners!
̷𝓭 ̷ a method of painting opaque pigments ground in water and thickened with a glue-like substance
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‘Arnold St Claire’, The History Buff, 12-Dec-2017, http://campbelltown-library.blogspot.com
‘175 Years of Mental Health – Episode 3: The Artist and the Mural, Arnold St Claire’, Western Sydney Health, (Video, 2024), www.youtube.com
‘Ian Fairweather’, Art Gallery of NSW, www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au
Janet Hogan, ‘Fairweather, Ian (1891–1974)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/fairweather-ian-10147/text17919, published first in hardcopy 1996, accessed online 9 June 2025.
ʰᵃᵐᵇᵘʳᵍ ¹⁹⁶¹ ⁽ᵖʰᵒᵗᵒ﹕ ᵍᵉᵗᵗʸ ⁱᵐᵃᵍᵉˢ⁾
(Photo: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
(Image: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)
Next year marks the centenary of the visit of acclaimed writer DH Lawrence to the Antipodes … the author of Sons and Lovers and Women in Love spent some 99 days on the southern continent travelling from its west to its east coast and writing the bulk of his great Australia novel, Kangaroo. The 1922 visit by the English novelist and poet has attracted new interest both within Australian literary circles and the general public over the past couple of decades. The tortuous saga of the vicissitudes of Lawrence and his wife Frieda’s house in Thirroul, NSW, after the Lawrences departed Australia, has been canvassed elsewhere on this blog site – “Lawrence of Thirroul: Creating Kangaroo at ‘Wyewurk’”, November 10, 2014.
(Image: Lonely Planet)
(Photo: Britannica)
In his lifetime Fleming never said definitively who the principal model for 007 was, but the consensus seems to gravitate towards a Serbian double agent Dušan (‘Duško) Popov, someone Fleming came across in the course of his own intelligence career. A famous scene in Casino Royale (Fleming’s first James Bond novel) further advances the association of the world’s most celebrated fictional spy with Popov. Bond’s besting of a powerful Russian criminal at the baccarat table in Casino Estoril (Portugal) in the book/film mirrors an exchange Fleming observed first-hand when the real-life spy spectacularly called the bluff of a boastful Lithuanian gambler in a baccarat game at the same location.
Popov stumbled into the espionage game after being arrested by the Gestapo. To get out of that pickle Popov agreed to spy for the Abwehr (German intelligence agency). While in England he was recruited by MI6 and turned double agent✫. During the war Popov managed to feed a steady stream of misinformation to the Nazis about the Allies’ movements, strength, etc. Most productive for the Allies was his role in Operation Fortitude – Popov helped to convince German military planners that the D-Day invasion of France would occur in Pas de Calais, not Normandy, the actual landing point. As a consequence of Popov’s disinformation, when Operation Overlord was launched in 1944 there were seven German divisions stuck in Calais and unavailable to the Reichswehr in Normandy [‘My name is Popov, Duran Popov’, (Marta Levai), www.0011info.com].
(Image: Getty)
(Source: 
Business-savvy Harvey sensed there was a gap in the market and in 1876 he clinched a deal with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (AT&SF)
(Photo: 
⌂ 1890s map of the Samoan Islands 🇼🇸 
After RLS’s death of a stroke in December 1894 after decades of ill-health, his widow sold up and returned to California. Since then, Villa Vailima initially housed the German colonial administrators followed by the New Zealand ones. After decolonisation it became the residence of the Western Samoan head of state. Finally, restored to its impecable state, it was transformed into its present incarnation as the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum on the anniversary of the novelist’s death.
RSL’s study and the smoking room are probably the highlights of the tour for several reasons…on display in the former is a bookcase full of original translations of RL Stevenson works. Even more impressive, it contains the novelist ’s original, solid wood writing desk (on which he wrote his last four novels). The pièce de résistance for me though was in the downstairs smoking room – a double fireplace had been installed (and never used!) It seems that the Scot wanted the “feel-good” reassurance of having a quintessential feature of his former Northern hemisphere life – irrespective of how incongruously impractical it seemed (and how puzzling to Stevenson’s Samoan attendants!), located in the steamy tropical climes of the South Pacific. RL’s wife Fanny had her own familiar reminder of home at the Vailima house, she had the walls of her bedroom lined with polished Californian redwood [Lonely Planet Samoan Islands, (M Bennett et al) (2003)].
By the 1930s it was apparent to all concerned that Fordlândia, Henry Ford‘s rubber plantation in the Amazon, had been a costly, massive underachiever. Ford however, to the unending frustration of his family, doggedly refused to pull the plug and walk away from the Amazon fiasco counting his losses. In 1934, instead of ditching the failing Fordlândia operation altogether, he retained it and at the same time poured a fresh pile of money and resources into a second Amazonian rubber plantation site.
Improvements in local agronomy
The Amazonian rubber venture by 1941 nevertheless did seem to be making some headway, there was in excess of three-and-a-half million rubber tree planted (mostly at Belterra), which by the following year had yielded 750 tons of latex [ibid.]. The Ford Company was optimistic enough to announce that it expected to produce 30 to 40 million pounds of high quality rubber from the Amazon by 1950 [Esch, op.cit.]. One thing in its favour, as a consequence of the world war extending to the Pacific, was that British, Dutch and French Far Eastern rubber plantations were now in the hands of enemy Japan and no longer commercial entities.
Iceland at this time was a sovereign territory under the realm of the Danish-Norwegian real union. During the hostilities, in 1809, a British trading expedition to Iceland was mounted by London soap merchant Samuel Phelps. Accompanying Phelps on this mission was a Danish adventurer with a dodgy past, Jørgen Jørgenson whose escapades in Iceland and elsewhere were to make him one the most colourful characters of the era.
Jørgenson’s coup
Three hundred years ago this coming April, London merchant-cum-journalist Daniel Defoe published his debut novel anonymously✱ – it was to become one of the most iconic and most imitated literary works ever…it began with a title page descriptor that read in full:
Once “cast on Shore by Shipwreck”, Crusoe, isolated and alone, is forced to make the best of a perilous predicament in an alien and challenging environment. His solitary, epic struggle in the face of hardships and the existence of threats from wild animals and the unknown elevates the story to mythic proportions. The myth is complete when Crusoe ultimately succeeds in conquering all impediments and fashions the island into his own “miniature Great Britain”.
2013: John Lewis presence in Westfield’s Shepherds Bush mall ∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸∸
Dalí practicing his mesmeric pose, with fellow Surrealist, Man Ray, 1934 ⤴
Hybrid Dalí, ‘L’elephant–giraffe’ (1965) ⤴
With such startling figures, leg-spinner or not, the selectors couldn’t ignore Tich forever. He was selected in an MCC ‘A’ tour to New Zealand in which he excelled on NZ pitches, followed by a full test tour to Australia in 1924-25 in which he made his debut at age 36. A combination of good, hard Australian wickets and the fact that Australian batsmen were brought up on a diet of leg spin meant that Freeman made very heavy weather of the series. Thereafter the national selectors choose the leg-spinner very irregularly. He did very well against South Africa and the West Indies, but was not considered for the tests against the Australians on either the 1926 or 1930 tours of the UK, despite getting a six for and a five for in the county games for Kent against the tourists. The selectors demonstrated a remarkable lack of perception in not showing a sustained faith in Freeman’s obvious talent and not backing him in tests, especially in English conditions. As things turned out, his record in tests suggest the magnitude of their error in judgement:
While he’s there, Hulot’s sister tries to match him up with her neighbour, a matrimonial project which is equally doomed to failure. The female neighbour is far too bourgeois in her tastes for Hulot, who is in any case a confirmed bachelor.
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Tati is a dab hand at noting all of the “modern inconveniences”(sic) of contemporary Western society. Mon Oncle is a sharp commentary on the way “modern life traps humanity within its contrivances” [James Quandt, ‘Scatterbrained Angel: The Films of Jacques Tati’, From the Current – Criterion Collection, 
Although the persona of Hulot is the human thread that runs through Playtime, Tati deliberately does not allow the popular character to dominate proceedings (as tended to be the case in Mr Hulot’s Holiday and Mon Oncle) [Kent Jones,’Playtime’, From the Current – Criterion Collection, 
George Wallace (above) had an early taste of the stage appearing in children’s pantomime at age three, but it wasn’t until after WWI that his career really took off when he teamed up with fellow vaudevillian Jack Paterson to form a knockabout comedy act called “Dinks and Onkus”. The duo performed their “couple of drunks” routine to packed audiences at the Newtown Bridge Theatre for five years before Wallace outgrew the partnership and joined up with bigger enterprises, first that of Fuller’s Circuit and then the Tivoli Theatre Circuit.
George was smallish in stature and quite chubby in build but despite this, on stage he was exceptionally acrobatic and agile on his feet. As part of his very physical act he became acutely adept at landing on his left ear during a deliberate fall. Wallace wrote witty songs and review sketches to perform in theatre, sometimes he told absurd stories about characters such as Stanley the Bull, the Drongo from the Congo and Sophie the Sort [Stuart Sayers, ‘Wallace, George Stevenson (1895–1960)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 
Wallace’s “working class zero” popularity attracted the attention of local film-makers and in the thirties he appeared in a number of films such as Gone to the Dogs, A Ticket for Tatts, mostly for Ken G Hall, Australia’s foremost (Cinesound) director in the interwar period. In his movies (some of which he co-wrote) Wallace reprised his theatre role as a bumbling, disaster-prone innocent. In his performances on the big screen Wallace demonstrated that he was able to make the transition from stage to cinema. After WWII however, finances dried up and the Australian film industry went into steep decline. Wallace returned to theatre including a return to pantomime and to the new medium of radio performance. In 1949 he began a weekly radio show with the Macquarie Network in Sydney. The one setback to Wallace’s career was his unsuccessful attempt in the early fifties to make it in the English theatre as a comedian, but this could be attributed partially to the English audiences’ unfamiliarity with his Australian accent [ibid.].
Rene had a very distinctive on-stage appearance, striking black-and-white face paint which gave a nod to the influence of minstrelsy, baggy pants and a battered black top hat. In performance he exuded an extroverted and even exhibitionist style – he was the quintessential lair (the self-promoting “show-off”). Often he would robustly insult the audience with a spray of obscenities, both verbal and gestural. In today’s milieu of political correctness Rene’s act would in all likelihood be characterised as sexist and even racist (in its presentation of a Jewish caricature) and it did alienate some viewers in the day. This did not stop Fuller’s from billing him (pre-war) as “Australia’s foremost delineator of Hebrew eccentricities” [Frank Van Straten, ‘Roy Rene 1892-1954’, Live Performance Australia – Hall of Fame (2007), 
After WWII, with variety theatre in recession, Rene made a successful transition to radio. He was able to do this having learned from the lessons of his failed venture into films, because he made sure that his radio shows were presented before a live audience to ensure that his performances had that necessary edge. At Sydney radio station 2GB he found a niche as the bombastic “Professor Mo McCackie” of “McCackie Manor” finding a whole new audience for his unique sense of humour.
So, how plausible is the link between “Middle Earth” of Lord of the Rings and the sleepy, little village of Hogsback? Clearly, as stated above, JRR Holkien had no direct association with Hogsback, having left South Africa at age three. Information on Tolkien’s life however, suggest the existence of an indirect link. One of Tolkien’s sons, whilst in the Royal Air Force during WWII, was stationed at Hogsback and did correspond regular with the author with his reflections on the locale. These correspondences from Tolkien Junior included sketches and descriptions of the Hogsback ambience [Ibid.].
Lawrence grappling with the menacing Kangaroo on the veranda of “Wyewurk”. ⍙ ‘The Struggle’ by Garry Shead (Wollongong Art Gallery)
Griffin’s inventive use of windows and fireplaces in Castlecrag won praise from admirers and provided inspiration for later Australian architectural practitioners. Not everyone however had a favourable view of the WBG concept of the model house. Many home-buyers were not attracted to the utilitarian plainness and the restrictive compactness of the standard Griffin house with its flat, odd cubic shape. In addition, the quite puritanical covenants concerning individual property use, whilst implemented to protect the natural environment and for egalitarian purposes, served to turn many would-be Castlecrag residents off.
The sales brochure of the Greater Sydney company (the Griffin’s firm) reads: “Castlecrag architecture has struck a distinct bold note in Australia. In place of the high peaked tile roofs … the handsome landscape style, with the stone walls and flat roofs, has been introduced in harmony with the great amphi-theatre of stone and forest”.
Early Griffin project {Carter House Evanston, Illinois}
