Interviews

Between the mid-1970s and 1992 the art critic Sandra McGrath recorded her conversations with Australian artists on cassette. 19 subjects, 47 tape sides, 29 hr 37 min of talk. They sat unlabelled on a shelf for thirty years.

Much of it is her working material. The interviews of the late 1970s sit behind her books — Brett Whiteley (1979), The Artist and the River with Arthur Boyd and The Artist and the Desert with John Olsen. The 1992 recordings are something else: after Whiteley died that June she went back out to everyone who had known him.

Every recording has been transcribed and the transcript is on the page with it. Transcription is machine-made and corrected against the audio, but not proofread by a person — expect the occasional wrong name. The tile artwork is generated, not the work of the artists interviewed.