Mandy + Peter Wright

Interviewer Testing 1, 2, 3. Testing 1, 2, 3. Interviewing Mandy and Peter Wright at Bellevue Hill, August 10th, 1992. I'm I'm just going to put some of this on tape, do you care?

Mandy Wright No, I don't mind. And we felt very strongly. At that time we felt, um, extremely sympathetic towards Wendy in terms of what she'd mastered in in her, well, 18 months away or however long it had been, because she'd done it in '84. She'd got off the the dope and then she'd come back, and then she'd been seduced by Brett again back into it, you know, which was a nightmare. And then, you know, she got on the booze when she tried to get off it, and Brett finally got her back into that clinic in London. She made the kind of effort to get off it again, fantastically. And Wendy lived in that halfway house and everything. And I always felt that when she came back to Australia, like, you know, the day she got back, virtually, Brett went and said, 'Well, you know, it's over, and I've got Janice.' And she never got any applause in terms of the family whatsoever, you know, for that kind of major second effort effort that she'd made. And, um,

Interviewer which was huge. And one of his kids...

Peter Wright The counsellors and so on... split. They both decided they could only come down in separate countries.

Mandy Wright Well, she knew about Janice. She did know about Janice, but I think that I don't know what she thought, actually. But I felt enormously sympathetic because I know that he arrived over there and he said, 'Wendy, no tears,' you know. 'I don't want any tears. Like, it's over, you know, really, I'd like to be friends with you,' you know. And he was so naive in terms of what he felt he could get away with in terms of settling her. He virtually said, 'Right, you can have the house.' He'd taken the best things out of the house in terms of his work, but said, 'You know, you can have the house and everything that's in it, and that's it.' Which was extraordinarily naive of him to do that, because in in this day of divorces, and we all know about it, well, you just don't do that. You know, they'd always invested in terms of his paintings. They'd never bought buildings or shares, or they had their family house and that was it. And they'd always kept the best of his work, you know, and that was the booty, as as you've talked about, I think, too, in that book. Remember in the divorce it was referred to as the booty.

Interviewer No, they weren't divorced in this book.

Mandy Wright No, they No, that's right. Well, they'd always referred to what they'd kept as the booty anyway. And, um, so we really sort of stuck our necks out, really, for Wendy. And really, which Brett always respected, you know. And our friendship never suffered with Brett in terms of us, you know, really being up for her. So we always still saw him. In fact, he'd sort of want to talk to us about it, because he knew we were involved from both sides of it. So we've had a tremendous thing over the last four years, which we were all fed to the teeth with, you know. Absolutely. And and that then it should end so tragically, when you were never sure with them. I mean, we came to be sure before he died, really, that it was definitely over between them. But when Wendy first came back, we always felt, 'Well, you never know. If she stays clean and, you know, he sees the example that she's setting and and she was very aware of that herself, maybe she can woo him back,' you know. And but that didn't happen. But they were always in communication, you know. And last year, I think it was in about October of last year, they actually took that trip together up to Port Douglas, and Brett was clean and they had a couple of wonderful weeks up there really talking again and trying to work out the settlement between them. They'd both realized that the lawyers, they weren't going to work out anything with the lawyers.

Interviewer Paying too much money. How much went down in the belly of the lawyers?

Mandy Wright Yeah, well, exactly. But anyway, it didn't it didn't work out like that, you know. So we're still so kind of embedded in the last four years that it's quite difficult still, you know, to kind of cast back all the other...

Peter Wright To retrogress it, to make it clear, make it past tense.

Interviewer I'm not sure. I I, um, heard, what I could hear, actually, it was not very clear, the speech that you made for the funeral, and I thought it was very, very good. You said at the beginning of that speech that you went to art school.

Peter Wright No, I said that I met him... No, when he was at Julian Ashton's, and I was still at school. When I was I was 15. No, but I was a kid sailing around the Middle Harbour, you know, in a little VJ and all the Bondi kids would go down to the Spit every Monday night for the meeting of the sailing club and then we'd all go up to the pub. I didn't drink, mind you, like you would gulp an orange juice and most of the crew, but Brett and Michael would be up there pretty well every Monday night, so...

Interviewer Which pub is that?

Peter Wright The Mosman Hotel.

Interviewer Why would they be at Mosman?

Peter Wright No idea.

Mandy Wright I suppose Brett lived at Longueville.

Interviewer Longueville?

Mandy Wright Well, it's all Longueville's quite close to Mosman.

Peter Wright No, it's miles away.

Mandy Wright Mosman's not miles away. I always think the North Shore...

Interviewer It's like you going over to Sussex Street for a drink from here.

Peter Wright Mosman was quite a kind of, um, mecca for the kind of, you know, teenagers, the kids there. There was the the Club Coffee Shop down the road, further down the road at the Spit hill, and the Mosman pub, so it was a bit of a gathering place. I think Newport was a gathering place, but, you know, Mosman was a

Interviewer a gathering place. See, that's the sort of thing I want in a book. I want sort of like a social course,

Mandy Wright history of the city and the artists and where they went and...

Interviewer I'm, you know, I'm not I know Wendy found it hard to believe, but I'm really not that interested in the divorce.

Mandy Wright No, well, exactly. No.

Peter Wright Well, it doesn't make years years of interesting reading, does it?

Mandy Wright Well, it's only a tiny percentage of the life, isn't it?

Interviewer Yes. But anyway, I hope she understands that.

Peter Wright Well, there must be thousands of pages of transcript to the divorce.

Mandy Wright Yes, there is. If you wanted to get anything, wonderful transcripts.

Peter Wright Amazing.

Interviewer Have you got it?

Mandy Wright I haven't, but I was there in court, and I heard them both, you know, being cross-examined and everything.

Interviewer It would be interesting to put in a bit of it, though, just to see how they'd argue over it.

Mandy Wright Yeah. Well, it is. I'm sure it would be fascinating.

Peter Wright Well, their versions of what had gone what had gone down in the marriage.

Interviewer Yes. Is that open to public, the transcript?

Peter Wright I'm not sure. I think it's the money aspect, is it, that's...

Mandy Wright I'm sure it would be, yes. You'd just have to pay.

Interviewer 25 dollars a page or whatever.

Mandy Wright Yeah, something like that. But I'm sure of I mean, yes, there'd be access.

Interviewer Of course, because sometimes they hand it out to newspapers.

Mandy Wright Mm.

Peter Wright Yeah, of course.

Mandy Wright I'm sure. And I think that would be very interesting to read, because, um, on Wendy's behalf particularly, because she spoke so well, you know. And Brett was really upset at the time and kind of and a bit out of it, as well.

Interviewer It's all a bit tense.

Mandy Wright And that goes through all their life.

Interviewer Must be hard for anyone to have to sort of do anything about that and just take care of it, sort of thing.

Mandy Wright Absolutely. And it really, you know, travels right through kind of all all the paintings, because she had to kind of prove her contribution in terms of the marriage.

Interviewer That is interesting, yeah. That's a good idea.

Mandy Wright So she has to really talk very seriously about her role, you know, beside Brett. And she spoke wonderfully. And I think that'd be a terrific thing to get your hands on.

Interviewer Oh, it would be, yeah.

Peter Wright We We came back especially like so Mandy could be with her to support her through that thing, and that was January '88 that started, they went into the court. So that's how long it's dragged. Yeah.

Interviewer Must be four years.

Mandy Wright Oh, it was awful. Agony.

Interviewer Well, let's go back to Mosman for a minute, can we?

Mandy Wright Absolutely.

Peter Wright Well, that that that was like, um, well, at that stage I was kind of destined to to go into architecture, they sort of decided I was going to be an architect, and whether it was meeting Brett and Michael or whatever, but I just... It was just one of those nights that just live on in your mind. And they were going to the zoo drawing the next day, which was a Monday, which was a Tuesday, which, ah, and said, asked me to go with them, but I couldn't. I couldn't go with them, because I didn't think you could get there. And it really kind of faded out after that, it was just one of those brief kind of encounters.

Interviewer Do you remember what year?

Peter Wright Well, I would have been 15 or 16, 15, so it would have been I was born in 1941, so it would have been 1956. Around about 1956, '57.

Interviewer Do you remember what Brett looked like? Was it the Mosman pub? Is that what it's called?

Peter Wright Yeah. Mosman Mosman Hotel.

Interviewer Was that the one on the corner there, uh...

Peter Wright Yeah, on the corner of Parriwi Road and, uh, Spit Junction. Spit Junction, it's called.

Interviewer Spit Junction, that's called. Spit Junction.

Peter Wright Well, the name of the place is Spit Junction. Well, that's what it was known as then, the Mosman Hotel at Spit Junction. It's at that crossroads where where it swings down to the zoo and then it turns left down to, um, the Spit.

Interviewer You know who owned that hotel?

Peter Wright Who?

Interviewer Martin Sharp.

Mandy Wright No!

Interviewer His family.

Mandy Wright Oh, what a funny thing!

Interviewer Didn't you know? I worked out with the whole family, the father... They owned about seven pubs, where is it, the Mosman and, and I don't know how many more, five or six more.

Mandy Wright Oh, well, that's Martin! Martin loved that, he loved that kind of synchronicity, you know!

Peter Wright So '56, it might have been '57 or '56, but the next... Anyway, whatever it was, it was the stimulus that I ended up not deciding I wanted to be an artist as well and not be an an architect. Ended up going to, um, art school next year. So that's all around about '56, '57, '58.

Mandy Wright You just You just give me three years now.

Peter Wright No, I was just trying to fix, because as I started at East Sydney Tech then with Ronnie Swann, I'd left school, started working, so I was probably 16 or 17. So that would have been '57.

Mandy Wright And Brett would have been Brett would have been in advertising then, wouldn't he?

Peter Wright I think he was working at, um, Lintas.

Mandy Wright Lintas, yeah.

Peter Wright And then I started working at George Patterson's with Ronnie Swann, and we started going up to Lyndon Dadswell to study sculpture. And then I started going to Julian Ashton's for myself. So that was then about '58.

Mandy Wright Because you said in in your eulogy for Brett that you actually you never saw him again after that, did you?

Peter Wright No, so I didn't see him again until he came back all years later. And you'd see Wendy around Rose Street and so on, but you wouldn't I I wasn't really that friendly with Wendy either at that stage.

Interviewer You came over and made up for it.

Mandy Wright Absolutely!

Interviewer So when did you really pick up as adults? What sort of...

Peter Wright Well, then, when he came back from Fiji in '69 or '70.

Mandy Wright Oh, it was '71, wasn't it? Because that was the year... Or was it '70? It was '70.

Peter Wright I think it was I think it was '70. It was around about...

Mandy Wright Because, remember, I left for London in March '70 and they arrived sort of at the end of March '70, about.

Peter Wright And they arrived soon after you left, yeah.

Mandy Wright Yeah.

Interviewer So, Peter, when they came back from Fiji, where were you living, what were you doing?

Peter Wright I was I was living in, um, in, uh, Jersey Road and Doug Gordon had a place there. Since I had a studio then, and I I'm just trying to show you, no, then we'd go away. Somehow we all linked back, like I was mates then with Kingo and Mick Glasheen, and I'd been living around South Dowling Street with them earlier.

Interviewer that that he gave to the gallery from that exhibition?

Subject I think so. He must have. Yeah. I think all the sculptures were in that show, too. The boxes with the, you know, the wombats, the shark sculptures. There was an enormous amount in it, wasn't there? It was a huge show.

Interviewer Huge show, wasn't it?

Subject Yeah, it was that whole big gallery of 19th and, no, it was the three major courts were all Brett's stuff.

Interviewer I get confused between the two shows, whether it was the Buddha and the Bacon upstairs and the Alchemy, and then, you know, that one.

Subject Yeah, that came after the Yellow House, that show. So this was pre-Yellow House, and that show was post-Yellow House. And that port- that portrait of me, do you remember, at Palm Beach, that was that was after that other show. And I was out of town when that, when Brett left, and Wendy was coming back from London. Yeah, I came back in, um, in December '71, and then I remember going to that exhibition to see the portrait of you.

Interviewer What, what else was in that show? Was it Gauguin?

Subject No, exactly, I really, I was... Well, that would have been the big Mao painting and that.

Interviewer That's what I think it was.

Subject Yeah.

Interviewer And the Rembrandt.

Subject It was called, yeah, it was called after the Rembrandt, yeah. It was called the Portrait Show.

Interviewer Yeah. Sure. And he had you in Chinese robes.

Subject He had me as a Japanese, a samurai, a Buddhist sort of...

Interviewer With a halo.

Subject Absolutely.

Interviewer Why do you, why do you think he gets so into, or how did he get so into Eastern religion and philosophy?

Subject Well, it was the whole push of the '60s, wasn't it?

Interviewer Eastern philosophy and religion.

Subject There was, there's that sense, satori and enlightenment. There was a notion of higher consciousness, you know. And it seemed to, Eastern philosophies seem to be more accessible than Western mysticism, because it wasn't that anyone who were unaware of, like, you know, St. Augustine or, you know, William Blake, or those sort of people, or Meister Eckhart, which was, I've never quite... Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game?

Interviewer What do you mean, Hermann Hesse and The Glass Bead Game? What's that mean?

Subject Well, that was all that sort of mystic stuff, you know, towards the end of the '60s.

Interviewer No, I don't know what The Glass Bead Game is.

Subject It was all being propagated furiously.

Interviewer Now what was The Glass Bead Game?

Subject The Glass Bead Game was a game, one of Hermann Hesse's books called The Glass Bead Game, which was an intellectual game where it was at the end of the world when all creative work had ceased, and it was postmodernism, in fact. It was a perfect description of it, of appropriation. And that the art, they'd all become this Magister Ludi, or these masters of the game, who would sit around in kind of very elite circles, and everyone would throw in a kind of, they'd be saying, "Oh, what's the second, the second movement of the Bach Double Cello Concerto?" and they'd say, "Oh yes, and that, that, that line of Henry James's, you know, on page 416," and so on, so. And they'd reconcoct, you know, these amazing kind of aesthetic experiences like Des Esseintes, you know, like that. Who was that, who was that amazing writer, the French writer, Huysmans? *Against Nature*, you know. So it was like they rebuilt these sort of structures, but from all the, the great, sort of creative geniuses of the past, but there was no creativity in its own right, happily gone by. Oh, that sort of thing. Yeah, I get it. So it was those things. And Hesse wrote a lot on, on those lines, like the, the Magic Theatre of, um, Steppenwolf, which, which was a huge stimulus in the Yellow House, the notion of the Magic Theatre.

Interviewer No, I know about the Magic Theatre, I know about that.

Subject Well, that, that was very appealing, because if, have you read Steppenwolf? No. Oh, it's the...

Interviewer And the name of the book is The Magic Theatre?

Subject No, the name of it is Steppenwolf, which is the wolf, the wolves that live on the steppes.

Interviewer Steppenwolf.

Subject Steppen-

Interviewer Steppenwolf.

Subject S-T-E-P-P-E-N- W-O-L-F.

Interviewer S-T-E-

Subject double P-E-N-W-O-L-F.

Interviewer And that's the author's name? Oh no, I'm being really dumb! I thought...

Subject Hermann Hesse.

Interviewer Oh, Hesse!

Subject Still Hermann Hesse. Yeah.

Interviewer Oh, Hesse! Still Hermann Hesse.

Subject Hermann Hesse, Hermann Hesse. Now we're getting back to why the interest in Eastern philosophy.

Interviewer Oh, yes. I'm too...

Subject Well, Hesse, Hesse was a German, but he read, and then he, so he wrote Siddhartha, he wrote the book on the Buddha.

Interviewer Yes.

Subject Yes. And, and the other book, of course, of Steppenwolf, The Magic Theatre, was that that was a real descent into hell of one person's unconscious, it's a marvellous book. But The Magic Theatre, he's walking on the street one night past a stone wall and a little sign comes up, "Magic Theatre, for madmen only. Price of admission: your mind." And sort of perfect kind of quips for us. And he enters, and it becomes this incredible series of rooms, but this wonderful kind of creature is in there who can offer you any experience you want. You could summon up, you know, the greatest dancing girl, or the most strangest kind of shark, or anything like that. So Steppenwolf goes through this whole series of reality or non-reality kind of situations until he doesn't know whether he's stabbing, and he eventually murders somebody in his dreams, and so then he goes on trial for this kind of murder. An extraordinary convoluted book, but it's in and out of consciousness, what's real, what's not. Brett was constantly questioning those things.

Interviewer Well now, who would have been reading this book? Probably you, and Brett never read books, so you have been talking...

Subject Well, Brett, Teddy never read books, but...

Interviewer You're lost!

Subject For someone who didn't read books... Maybe Wendy did the reading and told him about it, you know!

Interviewer So you would have, in fact, been telling him about Hermann Hesse.

Subject Yeah, well people were, yeah, a lot of people...

Interviewer Hesse was actually a thing of yours, was it? Everyone read Hermann Hesse? It was really a stick you, you were very...

Subject It belonged to the '60s, at the towards the end of the '60s, as a kind of movement for a generation. You know, like these people are reading Jay McInerney and, and people now, you know, Hermann Hesse was the... It's like when you've got, what is it they call the zeitgeist, or whatever? The spirit of the times is...

Interviewer Zeitgeist.

Subject Zeitgeist, yeah. ...having, if Hesse really summed that whole sort of era up in that sense.

Interviewer Interesting.

Subject Yeah, that's certain, the Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

Interviewer Yeah, absolutely.

Subject Yeah, and the other thing was the I Ching, like the Book of, The Book of Changes, which... Everybody was... ...that came in the early '60s, you know, with the kind of psychedelia thing, and this book of prophecies actually Taoist and then worked out by Confucius and, you know that one, Sandra, the I Ching?

Interviewer I've never been able to work it out. I know what it's about, but have you ever used it? Did you use it?

Subject Yes. Oh, everybody used it! Everybody! The way you talk, you talk as if they've gone...

Interviewer Turn that black chair over.

Subject There was that great, you know, all about that Mexican. What were they? What were they? Carlos...

Interviewer Carlos Castaneda.

Subject Oh, Castaneda! Early '70s.

Interviewer God, you are wonderful, all of you.

Subject And of course the most...

Interviewer He was on an island, that became the walkabout as well.

Subject Oh, he was wonderful. But of course the most important book of the late '60s, early '70s, was the, um, Ken Kesey, you know, the, um, the Acid Tests. What was it called? Oh, Tom Wolfe, Kool-Aid Acid... Yeah, the The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe, yeah. Tom Wolfe, yeah. And Tom Wolfe was a a terrific spokesman for that time, too. Oh, look, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Oh, that was earlier.

Interviewer And Jack Kerouac. Kerouac and...

Subject Oh, that's earlier. Marshall McLuhan. Marshall McLuhan.

Interviewer Marshall McLuhan, that's right.

Subject But he, they all sort of fitted in together, you know, they followed on from one another. Oh, and of course that other poet that came out here, you know, um, American poet. Allen Ginsberg. Allen Ginsberg, right. No, there was a marvellous, there was a marvellous night that Brett and Wendy and the entourage, I missed that night... You were in Darwin. Was it, yeah.

Interviewer Where was this and when?

Subject Oh, I'd escaped that. When, where now? It was at the Town, I think it might have been at the Conservatorium. At the Conservatorium.

Interviewer And what happened there?

Subject They got arrested, Brett and Wendy.

Interviewer What for?

Subject Well, they were calling out. There was, um, Ginsberg was there, the American poet, and then there was that Russian poet.

Interviewer What's his name?

Subject Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Interviewer Yevtushenko, I bet it was Yevtushenko. No one ever knows any other Russian poet than Yevtushenko.

Subject Well, he was out here then, at some stage. I suppose it was him, I can't remember right now exactly who it was, but they were calling out, you know, in the middle of it, kind of, "Bullshit!", you know. "Bullshit!", you know, and they ended up being arrested for that.

Interviewer I always remember hearing Wendy had bitten a policeman. Gave her...

Subject And then of course the poets didn't press charges, and so it all, you know, it all fizzed, it was all okay.

Interviewer I remember too, I don't know if you were here, we did a protest against the nuclear bomb in the in the Pacific, South Pacific. And and Brett did a poster, we all carried these posters that he'd done of a the black of a mushroom. And Wendy and I set up two other people. We did about 150 trekking back and forth. Do you remember that?

Subject No, I don't think I could have been here then. We'd have, disappeared out of Sydney in '70... '72. Yes, we went to Wilcannia, didn't we? In '72. I was Darwin, and then we went to Bali for a year, and then we went to Wilcannia in '73. Yeah, so we had really all of, all of '72 that we kind of...

Fairlie Kingston that, um, Pete and I'd been out with, I don't know, we'd been out to a party or a dinner party or something, and we were down from the country, and we were staying in my parents' house, and they were away. And, uh, Pete had had a lot more to drink than I had, you know. So by the time we got home, I was really just ready for bed and ready to sign off. And Pete was still raring to go and furious with me because I wasn't interested, you know, I was ready for sleep and everything. And so he came into, you know, I'd gone to bed, you know, and he ended up furious with me, and I ended up getting an ashtray full of butts shaken over my head [laughter] in an absolute rage. And then he left the house and walked all the way to Arthur's, which was in Victoria Street, you know, Arthur's night club, Arthur Barton. And who should be there but Brett. And Pete was, by the time Pete had walked all the way there, he was feeling terribly sad and sorry at what he'd done to me, not that I cared, I was glad that he'd gone. But he said to Brett, 'Oh, you know, poor Mam, and I dropped the whole ashtray over her head and everything.' And Brett was wearing a white T-shirt, which I'll show you after, with a lovely, um, pen and ink drawing that he'd done on the T-shirt, which was the hand holding the bunch of flowers.

Peter Kingston A bunch of flowers.

Fairlie Kingston And he took the T-shirt off and gave it to Pete and said, 'Give this to Mam, you know, this is from me, for what happened.' So when I woke up in the morning and Pete was finally woke up, he got into soft heart and he said, 'Oh, there's a present for you from Brett.' It was a lovely, lovely thing to have done.

Sandra McGrath Now describe Arthur's for the tape, because that was definitely a part of the '70s,

Fairlie Kingston Oh, very much so.

Peter Kingston Well, I carried all the bricks up for Arthur's.

Sandra McGrath What do you mean you carried all the bricks up?

Peter Kingston They all came from the old pubs and shops down on George Street, Lower George Street, the Theatrecourt pub.

Fairlie Kingston You were earning some extra money at the time, supplementing the income.

Peter Kingston Supplementing our painter's income. And so we'd hire a car and then fill it up with bricks and then bring it back up to the back of Arthur's, and we dumped them and then there's somebody else there stacking and cleaning them. And Arthur really built the thing out from the bricks. So there were, at one terrible stage, it was like three storeys of a one-thin brick wall held on two Acrows, you know, just those sort of hydraulic jacks.

Sandra McGrath Yes.

Peter Kingston And there was a terrible moment when Blake—do you remember Blake? Blake who?

Fairlie Kingston Blake.

Peter Kingston He's been around. Blake had to yank the thing away. It was stuck, and I just knew the whole thing was just going to come down. It didn't, thank Christ, but it was—it trembled before it stood there.

Fairlie Kingston Well, Arthur's was really started, we'd all been saying for years, from the moment Vadim's closed, ah, what a terrible thing, there'd be nowhere for anybody to meet as a central point, in the same way that Vadim's had provided for everybody. And so Arthur felt—that was very much in Arthur and Gabriel's mind when they were organising to open Arthur's. And it was a completely—it was a black and white concept, wasn't it?

Peter Kingston Yeah, Bruce Goold painted a lot to do with it.

Fairlie Kingston Yeah, Bruce Goold, yeah.

Peter Kingston Because that was post-Yellow House too, Arthur's.

Fairlie Kingston Yes, it was.

Peter Kingston And you walked in off the street into what was a kind of very upmarket milk bar with a kind of black marble, um, bar on the right, and a white, a white glass wall. No, it was a coffee machine with glass shelves. And then it had a split into a kind of mezzanine and a downstairs and then another stair coming back to a dance floor about the back bar. There were really four floors. It's an upstairs bar, the down—the middle bar, the downstairs dining room, the upstairs dining room, and then the balcony, so the veranda's off the back of it.

Sandra McGrath Would you consider that a meeting place still?

Fairlie Kingston Oh, absolutely, very much so. Definitely, definitely. Everybody went there. I mean, you'd always see somebody there late at night.

Peter Kingston It had cycles. It came, it went in and out, sort of went through

Fairlie Kingston Well, at the end, it kind of collapsed.

Peter Kingston It never, it never actually did become Vadim's in the sense of...

Sandra McGrath No, I don't think so.

Fairlie Kingston It wasn't a talking place, but it was a meeting place.

Sandra McGrath What other meeting places do you think there were that one can recall now?

Peter Kingston There was a real scarcity of them, you know, like Vadim's was unique in that it attracted everybody. Like, because you had the journalists there, you had the musicians, you had the actors, the artists, the lawyers.

Sandra McGrath You're talking about now in the '60s?

Peter Kingston Yeah.

Fairlie Kingston Well, Brett and Wendy, for example, often, you know, after a party or something, they say, 'Where would you go?' The old Tai Yuen was, um, a very popular place. You know, the old Tai Yuen where you went up the stairs and it was...

Sandra McGrath Where was that? That was in, in, in...

Fairlie Kingston In—well, it wasn't—it was just before Dixon Street. Yes, just before you turned right into Dixon Street, and there was that pub underneath, and then you walked up the steep staircase.

Sandra McGrath Up near Choy's, was that one?

Fairlie Kingston Yes, yes, just back from Choy's a bit. So they loved to go there, to there.

Peter Kingston Yeah. Yeah, that was a favourite spot. We went there a lot. That was a Labor Party hangout, so you'd get all kinds of people up there too, and journalists. But there wasn't any talking places. Nothing really replaced Vadim's.

Fairlie Kingston You know, we did so much at the Whiteleys' house. Yeah. That was a tremendous meeting place in itself, you know. That was always just thronging with people, wasn't it?

Peter Kingston Jumping, yeah.

Fairlie Kingston Yeah. And I remember at one stage, they'd thought that they might have erected a flag, and and when it was on one side, it meant nobody could come in, they weren't receiving, and when it was on the other side, you know, anyone was welcome. Because I think they were besieged by people. You know, there are people like, um, who you could track down, I think they live up in Queensland now, for that earlier period of Brett and Wendy's life when they first came back. Ian Lightfoot, for example, had the flat underneath their house before their house was made into one big place, you know. They rented the upstairs, and Lightfoot had the bottom. Yeah. And then, you know, the Oliver bought the upstairs of next door, and Pinho bought the downstairs of next door, you know.

Sandra McGrath How do you think everyone ended up in Lavender Bay? Was that an accident?

Fairlie Kingston Because of—oh, no accident. Because they were such magnetic people, I think. Brett and Wendy.

Sandra McGrath Oh, no, I'm talking about how did they actually go to Lavender Bay rather than to Elizabeth Bay or Paddington, or Surry Hills, or...

Peter Kingston Well, Lightfoot was there, really. And

Sandra McGrath How did they get there? Who is Lightfoot?

Peter Kingston Ian, Ian Lightfoot.

Sandra McGrath What did he do?

Peter Kingston He was one of the Libertarian kind. He was a kind of enigmatic. He was a fringe person on the Push who wrote poetry as a sideline, but he made and sold jewellery.

Fairlie Kingston Gold jewellery, silver jewellery.

Peter Kingston But his main, major kind of boost was his poetry.

Sandra McGrath What, how, what did, was he—where would Brett and Wendy have met him?

Peter Kingston Well, I think he knew Wendy somewhere. And he was always around like the the gallery, the the Rowe Street coffee shops. So he was part of that milieu, 'cause Rowe Street, the Rowe Street's an enormous kind of place actually, but that was the '60s, too. That had really ceased.

Sandra McGrath That's all destroyed now, Rowe Street.

Peter Kingston Totally. Thanks, Harry.

Fairlie Kingston I always remember Wendy telling me Roy's, was it the Galleria, was that the most popular coffee shop?

Peter Kingston Yeah. Repin's and another one, Colin's.

Fairlie Kingston And Brett had banned Wendy from going there when they first got together, because you're not to go there because he was so jealous of, you know, the attention that then she attracted and he was terribly jealous of kind of meeting anybody else and like that. And, of course, then she did go there. And then he found out she'd been there, and then there was a terrible kerfuffle about all of that. Furious.

Sandra McGrath I can't remember where, I'm sure it's in my book, but I can't remember where did they actually get married?

Peter Kingston In London. Chelsea, Chelsea Registry Office, wasn't it?

Fairlie Kingston Yeah.

Peter Kingston Yeah.

Fairlie Kingston Yeah, in a registry office in London. Whether it was Chelsea or South Kensington, I'm not sure.

Sandra McGrath And who was at the, who was the witness?

Peter Kingston Well, was Laurie Daws?

Fairlie Kingston It wasn't a big deal, was it? I can still see those photographs of Beryl's, you know, in her bedroom.

Sandra McGrath Did Beryl go to the wedding?

Fairlie Kingston Was Beryl a witness there?

Peter Kingston Was Ma?

Sandra McGrath No.

Fairlie Kingston I remember before they got married, I think Wendy had been in New York staying with Beryl. Beryl had said, 'Come and stay with me,' you know. So Wendy had had a few months in New York staying with Beryl, kind of just fed up with Brett, I suppose.

Peter Kingston He married Wendy's as well as Tracey on the 27th of March, Chelsea Registry Office, London.

Fairlie Kingston '62, yeah.

Peter Kingston Yeah.

Sandra McGrath There's something—I'll trace something quite prophetic that that Martin picked up. He picks up things, you know, Martin?

Peter Kingston 'The square is the... is the four-dimensional man.'

Fairlie Kingston Just show us the square. [laughter]

Sandra McGrath Anyway, I'll ask the producers, or whatever they're called, to, uh, to put that quote on the back of the little—the paperback.

Fairlie Kingston Oh, lovely! Lovely.

Sandra McGrath I don't know if they will, because they always say yes to everything. I'll ask them.

Peter Kingston Yeah.

Fairlie Kingston Whether they'll take it, yes, I know. But when you get closer to it all, of course, that's when you'll have to really get into the whole design of the thing, you know.

Sandra McGrath Yes, well, I want to hear that.

Fairlie Kingston You know, that frame...

Sandra McGrath I think it's a very fierce photograph.

Peter Kingston Yeah, it's that photograph where Wendy was supposed to be drunk.

Sandra McGrath No, this was before that.

Fairlie Kingston He was so sweet, Sandra. You know, when Pete and I married, we got married at my parents' house, you know, and Brett and Wendy came to the to the marriage and everything. And when it came time, you know, and Mum brought out the wedding cake and and put it out in the garden on a marble table, and I had to be there, you know, to put the knife through it, and I suddenly looked to my left and I saw Brett, absolutely pressed against the table with a kind of, ooh, you know, sort of, quite a voracious look on his face. 'What on earth is he doing there?' And I put the knife through the cake and made my wish or whatever, and I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'I wanted to have the first piece of cake for luck,' he said. So, I mean,

Sandra McGrath Oh, really?

Fairlie Kingston very sweet, he was sort of quite superstitious in his own in his own way, Brett.

Peter Kingston We all are, don't you think?

Fairlie Kingston Yeah, definitely, definitely.

Sandra McGrath What are you most superstitious about, Pete?

Peter Kingston All pathways, tracks and things. I'm very superstitious about timing. You know, like I can't, I won't go anywhere unless the clock hand, the clocks are like that, or like that [laughter] Time to fly or time to—or they point in the direction that I'm going, so if it's [laughter]

Sandra McGrath Oh, that is weird! [laughter] I didn't expect that when I asked that question. [laughter]

Fairlie Kingston Oh, well...

Sandra McGrath What were some of Brett's super—

Peter Kingston If I want, if I wanted to go over to Lavender Bay, for instance, I could I could leave in about 3 minutes, you know, there's going to be a nice directional impulse here. But I can't—it's a bit off-centre at the moment, and it won't be any good at half past. [laughter]

Sandra McGrath That's so hysterical!

Peter Kingston I'll have to start being at somewhere else.

Fairlie Kingston And, Sandra,

Sandra McGrath Yes.

Fairlie Kingston when I first started drawing, um, Brett heard, you know, that I was I'd just started to draw and I'd never drawn before or anything. There was a kind of a little bit of a buzz, you know, that goes around between friends if somebody starts to do something, so come and have a look, and I'll show you, a few others. And so he came around one afternoon, you know, 'cause he couldn't resist, he wanted to have a look. And, of course, then he was terribly excited by the drawings, you know. And so he suddenly just absolutely he was all over the house. He said, 'Where's some paper?' You know, 'Get me some charcoal, do this, do that,' you know, he's down on his knees kind of doing things. And my sister-in-law, Pete's sister, had just called in, and, uh, so he said, 'Who do you want me to draw?' to me, and I was silly, I should have said me, but I said, 'Draw her, she's prettier than me.' So he said, 'Okay.' So he was down on his hands and knees, it went under the shower, it went—but what he was trying to do was to show me what you could do with a drawing. It didn't end up a kind of one of his best drawings. But the generosity in his heart was to really try and show me how far you could take something. So, you know, he had the Windex and a hole went through the paper, and it was under the tap and this, and then he chased Dolly, our little daughter who was six at the time, she was terrified of him. [laughter] He chased her, you know, around the garden with a big bit of charcoal to draw a portrait of her and her screaming, you know, with terror. And, um, so he did this, uh, drawing of Pete's sister, which is—I think she's still got it, which isn't very good at all, but, you know, and then I kept thinking of all those, that whole afternoon, what what could have been. But you know, typical of him, you know, just wanting to show someone, you know, throw charcoal into the shower, rip bits of paper up, you know, stick this, throw some sand on it, and you know, like that.

Sandra McGrath Did he ever criticise your work?

Fairlie Kingston No, he was very sweet. No, I mean, the only thing he would do is that he came around when I was doing a drawing of my brother's house and there was this lawn, you know, and he sort of said, 'Well, if you put some spit on the pastel,' and he took some spit and threw it on the pastel on the lawn. And so he, you know, kind of gave that, made a texture on the lawn.

Sandra McGrath Yes.

Fairlie Kingston And then the other thing was, I remember when he got that portrait of you, Sandra, that pastel portrait,

Sandra McGrath Yes.

Fairlie Kingston and you'd got it framed, and Pete and I went down to Wendy and Brett's, and the portrait had just arrived, and Brett said, 'Oh, look, it's just come from the framers,' you know, and it had a lovely gold frame on it and everything, and he was so proud of it and so thrilled with it, he was just beside himself with excitement, you know. And he loved the frame and he just thought the whole thing had just come off, and he was just thrilled.

Sandra McGrath Did he have a special frame?

Mandy He chased her up into her bedroom and said, "Get me a pen, get me paper!" So she produced this piece of paper with her fingerprint, you know, on the back of it in her bedroom and a terrible old green Texta that was running out of ink. And he did that little drawing of her, which is much nicer. Much nicer than that. But that was the—just in terms of his tremendous generosity, that if anybody was trying to do anything, you know, he just wanted to help. You know, he was so excited himself that you were trying, and that fantastic, you know.

Peter Kingston It was like the waves were falling over him, wasn't it?

Mandy Yeah, sucking him in. Absolutely.

Peter Kingston They were wonderful. See, that's the first stuff he did here.

Mandy There. Well, you know it is.

Peter Kingston Yeah, yeah. Oh, come on.

Sandra McGrath I mean, I'm not saying you're copying.

Mandy [laughter] No. But that's all plum now, the background. That'd be interesting to re-photograph that.

Sandra McGrath What do you think that shows about her, Mandy? You're the portraitist at the moment.

Mandy Well, Wendy never liked that portrait, and I don't think Brett was ever really happy with it either, actually. Um...

Sandra McGrath Do you think she'd like that one better?

Mandy Yeah, I think she would. Definitely.

Sandra McGrath That one reminds me of Germaine Greer.

Mandy Because it kind of shows a kind of... I suppose it to me, I mean, when I look at that, I kind of see fear, I suppose.

Sandra McGrath Well, that to me is innocence to experience, that's what I see.

Peter Kingston I see that as a young girl, look at the brightness, the optimism.

Sandra McGrath Optimism and intensity. Then I see that is what happens to women as life goes on.

Peter Kingston Yeah, well, he was working in that thing, what was it, the ages of women was one of the things. Was that in the portrait show?

Mandy Yeah, I don't see that as innocence. Brett never saw Wendy as innocence, because she's got such a kind of power. No, there's not, there isn't any innocence in her.

Peter Kingston It's a dominant, a dominating thing. It's like...

Sandra McGrath It isn't innocent. It isn't. We are wrong, actually. It isn't innocent, because that's much too...

Mandy It's not innocent. Off brown. No, it's not innocent. And when you really look at the kind of the skin, the old, you know, when you look at the painting...

Peter Kingston That's, that's the Wendy that really scared the shit out of him.

Mandy Yeah, that's the person he was frightened of.

Peter Kingston The night, what was that, it was night, after like he'd been out of Lavender Bay for years, there was one night, last year, or the year before, that's right, and it was almost shifting. I said, she's not, the clothes are never going back into the cupboards over there. She's not getting, I'm not getting back in under that roof. There's no way I'll be back in under that roof coming.

Mandy Crossing the bridge.

Peter Kingston It was suddenly, it was as if it suddenly became a terrible thought in his head that she might get him back in there. She had that power to pull him back into that world.

Mandy Unfortunately, Brett really did believe that Wendy had so much more power than she actually had, you know, because no human being's got that kind of superstitious power over another person unless you give it to them. You have to give them that power for it to work, you know. The victim has to allow the person the power. And the minute you say, "Well, you just haven't got that power over me," it just doesn't work anymore. They haven't got it, you know, and that's what Brett was still fighting with that, you know, in himself. Well, freedom is a very hard thing to

Sandra McGrath achieve, isn't it? Mmm, impossible. I don't think there's any such thing, really, because people need people,

Mandy you know. That's what life is in the end: the interconnectedness of all of us. And the portrait

Sandra McGrath over there of Wendy is very curious, too, really, and it's not one of my favourite pictures, that one

Peter Kingston by Brett. No. The best—there was a beautiful drawing he did that I was mad on, you know, that was just a very quick wash drawing, it was very asymmetrical and really washed. It was very wonky, and he tightened it all up for that, you know. Really, it's a huge loss. Have you ever met anybody sort of, you know,

Sandra McGrath like him before? Never. Never. I always feel he really isn't really quite of this world. Absolutely,

Mandy I feel that, too. Quite extraordinary. No, he had that shamanistic—tremendous intuition, and you really,

Peter Kingston you really felt Brett read your diary two weeks in advance. David Litvinoff is a copy dude that Martin brought out here that was professor of music for the Opera House, and he was older than all of us, I suppose he was 10 years, like he was the next generation down, and he had an enormously effective life in London with the London underworld, with people like the Kray brothers and so on. Martin could fill you in on all these details. But you either adored him or you just loathed him. He was one of the most vicious mouths you've ever come across and would just tear you to pieces. Tell Sandra what he'd do walking along the road, you know. I wish I had a video, but I did a walk with him from the Yellow House, down through the Cross, past old ladies sunning themselves on park benches, down to Circular Quay and then on the to catch a ferry over to Manly Wharf. And whether he was doing it just to take me out of my... I don't know, but... And no one—no stone was left unturned. Old ladies were badgered and bothered and turned upside down and, you know, knickers inspected and finally released, but with smiles on their faces. He'd always leave you laughing. That was the other—he could turn the thing around in an instant. It was like the devil's bravery. He carried this enormous... And he'd been mates with Mick Jagger, and he had extraordinary bootleg recordings of Dylan playing piano, just so smacked out of it that you thought the guy was just going to die in a minute, but just extraordinary stuff that you'd never heard anywhere else. And Ian Reed ended up with all that stuff. But this day we walked, we got down to the Quay, I thought we're going to be arrested at any moment. And Litvinoff striding along, and this like Mal Meninga, you know, a giant footballer with his girlfriend coming towards us like this, you know, with the jeans and the ball bag sort of thing. And Litvinoff walking, just grabs the guy by the cock and goes, [gasps]. "Oh, you're kidding!" into this catatonic kind of, "What's happened to me? This figure has come out of the bush and attacked my manhood," you know. And somehow Litvinoff calmed the whole—talked the guy up and then down. He went in and out of rages, but he completely fascinated this guy and the girlfriend in the end. And we we escaped, but he and he and Brett used to have this wonderful war, you know, where Brett used to like to take on take on the Jew and, you know, like he had the same sort of rap going with with Joel, I hear, Joel Elenberg. And Asher? And Asher, too. And so he'd he'd be Hitler to their Jew, you know. He played a kind of... He was a fascist. And some of the some of the kind of just some dialogues that went on in in in Patrick White's restaurant, you know, outside the Yellow House next door, the late-night spiels there were unbelievable. But like David could run Brett right up the ladder. He he really had to work for his kind of [laughter] quotes and his power with with David. He was the one person, outside of us all, that could really put him through his paces.

Sandra McGrath Paces. Probably the only person ever. But it was—but it was like world record stuff, you know, between the two of them. It really just came off. We'd just sit there like hanging out. It was just the most fascinating entertainment. Do something really boring for me and spell his last name.

Peter Kingston L-I-T-V-I-N-O-F-F. Litvinoff. Yeah. Didn't Brett do a portrait of him? David Litvinoff? Yeah, he did a drawing of him. A drawing. And what's happened to him?

Sandra McGrath The only man who could take Brett on. That's what he's saying, Sandra. He um died of an overdose in Christopher Gibbs's...

Mandy Yeah, sort of really, um, very knowledgeable, sort of antique man, I mean...

Sandra McGrath Is he still alive?

Mandy He'd been a very powerful man in a particular coterie in London. He'd be very well worth talking to.

Sandra McGrath I will, that's what I was saying.

Mandy Yeah.

Peter Kingston So David ended up, that's his, he lived on David's own, down in Cornwall or somewhere south.

Mandy Very rich man, you know, and really sort of looked after people, you know, and very erudite and everything. Martin would know.

Peter Kingston And so we've never really got the proper detailed story of David. Martin probably has more details.

Sandra McGrath I'll ask him, so I'm seeing Martin at some stage. Martin know all about that, because Martin did

Mandy a portrait, I remember, of David, which Brett actually then took to the—took home, and it was at the Whiteleys' for a couple of months so Brett could have a look at what Martin had

Peter Kingston made of it. Martin painted him as a ghostly harlequin with a face that looked like a skull. Do you think he was evil? I I don't, I thought he was an angel. Litvinoff? Yeah, really. I thought he was a white figure, not a black figure. Oh, you must tell Sandra the story about

Mandy Brett's last words with Francis Bacon. Oh, look at this T-shirt. Imagine being small enough to wear that. He's making a vine. Yeah, sister vine. But you know what Wendy told me that he'd done, because I was telling her about it, and she said he'd made a few T-shirts like these, quite a few, and um with frangipanis and different things, which were falling apart, and she said last year he'd actually cut the drawing off out of the T-shirt and then had it glued onto canvas. Oh, how lovely. So she said, "Why don't you do that with it?" That's a good idea. "So that then you can mount it and hang it if you want to, because that's what

Sandra McGrath he did." "Why don't you put the whole T-shirt into a Perspex box?" Yeah, I hate to cut T-shirts. Yeah, I know. Well, I could do that, too. Yeah, I'd keep the whole thing intact, yeah. Just just pin it into a Perspex box on a pale blue

Mandy background. Yes. Yes, on a board. Now, what were you going to tell us about, though? Well, it was the story that Brett told us, because we had some lovely meetings. We'll tell you that in a minute. But, um, what night was it that he told us about? We'd been down to... No, we'd been down... Oh, the last words of Francis Bacon. We'd been down, um, Fran was staying with Brett. This was about two months before Brett died. And I rang, and I knew Fran was there, and I said, "Oh..." And Brett answered the phone, and I said, "Oh, we were hoping, you know, to have some dinner with Franny tonight." And he said, "We're just leaving for my local pub, you know, which was just down..." The Carrington. The Carrington, in Bourke Street. In Bourke Street. "So why don't you come and join us?" So we did that, and we had a wonderful, very funny time there and then went back to the studio afterwards. And I was—I'd been saying to Brett, "Oh, I've been really wanting to talk to you. I was so sad about Francis Bacon dying," and all of that, which then brought on this whole kind of flood of his memories. "And you tell that story, Peter, when they their last..." Yeah, well, he

Peter Kingston was so cool. You have to see Brett miming it, really, because he sort of mimed Francis doing it, because because he just adored Francis, I think, was his most favourite person.

Mandy He was his real hero, yeah.

Peter Kingston And they'd—it was really gone to London in '88, I think, for the Featherston film, whenever that was, and they were—and he rang him, he said. They were all very busy. Francis was very busy, he was very busy, and finally they clicked and they made a date to meet at nine o'clock at Francis's pub.

Mandy Pack it! Stop it!

Peter Kingston And to get to the pub, Francis came from one direction, Brett came from another one, so it was like central territory for them. And the meeting was for 9:00 a.m. Brett said he arrived there at sort of 9:00 a.m. on the spot, and Francis was there, and he said, in his position, you know, Brett does his... [laughter] He gets Francis into into the position, you know, shifts the stomach, and the hand on the hip, you know, and the gin and tonic, and the voice goes back, and he does this whole thing: "Brett, from the rock and roll, came along over there," and just stipulating who's what and what's going on, who's going down, who's in the pub, this whole kind of thing going on. So they had this wonderful kind of hour session in the pub and then set off to see each other home, which meant they walked together down the street and then Francis turned left and Brett turned right. And so they said sort of goodbye or the same goodbye on the corner, and then Francis turned to walk off and

Mandy Francis had some boys with him, didn't he? Francis had something, but it was off... He said something like, "Oh, Brett, I suppose the next time

Peter Kingston we'll see all my marbles, all my... [laughter]

Colin Lanceley "You'll see all my models, all my models will be little devils next time." And Brett said, "Oh, yes, Francis, of course." And then Francis started, he said, Francis started, he did this wonderful version of Francis going up the street like that, him standing on the corner. And he said he got about 50 yards up the street, and I was thinking, you know, that's not devils, and I sort of said, "No, Francis, Francis! No!" Francis stopped and turned, "What? What, Brett?" He said, "Angels, Francis, angels!" And and he said and Francis went, "Oh Brett, angels, Brett, angels!" And they waved and off he went, and then he turned and went down to his hotel.

Kay Lanceley Who'd have known that they'd be dead within sort of four months of one another, you know? Just extraordinary. Yeah. I didn't realise that, that Bacon and Brett... Bacon only died in about March, end of March, April this year. Yeah. 81, 82. Yeah, well, that's why Brett was just in total awe of him, because here was this man who'd drunk his way through, you know. And smoked his way through. Yeah. He had a great story, actually. And then the last time we saw Brett was quite extraordinary, because he'd asked me months before, when the Dalai Lama was coming, he said, "Now will I get tickets for both of us?" You know, he'd got some special thing someone had sent him and said, "I can send off for the tickets." And I said at the time, stupidly, "Oh look, oh, I don't know that I want to see the Dalai Lama, you know. You go, you can tell me about it." Well, then Wendy had said, "Oh, you're mad! You know, what are you doing?" She said, "Anyway, I've bought lots of tickets, so if you'd like to come on the last night to the Dalai Lama, you can come with me." And I laughed, "Oh, thanks very much." So, as it turned out, I did go on the last night, and she'd also invited Brett to go. So we all met in the foyer of the, um, Convention Centre. The Convention Centre at Darling Harbour. And so we were admiring, you know, Brett's painting there. He was thrilled to see his painting there. So he said, "Oh," and I knew Pete was coming straight from work with different seats, with different seats and tickets and everything. So Brett said, "Oh, come on, let's go and have a drink." I'm sorry, in the bar. And Johnny Hargreaves was with us too, you know, the actor, and Wendy. So we all marched around after Brett and ended up in this extraordinary little bar, and he ordered me two double whiskeys and, you know, triple whiskeys for him to make up for Wendy and Johnny, who weren't drinking at all, you know. They both said, "Oh, have a lime, soda and bitters, thank you." So anyway, so we downed the drinks back, and March, Wendy was saying, "Come on, you know, we're going to miss him. We can't be late. They'll lock you out, you know, if you're not there on time." So threw the drinks down and marched sort of back up. And as I was walking beside Brett, and as we were walking up, I was going

Subject Well, in terms of today's price, well it was very good then. But in terms of today, oh that's fast! Anyway. But anyway, we went up the escalator and he said, 'Oh come and have a look, Mand, at Ann Thomson's.' You know, he said, 'This is a really good painting, you know.' So we stood there and we looked at that. And while we were looking at it, he looked down into the lobby, down onto his own painting and said, 'Oh!' he said, 'Look at that, Mand!' He said, 'That needs dusting.' And all right along that gold the top of that gold frame, which you'd never think to look, you know. And he said, 'Oh, I'll have to ring them up about that. That needs shining,' he said. 'That needs shining.' But the dust was, you know, about that thick! So that was sweet. And then we marched into the Dalai Lama and everything, and got through all of that. And I remember having a bit of a bored moment at one stage and opening up my little packet of Butter-Menthols, and handing them, and he was just thrilled, and he was stuffing them into his mouth. Anyway, he was so sweet for the five minutes or something of chanting, where the Dalai Lama had said, now everybody, you know, should try and do this. Well, I couldn't do that, and Wendy wasn't going to do that, but Brett, you know, sort of stepped forward from his chair, and was 'Vum-vum-vum-vum'. You know, he loved the big mouth of that. So he did all of that, and then he was saying, 'Can you see Pete down there, Mand?' You know, he had the binoculars trying to find Pete in the centre. And so straight after that he said we all got together, Pete, and Wendy, and me, and Brett, and Johnny had gone off somewhere, and he said, 'Now, let's go over, there's a little Chinese place over the road. Now let's go over there, and we'll have some soup, you know, some wonton soup or something.' And then he said, 'Uh, the Mellencamp concert's on at the Entertainment Centre. Let's go and have some soup, and then we'll—' That's pouring with rain, yeah. '—pouring with rain,' and he said, but this was Brett, that you could go from the Dalai Lama— 'We've got time, we've got time, because the wonton—we can do the wonton and then Mellencamp.' 'We've got to do the scalps out there, we can do the scalps.' 'You know, you guys are up for that? We can scalp on that.' I had a car nearby, so I went and got that, and we had the Tibetan tape playing, and that 'Bwa-wa, bwa-wa, bwa-wa.' It was going all over... 'Bwa-wa! No more ways and no more score, no more score, no more—' Yes! [laughter] And into that. And he scalped, he scalped two and then organised so we'd go do the wonton soup, and organised for two other scalpers to go and find them and bring them across to the cafe where we were eating. So we had this courier kind of scalper deal going, you know, while we all headed over to the cafe. But Sandra, we crossed the road and this little Chinese cafe, from the Entertainment Centre, it was the filthiest, fatty little cafe, Chinese cafe you've ever been in, and Pete and I kind of looked at one another. Brett was quite happy, you know, 'Hello!' They knew him in there, you know. We've got a table, nobody else in there at all. He and Wendy both vanished upstairs to the loo. So Pete and I ordered for us, and they both came downstairs, and Brett was laughing, you know, he was holding his sides, and he was really laughing. We said, 'What's happened?' And he said, 'You won't believe what I've just seen up in the men's room upstairs.' He said, 'What?' He said, 'Well, I walked up there, you know, into the men's urinal, you know, and I walked in,' and he said there was an old Chinaman sitting on the loo with his trousers down around his ankles, peeling prawns!

Sandra McGrath Peeling prawns! [laughter] He said, 'Oh sorry, sorry! Sorry! Very sorry! Oh sorry! Sorry!' So we just roared, of course, at that. So that kept us going while we quickly had our soup and everything.

Subject And anyway, the next day, after we'd Then we went to the Mellencamp and had more drinks there, and it was all a mighty contrast, the Dalai Lama with 13,000 sedated people, kind of thing, and here was like 20,000 teenagers jumping out of their skins! But I said to Wendy the next day, 'Wasn't that a wonderful story of Brett's?' I said, 'Really, that is Who else could tell you a story like that?' I said, 'That's the kind of magic he carries, you know, to be able to come back to the table—' And she said, 'Oh, you believed that, did you?' And I said, 'Well, of course I did,' you know. And she said, 'Well, actually,' she said, 'that's a very old story that his father used to tell.' [laughter] But she said, and I said, 'But you never let on!' I said, 'You kept a very straight face and sort of laughed along with it.' And she said, 'Well, you know, I lived with him for all those years. I mean, that happened all the time.' But she said if he felt like the telling, and he really wanted to entertain, and he adored to entertain us all, to tell us particular stories and make us laugh. And she said that was his way, it didn't matter when it had happened or where, he could just conjure it up and tell you then, and it might as well have been then or ten years ago, it really didn't matter. So— Would have had to be in a Chinese restaurant. He'd have had to set the set the whole scene. Absolutely. And having had all those chances to tell you when to tell us.

Sandra McGrath He didn't say why that Chinese restaurant, did he?

Subject And he, because he wouldn't sing or something, but he recited Dylan's songs, you know, but wonderfully. But then he'd go into Billy Connolly. If you could get him on to Billy Connolly, he's home and hosed. Yeah, well Billy Connolly, he'd be another person to chase up, Sandra. Where does he live, Billy? In, er, well I think he lives in London. And he, you know, he married that Australian girl. Pamela Stephenson.

Sandra McGrath Oh, yes. Mmm.

Subject So he'd be very worth— Pop jokes and all of the Scottish stories, he'd draw, you know, he'd get them right inside. Yeah. But you must talk to Eric, because he actually had a, you know, he was about to go, after, what, it was this month, and was all teed up, he was going on a wonderful Italian tour with Mark Knopfler. His girl, and Brett was going—Brett was just— No, no, he was going to take the little French girl. Ooh, so we'd better get her. Yeah, he was in love with Cathy. I mean, he really was. Really. Well, she... Well, she did... Well, she did, she did love him. Horrified, but she was thrilled. Yeah, thrilled. And Brett always said, apparently, that there was one night, but whether that's true, you would have no idea. And, you know...

Sandra McGrath [laughter] You can take that off the tape.

Subject sort of had If he wanted that, then he had, you know, and so he'd be soothing along with those. But that was that was recent. That was just— But he did He, I think he really was in love with Catherine, really seriously.

Sandra McGrath I think he was too.

Subject And he flaunted that fact. But, um, I think with Emma, it was it was a a friendship, you know, a real friendship. She is exquisite physically. We went to Catherine's 21st that Joe and Sally Manning gave, up in Paddington. And Brett and Janice were there. That was about three years ago. And Brett whispered to me, we were looking at Catherine, who's truly the most exquisite, beautiful... He hadn't seen, but he was, you know, really besotted.

Sandra McGrath Have you got a photograph? I'd love to see the picture of Catherine.

Subject Yeah, we've got one. There's a bundle of them. I'll tell you who you must ring, who's got a wonderful selection, too, of photographs of all of the parties at the studio over the years, at the house and who was there at the funeral, and actually got a beauty in the chapel.

Sandra McGrath Who was that? Gillian. Yeah, Gillian. Oh, fantastic. Because what the producers are planning on doing is having about 100 black-and-white photographs from the best portrait photographer.

Subject Who was that Who was that man you—? Um, I was just saying about telling Sandra about Williams. Oh, yeah. Because he came here on Saturday night and had some dinner with us. We'll drive you when you're ready to go. We'll drive you home.

Sandra McGrath No, no, no. I'll just get a ring a taxi.

Subject Oh, we don't mind driving. No, that's too terrible. Why not—?

Sandra McGrath No, no, no. I like taking taxis.

Subject Where are you living? Are you in Diana's house?

Sandra McGrath Yeah.

Subject You're in that house. Mmm. Yeah. But William delivered us, um, you know, our Pete ordered off the, you know, those cards, all the tiny ones. And, uh, so he delivered them, and we took them over to Wendy's on Sunday to show her, so and of course we forgot about them, so William, he's got a wonderful selection, you know, from William on that day, back at Wendy's after the funeral.

Sandra McGrath Oh, good.

Subject You.

Sandra McGrath Who?

Subject You. No, that's— Oh, no. They're terrible, those photos. What are they? They're pictures of us. No, oh no, that's right. Look at Carol! Look at this photograph of Carol!

Sandra McGrath Oh, my god.

Subject That was that last That's a weird camera, but that's that's Is this your photograph? Yeah. These are you taking pictures. Yeah. What do you do with people? It must have been a funny lens. No, I get I was shooting rough-outs. Oh, that's Carol. Oh, my god, what's he doing? There's Gary, there's Carol. Yeah. That's beautiful. No, that's lovely.

Sandra McGrath What do you do to them?

Subject That that's a diff- different process in the form that you should do it.

Sandra McGrath Do you mean to?

Subject No.

Sandra McGrath You You just want to give everyone some medieval disease or something. [laughter]

Subject Yeah. Well, that's that was, you know, did you know her, that one?

Sandra McGrath No, I don't know that...

Subject Yeah, that was Emma, she was so much— And that one, of course.

Sandra McGrath Which is Emma?

Subject Well, this one's important because Brett had a big love affair with her.

Sandra McGrath Who's 'her'?

Subject When Wendy came back in '84, Brett was, um, had her living in the house. She was living in Lavender Bay.

Sandra McGrath What was her name?

Subject Now she lives in Adelaide. Karen. Karen.

Sandra McGrath He brought them all to my house and used to sometimes even poke them in the shallow end of my swimming pool, right in front of everybody, but I forgot all their names.

Subject Her name was Karen.

Sandra McGrath Karen. You gotta write that on the back.

Subject Yeah, she's a filmmaker.

Sandra McGrath K-A-R-E-N.

Subject Yeah. And Wendy, then when Wendy came back in '84, and Brett had the studio in Raper Street, and Wendy actually was the one who had to tell her that it was all over, and she went mad and threw things in Raper Street, and, the poor thing, she was just devastated. But then it was sort of all right, because Wendy sort of looked after her. Brett'd often do that, too.

Sandra McGrath She had beautiful eyes.

Subject Yeah. Karen. But he ador- you know, that was he really—

Sandra McGrath What happened to her?

Subject Well, she married somebody and she lives in Adelaide.

Sandra McGrath Mmm. And she's a filmmaker?

Subject She was, yes. She makes films about the Aborigines, doesn't she? She makes very interesting films. She was nice, too. And quite an unusual person, actually, for Brett to have linked up with, because she wasn't beautiful in that sort of have-to-walk-away She had a very big guile. Mmm.

Interviewer Yeah, she had a very unusual looking face. Six feet tall?

Subject Nearly six feet. Yeah, five foot ten.

Interviewer Think. Think. Karen from Adelaide. An Ode, O-D-E it was, wasn't it? A lot of women. I don't I don't mind talking in there, I just think dealing with women is, you know— That's what I that's what I sighed at. The other parts are alright, it's just women and drugs I think are the difficulty. Everything else is alright. Yeah, the art's great. Women. No, I don't actually think they were, I don't think they were. Janice was fairly important. Yes, Janice was there for some stage anyway. Do you have your notes? Yeah. Could I have a look at them? Sure. And uh could I have a look at them tonight and give them bring them back to you tomorrow morning? Yeah, sure. Is that alright? Yeah. Do you have them here? They're not very tidy, but— That doesn't matter. Do you have them here? Just some of— That'd be marvellous. I'll just, uh, look at them tonight and make some notes and make some notes from them, and then I'll I'll bring them back to you tomorrow morning. That's right. Oh no, it was awful to be with Brett when he was talking about it. I mean, you would've cried your heart out. that were being distributed, but it wasn't. But he was so naive in terms of the value of the pictures and what he was worth, years rather than invested in other things. And they'd done it together. She's been very badly done by in that sense. No, she has been slandered, you know, she's badly— What Age article? Janice is jumping up and down about— Janice is on the phone to Janet Hawley the next morning saying, you know, "What do you know? I was Brett's secretary and I've been living with him for the last 5 years." She never lived with him. Sorry, did I hear the tap?

Subject No, I don't think it did. Oh, sorry.

Interviewer But Janice, I think, is kind of, you know, absurdly trying to act as protector. I'll take that off, because I don't want— No. Oh, listen.

Subject They just go up about 20 feet in the air, 6 metres, which— Should I speak in imperial or metric?

Interviewer Imperial, please.

Subject Right, thank you. I do understand metric, but the numbers are all too— sounds like a form of inflation. All right, each bell is on two posts about 20 feet above the ground. And, er, posts are about 8 inches diameter.

Interviewer Made of what?

Subject All stainless steel. The whole thing. But the bell posts will be filled with concrete and reinforced inside, for reasons of the of the energy you generate when you turn the bells around on the top. But they'll all be set in bearings and so on. Again, all the bearings are stainless steel. The whole thing is stainless steel. That ultimately is why it became a very expensive thing to do, but hopefully it will ultimately be why it'll last. If you use 316 stainless, which is the marine grade they use for fittings on yachts and so on, it's just about indestructible, even in harsh sort of salt air climates. That's something of the configuration that you're looking at there.

Interviewer Right.

Subject We'll probably divide it up into four groups of 25, in part so that it has avenues in between it, which will centre on a very large stone. And what I wanted there was this: Here we are celebrating 200 years of of of being in this country when the people have been here before us by 50,000. There's no comparison. And to simply ignore the first 50,000 and do something for the last 200 seemed also out of proportion, you see. But the catch was this: that the people who were here for the first 50,000 never, God bless them, ever bothered to invent things like clocks. All of their cues were entirely natural, so their concepts of time are almost nonexistent. Er, their concepts of change are there, but that's a little bit different from a concept of time. So I looked and looked and looked. How could one even represent that idea? And then it came to me to use a stone in this way: Some of their cave paintings have been there for at least 20, 25,000 years, and until very recently, and thank goodness some are now being revived again, paint will, particularly in the Australian climate where you have wind and and, er, great fluctuation in temperature, will erode, will break away from the surface. And the only way those paintings have remained is because they've been renewed. And some of them have been renewed for over 20, 25,000 years. They've just continually gone back and touched them up again. So I took that as the kind of time measurement, the time in which it takes for paint to erode away from a stone. So we put in the very centre of the bells, very like the very centre of a watch, if you like. It's the only part which doesn't— It rotates, but it doesn't change its position, so it kind of represents a a a long, unchanging period of time. And I would like to get the Aboriginal people to come and paint their symbols on that stone, and as time passes, and as they fade and wear away, that they would in their measure of time, if you like, come back and renew them. Er, and that's really what the whole of the bells again is about. It's about continuity, renewal, going on, and you'll see we add things to the bells, which I'll come to in another couple of pictures. That's the significance of the stone. Also what I did want to happen too was that this had some sort of life from the beginning and not just in '88 again. So one of the first things, well, about the second thing that will happen is that we bring that stone onto the site and and do something special then. And hopefully that's only sort of two or three months away that we'll we'll do that. And if we can, I want to try and find somewhere like the geographical centre of Australia to retrieve that stone from and have the Aboriginal people give it some kind of significance.

Interviewer You think you can take a hunk off Ayers Rock?

Subject I thought of that.

Interviewer I'm sure it wouldn't be—

Subject And I, and I also thought that, that perhaps I'd wake up one morning with a hunk missing off me somewhere.

Interviewer The Olgas you can probably take a lump, they wouldn't—

Subject Well, I tell you what, one of, one of, one of the Olgas would've would've been just fantastic, but I think there'd be a bit of bit of flak there. No, I've I've I I worked it out very simply that obviously those stones were there before any of us, and by that I mean also the Aboriginal people. We give significance to things, it's not inherent.

Interviewer Stones, you know they say are the great libraries of the world, but no one's been able to read yet. And I've forgotten who told me this theory, that it's terrible in places like the Pilbara when when they when the bulldozers go through and just crack up these huge boulders, because this man said that one day the history of the world will be able to be read through boulders. And, er, we just don't know how to do it yet, because throughout time the sun has been bombarding these stones with their rays, the atmosphere, whatnot whatnot, and that in another hundred years we'll be able to read history through stones.

Subject Well, I think they do already in many respects. I mean, they we pretty well know how they're all formed.

Interviewer Well, I think this man meant a bit more than that.

Subject Um, I mean we know in principle what what the process has been. I mean, I can never quite believe— I walk up where I live and you go up about 5 or 600 feet, and there are beaches up there. And that's very recent stuff. All of that rock, like all of the stone here, is all sedimentary. It was all formed under the sea. And there you you come upon little beaches in the bush where it's just a band of white sand, which is mostly seashells broken down into sand. Um, I still find that difficult to understand when you're confronted with it. It's it's easier to understand it as an idea.

Interviewer Mm.

Subject Oh yes, you can imagine this was under the sea and that rose up. But, you know, they take fossils out of out of the Andes, marine shells. I think Darwin was one of the first to pick up on that, that's where his evolutionary theory got a bit of a start as well. They found seashells in the Andes, way up, I'm talking thousands of feet.

Interviewer Oh, that's intriguing, isn't it? Keep going. We've got to go and keep on—

Subject Right. That gives a view of what it might look like, and what these are photographs of is a model which is about twice as big as your table here.

Interviewer Mm.

Subject Each of those is about a foot high. So I just— I'm I'm not a particularly good draftsman. I draw for engineers and plumbers, because they're the people that are usually building my stuff, so I've never— So it was easier for me to build it

Interviewer than to draw it.

Subject than to draw it. And, er, it's a very pretty thing in itself.

Interviewer Mm, it's pretty. It's lovely.

Subject And there's a couple of nice stories attached to that. About a year ago, I became stone, absolutely broke, because it cost me a fortune flying all over the country trying to raise the money. And I had a certain amount tucked away, and I had blown the lot, broken all the rules, because I've always lived within my means and never borrowed money, so whatever I've done I always pay for. I'd mortgaged the house. And the week before, I'd said to them that at a certain time I have to pay you no matter what, because at that point there won't be any options, and to let let me go on borrowing money will just be form of suicide, so I said at this particular date I have to pay you back. And the week before, I came upon a particular person whose name I hope eventually will appear here. He looked at the photograph and said, "That's a great idea. It's too big for our company, but I'll buy the model from you." He said, "How much is the model worth?" and I told him, and he gave me an amount of money that was twice what I what I'd told. Imagine that. He doesn't know that he saved my bacon yet. I'm saving that to tell him later in the piece. Isn't that a wonderful story?

Interviewer It is a wonder— Sorry.

Subject Mostly you would say to a man in business, "Well look, it costs this," and he'd say, "Well, I'll give you that less

Interviewer Mm.

Subject 10%."

Interviewer It has to be John Kaldor.

Subject No, it wasn't, actually.

Interviewer He's the sort of man who'd do that, though.

Subject Um, yes, he is, but I wouldn't I would it wouldn't have happened with John, because he and I are too close. Um, I'll tell you later who that is. I'll save that one. That's a special debt. Now, go back to the idea of how it functions and how it functions with people. Each bell is numbered, and between each the the the posts at the bottom of each bell is a plaque on the ground. And so if it's the 15th bell, then anything that happens in the 15th year of any century, past, present or future, goes onto that plaque. So that say, for instance, we were to now discover the the plate, was it Dampier's that Was it Dampier that nailed the plate to the tree in Western Australia? Somebody nailed a pewter plate. I think it was Dampier. Say we discover a wreck somewhere and we have an even earlier time that we we can date that that the Dutch or Portuguese were— Portuguese are supposed to have been here before the Dutch, even— we can add things to these plaques, in the particular years that they occurred. Manning Clark has offered to do the current existing history for us, and include in that some Aboriginal history, too, although we won't be able to date it down to a year again, because they don't keep records like that. Their verbal histories are quite fantastic. I was just reading a verbal history that's come down, and it describes in it volcanic action, volcanoes in New South Wales being, what do they call it when they go, active. And they haven't been active, we know, for at least 20,000 years, and those stories have just come down by word of mouth. They'll be in strips so that you can put things in and take things out, because I learned in the process of going into the history of things that history isn't just a record of the past, it's really a record of the past that we wish to carry with us at the present time. Right. Uh, Gallipoli, in the lifetime that I've lived here, what's that, 30 years in Australia, has been sort of, ah, abolished completely almost from our consciousness in the '60s and then revived again quite recently. Last year they had in one week, six nights out of seven were to do with Gallipoli. So what I've allowed for here is to adjust what we wish to be visible of our history. But on this principle: that if we take something out because it seems at the moment to be irrelevant, or we have something which we think is more relevant that we want to know, you take it out and put it in the time path. It's just just a little path. I mean, it won't have anything in it for a long time, but it'll just start to accumulate detail, so that if you want it back again, you can go back and get it. Or if you want, if you find something else, you can put it down, and and the park itself will allow you to add things and and take away. And politics will get in there, too. So, rather than whip around chiselling off the names—

Interviewer Yeah, that's very pragmatic.

Subject Well no, I I always get annoyed in history that every time there's a decent revolution they go around and knock off all the wonderful inscriptions and and what have you, and then about a hundred years later they want to remember after the sting has gone out of it all, so I thought I would try and allow for that.

Interviewer [laughter] Flexibility.

Subject Peter Sculthorpe's taken an interest in the musical side of the thing. We're we're going to try and devise a system which is as broad as possible. I've really designed it not for experts, but for ordinary people to be able to go and use, and and to what degree what they do is musical is dependent upon them.

Interviewer Right, well, but it's, so in fact it's like a little boy who takes a stick and runs it down the pail and fits if he wants to.

Subject If he wants to, yeah, I don't see why not, you see. It's, what what I— I mean I didn't, I was almost the last person, I certainly took more time than anyone else to to realise what I'd got hold of. I mean I I I did really have it for about two or three years that I only tinkered with it when I was, you know, very little on my mind. And then I began to realise that bells have got a very broad base. They're they're used for almost every occasion you can imagine, from deaths, births, weddings, wars, stop things, start things. Always have bells. I mean—

Interviewer Calamities.

Subject Calamities. Uh, but we also ring them for good occasions, and there are sleigh bells and and war bells and God knows what else. So it's—

Interviewer Warning bells.

Subject That's right. So, I haven't really made it into a carillon. We didn't really want to turn it into a giant musical instrument. It's there, and it has both a profane and a sacred aspect to it. And there are, there is a Bellringers Association here, and I hope they'll take an interest in it ultimately. Peter Sculthorpe also gave me a bit of a nudge that we ought to think of really an Australasian bell. Being English, I'd really just automatically, when I had the idea of bells, thought an English-type bell or a European-type bell. So when we look through the history of them a bit, it turns out, just as a fluke which suited me, that the Asian bells are the more ancient form of bell, but they're also the more simple form of bell, and they're more like a hemisphere with the straight sides, rather than the sort of...

Interviewer Curvature.

Subject The the conical-shaped bell that the that the Europeans have developed. So, and in the style that I work as a sculptor, that happened to suit me, to go for the more simpler geometry of the Asian kind of bells, but with the tuning scale of the European bells. So we want to try and get some of the, some of the sounds of where we are. We're we're, Australia is really part of Asia almost, but with with a very powerful European, uh, immediate background. So we also wanted to deal with some of that diversity, too. And again, we're hoping that we can make some of the bells thinner, not just because of the stainless steel advantage, but thinner to get some of the more, uh, how can— I haven't been to describe them. I can imitate it, but I can't describe it. The sort of warm, warm, warm sounds that you get out of a bell, rather than that sharp, clear thing. Some of them, if you come down to a very thin shell for a bell, you get a sound more like a gong, a more, uh, a beating sound in it. Bit of experimentation to go on with there. I've got both at the moment. I mean, I've been fiddling with small ones for a couple of years now. Some very nice effects, which are outside the range of European bells, which tend just to ring. Uh, I'm seeing Peter this afternoon, actually, and we, I'm just about to do the final pricing on this, and—

Interviewer Well, I've been to Bali. The Balinese bells are very different.

Subject Yes.

Interviewer Oh, and so is the Swiss cowbell. I mean, bells are just different.

Subject Look, there— the fir— Can I steal another cigarette?

Interviewer Yeah.

Subject Goddamn it! I do it when I'm geared up.

Interviewer Too... I love cigarettes.

Subject They are They're a bloody nuisance. They'd be fantastic if they weren't so addictive.

Interviewer Wouldn't they? Anyway, let's not talk about that now.

Subject Cos they are addictive. No. Okay, that's Peter Sculthorpe and Manning Clark. Manning Clark, I might add, contributed to the thing. He really stressed the idea of the Aboriginal content as well. He thought that they should be the focal point of the whole thing. And, in fact, the idea of the stone came as a result of talking to him. I then went out and looked for that idea quite specifically. So what's been a fantastic exercise for me in this is that that although, you know, Laurie Le Guay started me thinking about it, other people have thrown ideas in, and it is that kind of an idea that it seems one can do that. It's not often that artists can, because you're generally struggling so much to get off your own point of view that there isn't any room to to take someone else into account. What's nice about the idea is that not only can it go back out to a great spectrum of people, it's also had quite a lot of input from lots of different people. What it can be is the focal point for all sorts of ceremonies: formal, informal, New Year's Eve. If we'd had this going when the America's Cup was won, we'd have certainly just kept it banging away all day. But it might be a citizenship ceremony, or a religious ceremony, or a military thing. I've I I haven't mentioned this to Peter Sculthorpe yet, because I'd like to get hold of it. I can see another 1812 Overture for bells and cannon fire, you see! [laughter] I'd love to fire a few shots into the lake.

Interviewer It's terrific. I love the idea of it.

Subject It's a pity I didn't bring the photographs of the site with me this morning, but we've only just got them back and I haven't had them mounted yet. It is a bloody wonderful site.

Interviewer It sounds terrific.

Subject It's it's it's, well, I've got a drawing here that gives some idea of the thing. People like Paolo Totaro with the Ethnic Affairs sees an interest from the spectrum of different racial origins that we have here. And again, the bells are just diverse. They they deal with all that business. Gerard Dusseldorp, when he was with Youth Affairs, gave me another nice idea that instead of just bringing the bulldozer in, that we start the site out with either a hundred or 200 kids with pick and shovel, and probably me in there raising a sweat. So there's some nice, you know, that we make the ground valuable by putting in some ordinary blood, sweat, and tears. This is an idea in this drawing which wasn't mine. I'd imagined that we would have some very nice ropes made up in the way the navy does, and you weave colour and some metal threads into them. And I probably imagined we had a nice long box that we pushed under the stairs somewhere. Uh, and one of the chaps in Canberra said, "Why don't you hang it as a tapestry?" So it was an obvious, it's a good idea. We'll do that. So the ropes will actually be hung either in the new Parliament House or in the old Parliament House, which may become a museum. So, just directly behind the bells, if you want to use the bells, you to go and get the ropes is itself a ritual, and they'll be on display as a kind of a tapestry, and again, probably with with with some sort of information around them about...

Interviewer What do you mean, you have to take the rope and take it out of Parliament House and take it down to the bells?

Subject Yes.

Interviewer And then how do you get it up to the top of the— to the 20 feet?

Subject They call them cherry pickers, because that's where they were that's what they were first invented for, but everybody uses them to change light bulbs on on lamp posts.

Interviewer Mhm.

Subject Instead of having a a little light on the end of a long stick, [laughter] you now go down the road in a cherry picker and change the bulbs. Um, look, we had to be realistic about that. If you leave the ropes on, I can imagine the Australians being who they are, there'd be a lot of informal bellringing going on at times that would be inclined to drive other people crazy. [laughter] So there had to be a simple way of of just regulating that. We'll have two sets of ropes. One will be the sacred set of ropes and one will be the profane set of ropes, and the profane set will be on on New Year's Eve, where we just keep them going, or the new century coming up or whatever. And what we're doing at the moment, probably jumping the gun a bit, is planning a closing ceremony for 1988, which will be New Year's Eve for 1988-89, that'll go from being quite formal and and hopefully will break down and become quite informal about 12:00 midnight. No, it was a simple problem. Some people were concerned about their, you know, the amount of informal use, and the answer really is it could be annoying if it was if it was just allowed to go all the time. But I've dealt with that, I hope, in another in another way. One of the reasons I wanted this thing near water of some sort was apart from the fact of letting the sound out, because you there are offers to put it within the city itself, but you but you see that it would swallow it up, and the city is a very powerful place anyway, so there was a kind of a conflict. I wanted it away from buildings in a more natural setting in order to be exposed to the wind, so that, as you'll see in a moment, it does respond to the wind. The top counterpoise above the bell is usually just a big lump of wood or concrete or steel which which counterbalances the bell so you don't have to rip your arms off trying to to move it. What I want to do there is I've flattened it into a wind vane, so it balances the bell, but also acts against the wind. It'll do two things. The model does it, so that visually the thing will start to set up wave motions in the bells.

Interviewer So there will be some sound from it.

Subject And—

Interviewer Like the tinkle of—

Subject Yeah, we'll we'll add Either the There's two ways of doing it, but I won't decide this until we've actually got down the track quite a bit. You can either hang a very light striker outside the bell and next to it so that it just tings the the side of the bell, or put a crossbar on the clapper inside so that it only allows the clapper to move the last half an inch. Of course, the volume of the bell is strictly regulated by how hard you strike it. That's why you spin a bell, so the clapper can accelerate through almost, you know, 200 degrees before the bell stops and the clapper keeps going and strikes it, and then it goes back the other way. Uh, if you just have the clapper moving, you know, an inch or so, it'll sound the bell, but not to the point that you would hear it, say, 50 yards away. So that what you might have on a day like today is just a background about the level of listening to somebody typing in the next room.

Interviewer Well, I think that's essential. I think you can't be dead. I mean, if you're looking at bells, you expect noise.

Subject Well, I also remember writing somewhere down the line that the silence of a hundred bells was also quite special. I got onto that simply because in the model I built, they're built out of aluminium, because it was too difficult to make them out of stainless steel at that scale. Uh, they're all made by hand, so the work to build the bells by hand, they're only about two or three inches high, was too difficult. So I did them in aluminium in order to just get the visual things right. And I found it's just such a beautiful thing just as it is, without—

Interviewer [inaudible]

Subject ...without any sound at all. Just looking at the...

Interviewer [inaudible]

Subject ...the mass of them together was quite fantastic. So you've got this other thing, this this sort of hidden sound. You know there are sounds in there, but until they're brought out, they're not visible. And then the way I've arranged them, is that there will be a... the five largest bells will be tuned down to about C below middle C, and that will produce a very nice, very solemn sound, and they'll occupy the centre of each of the five rings of the bells. The five rings are in the Olympic pattern.

Interviewer Mhm.

Subject And those five bells can be rung on their own. They're situated in such a way that they don't look completely isolated, but they can be rung without ringing the other bells. And they're really for solemn occasions: a state funeral or a disaster, or something which requires a solemn note. And then there are 20 other bells in each ring, which gives you 105 bells in total, and they cover four octaves of the European scale, so that one can play most European music on them. And also Peter Sculthorpe's going to write a piece of music specifically for the bells for the opening.

Interviewer Well, that's marvellous.

Subject And so it should be a very nice thing. And what I've tried to do is to keep the thing open to everyone, so that nobody feels that they're excluded from it. It's not an elitist project at all. It's for ordinary people to enjoy, and to be part of the Australian landscape.

Interviewer I think it's a great project.

Subject Well, we hope it comes off.

Interviewer I'm sure it will.

Wallace Thornton as it is, without any sound at all. Uh it's a really quite I mean, for instance, all the people that have supported the project have done so from the photographs of the model and the idea that it creates in their head. Nobody's heard a bell ring yet, you see. And the model's a very lovely thing. So there will be times when it's perfectly silent, but to just walk through a grove of absolutely silent bells, to me, is also it creates a special kind of silence. But I would like to have, on a day like today when there's a bit of breeze up, something a bit alive about it. And the fact that they will move and shimmer, see, what I really wanted was to to take on the character of the water, you see. The character of the water alters to do with the sunlight and the wind on it, so that they, too, would influence the bells and make them a bit more alive and not a static monument that simply became a uh a landing place for pigeons and other manufacturers of fertiliser. They're all the people that have supported the the project. They're all there in that envelope, so you can read those at your leisure. There's a drawing of the site. There are two sites, either that one or that one, but in fact, you know, that's that's the sacred site, if you like, in our terms. To get that site, they will have to pass an Act of Parliament, because anything that happens in that triangle has to go through Parliament. But that would seem to be on side. Bit of heavy legwork there.

Sandra McGrath God, to get an Act of Parliament.

Wallace Thornton Dining at The Lodge. Oh, it's all been very exciting.

Sandra McGrath You've taken all this to Hawkey and all?

Wallace Thornton All right. Yeah, they're all very keen.

Sandra McGrath Right. I'll tell you one funny story.

Wallace Thornton Did you present it just the way you presented it to me, Wallace? Except for the fact that we were laying on the floor doing it, because it's one of Hawkey's ways of putting people at their ease, to be very casual about things. So when we sort of looked around as to where was a good spot, we thought, well, the floor was the best place for it. So down we went, and we spread it out on the floor. The only snooker was that I was so geared up to be absolutely formal that when we went to the floor, I completely, and the only time in my life I ever lost the ability to speak, for about three minutes. Thank God he was looking at the pictures, because I was going, and absolutely nothing was coming out of my mouth. I I nearly had to take myself into the next room and bang my head on the wall. I mean, I got a total case of stage fright.

Sandra McGrath Good lord.

Wallace Thornton I mean, I I'd I'd sort of practised doing it on a tabletop, and suddenly, to make me at ease, to drop it on the floor, I just I just completely lost my whole sort of thread of good behaviour, best behaviour, whatever I thought I had to do. But anyway, we survived that. We survived that.

Sandra McGrath Was Hazel aware?

Wallace Thornton Hazel saw it first, actually. Uh in fact, she saw it about a week or two before, just just by a little crossroads of history again. Um no, I happened to meet his daughter. I mean, we were going that way anyway, because, well, he and Dick Kirby are old pals, so that's we were well on the way. And then just by accident, a friend of mine happened to be a good friend of Hawkey's daughter, and I drove to Canberra for one reason or another, and uh uh I wound up having lunch there. And in the process, um performed, did my little party trick. Well, that did some good, too. Women are always the key to making things really happen.

Sandra McGrath How did you do your little party trick?

Wallace Thornton Well, I had it I had this with me. I had all the photographs and so on with me. That's why I was actually going to Canberra, to talk to the NCDC about the site and so on. Um so it was there, and it came up as a bit of dinner conversation, so so it it it appeared as the dessert, if you like. Everything else was cleared away.

Sandra McGrath Drink that up, and I'll give you a fresh-

Wallace Thornton Not too many, cuz I'm driving and I've got one point left. All I need is to blow up a coloured balloon, and I've lost it. That's all it is: two posts, a bar, the bell. There's the light striker on the outside.

Sandra McGrath Mm.

Wallace Thornton It'll take about an hour for someone to go through and clip on the ropes, half an hour if you do it with two people. But it was the only alternative I could really find. Some people suggested that we put motors on them, and I thought of that, but the idea of this thing really is I've left room on those plaques to accumulate a thousand years of history. That seems a bit of a long thought, but I don't really think it is. I've just finished reading a book where they've just found, well, just, 1952, found next to the pyramid of Cheops or Khufu a pit containing a 45-metre-long boat. That's about that's about 150-feet-long boat made out of cedar that had actually sailed down the Nile, belonged to a pharaoh. Planks of Lebanese cedar stitched together in a pit. It's been there for 4,600 years. They've now taken it out and rebuilt it. It's taken them 10 years to put it back together. So a thousand years of me thinking about continuity is not a big jump at all. So the idea of putting electrical motors on it, I simply see them as sort of representing the kind of trivial repair job you have to do. So I've tried to keep it as simple and as ordinarily humanly physical as possible, so if I mean, for instance, if you did motorise them, and you could then put it on a keyboard, you could then have somebody sit down and play melody on it very easily. But I don't think that's the point. The point for me is that it's accessible to people. It's accessible to 100 school kids or 200 school kids to go down. It's the fact that it'll be a monument that people can go and do something, however simple, rather than just the sort of a silent, sacred place. You know, that monuments tend to have one big day when they're they're unveiled and we formally hand them over to the pigeons.

Sandra McGrath Wish there was some way that you could put the ropes inside of a inside a pole that had a sort of door in it that opened and shut. I think that business of

Wallace Thornton putting taking them on and off?

Sandra McGrath Yes.

Wallace Thornton Well, if you can think of it, I'll do it. Yeah, it's one part of the thing that there wasn't a simple answer to. There is a simple answer. The simple answer is that you just have to take them on and off. Uh maybe there's a way round that. Maybe. I just certainly know that to leave them on would would invite chaos. Maybe not. I don't know, you see. It's Look, I also think this can happen.

Sandra McGrath I think that that's the only disagreement with it is uh

Wallace Thornton try to tune them, or whether they do they just make a row of bells. The Chinese have done the same. The Chinese bells have tended to make all their bells the same size and then vary the thickness, and they just leave it at that. It's it's quite an arbitrary scale. But since we're a Western country, I thought we really had to have something which would relate back to written music, which is fairly specific.

Sandra McGrath This book he's just showing me,

Wallace Thornton Show Tell Tony that way. I've seen it.

Sandra McGrath Angus & Robertson is like the a quarter of

Wallace Thornton It's just full of me trying to work out the math-

Sandra McGrath a few pages.

Wallace Thornton how the mathematics and how you can tune them. And the tuning is very simple. Even with the cast, even in the English foundries, which have been going for about 600 years, they've arrived at their tuning entirely by accident and tradition.

Sandra McGrath Mm.

Wallace Thornton And but now what they do, they cast the bell within probably within 1% of what its final weight will be. They sit it upright in a lathe, and they just scrape off metal off the rim. They just lighten the bell, and that-

Tony While they're hitting it?

Wallace Thornton Yeah, and they strike it as they go, and that will heighten the sound of the bell. And if they want to dull it off, they'd just pour a bit of, sometimes just lead into the crown of the bell. Because when they fix it finally, they'll fix whatever's there, and they just- And I even suspect, I just looked at that beside

Sandra McGrath It's not very scientific, is it?

Wallace Thornton No, it's not. That was the catch, you see. And I didn't know where in the bloody hell I would start. I mean, I I I knew what visually what size the bells should be, but I also wanted them to make some sort of chromatic sense.

Sandra McGrath Well, tell Tony that, because Tony's very interested in music.

Tony He's just wondering if that engine sounds awful.

Sandra McGrath Tony knows quite a bit about music, and uh and I want you to tell him that uh about how you finally ended up with the bells, so twice as high this is as torch if you do the mathematical logarithms as you were looking at them at first. I'm not making myself very clear.

Wallace Thornton Well, it didn't, but I didn't give you a terribly simple thing to get hold of anyway.

Sandra McGrath Well, I do understand, but um I cleaned that pool this morning, I wish to know.

Tony Play us that again. It's quite constant, so it's not sounding so awful.

Sandra McGrath Yeah.

Wallace Thornton I'm just trying to find the line.

Tony How did you resolve the problem?

Wallace Thornton I eventually got the two ends to intersect at one point.

Sandra McGrath Intersection of what?

Wallace Thornton Well, talking to musicians at one end and some scientists at the other, uh and it intersected on one character whose name I've now forgotten. Anyway, it was a combination of what they call hertz, the H-E-R-T-Z's, which are the air vibrations. There's a way of translating those into a thing called cents, which are your subdivisions in a scale. And from that, I also discovered that an octave is the cube root of the weight of a piece of metal, doubled. So-

Sandra McGrath He invented that formula, I might say, Tony.

Wallace Thornton No, no, I didn't invent it. I I didn't invent it at all. Other people obviously knew about it. I'm just a couple hundred years later.

Tony I knew it was to do with the length of the string, but I didn't know it was anything to do with the weight.

Wallace Thornton Well, the cat- Well, yeah, the catch is, you see, the length of the string is quite simple. If you halve the length of a string, the note goes up an octave.

Sandra McGrath Didn't Aristotle Pythagoras work that one out?

Wallace Thornton You see, the snooker is with a thing like a xylophone or a metallophone, to be more appropriate, the the the metal has thickness, the metal has volume as well as length, if you like. So so that obviously just the length of a piece of metal wouldn't work. It turned out it's the cube root. It's a it's a three-dimensional thing. So if you take a bar of metal that you are going to eventually turn into a thing like a xylophone, an octave difference is you take the cube root of the weight of the biggest piece and halve the cube root and then multiply that out again, and you'll get the piece of metal that's an octave higher. In other words, it's really It is similar to the string. It's half everything. It's half the length, half the breadth, half the the width. Or or it translates more simply and obviously, it halves the weight. So you So what you can What the game I'm now playing is, and this is where I probably could use a computer, in theory, you'll get the same note from two bells that are of the same weight. But if you thin them out, in other words, you can make a very small, heavy bell or a very large, thin bell, you'll get the same note, but you'll get a different timbre, a different sort of colour to it. Uh and that's why I've got Peter Sculthorpe on side to do that, because his interests have been in Balinese, Asian, Southeast Asian instruments, where you get those yeah, that's uh all those what are they, gamelan or whatever.

Tony Yes, gamelan.

Sandra McGrath Gamelan bells.

Tony They're mad about bells, aren't they?

Wallace Thornton I'm just trying to find the one-

Tony How does your Jag go? Does it give you any trouble?

Wallace Thornton Well, that gives me a bit of indigestion every now and again. Well, look, it's nearly 20 years old, right, so it gets the kiss of life more often than I do. Um I just took it in for a service so I could drive to Canberra, and I got a bill for $2,500.

Tony What?

Wallace Thornton But, I might add, I've done 300,000 miles in it, and that's the first major mechanical thing I've had to do to it. I just had all the valve guides replaced. Uh

Tony You've had it all that time?

Wallace Thornton No, I haven't. I've had it for about oh, I've had it for about 15 years.

Tony Oh, yeah.

Wallace Thornton I did a very foolish thing when I was in England in about 1969. I was doing some work for BMC then, and I could have bought a