Tony McGillick

Sandra McGrath Yeah, recording 1, 2, 3. Recording 1, 2, 3.

Tony McGillick Can you hear me properly?

Sandra McGrath I hear you very much and properly. Tell me where you first met Brett, yeah. Well, we met at Lintas. Tell me about Lintas, yeah, Tony.

Tony McGillick Well, Lintas was, you know, in those— in those days was a big ad agency. And one of the customs of big ad agencies was to have lots of juniors in the art departments. And they had all the artists lined up in booths, and the boys would be taken from high school with some art promise, and we'd run around changing water bowls, water bowls and getting cardboard for them, and just being dogsbodies. And Brett and I were in one part of the agency.

Sandra McGrath Which part?

Tony McGillick It was called the finished art department,

Sandra McGrath What's that mean? The finished art department?

Tony McGillick Yes.

Sandra McGrath Not the unfinished, but the finished.

Tony McGillick Well, the other— other part was called the layout department. They were the designers. So you and Brett were in the finished art department, and the other section was what? I think it was called the design department, which was much more— the design department was much more fun. The finished artists were almost like little chemists, you know. They were all experts at something, but they were pretty dull people. So the idea was...

Sandra McGrath When you say that they were good at something...

Tony McGillick Oh, they're good at lettering, things that aren't done anymore, retouching photographs, or...

Sandra McGrath Keep going. Retouching, lettering...

Tony McGillick ...pack drawing.

Sandra McGrath What is pack drawing?

Tony McGillick Like a pack, a pack of Palmolive. They'd draw these things.

Sandra McGrath Pack, pack drawing?

Tony McGillick Yeah, or package, drawing of the package.

Sandra McGrath Oh, drawing of the package.

Tony McGillick Because nearly everything we had to do was to do with soap. Was it soap?

Sandra McGrath Oh, really?

Tony McGillick Rinso, Persil, Sunlight, because the agency— the agency was owned by Lever & Kitchen. And it still goes today, this agency. I think they do more than soap.

Sandra McGrath Lever & Kitchen?

Tony McGillick Yeah, they owned the agency.

Sandra McGrath And when you say the most thing we had to do was soap, what did you do with soap?

Tony McGillick Well, ads for them, drawing packages, doing the artwork for the pack that would go to the printer, posters, amazing amount of stuff. I couldn't— can't imagine what we did now. It took a lot of people to do it, though. But you know when you see a headline on an ad today, that's photo lettering, it happens instantly. Yes. Then they hand-lettered it. Brilliant artisans, these people, hand-lettered every single letter. So it would take days for these headlines to be lettered by some myopic artist. You're expected to practice doing this in between getting their lunch or emptying the water bowls. Supposed to practice lettering basically? Lettering and keyline drawing, all the— all the...

Sandra McGrath Now you have to tell me, because other people don't know. You have to practice lettering, keyline drawing...

Tony McGillick Keylines, they're the lines that for printing. Extreme accuracy with rulers and set squares and so on. This is all very interesting in respect of Brett.

Sandra McGrath Yeah, it is.

Tony McGillick Brett was totally disinterested in all this. So was I, really.

Sandra McGrath So you were supposed to practice this between cleaning the bowls and getting coffee, something like that?

Tony McGillick Yes, coffee. We'd run messages to illustrators. We'd go and see, say, Frank McNamara to get an illustration for some something or other, you know. Then we'd have to take it back to him with a correction. So we were constantly running up around the city, delivering artwork. We shared this task.

Sandra McGrath What was he like at that stage?

Tony McGillick Oh, the... Well, he was bohemian. In the terms of those days, he was extremely bohemian.

Sandra McGrath What does that mean, how he dressed?

Tony McGillick Yeah, but his behaviour was still quite extreme as well. How? Well, he was irreverent, disregarded 9 to 5 rules. I mean, I was a bit like this myself, but he was he was a bit of a... A larrikin. ...a larrikin, yeah. And what he— What did he wear in those days? Did he have... Really, all the time he wore a green corduroy suit, which never got a chance to be cleaned or pressed. With a tie? And desert boots, I remember that. He was a great innovator with desert

Sandra McGrath boots. Green corduroy suit with desert boots. And a tie? A tie and bow? Tie, probably,

Tony McGillick sometimes. Yes, I think the tie probably was worn because that was very much expected. Some concession to the office.

Sandra McGrath To the office syndrome.

Tony McGillick Yeah.

Sandra McGrath But did he have earrings or necklaces or any of that sort of stuff?

Tony McGillick No, no. He had short hair and, I mean, he was basically post crew cut, that sort of college boy look. It was a very definite style: black knit ties, which I think he wore to the— to the end. He always had black knit ties.

Sandra McGrath Black knit. Yeah, that sounds right.

Tony McGillick And, I mean, the last— even when I saw him in a suit for some reason or other, either when he was meeting Prince Charles or something, he had this bloody black knit tie on still. His answer to the tie was this thing. But that was...

Sandra McGrath How old were you all then?

Tony McGillick Oh, we were terribly young. I was 14.

Sandra McGrath Oh, my god.

Tony McGillick which, since I was born in '41, must have been '55, would that make it? '55, '56, sort of time. He was a bit older than me. So do you think he would have been 17 or something? Yeah, I'd say he'd be about 17. And that was in '55. Yeah, I'd have to confirm that, maybe Wendy would know. Where is my other glasses? Simply hot. But then we, and down at the other The agency was split up into two buildings. One was in Kent Street, one part was Kent Street, and one was in York Street.

Sandra McGrath Two buildings, one in York, one in Kent.

Tony McGillick Yeah, and since we were delivering work back and forth from the design to the finished art, they were split up, the two departments.

Sandra McGrath Oh, the two departments, one in the York and one in Kent.

Tony McGillick That's right.

Sandra McGrath Which was in which?

Tony McGillick The designers were in York Street, in Asbestos House. God, it's all coming back to me, what I'm doing! Asbestos House, I think the building's still there. And the finished art people, where Brett and I were, were down behind the Town Hall.

Sandra McGrath In Kent Street?

Tony McGillick Yeah.

Sandra McGrath In Kent Street, behind the Town Hall.

Tony McGillick So the day was spent running up and down with layouts and finished art and back and forth. That sort of carry on. And down at the other end, down at the York Street place, there was Michael Johnson.

Sandra McGrath Rollin Schlicht?

Tony McGillick No. No, he wasn't. He was— we didn't know him until he went to London. But the other one of interest there was Max Cullen, the actor. Charlie and... No, that's right. On what day they had... No, no, I'm going to have that.

Sandra McGrath So Max Cullen, the actor, was the other one, that's where we started.

Tony McGillick Yes. Oh, Max Cullen was there. Michael Johnson was there. People that left from, you know, within this time, they came and went, but we all— Even Dick Watkins was there before us. But see, this was quite normal in these places in those days to have quite a lot of kids around. Yeah. Well, we didn't get paid anything. I got paid £4, I remember, which even— Well, about Per week? Per week, which basically paid the fares. It was a kind of apprenticeship scheme, you know. And what would Brett have been paid, the same? Oh, he might have got a bit more because you'd be paid on your age, you know, that was another habit then. He might go up another pound a year, he might have got £6 or £7. Yeah. But it was only enough just to get to work and get back again, it wasn't. You were meant to train yourself there. I see. The basic assumption was that if all the big agencies trained a bunch of kids, they would all leave, but they'd go to the other agencies, you know, basically if the big ones like McCann Erickson and J. Walter Thompson's, Lintas,

Sandra McGrath seemed to have a— a— an agreement to train people. Oh, as in as a pool, sort of?

Tony McGillick It was a sort of pool of way of training people into that— that industry.

Sandra McGrath So it wasn't considered bad to lose all that?

Tony McGillick Not really, no. No. They'd sack you actually. They'd say, "Oh, we don't need you anymore, we'll get some younger ones, get somebody else." It wasn't though being brutal, because you could always get another job. It was a way of introducing people to that industry. And quite a good idea, actually. Quite a nice way of doing it. There weren't any art schools or anything functioning in that way. No. Um, so... But then the— the community, that those juniors that we all were in, began going to Julian Ashton's to do the— we were expected to, as well. Yeah. I think— I think the agency may even have paid our fees, or some— some part of those fees, to learn life drawing.

Sandra McGrath That's interesting. Because I sort of sensed all of this in a way that I'm seeing it now that sort of didn't make sense to me before. Mm.

Tony McGillick We were night students at Julian Ashton.

Sandra McGrath I saw actually the enrolment book the other day, I went down... Brett and there it was. It was £4.9 to go to Julian Ashton and Brett was the only unpaid one.

Tony McGillick Well, the agency didn't pay for him!

Sandra McGrath Was everybody living at home?

Tony McGillick Um, I wasn't. I don't know, yeah, I think— I think they were. Michael was and, uh, I think Brett was still at Longueville. Well, as a group of young people, there was you, Michael Johnson, Brett, Max Cullen, who wasn't an actor at this time, he was trying to be an artist.

Sandra McGrath Where does he live now?

Tony McGillick He lives just up around the corner here. Oh, really?

Sandra McGrath You don't happen to have his telephone number, do you?

Tony McGillick I do have it back there.

Sandra McGrath Can I ring you and get it? Yeah, sure. Michael Johnson...

Tony McGillick Yeah, sure. They're the— they're the people whose names you'd remember. Many other people, I can't recall their names, they didn't last or stay in the game, you know. There were other people would come and go in and around that: young advertising executives and things, juniors in other parts of the agency, they were all boys.

Sandra McGrath Did you ever graduate, any of you?

Tony McGillick No, the trouble is we barely went to college as a matter of fact.

Sandra McGrath What do you mean barely?

Tony McGillick Well, we'd go there. Do you remember— Have you ever heard of Gibbons?

Sandra McGrath Yeah, yeah.

Tony McGillick He was a wonderful, beautiful old man. He ran the college, the school. And I think he could see that he had something on his hands here with this lot, you know. Wendy Paramor was another one in that group.

Sandra McGrath What, in Julian Ashton's? Yeah, yeah.

Tony McGillick And her father owned an ad agency as well. So that's how they linked up with each other. Well, we went a lot. We went every... I think we might have had to go twice a week, and we'd go...

Sandra McGrath You were supposed to go three times a week.

Tony McGillick Really? Oh, we might have even gone three— well, Friday night. Yeah, well, perhaps we did. But what we did was go That's all we did was go there, show off, basically, because we could all draw much better than the other poor buggers, you see. We thought we could anyway. And then we'd skip, skip lessons and go across to the pub across the road and talk about Rothko or whatever.

Sandra McGrath What was the pub across the...

Tony McGillick I can't remember its name. The building is there still.

Sandra McGrath That was in the Mining Building, wasn't it?

Tony McGillick That's right, the old Mining Building, and directly opposite there was a a wharfies pub or something. There was a labourers' pub in those days. And they had a back room, and we'd get in there and be bohemians in there.

Sandra McGrath And what did that mean?

Tony McGillick It meant you had to watch out. Because you'd be beaten up, especially with Brett's provocative behaviour.

Sandra McGrath So being bohemian meant you had to be careful not to get beaten up by the locals?

Tony McGillick That's right. And as well as that, we seemed to have nice-looking girlfriends, and they didn't. And they thought we were pouffes, and they couldn't reconcile all these sort of things, which often meant we were intimidated. But I have to say that Brett would provoke them, you know. He would provoke these things. So it was dangerous company. But everybody was pretty interested at that period about abstraction, as far as we could find anything out about it. It would be Life magazine photographs of Pollock, or de Kooning. These sorts of sources of talking. You'd find out another layer of that from Michael Johnson, who was much closer to Brett than I was.

Sandra McGrath Which one was which? more broody...

Tony McGillick drinking too much and, you know, You had to actually create it.

Sandra McGrath emotional security.

Tony McGillick Oh, to find, find bums and characters, I mean, they were well-off young kids from the North Shore. There was a bit of slumming going on, you know.

Sandra McGrath or just to feel what low life, real life was?

Tony McGillick I think it was a bit of both, and to create a legend for themselves. Brett would often do drawings in the night in these places, quick pen, black or blue ink pen drawings, then come back to the agency and paint them up in gouache when he was meant to be doing messages. Basically he used the agency as a studio. Because they also supplied wonderful equipment and materials. No, we would go to the Newcastle, another pub down that way, opposite the Ironworkers Building. and the pub that I can't recall the name of, which attracted the... they weren't called hippies then, There was a Push pub, too, I forget the name. It was downtown here. certainly where the action was on Friday and Saturday, and you'd go there to arrange, and again, get university girls to be there. Perhaps I can get back to that. It might pop into my head. It was a famous place, since there were so few places to go to.

Sandra McGrath Was that where Margaret Fink was and all that group?

Tony McGillick Yes, she'd be there, and Robert Hughes. I remember them there. I wasn't included, but they were certainly stars of the place, you know. There was very, very much layers of acceptability in those places. Well, to come to that conclusion because we know about the advertising period makes an assumption about advertising then. Advertising agencies now are an entirely different issue. Where in those days, they were just workshops to bring out things for the Woman's Weekly, or, I mean, they simply didn't have that sophistication that we'd expect. They simply didn't have the sophistication. to produce advertising. There is no subtlety to it, no research, no analysis, and grasp of that would have been Wendy, really. A very few, maybe three people, had a relationship that would last more than four or five years, and then that would be the end of it. And when we got together after the funeral,

Sandra McGrath Did you go to the funeral?

Tony McGillick Yeah. Which afterwards, you know, some of the most people went back to Wendy's place. And you found you were going through sort of veneers of time, you know, like there was the young the early Ladbroke Grove people and even the Sydney people before London, then the next group, and then the next group, and they just sort of peeled back until there seemed to be nobody now. There seemed to be nobody there from now, or from the last three or four years, except... Well, Janice. I think she went there, perhaps, but she wasn't at the funeral. And Tim, Tim has known Brett for a long period.

Sandra McGrath Describe to me the funeral in Thirroul, how you saw it.

Tony McGillick Well, it was small, considering... the amount of people that might might have attended. But I can understand why they wanted to keep it very small.

Sandra McGrath What do you think you remember most about it?

Tony McGillick Well, I think Arkie's control in the thing, who is, what's called Deià? You remember Deià?

Sandra McGrath No, who's Deià? Is that Deià?

Tony McGillick Well, memory calls it back Deià. Well, in all probability, this might be puck, but at the time, they used to go to Deià in Mallorca, where Robert Graves lived. It's a village, Deià, where Robert Graves...

Sandra McGrath Was Deià where she was conceived? Was that the idea?

Tony McGillick This was the idea, right.

Sandra McGrath I've got a cousin called Bimini because she was conceived in Bimini. So what you noticed in the funeral most was Arkie's...

Tony McGillick Well, that was a very... I was I was extremely upset, and I was very surprised that I was so upset. Since I hadn't had much to do with him for years. And I was also very angry. These emotions really surprised me, because I haven't had any reason to... It was interesting your observation of people not knowing parts, parts of him. And thinking that, well, I'm like everyone else. I knew him for part of the time and there was always the potential to reunite, you know, to readdress each other, you know what I mean? This is very much the case with Michael. Because Michael and he were like twins. The separation between those two is a great shame. It was something that shouldn't have happened. It would have made a big difference to a lot of... It might have even made a big difference to Australian painting if they those two had continued to offset each other as they did when they were youngsters. I think it began with it's it it's sparked, it came from Brett's early success, and Michael's absolute lack of success, and some degree of envy, and some degree of Michael was beginning to... Brett Brett by the painting for the the 'Girls in the Bath' or the 'Woman in the Bath' from the French painting, the Soutine paintings, which were like... Ladbroke Grove area. He'd moved out of Ladbroke Grove by just down the road. And there were some paintings, I think they're called Cézanne or Cézanne. Um, there was a really definite shift back to figuration. Not just anamorphic things, but figuration. And 'The Woman in the Bath' was, I think, very good painting. But it was a definite step towards figuration. Meanwhile, Johnson's down the other end of the street pushing more into Miró and colour field, the original colour field painting, meaning in other words, abstraction. So that the grounds in which they started on had divided. They'd divided their road. And because they were both so bloody passionate, they couldn't communicate with one another in in a reasonable way about this difference. Because Michael never bothered with any of that pop art or any of the fashionable stuff in that period. He was always very single-minded too, but so was Brett. Brett was very eclectic. And, I mean, I think you'd do better to talk to Michael himself, but these are my third-hand... And that that friendship was a very extraordinary friendship. Which, like mine, was a quite a deep one for me too. And the gap and the split away, this is why I say years later when I had to go to his funeral and Michael has to carry the casket, it was a terrible thing to have found that in a sense he stole the chance for us to get back together, you know. Even as old men that would have been nice, to sort of settle down and just look look at what happened, but that's gone. And that that really aggravated me. And that that really aggravated me.

Sandra McGrath He didn't give you the chance, did he?

Tony McGillick I'm sorry? No, I wasn't aggravated with him. It was just that's the the thing you can't pin it down, why why these strong emotions keep swimming around it. I was scared of being led into it. Well, I saw, I didn't see very much of him once he got into it seriously. But when when he was toying around with it, I forget what years it was, but it was... Central Street was still going and we had some plans to do things there and so on. He must have gone to America on that Harkness thing, come back and started fiddling about. And I was too scared of him, really. Because I he's a very uh he was a very influential person. As kids we'd, when I say kids, 20-year-olds, we'd roar off to Europe without any plans, jump trains, and things like this, and I mean, it's amazing what influence he had. He's a very dangerous person if he uses it wrongly. And I knew that I was likely to be susceptible to him. Like any good little Catholic boy, I kept out of sight.

Sandra McGrath When you when you went roaring off to Europe to catch a train, did you go with him on that '58 trip, '59?

Tony McGillick No, as I remember, he won a scholarship here to go to Italy.

Sandra McGrath Yeah, he did. He won the Travelling Scholarship.

Tony McGillick And then they, somehow they all got connected in London. Michael Johnson went over there and they picked up with Dick Watkins, who had who'd found a a house to live in, big big rooms, in Westbourne Park in Ladbroke Grove, which was large with big rooms. So each had a studio there. And Brett and Wendy lived at the top of this thing. When I got there, that was the set-up. There wasn't a room for me, so I went to another place nearby.

Sandra McGrath Describe the set-up at Ladbroke Grove. I'm not I don't understand it quite.

Tony McGillick Well, as I just mentioned, Dick Watkins seemed to have found this place. He'd been there for some time. found this place. He'd been there for some time, living at, um, uh, 129 Ladbroke Grove. I even have a photograph of it.

Sandra McGrath Do you?

Tony McGillick Oh, well, years later, I went back and took a photograph of the, uh, site. That's right. A terrace building. And I think, as well as that, he probably realized that we lived there—I came in afterwards and lived in Dick Watkins'—um, he probably realized that we were fairly safe to have above his place at night and stuff. We might have looked a bit funny, but we were not going to break open the door and steal all his, uh, stands or something. Now, in a funny sort of way, he found an accommodation for us, which he would never do for anybody else. He was incredibly cruel and insensitive to all his clients or clients.

Sandra McGrath Oh, but you actually weren't in there?

Tony McGillick No, I turned up there with the setup already in place. And then Watkins left to come back to Australia. Brett, Brett, I think he had a show at the Matthiesen's or something like that, and he'd done quite well, so he had a bit of money. And then he went out to a... went to another house up the road, which was more comfortable. Well, Dick left, Mick moved up to John... uh, to Watkins', Frosty stayed there. There was a room down there. Howley went there for about six months, and then I took it over from Howley. I think he's always been interesting. He's an interesting person.

Sandra McGrath I'm sure. I think...

Tony McGillick The papers in Melbourne, will give you Wendy and Dennis and the, Will and the Hughes and Brennan, you know, they call him the Prince of Junkies in King's Cross City, you know. People say there's never been a fellow to hit with it. Prince of Junkies and leader of the school. You know, who's the icon? I thought about how I'd call that one, yeah.

Sandra McGrath Oh, there's always hostility, particularly...

Interviewer Well, Sydney, Brett in particular. But, you've all found that.

Tony McGillick Essentially, on the one hand they bought it, put it on the sinker, on the other hand there are resistance to it. Because they stand...

Interviewer Yeah, a bit shallow.

Sandra McGrath Shallow, shallow brand, shall we? Absolutely.

Tony McGillick Bit of rubbish. Bit of rubbish. That's London. Now, where in Brett's can wine and beer be considered really sort of like Bonnie and Clyde or Fitzgerald?

Sandra McGrath No, I mean in England you know, they don't do that. You can have...

Tony McGillick No, sure. They were quite brilliant mostly by then. But in the, in the, I mean there's no doubt that Brett's work was startlingly, mature and interesting. In London in those first couple of years, in '61, '62, I suppose it was. As well as that, there was really quite an interest in Australian painting. Oh, look. It had something to do with the heat out here, and it was Australian painting. They were looking for a novelty. And Brian Robertson thought this was a nice go. It was already established as Nolan. Nolan was showing at the, what is it, it's not the Fisher, but it was called Marlborough Gallery. And there was a bit of interest in some of the older Australians, Boyd. And then it turned out there seemed to be quite a lot more of them around. So there was a bit of interest in the, in the, in the group, just because they were Australian and painted brown paintings.

Sandra McGrath Because they were Australian, painted brown paintings, yeah.

Tony McGillick Yeah, sepia and English don't know how to use red ochre, for instance.

Interviewer Why not?

Tony McGillick It doesn't come into their visual...

Sandra McGrath Well, let's see. Why not?

Tony McGillick Well, because their country is green and grey, isn't it? Also, I think, I don't know that you need to be facetious about, there was a thing about these Australian painters. The landscape orientation. The option for landscape painting then was Cornish painting from St. Ives, Hilton and Peter Lanyon, and so on. Yeah, basically, that's what you got handed up, either Hitchins and so on.

Tony McGrath And it was all rather neat and pretty and...

Sandra McGrath Polite, it is.

Tony McGillick Yeah, well that's probably right. The Australian stuff looked a bit more butch and a bit more rough, you know. So, I think it had some attraction for its novelty. And beyond that, Brett was doing pretty interesting objects. He made nice work.

Sandra McGrath You went out to Christie's, did you?

Tony McGillick Yes, I did, yeah. Well, there you go. Get me jumping off tracks, you know. It's that we lived around the corner from...

Sandra McGrath Christie murders, huh?

Tony McGillick Yeah, the Christie murders. No, but Ladbroke Grove, 129 Ladbroke Grove was a block around the corner from Rillington Place, which was the name of the Christie place. And in the pubs and around the place, Christie was rather a dark legend, because it was such a lot of people knew him or didn't know him. A lot of the old whores knew him and so on. So, it proved to be quite a talking point all the time. And the house was still there. I think they've now changed the name to Ruston Close. They changed the name of the street because of the horror of the story.

Sandra McGrath Yeah, and what did they change the street name to?

Tony McGillick Ruston Close. Ruston Close.

Sandra McGrath C-L-O...

Tony McGillick Yeah, C-L-O-S-E, you know the English. Invent these pretty names for slum dwellings. Anyway, Brett got more and more fascinated by this story and meeting people that did know Christie and Melanie and all the other people involved. And he started trying to get into the house and climb over the back fence and generally be a bloody nuisance to the poor black people that were living there. And also reviving the interest in the in the thing that the whole street wanted to forget about. And then a strange trigger happened. Back in Ladbroke Grove at 129 Ladbroke Grove, there was a fellow called Ken. And Ken was a really creepy individual who emptied the gas meters and so on and worked for Evans. Also, that person, Evans, may well have been connected with the Evans who was with the Christie murders, you know, there was a man called Evans. So, I don't know whether that's Brett's making it all up or whether he'd researched it, but there was something about this Evans thing. Oh well, it's quite possible. It's a funny area anyway. Ken was arrested for killing prostitutes and...

Sandra McGrath The man who emptied your gas meters was called Ken?

Tony McGillick Ken. He was... No, no, Evans owned a business and had all these real rough trade around the place. He did jobs like, you know, empty the gas meters was one of them. And Ken did this. And Ken, who we all knew and kept at arm's length, and he used to give the girls a bit of a hard time, was arrested for murdering prostitutes along the Thames. And this was just too much for Brett, because now he knew a real, real murderer, you see, and it was all just bringing up to his... So, we went to Ken's trials at the Old Bailey and and it all this sort of death, havoc thing was very much on his mind.

Sandra McGrath What happened to Ken? Did they catch him?

Tony McGillick Well, Ken, Ken admitted to it all. I mean, if you want my opinion, not being on the jury, I think Ken did it, but Ken got off because he reneged on his, on his, on his confession. The, the real point was that what we did was go and experience all of that, catch that aggravation and the the experience of the Old Bailey and what the processes and so on. This is what Brett was really getting it first hand, so to speak.

Sandra McGrath Fascinating.

Tony McGillick And then he got onto some MP, he was wonderful for doing this, he got us into Pentonville, where Christie was executed. And also buried.

Sandra McGrath Buried?

Tony McGillick Well, they...

Interviewer Oh, they bury them in lime or some, some other ritual happens. They bury the murderers unmarked.

Sandra McGrath Pentonville is the name of the prison where Christie went, is that right?

Tony McGillick Was it? Pentonville? Pentonville, yeah. I think it's Pentonville, yeah.

Interviewer It's a famous English, London prison.

Sandra McGrath And you went into there? Did you go with him?

Tony McGillick Yeah, of course, yeah. At that time, Brett and I, I mean Brett and Mike, you see, I'm ready to do anything. You want to do, yeah, climb the fence, go to prison, whatever. Mike Johnson's fallen out with him, so I replaced Michael. And off we went to Pentonville to see the scene or retrace the Christie stuff. See how people are executed, he managed to get people showing him which, you know, the Governor of the prison showed us around. Went into the the cell where they hang Christie, and so on. It was the most alarming experience of my life going in there because well, we were treated cruel or something, in other words we were quite good-looking young men. We dressed up like, you know, early hippies.

Sandra McGrath Dressed up like what?

Tony McGillick Well, we were dressed up as early hippies, you see. You know what I mean? We looked pretty outlandish. And we're in this homosexual environment, getting ushered around with some police guards around, prison guards, which Brett projected to, once again, project stimulated the situation, you see, the drama in it. We went with a a very important politician, who used the excuse of wanting to look the jail over with his friends along. He he was the guy that got us in.

Sandra McGrath Who was it?

Tony McGillick Oh, sorry, I couldn't remember. So, that's, that's how we got in. And the obviously, the prison Governor, or who, whatever his name was, head of the jail, had to pander to this fellow and show us every bloody thing you can imagine. Like how good the porridge is, and where they make the bags, and we went right throughout this bloody place. All Brett wanted was the hang room and the burial site, but anyway, we had to go and do the whole thing. Which meant we had to walk into rooms full of hundreds of prisoners labouring and sewing. It was a very strange experience, and it put me off going to jail for the rest of my life, I can tell you. That one day in jail. It was extraordinary stuff that he'd he'd set up. Meanwhile, Jasper Johns was on down at the Whitechapel, at least during this period, phase. And you remember the Johnses with the little boxes along the top and there was that other painting like like Terry B, this kind of a little object inside boxes and

Sandra McGrath Brett Whiteley was never part of Central Street where Roland Schlicht was a member... had that ex- I'm thinking of that one exhibition, I guess, where Treweeke, yourself, Roland Schlicht, Michael Johnson, I guess, Vernon Treweeke...

Tony McGillick That was it, yes. Watters...

Sandra McGrath No, it was a terrific gallery, that one that was Central Street. Yeah, well, it was for the first time. Well, Watters was already here when this crowd got back here. But who actually ran Central Street?

Tony McGillick Well, initially I ran it with Roy Harper. That's right, yeah. Roy would... Well, when I say I ran it, my family paid for it, and I did a lot of the thinking about it. Roy did the um, just ran the shop, you know, and also did a lot of thinking and fixing and arranging. That was the first few years. Then Chandler Coventry came into the thing, and he wanted to be into a gallery, so... ...we said, "Yeah." Because we had no money anyway, we'd totally run out of it. And Channy came in to pay us some money, and that helped us go for another few years.

Sandra McGrath So, in fact, all Brett's real friends from London were at Central Street, but he never really became a part of it, did he? Did he ever show anywhere?

Tony McGillick Yeah, well, I'll tell you something. Brett was a very generous person. I mean, people have said that, but... ...he was... This is the fascination with him as a friend. Brett had already established a lot of strength. He'd been showing at Bonython, he was showing at Marlborough or whatever it was called, Fischer. And then we're doing the Central Street thing with hard-edge painting and Brett's... ...doing whatever he does. And he said, "Do you want me to have a show at Central Street?" "Just to kick it along." And I think in a way, too, he wanted to get back, not part of that, but just wanted to be back with some of his mates, you know, in a very sort of schoolboy way. With Schlicht there, and Johnson, and me, and Treweeke. And I think he just thought it'd be nice to be, have a show with that lot of, that crowd, even though there was no real affinity with each other's work, or at least with his work to our work. And as well as that, he knew that it would help us financially. And he arranged to... Well, he took it for granted that this would be acceptable, so he arranged it and then came and told me. And I wasn't that much, I wasn't against the idea at all. I was trying to reconcile how am I going to put this on at Central Street, which is supposed to be about all this other stuff. So, rather than take the responsibility myself, I said to my family, who were very happy with the idea, because they could see the money coming out of it, and as well as that, they could see the prestige that it would gain. And then I put it to the artists, and the artists were absolutely adamant. They didn't want anything to do with Whiteley. So my democratic foray didn't work. So I was put in the dreadful position of saying, "Brett, thanks very much, but no thanks." And Brett could never understand why. He just couldn't get his head around that. Even to the day he died, we could never get past that problem.

Sandra McGrath Maybe that's why he cut off from all of them.

Tony McGillick Well, that's why he cut off from me anyway. Roland Schlicht, he lived with Roland in the same house, you see. So we've set up a series of houses around Sydney as well. I mean, we were a great kind of property developers for other people. But in North Sydney, we took over the house Wendy now lives in.

Sandra McGrath What?

Tony McGillick The gallery took over that house. Central Street. The house she now lives in.

Sandra McGrath Lavender Bay?

Tony McGillick Yeah. Well, we took the lease on. And the idea was we'd set up these places for people to come back and live in. Kind of like another Ladbroke Grove. And the first person to move in there was Roland Schlicht in the ground floor of that place. And then we had another house in Neutral Bay, which Michael Johnson and Vernon Treweeke and Roy Harper lived in. These are places that we'd rent through real estate agents.

Sandra McGrath Pretty wild. So you were really responsible for the whole Lavender Bay roost in a way?

Tony McGillick Well, real estate agent, wasn't he, like? Because I lived up around the corner in Lavender Bay. Not there, but in a flat up around the corner.

Sandra McGrath Where?

Tony McGillick Oh, it's just near the Milsons Point station, I can't remember the... Well, it was on whatever that street Milsons Point station was. We had a look at the bay like that house does. And we wanted to get places where we could both have people staying and also store paintings and studios and that stuff. It was a bit of a dream, but we did get a couple of them. And the Lavender Bay place, Roland, and then when Brett turned up, I think the apartment above Roland became vacant, so Brett moved in. And then Roland left and Brett bought the house. So that's how that little process happened.

Sandra McGrath So you were really trying to... ...with your family backing all these... ...were you renting or leasing these places?

Tony McGillick We were renting. They were pretty dilapidated places.

Sandra McGrath But now they won't be.

Tony McGillick No. Well, the one in North Sydney has gone now.

Sandra McGrath Where was the one in North Sydney?

Tony McGillick That was in Neutral Street.

Sandra McGrath And who lived there?

Tony McGillick It was a beautiful freestanding, really quite a mansion, one-storey place, but very dilapidated, and owned by somebody who wanted to knock it down to build a block of flats, which they subsequently did. But we had it for a few years.

Sandra McGrath Who lived there?

Tony McGillick Roy Harper and Michael Johnson, Vernon Treweeke, and various other itinerants. And that would be the place where we'd set up to put, say, Paul Partos when he came to town, you know. They'd come to town for three days or something, and bed, a mattress on the floor, and that's where they'd go. That sort of a set up. This is a different story, though, to the Brett one. I mean, Brett wasn't part of all that, you see.

Sandra McGrath Well, that must have been a really... Huge rake Brett made when he would say things that...

Tony McGillick Yeah, but I think it was good for everyone, but I don't remember it that clearly. Yeah. Well, for one, for what it was worth, I mean, we were the focus feature point at the time, because there wasn't much going on, and we were very verbal, and had plenty to say for ourselves, we knew how to say it, we had lots of Greenberg theory and... I remember someone coming down, Wendy took a couple of lectures there. One by someone quite famous. Lucy Lippard? Yeah. That was later in the feminists' time. The gallery went through several phases. Like what? Well, there was the first phase, which was strictly the Ladbroke Grove team, plus... So when we got back to, when those people came back to Sydney, like Michael, Treweeke, and Schlicht, and myself, already Wendy Paramor was here and Dick Watkins, who had been part of that Ladbroke Grove thing. So basically you had half a stable just to start with, if everybody showed in the same place. Yeah. And you could fill it. The idea was we'd show ourselves and we'd fill it with prints from Castelli's, or a couple of English painters' stuff sent over, you know, one way or another, a couple of group shows. Before you knew it, you had a kind of year's cycle of work, and that's, because those people were around and had nothing better to do, that's why the gallery got going, and they all kind of felt at home with each other's work. And that positive thing happened out of all of that. And the second phase? The second phase we had to get, well, it was money, really. We had, we didn't sell any of this stuff that we were doing, you know, and so Channy was prepared to foot the bill on this. But naturally Channy wanted to introduce a more rigorous, or perhaps less rigorous... I think less rigorous. Yeah, less rigorous would be more appropriate. He also brought a sort of camp thing into it, which was a bit frowned upon by many of the characters who frequented the gallery. A bit of a more camp thing. Did you say camp? Camp, yeah. He brought that to it, so I mean this is probably a bit, this is for you to decide for yourself. But it changed the sort of sense of seriousness of it, because it became more frivolous. And the work was more or less continuing to be of a decent standard, but the vernissages would be much more parties, and they weren't serious stand-around talks so much as right-of-way, you know. So the more interesting people wouldn't come to the vernissages, so it got more and more a kind of circuit for the party crowds. And then it closed down because we had a squabble about all of that.

Sandra McGrath When did it actually close down?

Tony McGillick Well, it first closed down about, I think it was 1970. The last show was Jim Doolin. The most successful show we ever had was our last show.

Sandra McGrath I remember that. It was sort of sad, just when everything was going right, you had to shut it down.

Tony McGillick Well, the Doolins were beautiful. They sold everything. Anyway, that's the irony. We're probably, we all...

Sandra McGrath But you said here the first time it closed down. When did it close the second time?

Tony McGillick Well, then it, I mean it closed because Channy left and everybody was disjointed and a lot of arrangements were blown apart and so on. But then when we opened it again under another name, we just called it the ICA, Institute of Contemporary Art. A lot of people like Mike Parr and Peter Kennedy, all those sort of post-object, conceptual people started wanting a venue. It didn't interest me much, but I thought, well, I might as well use that since it's there, and we have the keys, we might as well let it happen. And that's when Paul McGillick, my brother, began running it. And it started doing lots of non-painting activities, theatre and conceptual art shows and things like that. In fact, some very interesting things happened there at that time, but it's not as well known about as the time before.

Sandra McGrath How was the ICA connected with...

Tony McGillick The ICA, we just called it the ICA. We wrote to the London ICA and said, "Look, we want to do this, do you mind if we call ourselves this?"

Sandra McGrath I don't remember it very much. No, well, it's... Do you know what years that was?

Tony McGillick Well, it went full steam for a couple of, several years, and then it began intermittently, just occasionally had shows, and then it petered out. It went through into the '70s, into '74 or so.

Sandra McGrath It's amazing that that might have been Brett's only attempt at being a joiner, and it didn't work. And it also is interesting to me that that his work was always not in tune with the times, really, was it?

Tony McGillick Yeah. Well, you see, it's very difficult. When people, I mean, look at it from the artists' point of view, the Schlichts and the Watkins, Johnsons, and me, doing this stuff that nobody wants. It's hard to take, you know. You've got critics saying you were the best painters, young painters in the country, but that doesn't make a bean of difference. No gallery buys it. It was a very difficult situation. These were tough times. No gallery would pay you in that. And all they had was their integrity. They thought that, I guess they felt that at least they could resist the Whiteley charmless tactile, and hold out that way. I mean, it cost my family a pretty penny not doing it, but that was the agreement, that was the way it went. And at least in a perverse sort of way it maintained a sort of integrity. Can I have a cigarette? Is that not worrying? Ten past two. Are you alright on time?

Sandra McGrath Yeah.

Tony McGillick You're alright.

Sandra McGrath I really... Don't forget about your family, why were they so nice to us? The McGrath family is so nice to us.

Tony McGillick Oh, they're not my... When I say my family, this is basically... ...and his partner, my brother's. He had a business, they were... they actually used Central Street as their offices, or studio, their offices, see? I had another business... And it was really a bit of a lucky accident that the place was empty and there for the use, you see. And I'd just come back through... ...New York and there was a gallery there I rather liked called Green Street. Did you ever go there?

Sandra McGrath Yeah, I remember Green Street.

Tony McGillick And I really thought, 'Gee, what... what'd be nice to do is to do a Green Street in Sydney.' Or where I lived. Especially if I can show there. So, uh, I think people like Laurie Preece showed there and had a good feel, you know. It wasn't, I don't think it was cooperative, but it was a good sort of...

Sandra McGrath Yeah.

Tony McGillick I think he came back, back to Australia, and then won a Harkness here, and then went there. So it was, I don't know, I came back before he did. So... I remember I walked... I walked around and thought, 'Gee, what have they done, you know, what are they doing here?' and I got to a corner of the street... ...where... what would the street be called? Hunter Street and Elizabeth or Castlereagh, that area, and they'd just built what, in the Sydney scale, was a skyscraper, Qantas House, or whatever... ...and I did a drawing of it, and I sent it back to Brett in London and said, 'Look, it's not too bad'... ...'cause London's so low profile when you think about it. Yeah, it doesn't... it's big, but it doesn't have that sort of... I said, 'Well, in certain parts,' I said, 'it even reminds you of New York,' right? Oh, it was funny. When he got here, and obviously he knew what he was doing, but he got here and set me up right straight away, you know. He said, 'Let's go and have a bit of lunch,' and I had never been to... ...monstrous building.

Sandra McGrath Oh really?

Tony McGillick I walked into it...

Sandra McGrath And you thought it was... you thought it was new, was it?

Tony McGillick It was new, it was newish, I suppose, mostly. But actually Sydney had changed its style and face a lot in the time we'd been away, you know. John Baily and other people in Melbourne had started doing park trees and...

Sandra McGrath How had Sydney changed when... when you came back?

Tony McGillick Well, mostly the architecture. Mostly they'd brutalised a few of the streets and so on. Nothing had happened in the art world, it's fair to call it. Watters was there, and Clune had closed, and the Hungry Horse Gallery... ...there was basically nothing happening compared to the feeling that you even got in London, and there wasn't much happening there, either.

Sandra McGrath Well you tell Colin Lanceley the same thing, because London was really... ...everyone talks about the swinging London and great artistic bubbling going on there, but that really wasn't the case, it was very isolated pockets.

Tony McGillick Yeah, well it was very much... Ladbroke Grove was near, in Kensington, near the Royal College. So you had all that huge art school... ...environment. Something the British did after the war, it seems, just hand out millions and millions of pounds to train everybody in the Labour government policy, I don't know why it was happening. Certainly there were hundreds of artists and designers, students, they all lived around that area. And the nexus of that would have been the Royal College. So it was quite a nice environment, it was a very lively environment to be a 20-year-old in, that area. And the whole Rock 'n' Roll thing was... all the people like the Stones were around, and you'd get up to Hammersmith Palais and listen to Bo Diddley and it was all very grassroots-y, nobody knew about it, you know, it wasn't Carnaby Street, it was pre-, pre- all of that.

Sandra McGrath Yeah.

Tony McGillick That um... wonderful sort of flowering of a youth culture which really, as far as I could see, started in those areas in London and it will went out to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Paris, from that point of view. But then when I was in New York in '65 there was no bloody sign of it then. The way that it is with Americans, they move fast when they get the idea.

Sandra McGrath They build on it, capitalize on it.

Tony McGillick Yeah, capitalise on it. And there was that whole renewal of Europe. I mean, '65 was really only, well, it was 20 years after the war.

Sandra McGrath Yeah, it was 20 years after the war.

Tony McGillick So in 1960 that's 15 years after the war, it's not far from the time when the place was on its knees, economically and all sorts of...

Sandra McGrath Well, England was... I mean Germany was.

Tony McGillick And it was still, sort of, parts of it were still bombed out, you know. There's still holes everywhere.

Sandra McGrath I remember going to England, being astonished in 1954 because there was still, all the squares were still...

Tony McGillick Oh, sure.

Sandra McGrath ...craters and bombs, rubble, down London there.

Tony McGillick Mmm.

Sandra McGrath Oh, maybe '56 actually.

Tony McGillick We all went off to documenta, in Kassel. That was one of the train rides. Wendy was jumping off trains. Wendy was pregnant so it would have been the year Arkie was born, or whatever her name is, Arkie.

Sandra McGrath Yeah, Arkie.

Tony McGillick Yeah, I think I'm right.

Sandra McGrath And what did you see at that documenta?

Tony McGillick Oh, I don't know what he saw, but I saw Jackson Pollock for the first time, because I missed the Pollock show in London. And I saw three or four beauties there. And a few other things that interested me at the time, like... like Ken, like people that did constructivist plastic art, and stuff like that. Don't care much for it now, but it had a big impact on me at the time. I don't know, I think Brett was... I don't know what he saw. He just had a quick look around.

Sandra McGrath Did he... Why were you jumping trains then? Didn't you just have a ticket to get a straight, hop-on German train, I think?

Tony McGillick Well, it's that sort of Diceman thing that Brett had. Do you ever read that Luke Rhinehart book?

Sandra McGrath He asked me to. I never read it. Tell me about it.

Tony McGillick Oh well, The Dice Man, it's the story of a guy who... ...forty-eighty wears out all his options and decides the only way to make a decision is throw the dice, and I'll do whatever the dice says, and my rules are that I will follow the dice. And in a way that that was written, maybe the '70s... ...but Brett anticipated that in a sense. He would... Like I can remember being on a train in, uh... one of those Paris stations.

Sandra McGrath Who wrote, sorry, who wrote The Dice Man?

Tony McGillick Luke Rhinehart. American writer. I personally did that in my life like that for a couple of years. In a... in a sort of...

Sandra McGrath You tried to live your life like that?

Tony McGillick Yeah, I did as well, but I... after reading this, I did. Brett, I don't know if he ever read it, but because certainly he's behaved like this before the book was written.

Sandra McGrath I don't think Brett ever read a book.

Tony McGillick Yeah.

Sandra McGrath Tell me about the train.

Tony McGillick Oh, it's... I don't know whether it was Est or whatever, south or what station out of Paris, but we were on... on our way to Kassel... ...and Wendy's quite heavily pregnant. And we were talking, I sort of used to talk to my wife about this, my ex-wife, who was Elizabeth, who was with us, you know, part of this foursome that used to get about. And... ...something was wrong with the train we were on. It was the right train, but it wasn't the train... It had problems, like we'd been... we couldn't sit down, or we couldn't get any water or something. And Brett said, 'I reckon that train's going to Germany,' you know, pointing across to another train. And I said, 'Well, anyway, it's just over there across all the tracks, you know, not on a platform or anything.' He said, 'Well, let's go and see where it goes.' And somehow Wendy leapt off the train with a big stomach, and we all leapt off the train with our satchels and got on the train, and it did actually head toward Germany.

Sandra McGrath And then you saw the sign on the window that showed where it was going.

Tony McGillick Yeah, all possible. But I'm not... I'm not really making that up. I mean, that's the way... way people would conduct themselves. And he more than anyone. It was a bit like, 'Let's see what... what happens.' It was a very innocent time. And as well as that, of course, getting back to his generosity, he spun me. I had nothing, you know, I never had a job or... So he was always um... without making me feel bad about it or embarrassed, was sort of just looking after... Just... it's a sort of generation, you know, 'cause he had a bit more money than we had. And it was that was a characteristic of his that I remember. He was genuinely generous.

Sandra McGrath Childishly. Child... childish, yeah.

Tony McGillick Childish?

Sandra McGrath Childish, yeah.

Tony McGillick Well, I said genuinely, but uh maybe childishly is better.

Sandra McGrath No, I said he was, you know, he was generous to artists, I said, I wonder if that was his form... his form of charity was that.

Tony McGillick Yeah. And he bought pictures from me as well, which he didn't need, but just threw a few quid.

Sandra McGrath Yeah, well you've all got the pictures. But why... why did he fall out with Michael Johnson? I mean, I know he did because... ...Colin told me he drove him around, when he went in London, they rented a car and he showed him the window where Michael Johnson's... ...flat, he didn't live in, because that's where Michael Johnson lives.

Tony McGillick Yeah. Well, I think an analysis of it is that Michael needed some privacy, some of his own space. He wasn't moving as quickly... ...intellectually, and uh certainly not economically. Nobody else was either. But since they'd been so equivalent for so long... ...you know, I mean when you take five years out of a 20-year-old life, it's a about a quarter of their life together. And all their life together as adults. There just became a strain to that. Um, and I just... I think Brett... Michael just needed to get away from that, to be... It was bloody... bloody... ...energy that uh that was constantly, ceaselessly flowing on. I mean you'd see him active... I... I can remember seeing Brett actively trying to restrain himself just to be a bit passive for a moment, so somebody else had some space or something. But it would only last three minutes and then whoosh! off we'd go again. So, Michael couldn't tolerate it, and I think a lot of people couldn't tolerate it for long, you know. I tolerated it for much longer because I had a different... ...I didn't feel competitive or threatened at all. I felt I was working in another zone, and I'd go the long way, and I was glad to see him doing it, and... And not having gone with the chance of taking it out either, you know. I mean this is hard to take when it's hard to think out for the originator.

Sandra McGrath I'd love to see two paintings the same, actually in the same area like that.

Tony McGillick Yeah. Well, I think Johnson's killed all those. I don't think there's anything around. Brett also practiced much more energy. I mean, frankly, we're all wasters, you know. We spent more time wasting time than he did. He had a very disciplined way of working. Get up and do it, and by the time he's ready to go to the pub, we've just sort of started getting going, so we're just as easily distracted to go to the pub with him, you know. So that means we haven't done anything all day, he's already done a morning's work. That was always the, uh, in the background, the energy and the productivity. Well, he had some, his mother and father were very demanding personalities, you know, they expected success, and you know, all the rest of it, so that was always sort of in the background that he had got the pressure that he had to deliver the goods for old Clem. I met Clem a couple of times. What was Clem like? Uh, well, I couldn't really describe his personality, but he was a very, uh, bluff, confident, very Australian, very quite good-looking, you know, sort of tough guy, sort of Whiteley aspect to him.

Sandra McGrath Makes me a bit surprised that they got on so well in the end, Brett and Clem, though. I don't know that either of them bothered.

Tony McGillick There's a giant attachment with the mother. Like, I could never, uh, really quite figure out that mother in the background all the time. But Beryl... Beryl...