My Brother Jack

by Johnston, George

  Fritz Richter was more a craftsman than an artist. He made etchings on copperplate and pulled them up on an ancient handpress which was a miracle of cast-iron curlicues and lions’ heads and eagles, and sometimes he did steel engravings, but mostly he was engaged on the very finest lithography, and he always worked on the choice stones he had brought from Bavaria more than half a century before. There were hundreds of these limestone slabs stored in the loft, but Richter had them all numbered and he knew exactly what each separate stone was best for. He would go round with a feather duster once a week and dust them down and pat each one, and he would always grind and polish and clean the stones himself when they were to be used, and he had his own secret mixtures for gum and acid and torsch and asphalt and chalk. He was quite fantastic at fine work and subtle stipplings and delicate gradations of colour. With his left hand he would hold a magnifying-glass over the stone, and work beneath it with a camelhair brush as fine as a needle – no more than two or three hairs – and although he would keep this up for nearly eight hours a day his fingers would never tremble, although in the lunch-time break he could barely hold his sandwich for the palsy in his ancient hands.

  The big studio and the separate crannies occupied by the two old Germans were the cells of ‘art’ at Klebendorf and Hardt, and everywhere else except for the business offices and sample room on the ground floor was ‘The Factory’ – a great roaring and thundering and clattering and swishing, a bedlam of giant rotary offsets and racketing flatbeds, of linotypes and monotypes chattering their nervous messages to slugs of antimony, or slobbering ink ducts and grinding guillotines, and rumbling conveyers from the varnishing machines, and the gabbling of the girls, and the everlasting slap-slap-slap-slap of printed sheets.

  It was never my intention to defect on the people at Klebendorf and Hardt, and there were times later when I came to regret the way I had gone about it, but as it all happened there never really seemed to be any particular point of decision. It was just a kind of drifting thing.

  They were a warm-hearted, gentle, considerate crowd in the big studio, and like most true craftsmen they had a serenity and dignity that I seldom saw later among those who would profess to be ‘serious’ artists. To this day I harbour suspicions of bohemian ferocities.

  All of them balanced their work with other interests. Old Joe Denton grew exhibition dahlias, Tom Middleton played the cello in a string quartet, Barney Druce was an amateur photographer and secretary of a canoeing club on the River Yarra, Paul Klein painted water-colours for a commercial gallery and made ship models for his own joy. The studio must have provided some cross-fertilization of interests, because every one of them was a fanatical Savoyard, and at any hour of the working day would be as likely as not to burst into a chorus from HMS Pinafore or Yeomen of the Guard or The Pirates of Penzance, then everyone would join in and the whole studio would rock to Gilbert and Sullivan airs until old Klebendorf would open the door and peer in and shake his head wonderingly and go away. (The first time I ever dined out in my life was at Paul Klein’s house, to which I had been invited to meet his wife and to hear the score of Ruddigore played on the Victrola; the first time I ever visited a theatre was when the whole studio made up a party to go to Iolanthe.)

  Although work was the paramount endeavour in the big studio, there were certain formal levities which old Joe Denton condoned. The singing, of course, was one of them, since he could quote by heart every libretto that Gilbert ever wrote. But he also, surprisingly, permitted the dart-play and the practical jokes with turpentine.

  In lithographing on the big sensitized zinc plates the artist’s hand or any other part of his flesh must not come in contact with the plate; he works with mauls and hand-rests, moving around his table, seldom seated on the high counting-house stool, more often than not bent over, as Jack used to say, ‘head down and ass up, like a sandpiper’. The ‘turps game’ and dart-play were both related to all this. Each artist had his own collection of homemade darts: little feathered blocks of wood pointed with used phonograph needles which would be aimed with considerable force at the backside of the artist who stooped too temptingly over his work. There were many times when I got home to find my underpants spattered with blood and my buttocks fiery with pain, but one had to take it all in good part and try for revenge. The turps game demanded more finesse. Our high stools had circular concave seats; the idea was that while the artist was engrossed a pool of raw turpentine would be spilled surreptitiously into this concavity; when the artist at last sat down to rest his aching arms and back, the turps would soak through his trousers to the infinite agony of his private parts. I have seen the whole studio convulsed with laughter while Tom Middleton, clutching his balls, went roaring through the factory like a maddened bull.

  I think from the very beginning old Joe Denton, and perhaps all the others too, must have known that I was really not very good potential material for Klebendorf and Hardt, that I would never have the total aptitude or the sense of dedication, or even just the willingness and patience to persevere, that would ever bring me to even the basic standards of craftsmanship which the studio demanded. It must have been the fact of Young Joe being an apprentice too that saved me from the castigations I deserved. Joe Denton was enormously proud of his son and he knew that the boy was potentially a first-class craftsman, and I am sure this made him lean over backwards not to be thought of as favouring Young Joe against me. It was always his son who got the occasional rough edge of his tongue, never me.

  I was not envious of Young Joe in the beginning; I only grew to be jealous of his skills later, when I began to suspect that he might be carrying tales to his father about me.

  Old Joe, of course, had no doubts that, given any sort of cooperation at all, he could train us on the technical side: beyond this to be a successful commercial artist one would need only two more things – a high standard of skill in lettering and the ability to draw the human figure. Barney Druce gave us our training in lettering – hours of trying to do, to his satisfaction, a Roman or sans-serif alphabet with a No. 1 camelhair brush in letters an eighth of an inch high with no part of one’s hand or arm touching the exercise board – and for training in the human figure we were sent to the drawing and painting school at the National Art Gallery. We went first to the Antique School, drawing in charcoal from plaster casts, then to Life Class. Each of us, Young Joe and I, was given two afternoons off a week to attend the classes, and we had to do five nights a week at night school. We took different afternoons off, because there always had to be one apprentice in the studio to run the errands.

  Later I was glad of this, because there was nobody to know that I was cutting the lessons, but when I began skipping the night classes as well it became more difficult, because Young Joe must have known what I was doing, even though he was way ahead of me and up there doing oils in monochrome from nude models while I was still struggling in fine charcoal on Michelet paper, with the ‘Apollo Belvedere’ or detail from the ‘Laocoön’. At first I used to skip only an occasional class, then I would stay away from the school a full week at a time; finally it came to the point where in a whole term I attended only on the night when one signed the students’ book and got an easel place.

  I lived in mortal fear of Young Joe telling his father. It would have been very difficult for me explaining to old Joe Denton that, while my artistic ability might not have shown any noticeable improvement, I had completed a record of the homeward passages of every wool clipper sailing out of Melbourne between 1860 and 1890, and that by a diligent study of the Papyrus of Ani I was teaching myself to read and write the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt. I need not have worried. Young Joe never told tales either.

  It was Paul Klein, really, who moved me on the tangent. There was a thing of the past making an arabesque of this, too, for Paul had been a patient in the Caulfield Military Hospital and had known my mother.

  ‘Of course I knew her,’ he had said to me once, then added, just to please me, I think: ‘Eve
ryone who was in the war knew Sister Min.’ Anyway, the night we went to Iolanthe Mother came too, as his guest.

  Paul had been involved in a skirmish at Rabaul, in German New Guinea, but he had got a bullet in his leg and a good scar and walked with a limp and a cane, and there was something about this combination of the tropics with the military exploit that made him, to me, far more glamorous than the victims of the commonplace savagery of the Western Front.

  It was Paul who introduced me to the waterfront.

  There was an interest then in marine painting, and his gallery had suggested he do a series of water-colours on dockland subjects. Melbourne’s river wharves were still picturesque then. There was an anachronistic little quay – in fact it was actually called The Little Dock – which to the despair of the municipal traffic people butted right in among the city tram lines and the stamping dray-horses and the confusion of the Spencer Street railway viaduct, where the timber schooners and ketches from Tasmania always tied up, schooners like the Joseph Sims and Alma Doepel and the big ketch Defender: they would be there with their patched sails drying among the warehouses and business offices and the ship chandlers and the overhead power lines and the smoke from the goods trains, with an ancient clipper-bowed steamer called Edina warped in behind. (Years before we had always gone to Portarlington or Geelong in the Edina for the annual tramways picnic.) And further down river at the timber berths along Lower South Wharf there generally would be three or four big square-rigged sailing-ships unloading sawn planks from the Baltic – four-masted barques usually, either Scandinavian like the Beatrice and CB Pedersen and Herzogin Cecile, or American like the Moshulu and Tonawanda, although if they were American ships they would usually be swinging out Oregon building timber from Seattle or Portland.

  After I had been working in the studio a few months Paul began to take me around the docks during the lunch-time breaks. We would chew on our food as we walked about looking at the ships and the unloadings and the tugs and lighters at work, he with his sandwiches and me with my bread roll and bananas, and Paul would make quick little sketchy notes of things in sepia wash on a small block he carried in his pocket.

  It was on Saturday afternoons that he would do his more finished paintings, and eventually I began to go with him, because I rarely had anything else I wanted to do at weekends. I remembered how surprised I was when he set up his paints the first time because the subject he chose seemed so drab and ugly. It was an old coal-hulk which was tied up alongside one of the Howard Smith coastal steamers. All along the lower Yarra and in Victoria Docks they used these grimy old hulks to load coal into ships’ bunkers – motor-ships were only just beginning to come in then – and this particular hulk, the Garthsnaid, was not much more than a low-floating rusty hull supporting three stumpy masts which gave purchase to the loading derricks and a squalid little deck-shack for the vessel’s watchman. As it happened, directly across the river a Finnish full-rigged ship was berthed alongside Sharpe’s timber-yard, and the crew was aloft bending the sails on the yards, and it seemed to me that this romantic and beautiful thing should be the subject for an artist and not a grimy old hulk half awash in a garbaged stream.

  ‘But why are you going to paint this?’ I wanted to know, and asked him why we didn’t call the ferryman and get him to row us across to Sharpe’s wharf. Paul just smiled, and then explained to me that ‘pretty-pretty’ subjects like the Finnish square-rigger were best left to the calendar painters, and he tried to show me the things of pattern and shape and colour and form which he saw in the squalid hulk of the Garthsnaid.

  ‘And you just look at what beautiful lines she has,’ he said, with the reverence of a man who respected ships and made patient, loving models of them. ‘You see, David,’ he went on, ‘all the old coal-hulks they use around the docks here used to be clipper-ships, or most of them anyway. This one was a Scottish wool-clipper called the Inversnaid. She was a full-rigged ship, too, just like that one over there at Sharpe’s, only a lot prettier. One day she got dismasted in a storm out in Bass Strait, and they towed her in here, and instead of breaking her up and selling her for scrap they chopped her down to her lower masts and used what was left of her yards for derricks and made her into a coal-lighter. But in a way,’ he ended musingly, ‘you can still see what she was, can’t you? I mean, she’s still beautiful, don’t you think?’ He nodded to himself. ‘She really is, you know.’

  It is on observations as ordinary as this that the very tangents of our lives are changed.

  I began to leave home in the mornings an hour earlier. This carried with it the disadvantage of having to eat breakfast at the same time as Dad, but now instead of sitting on the steps in the lane waiting for the studio to be unlocked, I could go wandering around the waking wharves, and for the first time in my life I came to be aware of the existence of true beauty, of an opalescent world of infinite promise that had nothing whatever to do with the shabby suburbs that had engulfed me since my birth. The fine floating calligraphy of a tug’s wake black on a mother-of-pearl stream in the first glow of a river dawn, the majesty of smoke in still air, the pale and tranquil breath of river mist and morning steam, the rising sun picking golden turrets out of derricks and samson-posts and cranes and davits, the coloured smoke-stacks and the slender gilt pencillings of masts declaring themselves little by little against the dark haze-banks that always in this waking time veiled the river flats, the faint images of ships far down the stream, coming in from Gellibrand, looming out of dew and light and sea mist, and then, at every bend and twist of the river, changing the shapes of beauty like a rare vase turning in the fingers of a connoisseur.

  It filled me with an excitement, almost an exaltation, that I could tell nobody about. I did not see it then as a way out of the wilderness, for the stuff of this material was too fragile to be considered as something which might be used, but I was quite sure that something important had happened to me. I moved through this newly-discovered world breathless and alone, like Adam in a new Eden, and I felt almost as if I had to walk on tiptoe wherever this shining place extended.

  It was not very long before I began to visit the wharves on Sunday afternoons, too. I would go alone, taking a sketch-block and my water-colours, but I seldom made a drawing and for a long time I never talked to anybody. The river world was very different on these Sunday afternoons. There was practically no activity anywhere, because Sunday work meant double-time for the wharfies or dock hands or tugboat crews or lightermen, so that the ships which made port on a Sunday would usually stay at an anchorage off shore and save port dues and not come up the river to discharge their cargoes until early on Monday morning: and because of the labour costs there was rarely any cargo-handling on those ships already at their berths.

  So there would not be much to see on Sunday afternoons apart from an occasional police car slowly patrolling the deserted dock roads, or Customs men walking around, or the shipping companies’ watchmen tapping dottle from their pipes and talking together around the silent cargo sheds, or the little bands of bold frizzy prostitutes plying their trade from ship to ship, or a drunken seaman lurching back to his boat from one of the illegal ‘bodegas’ around Dudley Flats.

  One Sunday afternoon the coal-hulk which Paul Klein had painted, the Garthsnaid, was tied up at the gas company’s coal wharf, underneath the dead silent black gantries that took the conveyer belts up and over the wharf to the plant in front of the big cylindrical storage tanks. The wharf was thick with soft black dust, and amid this an old crone was pottering around. All the longshoremen knew her as ‘Snotty Sal’, and she lived in a rags-and-rubbish hovel in the wasteland behind the docks and drank methylated spirits. There were quite a few ‘metho’ drinkers living around Dudley Flats at that time. The old woman was stooping around with a frayed basket muttering to herself while she gathered lumps of coal that had fallen from above. She never made a fire with this coal: she would sell it and buy ‘metho’ with the money. The gasworks foreman knew this and he had a soft s
pot for Snotty Sal and just before the knock-off whistle blew at midday on Saturdays he always made a point of seeing that the upper conveyer belts were jolted around a bit so that a hopper or so of anthracite would go spilling down on the wharf below.

  The only other person in sight was the Garthsnaid’s watchman, who was sitting in the sunshine outside his little deck-shack, in a black litter of coal-dust and stacked baskets, boiling a billy of tea over a tin brazier. He was a thick-chested, stumpy man wearing patched trousers and a grey flannel undershirt.