A family photograph taken about 1884. Fred and Eileah are the two older children, and Viz and Ted the younger pair. Tom, my mother and Doozie are not yet of this world.
My grandparents: my mother’s mother and father. Here they are, Mr and Mrs Michael Dennehy. The photo was taken on their honeymoon, 1880.
Fred, Ted and Tom Dennehy – Mum’s brothers, my uncles. This photograph was taken before they went to the war. Ted and Tom were killed, and Fred very badly wounded.
Frank Fahey, my father’s older brother. Frank is pretty proud of his car, which he drove through to Mt Cook. What a handsome guy, and what a mindless fate that arranged his death in Africa: to die, infected by some random bug out of Sierra Leone. Frank had no urge to die for Empire; he waited to be called up. He was an ardent Republican. Of all the Fahey brothers, he was the one with a sense of history.
Mum and Dad’s wedding day, 1928. No longer the poetic youth off to the war, Dad is here more like a Mafia boss. Mum was annoyed: her veil had slipped over her brow. Why hadn’t someone told her? The two page boys are Fred Dennehy and Tilly Campbell’s twins. They were named in memory of Ted and Tom. Doozie, Mum’s youngest sister, is the bridesmaid and Milton, Dad’s youngest brother, is best man.
Cecil Alphonsus Fahey, my father, is the prince in this Timaru Marist School end-of-year theatrical. That year was, I think, 1906. Unless you were rich, primary school was as much education as a Catholic boy could expect. Grandpa sent his boys on to the Timaru Boys’ High School, although it meant estranging himself from his tribe.
My father at Sling Camp in England, I imagine in 1916. At this time Dad had a sort of romantic connection with a Highland woman. She lived in a castle and Dad stayed there a few times. They wrote to each other for the rest of their lives, so clearly it was important. Mum and Dad visited her when they went to England in 1948. Curiously, Mum liked her. I think she was flattered that a woman of such distinction fancied her husband.
I drew my Dominican nun from memory, and very true to the past. I just needed to fill in her veil and belt with black watercolour – a wash not so thick as to lose the lines, transparent wash.
Sabine Fahey, née Boyle, mother of John David Fahey. The Boyles and the Cavanaghs came from Annaghdown, considered to be the spiritual heart of Ireland.
My eldest sister Cecil and me. I was twelve, Cecil fourteen. We are in the Teschemakers dress uniform: bottle-green velvet dresses with lace collars. Some of that lace the nuns were creating on the porch outside the chapel.
A photograph taken in 1951, my last year at art school. I don’t recognise myself at all in this photograph. It makes writing about that time difficult, as I don’t even know who that young woman is.
Capping week in the Quad, 1948.
The Auckland City Gallery, 1959. Peter Tomory is taking an intelligent interest in my work. This photograph appeared in the morning paper. It was during this week that I had to understand I was having a baby.
The Hill of Bitter Memories.
In the late seventies, early eighties, I walked my beloved dog Max in the Domain. Or rather, Max ranged at will over the Domain while keeping a sharp eye out in case I got into any trouble. While I walked, my mother taught my youngest daughter Emily the piano. Walking, thinking, looking: the Domain’s function as keeper of memories, a centre point for grief and remorse, began to take over my imagination. Having a drink with Mum in Parnell afterward slotted in perfectly with my growing preoccupations. Her grief and bitterness about the First World War, which effectively destroyed her family, directed our conversations.
I based the figures of the women on some photographs taken after the siege of Stalingrad. In this transposing, the images emerged, formed by my mother’s unconscious. Those images are about the primordial urge to descend onto the field of slaughter to claim the dead after the battle. It made the war no easier to bear that New Zealand women were denied the reality of that experience. I had an image of women from the First World War, old now or dead, as restless spirits forever searching for the bodies of those dead men, forever agonising over how, why, when. The menacing kite hovering, casting its time-distorting shadow, was a practice in tribal warfare that was shared by Maori and Celt.
The startled flock of seagulls rushing skyward was as much a fearful portent of disaster for Maori as for Romans. And then there was, on another day, a pack of dogs running wild in the Domain. They evoke Mark Antony’s apology to the slain Caesar: ‘And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from hell, Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice, Cry “Havoc” and let slip the dogs of war. That this foul deed shall smell above the earth, With carrion men, groaning for burial.’
The Butt and Ben, 1951, oil on canvas
The Ballarat Hotel, 1951, oil on canvas.
A fascination with old buildings was very much a preoccupation of us students at the art school. I still love the simplicity of these old structures that I painted in Arrowtown.
The woman who ran the pub I stayed at belonged to the original settler’s family. They had been Irish Catholic but changed their minds about the Catholic bit early on. They’d been oppressed by a bullying, meddling priest and, in protest, left en masse. All that seemed pretty grown up, but something else she told me wasn’t. Arrowtown in those days was your original one-horse town, but this landlady had a real thing about the wrong set. I hadn’t so far glimpsed a right set, let alone had the pleasure of encountering the wrong one. But apparently they were a corrupt and dangerous lot, and a young woman like me had best beware. Alas, I left Arrowtown without sighting one of them.
The Cancer Patient, 1956, exhibited at the first outdoor exhibition in Wellington, 1956.
Fisherman Cutting Up a Fish, 1957, oil on board.
When I look at this painting I have to understand that it is a conventional socialist realist painting. It is the worker as a man. It was a year before I understood that it was more satisfying to discover my own perception of who was the worker.
The Autopsy, 1958, oil on board.
This is one of the few surviving paintings based on Fraser’s and my life at Porirua Hospital. Soldiers and doctors are constantly dealing with death, and on this occasion I was able to be a witness to that. It was a terrifying privilege to watch Fraser carry out an autopsy.
My sister Barbara, 1958, oil on canvas.
A good example of the red lines of tension pulling a painting about. The lines of tension replicate her state of mind. How her intelligent sensitivity demands her constant attention. I painted this not long before Barbara and her husband Bill Glass left for England.
Self-portrait with sunglasses, 1961.
The Fahey Family Group, 1975, photo 1935.
Fom the left, Barbara, delicate as glass; Cecil Alphonsus, his unusual blood group Basque-staining Barbara, who shared it; Cecil, the eldest, as a beauty, Diana the huntress. I am the urban guerilla already taking up arms and Terry, the baby, is full of tears, Margaret the mummy full of emotions.
Final Domestic Exposé, 1981
Can Painting Change Anything?, 2003
Our marriage photograph, 1955. A friend of the family, wanting to help, permed my hair. Why did I let her do that? I rather think there was an impulse in me to conform. Rather like shaving off your hair when you take the veil, an attempt to become someone else. Perhaps an admission that I wasn’t suited to marriage – not the way I was, anyway.
Afterwards, I tried to cut the gruesome curls off, but I still felt eunuched. Poor Fraser, it wasn’t what he wanted, a nice girl with a perm. Of course this swerve towards conformity didn’t last long. In no time my hair was straight, long and shiny again.
Something else equally awful happened. I got fat. Well, maybe not exactly fat, but I plumped up into a respectable-landed-gentry-girl shape. I wasn’t thin any more. I managed this in three months before my wedding. I had apparently contracted cystitis, a not uncommon affliction for those getting married, just married or rather keen to experiment. I called it
scalding wee-wees. I was given penicillin and bed rest. It certainly wasn’t what Fraser had been looking forward to: a nice fat girl with a perm.
The Christ’s College ball, 1947. Orburn Purchase, first on the left, became the curate in Timaru.
Dr and Mrs Bill Glass on their wedding day. Mrs Glass is my sister Barbara.
Louis Johnson.
Party on a yacht. Burning the candle at both ends, 1957.
Feeding the birds in the garden at Carrington, about 1986.
Fraser at his desk at Porirua Hospital, 1957.
A Woman patient in one of the locked wards, 1957.
Woman patient in one of the locked wards, 1957.
One of my ‘Suburban Neurosis’ paintings, 1959, oil on board. ‘Woman at the Sink’ is now the only one around; the other three are lost. These paintings were a conscious feminist statement addressed to my socialist friends of the time, mostly artists, writers and poets. They felt I should be painting the worker who was of course a man – a man working in a factory or on the road. The worker most obvious to me was the unpaid, unrecognised worker, the house worker. The other paintings emphasised women’s isolation from their husbands’ real lives and from other women. They couldn’t get a grip on reality. Society was developing a child-like state of mind in women, a belief in magical solutions. That’s what the other paintings were about: reading hands, reading tea leaves, a feeling of entrapment.
This photograph was taken when I was working at Harry’s. I was also pregnant with my first child. The date is 1959.
Copyright
First published 2006, reprinted 2012
This ebook edition 2012
Auckland University Press
University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand
www.press.auckland.ac.nz
© Jacqueline Fahey, 2006
eISBN 978 1 86940 510 6
National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Fahey, Jacqueline.
Something for the birds / Jacqueline Fahey.
ISBN 1-86940-355-x
1. Fahey, Jacqueline. 2. Painters—New Zealand—Biography.
I. Title.
759.993—dc 22
Publication is assisted by
This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior permission of the publisher.
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