Autobiography of My Mother

by Meg Stewart

  One day when Mum was entertaining the Greek priest she called me into the sitting room; I could see her eyes were twinkling.

  ‘Father Constantine has a proposition for you,’ she said blithely, and stopped. Father Constantine took over. His eyes were glowing and he waved his hands around as he explained.

  ‘Margaret, my child, I have found a nice husband for you,’ he said. ‘A nice Greek husband. The boy is here in Sydney, the marriage will take place in a few months. You will be very happy with him.’

  Father Constantine was very happy. I was furious. I had not the slightest interest in an arranged marriage with anyone, not even a nice Greek boy. Father Constantine took my refusal badly. He wanted Mum to intervene. But Mum said the decision was up to me, since it was my arranged marriage.

  The Greek priest went off in a huff. I don’t know if he was paid to arrange marriages, but I think not. Probably he was fond of Mum because of the cups of tea and thought he was doing us both a favour by providing a husband for me. No more tea and sandwich visits to the Coens for him.

  I received another equally strange proposal at about the same time from wealthy family friends, a married couple about Mum’s age, who seemed quite elderly to me. The man picked me up as I walked down Botany Street and said he would drive me home.

  Instead we drove off and did a circuit of Centennial Park. Then, in the most matter-of-fact voice, he asked me if I would consider becoming his mistress. He didn’t touch me. It was as if he was offering me a business proposition.

  ‘What about your wife?’ I stammered out.

  ‘My wife understands,’ he said calmly. ‘She thinks it would be a good arrangement.’

  I was terrified. I wasn’t at all convinced that the wife knew anything about it. I didn’t know what sort of maniac he was.

  ‘I don’t think so. You’ll have to ask me another day,’ I said, stalling for time.

  We did another circuit while he coolly elaborated, telling me that he had been watching me and how much he liked me. He had no intention of leaving his wife if I became his mistress, he added and concluded by saying that I would be very well looked after financially.

  I wasn’t going to be this man’s mistress any more than I was prepared to accept a Greek husband I hadn’t met. The man and his wife were childless and I often wondered afterwards if they had wanted me to produce a child for them.

  If you say you are going to be an artist, the first stumbling block for religious people is that you have to draw from the model. It shocks them.

  It doesn’t matter that every artist who ever painted drew from the model; they are still shocked. In my case it began with Auntie Ina before she entered the convent, when I was a child and she was still living at The House. For reasons best known to myself, I had undressed a doll, but my doll appeared mysteriously dressed again. Miffed at this intervention, I undressed the doll as before; again mysteriously she was re-dressed.

  Then I caught Ina in the act. I was cross with her for interfering in my games, and she in return scolded me for daring to be so bold.

  ‘Cranky Ina’ I called her. The name stuck. She was ‘Cranky Ina’ for many years thereafter.

  During my first term at Rubbo’s art school, I took a selection of my work up to show Grandma. It included a few studies of the nude. I hadn’t quite made up my mind if I would show them to her or not. In the meantime they were safely stowed away in my bedroom. Or so I thought.

  Ina, who had now long been a nun, was back at Yass for a holiday. She went investigating in my room and managed to fossick out the hidden nudes.

  Is this what they teach you in art school?’ she said in shocked tones.

  ‘Unless you draw from the model, you will never be able to draw the human figure,’ I replied defensively.

  Ina quailed. Nothing more was heard from her about the nude. Annie and I giggled about it in the kitchen, Annie agreeing that Ina shouldn’t have gone snooping around my things in the first place.

  Not only Catholics carried on about drawing the human body. One of Doug’s strictly Anglican uncles was visiting us long after we were married and living in St Ives. The house was hung with nudes, mostly by Norman Lindsay. A nude that Norman made out of plastic wood (a filler that looked like brown plaster of Paris) stood on the mantelpiece, while a bronze figurine made the centrepiece of the dining table.

  Uncle Wallace looked askance at all this nakedness, his wife pretended not to notice. After two whiskies and a few glasses of wine, Uncle Wallace recovered from his initial shock at seeing unclothed females adorning the house, and even grew a little lecherous.

  I’ve never seen so many,’ he confided over dessert.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘when you finish your lemon meringue pie you’ll find another.’

  The dessert dishes were hand painted by Arthur Murch. At the bottom of Uncle Wallace’s pudding plate was a curvaceous mermaid. Uncle Wallace scraped away at his pie with a gleam in his eye.

  I was drawing the model as soon as I started Rubbo’s art class. Usually Rubbo’s pupils had to spend twelve months in another room drawing ‘the antique’ before they were allowed anywhere near the model. This meant drawing from a series of famous plaster busts and bodies, starting with a head of Homer, moving on to the hideous bust of Voltaire, the bane of every art student’s life, then on to the ‘Drowned Girl of the Seine’ with such a calm expression on her face. A life-sized plaster torso with the skin stripped off to show the muscles came last.

  Rubbo might have taken into account the years of drawing lessons I had from him at Kincoppal, but for whatever reason I escaped the antique. Later, at the Royal Art classes, I was not so lucky.

  Despite my delight at having left school and becoming a serious art student, the first time I saw the model I nearly died. I knew I would have to draw from the nude and thought I was prepared for anything, but I was still surprised when I saw our model. She was not a young woman. She had masses of black hair which looked dyed to me, naturally dusky skin with a pinky glow and although she had a slim figure she must have been about forty – I was, I suppose, expecting the model to be like the women in Botticelli’s Primavera.

  My mother was as alarmed as everyone else when I started the life class. ‘Do the models have any clothes on?’ she asked. ‘The men wear vees,’ I told her. ‘The women have nothing on, but during the rest breaks they go behind a screen and put on a dressing gown and slippers before they sit down with the rest of us.

  ‘Come in and have a look for yourself,’ I said to her. ‘See how absorbed everyone is, it’s almost like being in church. The invitation was sufficient to quiet Mum’s concern. She didn’t come to the art classes and she didn’t say any more about drawing the nude. What I said about the religious atmosphere was true; in a life class you can hear a pin drop, the students concentrate so intently. As for the rest of my family, I later learned what really set them talking, apart from my drawing nude models, was the fact that I didn’t – except on the most formal occasions – ever wear a corset. I simply couldn’t bear being constrained by tight elastic.

  Rubbo’s studio was on the seventh floor of a building at 15 Bligh Street. The lift up to his rooms was cramped and creaking, but once you arrived, the space was quite airy. Sun streamed in the front windows. Up to the left was the Hotel Metropole; directly opposite, in an old-fashioned sandstone building with Doric columns across the porticoed front, was the Union Club. In spring and summer, the jacaranda tree that grew in the small strip of garden down the side of the Union Club was covered with mauve blossoms and the members’ wives held garden parties there. We watched them with amusement arriving in elegant frocks, big hats and white gloves. The back windows had a view right across to Circular Quay.

  Not that we had much time to stand and stare with Signor Rubbo. We always had to call him ‘Signor’. ‘Perspiration, not inspiration’ he told us was his motto. ‘Work, work, work!’

  The Tuesday class I attended was made up of women pupils only, mostly of my ow
n age. There was Elsa Russell, Janna Bruce and tiny pretty Dora Jarret, very proud of being half French. ‘The Jarret’ Rubbo used to call her.

  Rubbo gave everyone pet names. Janna was ‘Brucie’, the other two girls were ‘Woy Woy’ and ‘Goldfinch’. Irene Marr was ‘Titianella’, which I thought was wonderful. Irene had red hair and the fair complexion that goes with it. When Rubbo criticised her work, we could see the blush run up her face. Alison Rehfisch he called ‘Gorgeous’. ‘Gorgeous’ was Alison’s favourite adjective; Alison herself was gorgeous too. Golden-haired and blue-eyed, she was a little older than the rest of us. She had been married and used to bring her little daughter Peggy to classes. Peggy called me ‘Auntie Margaret’.

  My name was ‘Gunner’, which I didn’t find nearly as attractive as ‘Titianella’. Rubbo said it was because one day I would go ‘boom boom’. I didn’t know what he meant then, and it’s no clearer to me now.

  Signor Rubbo was in his mid-fifties then, still handsome, still wearing the green Borsalino low over one eye. With his curly black hair, he reminded everyone of Frans Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier. Often he wore a red tie, like a Communist, to make him look dangerous. As he grew older, he became more sober about his dress and would appear in a double-breasted suit, a white collar and dark tie. Even in his most flamboyantly bohemian attire Rubbo was never untidy or ill-groomed.

  Rubbo’s head and hands looked slightly too big for his body. He should have been a tall man, but both his legs had been broken in some childhood accident, which impeded his growth at a critical period. His hands were beautiful, though; sensitive and artistic with the smoothest olive skin.

  Numerous stories about how and why Rubbo came to Australia passed round the class. The one most often given as the truth was that he set out from Naples for South Africa but as a prank his friends put him on the wrong boat and he ended up in Australia.

  When Rubbo first arrived here, Norman Lindsay had a studio next to him in Rowe Street. There was only a thin partition between them; Norman could hear Rubbo talking aloud to himself, lamenting his lack of recognition. Norman used to give an amazing imitation of this; you would swear Rubbo was in the room. ‘Rubbo’s soliloquy’, Norman called it.

  ‘The great Rubbo is dead,’ it began. ‘Nobody knows who this great man is. They will come, they will find him on the studio floor, they will see the masterpiece on the wall.’ Of course Rubbo was dramatising; he never suffered a fate like this. He was well loved and cared for until the day he died.

  Rubbo had a secretary in Bligh Street, a tall, skinny woman who wore navy blue suits with flaring skirts nipped in at the waist and very high heels, on which she tottered around. Her hair was done up on top in a bun that looked as if it never came down.

  Her duties included preparing Rubbo’s lunch. She was no cook and as she grew older her culinary skills declined. Rubbo would set up a table in the antique room at which they sat and ate, or tried to eat, whatever inedible mess she had concocted in the cubbyhole kitchen off the side of the two classrooms.

  Poached eggs were her pièce de résistance. She would break the eggs into strenuously boiling water, wait a few seconds, then dish the whole lot out onto a plate. Rubbo would stare down with horror at the uncooked eggs swimming in water before him. Eventually his wife sent his meals in.

  Besides drawing from the model, Rubbo made us do character studies of old men; Rubbo loved painting old men, or ‘battlers’, as I called them in my Great Artists book from school. He would scour Hyde Park for derelicts and persuade them to come up and pose for us. (I presume he paid them for their services.) After he had arranged his subject on the dais, or the model’s throne as it was called – usually a table with the legs cut down – Rubbo put a shovel or pick next to the old man to add a touch of authenticity. But the warmth of the sun coming through the windows sent the derelicts straight to sleep. In retaliation, Rubbo kept a pocket full of gravel; as soon as the model nodded off, ping! With deadly aim Rubbo threw a pebble at the peacefully somnolent sitter. Rubbo drew them very well. He was deeply sympathetic towards them. Later one of these old derelicts actually lived at his house.

  The male models in the life class were a sorry lot. I don’t know how the boys felt about drawing from the female models, but as far as we were concerned, the men were no temptation. Old Mack, looking like a Roman emperor gone wrong, was almost always tipsy. Ten minutes into a pose his mouth would sag open; not a seductive sight.

  We had to draw the model in the same pose until we knew it inside out. Sometimes we drew the one model for six weeks. Being stuck with Old Mack was punishing.

  Then there was Petit, who claimed to be the descendant of kings. He was a very short man with an immense moustache. Anything less romantic than Petit would be hard to imagine.

  We had a favourite story about Petit. He was posing for the Women Artists, a sketch club of prim and proper elderly ladies. Petit picked up the wrong pair of trunks when he was changing and came out to pose in vees belonging to a much larger man. The lady artists stared at him aghast, none more so than Mildred Lovett, who finally broke the silence.

  ‘Petit, your person is showing,’ she said. Her words became legendary. Every art student had heard about Petit’s person. It was hard to suppress the smiles when Petit appeared to pose.

  After a class began, there was no chattering or mucking about. Rubbo insisted on utter silence while we worked. He would stalk round the room, criticising our efforts in turn.

  We waited in fear and trembling for Signor Rubbo’s appraisal. If he didn’t like a drawing on the board in front of you off it came, a habit with which I was already too familiar from my days at Kincoppal; it was still devastating. To work on a drawing for a whole day, or three days, or three weeks, then to have it suddenly vanish with one whisk of the feather duster or Rubbo’s handkerchief was more than we could bear. In desperation, we gave up charcoal and started drawing in soft pencil. ‘Rub it out, rub it out,’ Rubbo would mutter furiously, but at least he couldn’t take to it with the duster.

  Attention to detail was what he taught, not emphasising detail as such, but learning to show every detail in its correct relationship to the whole, tonal differentiation being the key.

  I didn’t use colour at all in those days. When I wasn’t drawing in charcoal or pencil, I was doing pen and ink still lifes. It seemed that I laboured over each one for hours. Pen and ink is a finicky medium, but I was desperate to become an illustrator like Jack Flanagan. I didn’t work as hard as I do now, though. Now I hate to waste time, but it takes years of learning to become really industrious.

  My mother had a large collection of my early drawings in the flat at Randwick. When she was taken ill and had to leave the flat, the drawings were bundled up and destroyed. Just as well, I think.

  Our neighbours had a daughter, Mary, whose mother thought, since I was an artist, I should paint Mary’s portrait.

  Mary wore glasses. I was nervous about drawing them so I suggested she take them off. There was no need for her glasses to be in the portrait, I argued. I produced a reasonably good pencil likeness, except for the eyes. I worked on them for a couple of days, but they still looked wrong. My mother came to inspect the portrait.

  ‘Good heavens,’ she whispered reprovingly, ‘you needn’t have made Mary so cross-eyed. She may be cross-eyed in real life, but you could have left it out of the drawing.’

  Mum was right. I had forgotten. Mary had one eye that looked straight ahead, while the other looked out to the side (not strictly speaking cross-eyed, but we always called her cross-eyed). That’s what had been worrying me as I tried to draw her. If I had roughed out the head properly from the start, I would have noticed at once.

  When you’re drawing a head, you rough it out first, you do a circle where each of the eyes is to go. You don’t draw it feature by feature to begin with, as I had.

  Rubbo himself fell into that trap once. Doing his usual round of the class, he swooped on one unfortunate girl working away at the
model. ‘Why are you drawing one toe, two toes? Here you have drawn six toes,’ Rubbo scolded, busily wiping the drawing off the board.

  ‘But, Signor Rubbo,’ the model spoke up, ‘I have six toes.’

  Rubbo also taught at the Royal Art Society, and towards the end of the year I started going to classes there four nights a week. I chose the Royal Art out of loyalty to Rubbo; there were other art schools in Sydney, including Julian Ashton’s and J. S. Watkins’s. By then Watkins was a very stooped old man who gave lessons in his studio. Janna Bruce also went to an etching class at Syd Long’s, which he conducted separately from his Royal Art classes. Syd’s own paintings were mostly romantic, art nouveau-looking landscapes. The East Sydney Tech didn’t have the stature it later did so nobody studied there much. I don’t even think the course had a diploma.

  Going to the Royal Art Society meant that I became much more serious about my art. My Randwick party life with Amber gradually declined. Being an artist was most important to me now, although I still loved dancing. If there was any party in the offing, I was eager to be dancing.

  Amber had become involved with a boy (not Paddy the tennis player). She spent an enormous amount of time talking to him on the phone. When I did go round to the Hacketts now, the phone would inevitably ring and Amber would disappear for hours. They didn’t marry for six years, but he was a constant presence in the meantime.

  Even though that side of my life was fading away, Amber and Noel always treated me with the greatest respect as an artist – not that I had done anything to justify that title – and they believed in me totally. Noel gave me my first commission. He asked me to do two black and white drawings as a wedding present for a friend of his.

  I was thrilled pink. The finished product, I’m afraid, was not very original. It bore a close resemblance to the work of an Irish artist named Harry Clarke, who had illustrated an edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. I was an ardent fan of both the stories and the illustrations.