Our man up there
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 9: Up North
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Phil Brown
Download the complete article PDF
Phil Brown's biography and other articles by this writer
Gil Jamieson sat looking over Three Moon Flat, a shotgun across his sarong-covered knee as the sound of the crows in a vast gum tree filled the air. "They make a hell of a racket," I said, stating the obvious.
"They know I've got the gun out," he smiled. "Smart bastards. I killed one yesterday and they haven't shut up since." He stood up, put the old Browning to his shoulder and aimed it at the tree. The birds lifted in a dark spore of a cloud and wheeled about overhead, cawing with one voice. It sounded vaguely human, like the eerie soundtrack to a Hieronymus Bosch painting, if there were one.
"I'll leave the bastards today," Gil said. "I think they've got the message." And the message was – leave the damn chickens alone or you'll end up hanging upside down full of buckshot outside the henhouse. The tatty ebony corpse dangling there was proof of that.
As the crows still protested from above, we went inside and Gil brewed some strong espresso coffee. I knew of nowhere else in Monto where you could get a short black. At the milk bar in the main street you could get a milky cappuccino but it was hardly worth the having. I'd been in town for several months without strong caffeine so appreciated the visits to Gil's property for coffee and cultural conversation – both of which were otherwise thin on the ground.
Gil was an artist of national repute, better known in the salons of Melbourne than in Queensland. A figurative expressionist painter, he had been a fringe member of the groundbreaking Antipodean movement, along with Fred Williams among others, in the late 1950s. He was also briefly part of the Heide circle and had his first solo show with John Reed at the Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne in 1960. He exhibited with Kym Bonython in Adelaide and Rudy Komon in Sydney. But in the decades that followed, he preferred being back home in the north on his share of the family property just outside Monto, where he lived with his wife, Maureen, and children Matthew and Alicia. He ranged out across northern Australia – painting Kakadu before it was trendy to do so, journeying into the deserts and ranges to produce exquisite gouaches and unruly oils. Some adorned the walls of the family home, a bungalow shrouded by trees on the edge of Three Moon Flat, a large expanse sliced by Three Moon Creek.
MY FRIENDSHIP WITH GIL WAS AS ACCIDENTAL AS MY LIFE IN MONTO. I'd come to the tiny town in Queensland's North Burnett District in 1979 to visit a friend and had stumbled into a job on the local newspaper, the Burnett Herald. Well, I wasn't doing anything else at the time, so why not? It was all a bit of an adventure. Unlike my contemporaries, I yearned to go bush, to travel north, to revel in the real Australia the way others yearned to rush to the imperial bosom. So I found myself falling north instead of towards England. Having spent most of my childhood in Hong Kong and my teenage years on the Gold Coast, I knew nothing about Australian rural life, although I had read Kenneth Cook's quintessential outback novel Wake in Fright.
I thought about that slim, chilling volume after my first visit to Gil Jamieson's place, as I reeled home across the paddocks. Drunk and directionless, I vomited in the pitch darkness, trod in most of the cowpats along the way and tore my clothes on barbed wire climbing through fences. My baptism of fire in Monto hadn't been a drunken kangaroo shoot but a night of philosophical discussion in the artist's studio. I was living in a house a mere kilometre away, on a hill overlooking Hurdle Gully Road and a piggery, which made the cooling evening breeze unwelcome.
The artist singled me out as a kindred spirit after an abrasive meeting in the main street, and invited me to his home. He'd poured as much alcohol into me as he could over dinner and then we retreated to his studio to discuss poetry and art and smoke fat Cuban cigars. Not what I'd come to expect of an evening out in Monto. Instead, it offered proof that there was cultural life beyond The Brisbane Line. In fact, Monto and district has produced a few art notables including Gil, the late Patrick Hockey from the nearby hamlet of Abercorn and Gordon Bennett, who was born in Monto.
Gil took great pride in his home town and its characters. That first night he filled my head with stories of the town and its people; wonderful, awful stories, soon lost in the oblivion of drunkenness. I didn't exactly wake in fright the morning after but I was certainly very crook. That morning as I watched the crows rise and wheel, cawing piteously in the merciless, cloudless sky, I was woozy. Gil was fine, confirming the distinction in drinking prowess between city slicker and countryman, artist and neophyte. In fact, Gil and I had come together because of the differences, as well as the similarities, between us. Even though Monto was his town and the surrounding landscape was his country, he still felt a little alien. As an artist, he was enough of an outsider to detach himself, to chronicle the place in his work. I was a complete alien.
In my first weeks in Monto, writing poetry in my friend's house, I was a mere visitor. Soon I would become a resident, a victim of circumstance. A report came back from the pub, with some urgency, that the editor needed another reporter. I was urged to take the job. On the strength of a flimsy scrapbook of cuttings, the result of half a degree in journalism, I got the job.
I threw myself into it, aware of the literary possibilities of such an experience. As the local reporter I legitimately entered into the daily life of the town and district and its 1700 inhabitants. As an alien I was met with suspicion, but as a reporter I was welcomed: in homes and at meetings, at saleyards and rodeos and wherever my beat took me. I quickly learnt about cattle and lucerne, pigs and sawmilling, and saturated myself in the life of the town. To me, Monto was an exotic world as far removed from my previous life as I could imagine. The fact that I had long hair and an earring, which marked me as an outsider at first, became less relevant when I had a job to do.
There were still occasional mutterings when I passed people in the main street but no outright challenges. I confounded their suspicion I was gay (long hair, an earring – must be a poof) when I danced The Pride of Erin with a local schoolteacher.
There were the usual hierarchies in the town and various sorts of snobbery prevailed even (especially) among such a small population. Life beyond the town was another world altogether and many of the larger landowners were a breed apart. They tended to look down on the townies; they'd been to expensive private schools in the big smoke and their properties were like little city-states dotting the countryside. An unofficial aristocracy, they were likely to have extensive libraries and decent art on the walls. But the town itself was generally starved for culture, despite its famous sons such as Gil Jamieson and the actor Michael Caton.
WHEN I FIRST SAW GIL HE LOOMED LARGE ON NEWTON STREET, THE MAIN DRAG; a wild man with long, dark hair tucked under a beaten bushie's hat, an errant beard and a kangaroo-skin jacket. He'd just blown in from the Northern Territory and wanted to know who the hell I was and what I was doing in his town. I'd been asked that a few times.
Getting to know him was my entrée to the psyche of the place. He was realistic about the town but he knew and loved country life, warts and all. And there were plenty of warts. I'd romantically imagined rural life to be essentially noble. Through his eyes the flaws became clear. Racism was the ugliest. Monto is an Aboriginal word (it means "ridgy plains") but the indigenous presence was sketchy. It was stronger in the nearby town of Eidsvold, known locally as Coonsvold. When a local service club held a country music jamboree at nearby Cania Gorge, where evidence of continuous Aboriginal settlements during the last Ice Age has since been discovered, a boom gate was erected. "This is our coon bar," a club member boasted. If Gil had been with me he would have driven his four-wheel drive straight through that bloody gate. In his travels in the north he had become close to indigenous people, particularly in Kakadu where his best mate was the Aboriginal elder Nipper Gabreekie. Nipper showed him the secrets of his country and Gil painted them with reverence and considered that work part of his own whitefella dreaming.
But back in his home town racism was endemic, the worm in the bud of this aspiring town, a town that was constantly trying to revive itself from its brief glory as the hub of farms carved out for returned soldiers to settle on, despite being in a seemingly terminal decline ever since. Civic pride was enshrined in events like the jamboree, the dairy festival and the Monto Show, which Gil enshrined in a huge oil painting, now buried deep in the bowels of the Queensland Art Gallery.
Outside town, the Aboriginal presence could be felt strongly but mostly in emptiness. Around Cania Gorge, rock art was a message from the past, from the original inhabitants, but their absence and the silence of the landscape were palpable. In the bush behind my place, above the piggery on Hurdle Gully Road, I imagined I saw silhouettes of figures, spears in hand, stalking through the parched, crackling scrub. The lost history seemed more enticing than the official local lore, which lionised white pioneers and celebrated "closer settlement", the seal on the destruction of 40 millennia of history – forgotten history. As a child, Gordon Bennett must have sensed this horror at the heart of the town, the searing wound in the soul of the district.
Gil captured Monto's decline in his expressionist paintings, which sometimes depicted the unrelenting harshness of country life – pigs being slaughtered, men brawling in a pub, a drunken farmer slouched over his dinner while his bereft, abused wife attends the sink. But he also captured the resilience of its people and the haunting beauty of its landscape – the mystery of its forests, the wonders of the light, the surprising jauntiness of the main street on a Saturday morning. Gil was a prism through which I viewed the place. Monto was his Milk Wood and he exported it to the southern salons where such a place seemed an artistic invention. For me, it was a raw but fascinating place as alien as Bundanyabba, the blighted town in Wake in Fright.