Sydney was at the edge of winter, with that crisp thin sunlight that can make the harbour city idyllic, when my friend Colin Oehring and I were there for the first Bill Henson opening since the one Kevin Rudd found ‘disgusting’ and which was closed down by the police despite getting a G rating from Donald McDonald’s Commonwealth censors. It all went without horrific drama. Barry Humphries could be seen in the midst of a capacity crowd which had seemed at the outset to consist of Miranda Devine and a couple of teenage girls. I’m told Devine was apologetic about the bushfire cum auto-da-fé she inadvertently started back in 2008.
The exhibition itself didn’t emphasise the jeunes filles –– the dominant young woman in the series was womanly in Henson’s pensive Leonardo da Vinci mode –– but the show was notable for the way Bill has gone digital but in a manner which allows him to flood his images with Renaissance blacks, which make them even more textured-looking and painterly than the analogue work with its chiaroscuro and its famous sense of drama. That sense of drama was evident in the landscape pictures here which have as keen a sense of epiphany and portent as any girl looking out of darkness into an annunciation of light.
Later that night, at the party thrown for Bill by his dealer Roslyn Oxley at her home, Carthona –– its old stone once occupied by Major Mitchell and abutting what feels like a private neck of the Pacific, a place that makes you dizzy at the beauty of Sydney –– we talked to that grand old man of the theatre (once a wonder boy) Jim Sharman, the man who went from Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar to Benjamin Britten and Patrick White and made the film of The Rocky Horror Show. He said how much he loved the Benedict Andrews production of Shakespeare’s most sustained meditation on politics and history, The War of the Roses (the blood-spitting one with Cate Blanchett as Richard II). And you got the strongest sense that Sharman, even at 70, will always be on the side of the young Turks who want to show what can be done with the theatre.
Jim Sharman had been close to Patrick White –– he directed the opera of Voss and the film The Night The Prowler –– and we talked about Fred Schepisi filming The Eye of the Storm in Melbourne with Charlotte Rampling as the matriarch and Geoffrey Rush as her actor son, Sir Basil. Geoffrey, though just as eminent, is not quite the theatre knight type, whereas Sir Ian McKellen, whom we caught up with back in Melbourne, is –– he who was famous for his Macbeth and his Richard II before The Lord of the Rings gave him an immeasurably greater audience. Geoffrey Rush told me he loved McKellen’s Estragon in Waiting For Godot (now in Sydney) because he captured the clown so consummately. Ian McKellen had also worked with Fred Schepisi on Six Degrees of Separation. He was exercised both times we saw him by what British politics would look like with the Cameron/Clegg alliance and was unimpressed by pussyfooting on gay issues.
The second night we were in Sydney we caught the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Joanna Murray Smith’s Honour, with Wendy Hughes playing the role that was played on the London stage by two of the great dames of British theatre, Diana Rigg and Eileen Atkins. Honour is very much an example of what the theatre can do, and Wendy Hughes was the best thing in this production, which got a very warm response from the Friday night Opera House audience.
Later that night we were partaking of more Sydney luxury at the party of my old friend (and doctor) Jonathan Upfal and his lovely lady Susie Corlett, which was in the Pratt flat that overlooks Circular Quay the way a Martian spaceship might overlook Earth. It’s another of those views that make you feel, for a moment, like a master of the universe, even if what you’re listening to in the velvety darkness of the balcony with the lights in the water like inverted stars is that wild man Peter Booth talking about his paintings, or Bill Henson arguing that the films made by that left-wing aristocrat Visconti just got better and better as his career went on. Colin appeared to spend the whole night talking only to that gorgeous popular novelist Lee Tulloch.
Charlotte Rampling (a strikingly thoughtful and self-possessed woman with whom Colin and I had dinner on Saturday night at Jane Badler’s South Yarra home) was 24 when she made The Damned for Visconti, and is still a regal presence in the French cinema. She is playing a dying woman in Schepisi’s White film and Judy Davis her daughter, the Princesse de Lascabanes. On the previous Sunday we went to the 80th birthday party of Jonathan Upfal’s mother, Bunny, a lady who used to vote communist but who is now (and she finds it a great lark) la comtesse de Saint-Ferjeux. Back in her school-teaching days she taught Cate Blanchett at MLC. She was in great form, though she just wrinkles her nose in puzzlement at a world of iPods and iPads.
A couple of days later I was at the memorial service for that great Australian-born London-based poet, Peter Porter. His daughter Jane told me that at the actual London funeral –– at which Clive James, visibly moved, had read from the Bible — Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, those lions of modern fiction, had all showed up to honour the man who gave up a job in advertising to make a living writing reviews but will be read as long as the English language is spoken. At the service at Newman College, Fr. Peter Steele presided, Morag Fraser read psalm 39 to the manner born, and Peter Rose talked of the funny, generous man who always thought everyone was likely to be run down crossing the street by a dark Daimler sent by the British government. Craig Sherborne read a late poem by Peter, ‘After Schiller’, which had a staggering formal power, magnificent and moving. They sang Mozart, Wolf and Schubert, with Anna Goldsworthy at the piano, and then in the high reverberant acoustic of that Catholic chapel we heard the voice of Peter Porter reading his own work: so warm, so understated, a commingling of Britain and Australia. The congregation –– which ranged from the comedian John Clarke to the critic Owen Richardson –– melted.
One person I saw in Sydney was Murray Bail, whose novel Eucalyptus was almost a Nicole Kidman/Russell Crowe film. The thing he singled out about Peter Porter, as we sat over pasta in Potts Point, was the thing everyone does –– his modesty. It’s funny: he was a man of complete integrity who was a great poet. He didn’t have a lot to be modest about.
Peter Craven was the first editor of Quarterly Essay.
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