I recall the thrill of my first visit to the National Gallery of Australia to choose some paintings for Yarralumla a few days after I took up office as Governor-General of Australia (2008-2014) 16 years ago.
I looked and I looked, and then I saw Springbrook with lifting fog, Bill Robinson’s revelatory highly theatrical rainforest painting of the might and majesty of the volcanic ranges of the Gold Coast hinterland. I couldn’t believe that I could borrow the work and luckily the space on my wall was perfect.
I cannot describe the delicious pleasure, happiness, contentment that this painting brought me and I knew the National Gallery of Australia would become important and influential in my life in the years ahead.
In April 2015 (husband Michael Bryce) and I returned to farewell Betty Churcher in Gandel Hall. I was deeply touched to join the tributes to this great Australian. It is a great honour for me to present the Betty Churcher Memorial Oration. An invitation I couldn’t resist.
The arts have given me friendships to treasure and so much more, although I have observed how demanding it is to sustain a career in this field. We say we value the arts and creativity and we talk about what they give to our nation and to our own lives. But this appreciation is not reflected in the way artists earn a living.
A report from Creative Australia released in May this year entitled Artists as Workers reinforced some of what we know but the statistics make my heart sink because it’s actually harder than ever to make a living today. Half of our professional artists earn less than $10,000 a year from their creative work, two in five are not meeting basic living costs. Only one in 10 work fulltime on their creative practice. The annual average income based on creative work alone is $23,000. Women artists earn 19 per cent less than their male counterparts.
Rather than being a luxury, an entertainment, the arts are fundamental to good health, a good education and quality of life. They transcend our day to day and let us imagine what is possible. Art creates culture, culture creates community and community creates humanity. Betty Churcher believed in an aesthetic mindset that could be taught and nourished from the early years.
In recent months I have become a Betty Churcher sleuth, going down the rabbit hole to read about her life. I have sought out old pals, colleagues, curators, journalists and asked: What was Betty like?
“Betty was charming,” they would often say.
I talked to Leigh Sales about her exquisite interview on the 7:30 Report with Betty near to her life’s end. Leigh told me that Betty had some things she wanted to say to us. Her message was pretty straightforward: “Go to the galleries, look at the paintings … stop and look and see.”
At her memorial we talked about her legacy. What set Betty apart? I was drawn to explore the early years as they tend to shape our lives so deeply. Betty railed against hers.
Elizabeth Ann Dewar Cameron was born in 1931, the daughter of William and Vida, sister of Ian. Her earliest memories are of Southport by the sea, her toes in the sand and in gentle still water. When she was around three the Camerons moved to Holland Park on what was then the edge of Brisbane with cows and hens and dirt roads and, best of all, a creek with clear cool water running over stones. It was a world perfect for cubbies, solitude, dreaming, imagining.
She joined her brother in correspondence classes at home. Despite the gender divide, with her brother endlessly favoured (“Everything that I did seemed to be wrong,” she once recalled) she was determined to make her mark, despite being told she couldn’t.
The unfairness of her girlhood never left her, then, hallelujah at age seven her great-grandmother’s will provided for private schooling and Betty went to Somerville House while her brother went to Anglican Church Grammar School (Churchie). At Somerville, the “grim little mollusc” (her words) found her happiness.
The headmistress, Miss Craig, identified Betty’s extraordinary ability to draw straight away. Betty thought that everyone could draw. She adored her art teacher Pat Prentice.
When her father took her to the Queensland Art Gallery for the first time, there, at the entrance she saw the enormous evocative painting Evicted by Blandford Fletcher. It was breathtaking and heartbreaking and her emotional response never left her.
At age 10 Betty won her first art competition in The Sunday Mail. She was away! She became obsessed with her art making. Her father, her only support at home, encouraged her but suddenly announced she would not be going back to school at the end of Grade 10. When Miss Craig discovered this she phoned Ernest Cameron.
“Is there a financial problem?” Miss Craig asked. Shamed by the very notion he caved in and Betty went back, fees waived in exchange for some art teaching in the Junior School.
At just 17, while still at school, she sold her first paintings, four in three days!
In 1951 at the age of 20 she won the Younger Artists Group Scholarship, 300 pounds, a vast sum then.
At 21 Betty travelled to Europe and London on the Orient Line. She ended up studying at the Royal College of Art and after three idyllic years there she graduated and, with husband-to-be Roy Churcher went off to Europe for three months.
In 1957, after six years away, Betty went back to Brisbane with Roy. She had no intention of staying in Brisbane because London was her life now! But Roy decided he didn’t want to leave. She hated being back in Brisbane. “It was all about Roy and Roy’s work,” she said.
When she became pregnant in 1959, she made up her mind that she would never paint again. Betty told herself – If you can’t paint then the next best thing is to be in something where you are looking at art or talking about it.
She returned to what she knew and loved, teaching at a few girls schools, including my own.
In 1971, Bill Robinson, then teaching at Kelvin Grove Teachers College, encouraged Betty to take on a fulltime job there. Not so sure about connecting with older students, the imposter syndrome that had dogged her at every change in her professional life struck. But then she realised that by training their teachers she could reach out to more children. I have vivid, fond memories of Betty in those years – the tall, elegant, beautiful woman. I loved her style and most of all that unforgettable smile.
We all wanted to be like her. I look back with enduring and affectionate nostalgia on those years. Michael and I with two little ones, back home from the swinging ’60s in London, the exhilarating social change sweeping the world.
The beautiful people, Betty and Roy among them, were seen at the Johnstone Gallery eating Jatz crackers and drinking wine that people were snobby about. The Johnstone closed its doors in 1974 and 50 years ago Philip Bacon Galleries opened and for some time now has been the leading commercial gallery in Australia. I loved soaking up the ambience, the personalities, the joie de vivre in a gallery, but Betty always insisted she wasn’t a party girl.
Galleries were her metier, but definitely not openings. Her devotion to art history forever apparent, she was art critic for The Australian from 1972 to 1975 and in 1973 her prize-winning book Understanding Art was published. Betty taught at Kelvin Grove until 1977.
In 1976 she went back to London and to New York to study for her master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute, the undergraduate requirement waived on account of the success of her book, which won a Times Literary Award.
Back in Australia she was appointed senior lecturer in art history at Preston Institute of Technology. She made the difficult decision to go ahead to Melbourne on her own. Roy and the boys followed at the end of the year. By 1982 she was dean of the school of art and design at the Philip Institute, the first woman to head an Australian art school.
1983, she became chair of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council and later deputy chair of the council and in 1984 she wrote Molvig: The Lost Antipodean.
Her reputation established, in 1987 Janet Holmes a Court, wife of Robert and the chair of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, went to see Betty in Melbourne. Would she be interested in the idea of the directorship of the gallery?
Betty had always wanted to work in an art gallery but she thought that at 56 she had missed out. She was in for some challenging interactions with Robert Holmes a Court but was exhilarated by the opportunity. It was a great stepping stone for her, the first woman to run a state gallery.
In 1990 she was appointed to this esteemed gallery, the National Gallery of Australia. From the beginning she foresaw the diminishment of public funding and wanted to focus more on private sector sponsorship and philanthropy. And she wanted to give curators the opportunity to make their own exhibitions, rather than just accepting pre-packaged shows from overseas. I remember the thrill of coming to Canberra to see some.
In 1997 she retired from the NGA. Wow! Betty came into our homes with the enchanting television series Take 5 – art tidbits on television. They were gems.
In 2011 Notebooks by Betty Churcher was published by Melbourne University Press. It is sublime reading that I turn to again and again. I took that book to the Prado with me to help me look and see. In the three Notebooks – 2011, 2014 2015 – we have inspiring, engaging, enriching stores of Betty’s drawings, her erudition encased in the warmth of her invitation to come, to look.
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Looking into Betty’s legacy I did not realise it would reach into my heart and mind. I have scarcely scratched the surface. Never have the arts in Australia had a more powerful advocate, a more brilliant communicator.
Art makes the world a better place. Betty would want us to never forget this.
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