Art Mania

详细摘要

This moment of retreat becomes essential in the narrative. Knowing when to give up on a faulty story idea, no matter how much time and energy has been invested in it, becomes the…

Perhaps there is no better feeling for a jobbing writer than finding a story. Writers spend their days, if not their lives, searching for them. Scanning their surrounds, alert to shapely, layered ideas that are promising in their potential and propulsion. The moment of discovery can feel so potent, so inevitable, it might become an essential narrative thread: this was meant to be.

Historian Kitty Hauser opens her latest biography – Art Mania: Geoffrey Bardon and the Painting Men of Papunya – by recounting how she happened upon Bardon’s story. Not long after moving to Australia, Hauser was sitting in a waiting room when she picked up a magazine. She read an article about how a young art teacher from Sydney travelled to Papunya, Central Australia, in 1971. The government settlement “was intended as a staging post to assist its inhabitants to assimilate into mainstream Australia”.

While working in Papunya, Bardon became “involved in the beginnings of the Aboriginal painting movement”. He had “encouraged” the men living there to “transfer their ceremonial designs and their Dreaming stories onto boards”. Eventually, Bardon would be awarded an Order of Australia in 1988 for “service to the preservation and development of traditional Aboriginal art forms”.

After 18 months of living in Papunya, Bardon was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for deep-sleep therapy. Hauser’s mother-in-law, Noeleen, had been admitted to the same facility. Aware of the “physical abjection” that took place at Chelmsford hospital, Hauser’s writerly instincts were activated. Patients were put into a drug-induced sleep for weeks at a time and given rounds of electroconvulsive therapy they often had not agreed to. In 1990, a royal commission found the deep-sleep therapy regimen had caused “at least twenty-four preventable deaths (not including suicides) and countless instances of brain damage”.

As Hauser sat in the waiting room, the story’s narrative engine started to tick over.

A beat later, on the…

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