Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

An arty day in Perth

It was quite a pleasing day yesterday. My wife and I had about six hours to ourselves. We trotted of to central Perth to take a look at an exhibition of 200 erotic etchings published by the famous Australian artist Norman Lindsay (1879-1969). The venue was the state's Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Mr Lindsay liked to depict naked women with all the naughty bits showing, and this gained him a notorious reputation amongst the wowsers. There were no wowsers evident yesterday. Just lots of senior citizens taking advantage of the two tickets for five dollars offer if a Senior's Card was produced. The State Government gives one of these to everyone when they turn sixty to stop them whining about high prices.

In this case it was, "Let them eat forbidden fruit." There were just as many women as men having a gawk, and plenty of couples too. We all gazed at the images and made quiet, but wise remarks on the artistic merits of Mr Lindsay's porno efforts.

Well, porn is such an unkind word, erotic might be more apt, but they were no more erotic than the hundreds of old nudes which are scattered throughout the world's most famous art museums. After gazing at 200 Lindsay etchings I was pretty well desensitised. Dare I say that if you have seen one of them that's just about enough, because there are the same themes repeated many times throughout the collection. Nude, vaginally conspicuous woman operating as the main focal object surrounded by innumerable decadent beings - lustful devils, goblins and skeletons who were trapped in some sort of eternal hell, perhaps their reward for being tempted by the sins of the flesh. Unfortunately there was no accompanying explanation with the individual etchings, or in the ten dollar catalogue I now have before me.

My thoughts also were that men were being depicted as the lustful spoilers of feminine beauty and that this was an eternal theme in the human experience. But there were also etchings which suggested that corrupted women were present in the world to despoil naive young men - that they would soon be sucked into the feminine vortex of debauchery - that ultimately their fate would be a sorry one indeed - the pleasures of the flesh would ultimately lead to their own eternity in hell - that there was no escape, because this was the human condition. Does that sound logical?

Anyway, Mr Lindsay sure knew how to draw nudie cuties. The fine detail was astonishing. If I could draw like that I wouldn't be sitting here writing about it. I would be out there making lots of money as a producer of erotic art for the filthy rich.

Speaking of the filthy rich, the entire collection of etchings on display yesterday was on loan from a Western Australian private collector. There must be hundreds of people who know the identity of this person, but the catalogue gives no clues, unless "Private Collector" is actually someone in the Army. I don't think the Lindsay works would be from the Holmes a Court's collection because they regularly lend their acquisitions to major galleries without fear of being identified.

There was an interesting collection of souvenirs on sale. Besides drawing pussies, Norman Lindsay like to draw humorous cats. There was a set of nine large unframed colour prints on offer for $39.95. My wife purchased a set. In a couple of hundred years our descendants might be able to flog them off at a profit. They had a few modern reproductions of Lindsay's nudie rudies on sale too, but they were priced in the hundreds of dollars each.

Fully satiated with high culture we departed the Art Gallery for the centre of town, and food. We ate in an underground food hall - our choice was the two cuisine Hong Kong Chinese and Himalayan Curry stall. We each had a plateful of everything on display, one of Himalayan mysteries and one of Chinese mysteries. We shared a Coke. Over the years I have described some bad experiences with these sort of places, but what we had yesterday was okay. We left empty plates behind, and there was no vomiting in the street afterwards. Mind you at the table where we sat there was Chinese man who left his meal half eaten. What did he know that we didn't?

So, with food dispatched, we departed for the old Perth Town Hall. There was an exhibition of old TV station junk on display in celebration of 50 years of crappy commercial TV in this state. We whizzed around it in five minutes. They were having some sort of function upstairs for an invited in-crowd of parasitic pat-eachother-on-the-back nobs. A man was at the foot of the stairs turning back the peasants. We left the place with the pleasurable feeling that someone else had acquired all this old junk rather than us.

Then we made a great discovery. Just along the Hay Street mall from the Town Hall is a new bookshop. A mega sized two level affair with a coffee lounge and lots of comfortable setees where people can examine books before buying. I forget the name. I must have been overawed. But, the place is huge and the variety of books immense. Also CDs. Suddenly all the other bookshops in town have become irrelevant. The prices were cheaper too. General Peter Cosgrove's My story which I mentioned on 15 October was marked down to $29.95. After flipping through it I still didn't buy a copy.

Time was marching on. We stopped at Plaza Cameras to check the price of the Nikon D80 camera. Just under $1,800 for the body alone. I can't justify spending that sum.

The State Library was above where we parked our car. They have a bookshop which sell unwanted stock from the State Library Service. I bought two rarities. The first was Boans to the Battlefields - a collection of WW1 letters relating to the staff of the former Perth department store Boans - six dollars. The second was a signed copy of James McClelland's rare hand written, privately published Names of all Australian Armed Forces People Killed on Active Service. It starts with the Boxer Rebellion in China and finishes with the end of the Vietnam war in 1973. This was an amazing find. The circumstances of the demise of many nurses, soldiers, sailors and airmen are included. Fourteen dollars. It saddened me that librarians feel so little empathy for such rare and monumental works.

There was one other event during the day which I forgot to mention. When we were checking out out the naughty bits of Norman Lindsay's nudies we took a phone call from son number five (17). He had just passed his driving test. The examiner known as "The Terminator" must have been having a day off. I bought our son a couple of Scratch and Win tickets in celebration. I put them in my top pocket, but when I got home one was missing. Someone else will have found it by now.

© MMVI Paul R. Weaver.

About the writer

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write a couple of million words.

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