Accounts of Ian Fairweather’s life often focus on the time he spent in so-called exile on Bribie Island, north of Brisbane. The compelling quality of the works Fairweather produced during his last 21 years perhaps explains the tendency to read an added significance into this life of austerity. The years between 1953 and 1974 account, however, for only a quarter of his life. Of equal importance are the decades he spent travelling the world and absorbing the cultural life of northern Europe and Asia.
Fairweather’s decision to spend his last years largely removed from the company of others was the final chapter in a life interspersed with incident. He was born in 1891 at Bridge of Allan near Stirling, Scotland, during his father’s leave of absence as Surgeon-General for the Twenty-second Punjabi Rifles in India. The Fairweathers were reluctant to expose their youngest son to the vagaries of a tropical climate and elected to leave him, at the age of six months, in the care of his mother’s elderly aunt while they returned to India with his eight siblings. Ten years later, on his father’s retirement, Fairweather was reunited with his family when they set-up residence on Jersey, an island in the English Channel. The extent to which this early life experience affected Fairweather has been much debated, speculation being fuelled by comments he made about his family, and specifically about his mother, in later life. The subject of mother and child certainly recurred in his work.
There is something to be said regarding Fairweather’s apparent belief that he had been cast adrift, anchorless and rudderless, at such a young age. His incessant travelling, his inability to settle in one place for most of his adult life and his need to 'escape' were indicative of feelings of rootlessness that were to culminate in a near-fatal sea voyage. At the age of 60, Fairweather cast himself adrift, literally and metaphorically, on a makeshift raft and attempted to navigate the 400 kilometre passage between Australia and Timor.1 If the raft journey figures large in literature on the artist, it is because the event marked a decisive change in his style. Surviving the ordeal, Fairweather re-entered the world with the experience of a lifetime behind him and a clarity of vision that saw him realise his greatest works.
Fairweather’s journey to becoming an artist was circuitous. Encouraged by his father, he enlisted in the army in 1912 and, by the outbreak of World War One, had achieved the rank of second lieutenant. His unit, the Eighth Cheshires, was sent to the Western Front but was captured within days. Despite the discomforts of life as a prisoner of war, Fairweather was to remember the days of his internment at Ströhen on the Soltau Marshes as '. . . some of the happiest of my life — no responsibility for practical things like money, food and shelter. Endless time to devote to something I enjoyed doing'.2 This activity was editing and illustrating the camp magazine, The Morning Walk, which ignited his love of drawing. While interned, Fairweather also read Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art by the American Orientalist and poet Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, and the work of his compatriot, the author and Japanese scholar Lafcadio Hearn. Their books sparked Fairweather’s lifelong interest in Asia.
Fairweather’s artistic aspirations were further encouraged in 1918 when he and several other prisoners were billeted to The Hague, Holland. There he enrolled at a local art academy, visited galleries, and studied under the Dutch painter Johann van Mastenbroek, who took him on sketching trips and to see the work of Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum. At the war’s close, Fairweather was repatriated and, against his mother’s wishes, elected to pursue a career as an artist. In 1920 he enrolled at the Slade School, London, where Henry Tonks took charge of his tuition, and instructed him in drawing and modelling according to the Slade method. He spent hours in the National Gallery where he '. . . fell under the spell of Turner' whose ability to '. . . perfectly separate colour from form' he admired greatly.3 He also enrolled in night classes at the London School of Oriental Studies, intending to learn Japanese but subsequently taking up Mandarin.
Having left the Slade School in 1924, Fairweather began his self-education. He spent time trekking and sketching in Germany and Norway where he became aware of himself '. . . as part of the world around me. It was a strange sense of elation, that certainty of being one with the environment'.4 In 1928 he travelled to Canada where he spent six months working in isolation as a caretaker on an island off the coast of Vancouver. Fairweather did not paint during this time, concentrating instead on mastering Mandarin. In 1929 he sailed for China where he spent three years travelling and painting, and observed the art of Chinese calligraphy firsthand. He was to travel constantly for the next 24 years, spending time in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and India. He made several trips to Australia in this period. The first, in 1934, saw him drawn into Melbourne’s modernist circles focused around George Bell, William Frater and Lina Bryans. The year was auspicious in many ways: Fairweather held his first solo exhibition at Cynthia Reed’s interior decorating shop in Little Collins Street, and his painting Bathing scene, Bali 1933 was purchased on behalf of the Tate Gallery, London, his first work to enter a public institution. During a second, and equally important, stay in Melbourne from 1945 to 1947, Fairweather lived as a tenant in Lina Bryans’s Darebin Bridge house. It was here, amidst like minds, that he further developed his interest in modern European art and, specifically, Cubism, which was to emerge as an important influence in his work in the 1950s.
Throughout his travels Fairweather was to confront the problem of '. . . painting in a town. I [would become] over critical and could finish nothing'.5 These feelings seemed to crowd in on him when, in Darwin in 1952, he found himself desperate to get away:
Instead, he formed the ill-conceived plan to construct his own raft and, with the most basic navigation tools and meagre rations, engineered his escape. The journey came to an end after 16 hazardous days when, near death, Fairweather was washed ashore on the small Indonesian island of Roti, the last land before the Indian Ocean. Deported to Singapore by the Indonesian authorities, he made his way to England, and eventually earned enough to secure his passage back to Australia.
The raft voyage was a turning point in many ways: Fairweather came face to face with his own mortality, and his achievements. Recognising that his work up to that point had been made with a Western market in mind, he now chose to paint simply to satisfy himself. As Mary Eagle has pointed out:
On his return to Australia Fairweather settled on Bribie Island, where he had lived for a time in 1945. His life there was not entirely reclusive or, from his perspective, one of privation. He made a daily pilgrimage to the local shop which provided for his limited personal needs and, after the bridge to the island was opened in 1963, he received regular visits from artists, including Margaret Olley, Robert Walker and Lawrence Daws. Fairweather maintained regular contact with Sydney art circles through exhibitions at the Macquarie Galleries, and he continued to travel, visiting Tasmania in 1961 when his painting Flight into Egypt was acquired by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, then Singapore and India in 1965, and London the following year. The period also saw Fairweather translate a number of Chinese texts, including The Drunken Buddha, which was published, illustrated with his paintings, by the University of Queensland Press in 1965.
Reserved rather than recalcitrant, and devoted solely to his art, Fairweather described himself to his biographer Nourma Abbott-Smith as 'selectively gregarious'.8 By far the most revealing records of Fairweather’s time on Bribie Island are, however, the paintings themselves. In works like Monastery 1961, Shalimar 1962 and House by the sea 1967 Fairweather reveals an eclectic yet entirely coherent visual language, which draws on his past experiences and the environment around him. His paintings provide clear and irrefutable evidence that, on Bribie, Ian Fairweather was finally at rest.
Samantha Littley, Curator (Australian Art to 1970)
endnotes
1 While many explanations for this reckless act have been proffered, including the most probable — that the impoverished artist was seeking deportation to England in order to locate two consignments of paintings he feared lost or damaged — none is fully satisfactory. In 1954 the artist himself mused in a letter to long-time friend, British art collector and patron HS Ede: 'I’m danged if I can make head or tail of the past either — that journey to Timor . . . such a mystery hangs over the whole affair'. Ian Fairweather, in Mary Eagle, 'The painter and the raft' in Murray Bail, Fairweather [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1994, p.25.
2 Nourma Abbott-Smith, Profile of an Artist: Ian Fairweather, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1978, p.19.
3 Fairweather in Abbott-Smith, p.27.
4 Abbott-Smith, p.34.
5 Ian Fairweather, 'Amorales', unpublished manuscript, p.32.
6 Fairweather, p.103.
7 Eagle in Bail, p.26.
8 Abbott-Smith, p.xi.
