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Kate Grenville crouches down on a rock on Sydney’s lower north shore, feet bare, next to a Cammeraygal engraving of a whale. The writer is careful not to trespass on the art. “You can just see the little figure,” she says, pointing to a faint outline of a mysterious tiny human with outstretched arms and legs in the leviathan’s belly.
Ten-year-old Kate was first brought to this coastal Waverton site on a school excursion almost 65 years ago, but remembered only the big whale, not the little human. “The whole thing was kind of trivialised,” she says.
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In Mitch Cairns’s enigmatic oil paintings on linen, the many thin layers of pigment intentionally leave no evidence of his brush work. “I have accidentally become a technical painter,” says the artist, bespectacled and feet bare amid the paint-flecked walls of his warehouse studio in Rozelle in inner-western Sydney.
The brushes themselves are, surprisingly, cheap synthetic ones. “I want the paintings to reflect the inherent lack of speed which painting hosts,” he explains, “[but] the brush is a little diagram of how fast the hand and mind are moving at any one time.
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Growing up on Brisbane’s north side, Bruce Johnson McLean sang and played yidaki, even touring internationally to dance with one of several Aboriginal dance groups to which he belonged. Yet in “wagging” high school, he found his ultimate career and ethos: supporting and advocating for First Nations visual artists.
“My mother worked in an Aboriginal grass roots organisation, and when I didn’t want to go to high school, I went and helped artists,” he says. “People realised I could write, and I could speak about art, where a lot of Aboriginal people did not have that experience or vocabulary.”
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