Travels with Dobell: drawing on a legendary link with celebrated artist
by Mike Scanlon · Newcastle HeraldNEWCASTLE really is a small town. Everyone seems to know one another, or you can easily be put in touch with a person you're seeking.
It's that small.
This tight web of connectivity, from work, family or old schoolmates, was starkly brought to my attention about a fortnight ago after I wrote about the late Sir William Dobell, OBE, of Wangi. That was during Lake Macquarie's month-long Dobell Festival celebrating the life and achievements of the artist (1899-1970) hailed as the nation's finest portrait painter.
I didn't mean to write about Bill Dobell again so soon, but a telephone call from former long-serving Newcastle lord mayor John McNaughton changed all that. He rang to tell me about a probably now forgotten Newcastle link between Bill Dobell and the artist's second and last trip exploring New Guinea, especially along the shores of the great serpentine Sepik River. Here he was seeking inspiration, something to reignite his creativity.
Dobell actually made two trips to then exotic New Guinea, one in 1949 and again in 1950. In all, he seems to have spent almost five months up there, gathering information and filling sketchbooks with colourful images and ideas.
Art historian James Gleeson regarded Dobell's obsession with New Guinea subjects as ending about 1953, but, in fact, memories of that distant country gripped his imagination for the next 20 years. Some items, such as tribal masks, were actually embedded in the background of some of his paintings for years, such was the great influence of New Guinea.
Both trips help reinvigorate the gentle artist who was still recovering-health wise in 1949. He'd been emotionally shattered after a devastating court case five years before in which one of his prize-winning paintings was labelled as a caricature. The controversy even briefly pushed the Second World War off newspaper front pages.
Dobell had then been flown to New Guinea in 1949 (along with 26 others) as a guest of philanthropist and Taronga Park Zoo trustee Edward Hallstrom to visit his experimental sheep station at Nondugl in the Central Highlands. It was the first time Dobell had been in an aircraft. He left the country months later with a sense of wonderment.
Haunted by his experiences, Dobell returned to the country in April 1950 sponsored by the then Qantas Empire Airlines. This extended visit included a boat trip up the muddy primordial Sepik River where, equipped with sketchbooks and a camera, he took some rare, early images of the Upper Sepik.
So, what exactly attracted this working-class Newcastle artist to become so entranced with New Guinea life? Perhaps the answer lives within the pages of author Scott Bevan's biography, Bill, published in 2014. In it, Bevan writes: "The very appearance of (New Guinea people) was often a work of art. For ceremonies, their faces were painted in red and yellow, blue and black; they wore plumes, including bird-of-paradise feathers; their nostrils were pierced with bones and shells; and beads hung around their necks.
"They wore some ornamental clothing, such as belts of woven cane, but their bodies were largely unclothed. Bill Dobell was face to face with living, compelling portraits."
All of which now brings us back to John McNaughton's memories, which seem to fill in, at least partially, some of a 'lost' chapter of Dobell's artistic life.
"It's a small world. My dad Harry was a captain of a coastal trading boat going up the Sepik and took Dobell along so he could sketch. Dad and Dobell knew each other from school in Newcastle," McNaughton said.
"Both were pupils at the 'school on The Hill'. Dad met Dobell when he was about 13 years old at Boys High, which is now Newcastle East Public, in Tyrrell Street.
"I think Dobell lived then behind the school at the bottom end of Pit Street, since renamed as part of an extended Kitchener Parade. They kept in touch.
"Dad had done his maritime training with the American Small Ships group in World War II, so afterwards he had a trading vessel going up the Sepik River in New Guinea. Dobell knew he was a captain. They met again in Madang and dad invited him aboard for a trip," McNaughton said.
"The vessel was 85ft (25.7m) long and I believe it was called Matoka. The company's other boat was the Marova. Their years of service overlapped.
"Dad's trader, with Dobell onboard, then left Madang sailing along the north coast visiting plantations to collect copra, then it was up the Sepik River. From Madang, the first plantation was five miles away. At each plantation site it took about two days to load the cargo, so Dobell went ashore to sketch.
"Dad's contacts with the managers would have helped Dobell.
"Dobell was on board at least six to eight weeks. The plantations were only two to three miles apart so it's a slow affair," McNaughton said.
"Dad was up in New Guinea on a two-year contract, some 21 months on board then three months off.
"Much later back in Newcastle Dad would catch up with Dobell.
"Dad's sister lived at Arcadia (Vale), on the lake, and she had a car to take him down to Wangi to catch up with Dobell and shoot the breeze.
"When young I was even flown up there in a Douglas Dakota. In those days you couldn't fly directly to New Guinea. I had five flights just to get to Cairns. And the tropics were hot, with no air-conditioning and you slept under mosquito nets," he said.
"There's one thing that still puzzles me though. I was later very interested in Dobell's notebooks and couldn't believe he had not made any sketches of dad, or the boat he was travelling in for weeks."
There may be an explanation for that.
A surprised Percy Haslem, a Lake Herald reporter, once claimed that after Dobell's death the executors of his will were instructed to destroy all his personal documents, presumably including old sketches, at his Wangi home.
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