Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Vida Lahey Busy fingers 1913 Oil on canvas on composition board 50x40cm George Melsom Collection Reproduced by kind permission of Shirley Lahey, Brisbane Frederick McCubbin Australia 1855-1917 Shelling peas 1912 Oil on canvas 76.8x51cm Purchased with the assistance of a special grant from the Government of Victoria 1979 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Helen Hindley England Washing the dishes 1904 Oil on canvas Photograph courtesy Sotheby's, London Nowadays there is no stigma attached to ordinary manual or domestic work. But the attitude then was that work of this nature was only performed by people of a very low order... To help develop respect for such occupations seemed a definite need, so by using it as a subject matter for pictures, I tried to give status to various forms of service .15 Lahey was from a moderately affluent background and the painting was heavily staged. She posed her sister Esme, in reality a small and frail girl, and a family friend, Flora Campbell, as the sturdy washer-women in the laundry of the family home, Greylands, describing later how she had strapped her canvas to the mangle (à la Turner) to capture more directly the steamy atmosphere of the scene.16However, there is no reason to doubt that Lahey helped with the housework and was aware of its grinding processes. She was the eldest child, a member of a large, busy household and her extended family's prosperity, driven by the 'Protestant work ethic', had been hard- won in Australia in just one generation. Maintaining the bourgeois residence involved intensive labour organisation: bedmaking, laying fires, cooking, cleaning, slopping out, carrying coal and water, washing up. The goal of all this activity was 'dirt avoidance', removing the unappealing evidence of a family's daily life: the scraps of food, the dust, the stained clothes.17For the Laheys, the regime was assisted by a Kanaka servant and 'some women who helped with the chores alongside the female members of the family'.18The washhouse in the painting also indicates that the Laheys enjoyed the modem conveniences, for the time, of piped water and built-in concrete troughs. During these years, the issue of exactly what constituted 'women's work' was being widely discussed and defined. In 1907 the 'First Australian Exhibition of Women's Work' was held in Melbourne, based on the conspicuous 'Women's Pavilions' that had emerged from the World Expositions in the late nineteenth century. The attendance figures at the 1907 Melbourne event are, in retrospect, overwhelming — 250000 people viewed the 16 000 exhibits. The displays represented a non-hierarchical, multicultural and quite enlightened spectrum of 'female' activity, encompassing fine arts, domestic skills (including laundry), industrial arts and handcrafts. The exhibition, albeit overseen by an all-male executive committee, received widespread national attention and was accompanied by satellite shows in other states and regional centres.19 Vida Lahey and many of her sister artists entered several competitions associated with the event (she won the Still Life category). Lahey also shared with the rest of the vast audience a familiarity with two decades of agitation for women's suffrage.20 Just how directly Lahey was responding to such matters in Monday morning is difficult to assess. As social historian Gaby Porter has remarked, the ideology embedded in form is the hardest of all to see.21Nevertheless, we do know that the artist was more alive to her time than has previously been acknowledged. Laheys aesthetic and ethical interest in the application of industriousness to everyday life manifested itself in Monday morning with a certain kind of painting — a little pompous, perhaps a little subversive, and quite accomplished. After the war, after everything she had seen and learned in Europe, that way of picturing was no longer appropriate. The steady gaze was the same, as was the focus on domestic life, on keeping busy and staying serene, but Vida Lahey's ideas about art and colour had changed irrevocably. They had become modern. Lynne Seear is Senior Researcher at the Queensland Art Gallery. 'STRAPPED TO THE MANGLE': Art, Work and the'Lady'Artist 115