QAG-2015-21

LURE of THE SUN : Charles Blackman in Queensland LURE of THE SUN: Charles Blackman in Queensland page 29. page 28. ‘BRISBANE WAS AN EXCITING SORT OF PLACE, THEN’: BLACKMAN IN 1940S BRISBANE Michele Helmrich LAURENCE COLLINSON Miya Studio c.1948 Watercolour / 30 x 40cm / Gift of Mrs Pamela Crawford (née Seeman), 1988 / Collection: The University of Queensland / Photograph: Carl Warner The 1946 Miya Studio exhibition catalogue cover LAURENCE HOPE Literary circle 1945 Oil / 24.5 x 39cm / Gift of Mrs Pamela Crawford (née Seeman), 1988 / Collection: The University of Queensland / Photograph: Carl Warner Charles Blackman was a young man of almost 20 years when he visited Brisbane in 1948. We know he was here because on 16 March he attended a ‘record party’ at Brisbane’s Miya Studio, in the School of Arts building on Ann Street, along with several members of Sydney’s Studio of Realist Art (SORA). 1 The party was held in honour of their visit and gramophone records set the mood. Accompanying Blackman were New Zealand poet Lois Hunter, and artists Robert Fosberry and William and Lola Sewell. 2 For Blackman, his visit north was pivotal in a number of ways, though details of his stay are sketchy. He recalled his impressions: Brisbane happened to me when I was also growing up a little bit; and I think that Brisbane helped to humanize my own attitude towards painting, in a way. Brisbane was an exciting sort of place, then, because Barjai was here, you could say, and because people were all doing something; and Sydney was full of the Charm School . . . the only painters that a young Sydney painter could find and like who were doing anything of any excitement were in Melbourne and in Brisbane. 3 Arriving from Sydney, Blackman and his friends had met up with the young writers and artists who had established Barjai magazine and Miya Studio at the war’s end, though by 1948 their ventures were undergoing transition. 4 As a strategic centre for Allied command during the Pacific war, many thousands of American troops had passed through Brisbane, generating a sense of energy and urgency to the city’s cultural endeavours. Yet, by late 1946, a Barjai commentator stated, ‘Brisbane has had culture. The Americans have left . . . and you get the current morning after the war before feeling’. 5 Barjai (Aboriginal for ‘meeting place’) had started life in 1943 as The Senior Tabloid at Brisbane State High School. It grew to become, from 1945, a national literature and art ‘magazine of creative youth’, with Barjai groups forming in other states, and writers such as Thea Astley, Vida Smith (later Horn) and Thelma Forshaw published in its pages. Poet Barrie (later Barrett) Reid and poet–artist Laurence Collinson began the magazine as something of a youthful counterpart to Meanjin Papers , edited in Brisbane by Clem Christesen until he moved it to Melbourne in 1945. By the time Blackman arrived in Brisbane, Barjai had folded. The editorial for the 23rd issue, in 1947, stated that benefactor Dr JV Duhig could no longer provide the funds. Barbara Patterson (later Blackman) was the editor for that final issue. Miya Studio (‘Miya’ being Aboriginal for ‘today’) formed as a cooperative group in late 1945, after breaking away from the Younger Artists’ Group of the Royal Queensland Art Society. Founding members included Laurence Collinson, Pamela Seeman and Laurence Hope, and they were joined shortly after by Cecel Knopke. 6 The Studio made its mark with a manifesto by Collinson for its second exhibition in September 1946, protesting in the catalogue against the ‘wasteland’ of local conservatism and inadequate art teaching. 7 In that year, temporary studio space was found at the Rationalist Society rooms, until an attic room was rented in ‘Alexandra’ in Wickham Terrace, above the Jacob’s Ladder steps; in 1947, the Studio moved again, this time to the attic room in the School of Arts building in Ann Street. Barjai and Miya Studio were linked in personnel, mutual support and, less often, shared space. Mutual support was evident in the series of Barjai–Miya talks delivered in 1946, the first by Viennese art historian Dr Gertrude Langer, a refugee to Brisbane in 1939. Annual exhibitions continued until 1948. When it lost its accommodation in the School of Arts building in late 1948, Miya Studio transitioned the following year to become the Artists’ Group of the New Theatre Club, a group linked to the Communist Party. Such alliances were indicative of how closely interwoven the arts then were — visual art, literature, theatre, music.