Vew from the chair: Speeches of Richard WL Austin

The first point I should like to make about this exhibition is that it is very different from the one in the Gallery next door. Whereas the surrealists allowed their creative imagination to carry them to new heights of improbability and sometimes of prurience, Harold Parker kept his strictly within the confines of realism and good taste. One of his best known sculptures, Ariadne, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1908 as the leading work of the year. Before being bought by the Tate Gallery, the Times wrote: 'His mastery of the figure is remarkable. His surface textures are extremely delicate and he has shown that he can say what he means to say in an adequately expressive manner'. 'What', you may ask, 'was Parker doing in London in I 908l'. The answer is simple. Like many other artists, both then and later, he had decided that Australia was a spiritual desert and he had returned to the land of his birth. In those days of Empire, he would have thought of it as 'going home'. He had come to Brisbane with his parents as a small boy of three, and at fifteen he had begun to study drawing and woodcarving at the Brisbane Technical College. At twenty-three, after a year in Sydney, he had had enough and took a ship to England, motivated not only by the wish to escape, but also by a need to test himself against the best in Europe. He did not return to live in Brisbane until 1930, when he was fifty– seven, although he had made two brief visits-one on his honeymoon in the intervening years. When he did so, he withdrew entirely from public life and remained in seclusion until his death in 1962 at the age of eighty-eight. Lloyd Rees, the painter, called this withdrawal 'the enigma of Harold Parker', and it is mainly because of the foresight of his niece, Mrs Clare Shepherd, who deposited his papers in the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland, that his achievements can now be assessed. Parker had arrived in London at a time when late-Victorian England still embraced the values and ideals represented by the Royal Academy, but at the same time was just beginning to be aware of the emergence of the more modern movement represented by the Camden Town painters. To this movement Parker could feel no intellectual or emotional attachment, and he returned to Australia even more of a traditionalist than he was when he departed. Sadly, much of his output from those London years--both plaster casts and sculpture-was destroyed during the Blitz in the Second World War, and what we see here today is the result of many years research by the curator of the exhibition, Judith McKay from the Queensland Museum, whose interest in Harold Parker led her to England in 1990, supported by an Australia Council Grant, to search for missing works. Enquiries uncovered, amongst many other things, a portrait of Lady Robinson, second wife of Sir Thomas Robinson, Agent-General for Queensland between 1910 and 1918. This bust has since been generously donated to the Gallery by its owner, Mrs Phyllis Birdwood, and it is one of the highlights of the exhibition. Parker's major sculptures obviously cannot be here today. These are the monumental figure groups The Awakening of Australia and Peace and Prosperity. These were commissioned in 1918 to adorn the entrance to Australia House in the Strand in London, to symbolise the new sense of Australian nationhood which had been found at Gallipoli, and to pay tribute to the fifty thousand or more Australians who had lost their lives during the First World War. 86