By Larry Schwartz
JOHN Borrack was in his late teens in the summer of 1954 when he took two painter friends to a Plenty Valley landscape he’d loved since childhood.
“I brought them out here in my old car, a 1928 Chevrolet International with mechanical brakes,” he gestures from his home at Mernda, 30km north east of Melbourne.
He looks out past the candle barks, red gum, box and blue gums and creamy-trunked viminalis he and his wife, Gillian, planted in what was an open cow paddock when they bought the block and 1870s cottage in the early 1960s. “We were across there about half a mile.”
He’d come rabbiting out this way from his grandparents’ farm in rural Thomastown as a child and has written of the enduring connection with the valley, “with its wide belts of twisted red gums beneath which huddle white farms, barns and outbuildings, the extended reaches of the blue ridges of the Plenty Ranges, long dusty roads, the glories of distant plains with their interspersed volcanic outcrops, panoramas of exceeding beauty and drifting skies…”
The landscape painter, whose contribution to Australian art in the past 50 years is celebrated in a new book by art historian Lucy Ellem and major retrospective exhibition of 62 works in watercolour, gouache, oil and pencil, first came to paint here that day in 1954 with Marjorie Withers, daughter of the Heidelberg School painter Walter Withers, and her husband, Richard McCann.
“That little picture there was painted by Marjorie on the summer evening,” he says, “and little did I know when she painted it, this is going to be our home”.
Nearby, a painting of Whittlesea was a wedding present in May 1962 from his friend and mentor, William Frater. “I was with him that day he painted the picture. But Whittlesea doesn’t look anything like that today.”
He is grateful for the encouragement of early mentors including Withers, McCann and Frater, who helped him become more than “just a topographical painter – a fellow that actually recorded exactly what the eye saw”.
“Frater, of course, was a rebel in the Melbourne art world. He was the one who actually introduced strains of modern art, if you like to call it that, into the local art scene. He introduced post-impressionism into Australia. Artists like Cézanne and van Gogh were given scant appraisal in the academic institutions at that time…”
For Borrack, who celebrates his 79th birthday later this year, Withers’ 1954 painting is a reminder of the first of many painting trips to Mernda. “What was here then was simply open plains and a significant number of dairy farms and cattle farms and so forth,” he reminisces. “There were orchards and it was a completely open countryside from South Morang right through to Whittlesea. There were very few houses. South Morang and Mernda only had a store and a railway station and a hotel. That’s all there was.”
He has witnessed the encroaching sprawl of suburbia in recent years along this part of the Plenty Valley Corridor. “They are predicting in the next few years that there is going to be 40,000 people living between South Morang and Whittlesea,” the artist says. “Already they are bringing in nearly 1000 people a week, with the new houses.”
When he first came out to Mernda to paint almost 60 years ago he’d go up the hill and, looking across the expanse, think how wonderful it would be to get some land here. Farmers were reluctant to sell. But when the president of a local football club put his weekender on the market “we snapped it up”.
“We built the house because we were then living in Eltham which was a very beautiful place also and it was suffering the same fate as Heidelberg, Thomastown, Templestowe, Diamond Creek. It was turning into the city. We couldn’t stand it so we decided we had to land here we would build and in 1969 we built the house and moved here.”
His brother, Geoffrey, designed a house that “blended into the landscape”.
With the trees planted in the mid-1960s, they were “trying to make an oasis for ourselves’, says Gillian Borrack, a textile artist and weaver awarded the Centenary Medal in 2001 for her work for conservation in the Plenty Valley.
Though he and Gillian have actively campaigned against the suburban intrusion in letters, submissions and meetings Borrack notes that he has painted the landscape not because he had any “political drum to beat”. “When I had a retrospective exhibition at the Whittlesea Gallery (in 1996), it got a review in The Age by Robert Nelson and he said that my paintings introduced a political element into the genteel art of landscape painting,” he says. “Well, I didn’t look at it like that at all.”
When Borrack talks of “defending this countryside”, he’s not referring to the paintings but letters and submissions written, meetings attending and other activities to speak out against the Plenty Valley Corridor for well over a decade. Channel Ten’s Mal Walden flew out here by helicopter to report on the issue after he rang the channel to express his indignation that trees alongside the road had been felled.
Ellem’s book In Praise of Landscape: The Art of John Borrack, is published by Macmillan and features more than 100 colour images. It will be launched at the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum on September 9 to coincide with the opening of a major exhibition of his work.
John Borrack: Selected Paintings and Drawings 1970–2011 is on until October 28. The exhibition features 62 works in watercolour, gouache, oil and pencil.
“It is a selection of work mainly from our own collection I have kept over the years that reflect different stages through which my work passed,” Borrack says of the exhibition.
He speaks of his preference for certain media. “Watercolour and gouache seemed to me the most sympathetic areas to work in what I was trying to do. One of the things that I have always been terribly committed to was this sense of light and luminosity. Working with watercolour, you are working …with transparent pigments. You can work very quickly and it is a medium that reflects truly the colours and the light of the Australian landscape.”
His work reflects the impact of several trips to Central Australia over the years. He first went to Alice Springs with a schoolteacher friend in 1961, encouraged by Frater, who had painted there, and Gillian, who had been there before.
“It was a revelation in the sense that I actually went in an aeroplane for the first time. We flew in a DC-3 to Alice Springs via Mildura, Broken Hill and Oodnadatta. It took about five hours and we were flying at about 10 and 12,000 feet over the desert. I have never seen anything like that before. I had seen the paintings by Sidney Nolan who had painted Australia from the air in the early Fifties but I didn’t quite believe that until I’d actually seen it for myself and I remember the colour, this warm sort of biscuity, pinky red colour, a little creek winding along and the colour of the trees and distant ranges. It was absolutely subliminal.
“We landed in the late afternoon. There was a sort of sunburst. I have never seen colour like it. I said to John, ‘Look at that bloody colour’. He looked at me in a funny way. He wasn’t an artist. I said, ‘I will remember that forever’.”
It was school holidays. He had been teaching at Hadfield High School. He spent close to a fortnight in Alice Springs. “It was incredible, really. Here I was, surrounded by these mountains that …always got the northern light on them. I couldn’t believe the colour. I developed this technique with the watercolour. Because the colour dried so quickly, you had to put one wash or slab of colour down and then you could overlap it with another colour….It was this transparency that was coming through… That was one of the great discoveries I felt I made in central Australia.”
He has described his painting as “a sort of tuning in or communion with a Higher Order”.
He attributes this spirituality largely to his schoolmaster father. “When we were young, we had a fairly religious upbringing. My father was Catholic and my mother was Lutheran. Both were devoted to their own specific religions. We were brought up Catholics but when I reached the age of 16 or 17 I began to query certain things.
“My father was always talking about nature. I think it was he who imbued a great love of the natural world into me. He taught me about the changing pattern of sky and formation of clouds. He was a geologist really. That sort of thing rubbed off very strongly on me and I adopted a sort of pantheistic attitude.”
The Borracks saved to build the house but, finding they didn’t have enough, decided to spend the money on an overseas trip. Ellem has described a 1964 trip with Gillian as “an artistic pilgrimage; to Spain for Goya, Velasquez and El Greco; to France for Cézanne and to England for Turner and the English watercolour school”.
“One of the reasons that I went to France was to look at the Cezanne country. I painted many pictures there of the Cezanne natives. I found the cabins which he had painted and the woods and the Mont Sainte-Victoire. When I came back to Australia, I channelled that into my own landscapes. When I was looking at mountains in Australia prior to that trip, they were very much steeped in the sort of Australian Impressionist concept of Streeton and artists of that calibre. But after seeing what was done in Europe by these gigantic people, I tried to get some of the qualities of their work into my landscape.”
All art, says Borrack, is eclectic. “We all borrow from what went on before and try and do it in our own way”.
Throughout, he has remained true to his own vision. Staff at the then Royal Melbourne Technical College, who had discouraged students from painting landscapes in watercolour, were not impressed in the late 1950s when he held an exhibition of his work in this medium at the Tasmanian Tourist Bureau galleries in Collins Street.
“It went down like a lead balloon,” he says. “So I always kept water colour for myself at weekends and holidays and so forth and it was through that that I developed my own personality and my own style. I always took the view, and I was encouraged in this view by artists that I knew and respected, to always be yourself and do what you believe in. It is no good conforming to someone else’s vision. If you are a painter, you run the risk of being nobody.”
Not for publication August 12, 2012
Larry Schwartz Writer 