From Melbourne to New York via Zoom, Lola sat down with Patrick McCaughey, esteemed author, former director of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and close friend of Fred Williams. Together they discuss his most recent book The Diaries of Fred Williams 1963—1970 published by Melbourne University Press. Through an intimate conversation Patrick recounts fond memories, mischievous anecdotes and his process of consolidating the diaries. By editing and compiling the diaries Patrick highlights a transformational time in Williams’ career that shifted him from being an artist to the artist.

Lola McCaughey (LM): Did you ever discuss the diaries with Fred Williams?

Patrick McCaughey (PM): Yes, I did. He never displayed an enormous amount of enthusiasm for it, but he knew they would eventually have to be published and well, the more I read the more I agreed.

LM: Did he ever allow you to read them while he was alive?

PM: Extraordinarily so, he did, parts of them. I read some (of the earlier dairies) when I was writing my first big book on Fred but it was rather different when I came to edit them.

LM: That’s amazing, did it feel personal to read them while he was alive?

PM: *Laughs* yes well sometimes it was very revealing… one had to be careful about what one said about them. Letting me read them, showed a remarkable amount of trust on his and his wife Lyn’s part.

LM: I can only imagine! Can you talk a little about the process of compiling the diaries?

PM: Well first they had to be edited and condensed, otherwise they were far too long. I tried to select passages that were most reflective on his practice as an artist and the period I specifically focused on was how he emerged from being a pretty ordinary painter around Melbourne to becoming a major figure in the story of Australian art.

LM: A-ha, the burning question… what do you think that shift was?

PM: Partly an enormous amount of hard work. Terribly, terribly hard. He would be in the landscape every week then straight to the studio. It was relentless. He also had a non-conventional view of the Australian landscape at the time.

LM: Why was his view so pivotal?

PM: It wasn’t normal perspective with spaces you could easily step into. It was a very modernist space. Flattened down and so on. He liked that the flatness would give him a soft resistant surface to work on with great density and immediacy. He had no interest in painting views or vistas.

LM: Some could argue he does paint views and vistas?

PM: Inevitably. Sometimes you could see him being led by the sheer beauty of the landscapes and the vistas. 

LM: So, his style was a modern phenomenon? To abstract the landscape?

PM: Very much so, that was the real shock and jar of the Williams pictures. They were not narrative painting like his contemporaries Nolan and Boyd.

LM: As an established writer yourself, why did you take on the project and why do you think you were the best person for the book?

PM: I had been close to him as an artist and I had written quite a big book on Fred which came out in subsequent editions and so on. I’d been close to his art ever since I really knew him. I was fascinated to tell the story to others of how his art evolved through the diaries and give a clearer picture of his thinking. I focused on those things which showed his development as an artist.

LM: Were you fascinated by other aspects of the diaries from this period that seemed important?

PM: Well yes; another touching element through the dairies was how effected he was by how heavy he was, how much weight he had put on and so on. He would go to St Andrews hospital and do courses of weight loss. These are told in a very direct and personal way, it was very interesting.

LM: Did you keep these discussions in the book?

PM: Yes, he would come back to it, it was an active source of distress, distraction and depression to him. He found it a burden, quite frankly, going out to the mountains and carrying gear, which he did regularly. It made it hard.

LM: How do we learn about Fred through the book, why were the 60s so important?

PM: The 1960s were a very interesting and changeable time in Australian art.

A new gen came forward, very much influenced by American and British contemporary art. Colour field and flatness of the surface was very much emphasised. Williams was struck by this, unlike many of his Australian contemporaries who resisted against the new abstractions of the 1960s, Williams looked at them very carefully. He saw certain things that he would want to have in his own paintings. The directness of it. He said I could use that as ‘it had some ring to the Australian landscape and I’d like to incorporate that’.

It was a time where he looked very much to the younger generation, as well as his own, to see where he might go in painting. He liked that you didn’t have to have subject matters and that what happened in painting was exciting enough. That was the basis of his art.

LM: Was he strictly a landscape artist?

PM: He felt like he should do portraits but it always troubled him that they weren’t better than they were. I think some of the portraits were the best works he produced. The ones of his children were more graphic. In the western corner of NSW on one of his expeditions he saw an Indigenous butcher slicing meat—it absolutely attracted him as a subject and he produced a remarkable set of paintings from it. He went on to produce a series of the man cutting up the meat.

LM: Did he use photos to remember the man?

PM: He did use photos sometimes but it rarely impacted how he painted. These were more for family and memories but they weren’t aids to his painting.

LM: So why didn’t he make more portraits?

PM: He didn’t have the natural sympathy he had for his landscapes, there was more fluency in his landscapes, you can see this and his frustrations in the dairies. I once asked him ‘do you ever get yourself out in the landscape and find you couldn’t paint what you were looking at’ and he said ‘no’ and looked at me mystified like it was dumbest question I’d ever asked.

LM: Did literature ever impact his art?

PM: It’s a subtle and interesting question. Surprisingly, widely read. He haunted book shops, searching for Lyn (his wife). Randolph Stow who wrote mystical novels of the outback and the west described the landscape in many ways that anticipated Fred Williams Pilbara Series. Jennifer Phipps, an NGV curator at the time, was the first to point out this connection. It’s one of the more direct connections between Australian art and literature we have.

He had pronounced opinions on literature, he admired the depth of feeling he got from literature and urged other young Australian artists to concern themselves with getting that depth of feeling into their art. A sense of the felt life.

LM: So felt life but not narrative?

PM: Yes, precisely, for example the You Yangs series, how moving they are. 

LM: Living in New York while working on the publication, did you find it hard to connect to Williams and the Australian art landscape?

PM: No, I can remember very vividly in my mind these experiences and his paintings, so not at all actually.

LM: Why are these entries important to be shared? How is William’s art situated in the history of Australian art?

PM: They make us aware of elements of the Australian landscape that aren’t naturally picturesque, yet he makes them so vivid and vigorous that we become attracted to it. This helps Australians and everyones eyes to understand the multiplicity of our landscape.

Sometimes art shows us things before we see it ourselves. It also helped us notice things which you might pass over as being pedestrian or not worth our attention.

LM: Do you see Fred through a different light after reading the diaries?

PM: He had extraordinary generosity to people and yet he was quite critical of them, his contemporaries and other artists coming up. Generosity whilst being demanding of standards was a remarkable combination.

LM: Did you know about this dichotomy prior to editing the journals?

PM: *Smiles*… Sometimes he would let fly how terrible he thought something was but the diaries definitely give more evidence of it. It’s a very constructive read about the dichotomy of these opposing traits and the comprehensive nature of human beings.

LM: Did he mention you… was it always positive?

PM: Surprised and delighted, it was mostly positive about myself.

LM: William’s art practice was rigorous, was your personal writing style the same in editing this book?

PM: It’s bloody murder, really, most of the time. Rarely do you get on a run, usually you have to grind it out but there’s an enormous lasting satisfaction once you do get a publication out. Writing on art is not very easy anyway so to write a whole monograph is quite an achievement.

I had a friend in World War Two who would go solo down to the bunkers of Italian ships and diffuse explosive situations between opponents… at the end of the day he would come back up from the bottom of the ship and have a beer with his colleagues to decompress the day’s events. I went very slowly with this book. At the end of each day, once I had hit my required quota, I would come upstairs from my study downstairs to the main area of the house and have a drink with my wife Donna. We would discuss the day’s discoveries in the diaries. Not exactly diffuse the days events but to more so take something away from it