Over three lovely hot days in January Denise and I attended a life-affirming memorial for my 84-yr-old sheep grazier/environmentalist cousin Sandy Campbell in Benalla (north-east Victoria) and two arresting solo shows – by the Australian contemporary artists Juan Ford and Joan Ross – serendipitously encountered on the drive south.
Struggling to articulate the linkages I sensed between these at-first-glance disparate experiences, I remembered the solid white moleskins I’d worn to all three events: to the N J Todd Funeral Home on the Baddaginnie-Benalla Rd, to the Benalla Art Gallery and to the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Purchased a few years’ ago for $5 from an op shop in Hay and once doubtless prized by a well-turned-out local cocky, the trousers were generously cut from quality fabric (which, I mused recently, might just see me out). Free of fashion and embellishment, the all-cotton moleskins, crafted in Rochdale, Manchester around 1965, fit well whilst bringing to mind much that once seemed dependable, durable, even comforting about ‘the mother country’… e.g. Derwent Pencils, The Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter, Gerald Durrell. Originally the preserve of 19th-century European farm labourers, moleskins have been manufactured in Australia by R. M. Williams since the 1940s, and are today marketed as a stylish staple for all occasions ‘crafted for life as we look ahead to a more sustainable future, where less is more’.
Juan Ford, The Reorientalist (2013), oil on linen, 122 x 183 cm
Since acquiring those storied second-hand strides the ease and obeisance of empire have all but evaporated as we new-settler Australians awake to the lazily-concealed truths of colonisation and dispossession, and begin to nuance our conflicted relationships to Country, to good stewardship, to always was, always will be. The spectre of climate collapse, too, has altered almost everything.
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Sandy (aged 79) with his prize-winning ewes, which took out the reserve and champion ribbons at the 2019 Wangaratta Show. Pic Mark Jesse
My cousin Keith ‘Sandy’ Cuming Campbell (1940-2024) was a giant of a man loved by his community with whom I felt, as a predominantly-urban earthling, a strangely-strong affinity. But I wish now that I’d darkened his door more often, known him better. Though well connected (his Scots engineer grandfather was briefly Lord Mayor of Melbourne) Sandy was something of a ‘black sheep’ who marched to the beat of his own, innovative, environmentally-attuned drum. He and his wife Sue worked tirelessly to revive degraded country in and around the north-east. In the 1960s they bought ‘Cooloongatta’, a denuded property out of Wangaratta better known as ‘the rabbit farm’ (its rolling hills lopped bare earlier in the century to fuel the gargantuan Eldorado gold and tin-dredging operation nearby). For 40 years the Campbells shot, poisoned, blew up, netted and dogged rabbits, while planting a million trees and improved pasture species, transforming the area’s most damaged acreage into its finest. Over many years Sandy was renowned for his prize-winning Border Leicester ewes, and in 2015 Sue was awarded an OAM for her dedicated landcare work.
After Sandy’s buoyant memorial event, attended by a couple of hundred friends, farmers, landcarers, racing figures, pollies (including Indi’s independent legends Cathy McGowan & Helen Haines) and extended family from across the eastern states, a few of us decamped to the Benalla Art Gallery for a light repast. There, a magnificent survey show of portentous contemporary ‘landscapes’ by the ecologically-touched Melbourne-based hyper-realist painter Juan Ford, its urgent wall texts and insightful catalogue (courtesy of curator Vince Alessi) were soon after to provide immensely prescient food for thought.
Juan Ford, Misunderstanding Everything (2009), oil on linen, 122 × 168 cm
Ruminating home up the Hume through country wild and tamed, place names explorational and aboriginal, the connections between (Sandy’s celebration of) life and art began to cascade and overwhelm, as supposedly hermetic realms (the gallery/the academy/the motel/ the odometer/the highway service centre/the e-Tag) collided, bled, coalesced. A few hours’ up the road – at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra – a second epiphany lay in wait.
Joan Ross, You were my biggest regret: diary entry 1806 (2022), oil and alkyd paint on stretched PVC, with printed perspex backing, 154 x 123.5 cm
Re-purposing and satirising the colonial project via artist interventions alongside august and ornately-framed portraits (almost all ‘influential’ men) and resuscitating forgotten/belittled First Nations figures, drawn from the Gallery’s vaults, Joan Ross: Those trees came back to me in my dreams (curated by Joan Ross, Coby Edgar and Emma Kindred) personalises, names, takes aim. In the work above, writes Edgar, ‘Joan makes herself the subject. A woman in deep regret, tenderly holding onto a tree stump … in the background is a vista of deforested hills digitally composited from an 1806 painting ... Joan opens up the possibility of empathy in hindsight and does what few non-Indigenous people do; she mourns the destruction of Country and points to European exploration and exploitation as the cause.’ Her disturbed contemporary visions are not a million miles from the more universal shamanic protestations of Juan Ford, his beauteous, fearful canvases populated by environmental avatars ‘carrying with them powers of divination’, tattered banners and ‘messages of portent’.
Ford’s exquisite paintings of nature – and thus he himself, and all of us – under duress, and Joan Ross’s fluorescent colonial stitch-ups, rigorously-researched and cleverly-collaged lampoons leaving Anglo-Celtic settler folk like me (and her) skewered and complicit, provide urgent and essential new lenses through which to re-consider Australia and those who’ve helped themselves via privilege and/or good fortune to destroy it, those who’ve weathered or succumbed to its hardships and vicissitudes – and perhaps most importantly, and hopefully – those who’ve worked often against the tide to nurture and add real value to our national account, to tread more lightly upon this special place, to care for Country, for ‘the biggest (damaged) estate on earth’.
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Juan Ford’s show @ Benalla Art Gallery concluded somewhat fittingly on 26 January; Joan Ross @ National Portrait Gallery is on until 27 April 2025.
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Incidentally, recent UK research sheds salutary new light upon those once-implicitly-trusted moleskins of mine. Like many an enterprising 19th-century industrialist, the brothers Langworthy, whose Rochdale factory nr Manchester (then known as ‘Cottonopolis’) once employed 1000 people, made their fortune on the back of cotton picked by African slaves across the Americas/Caribbean.
In case you didn’t know (like me) … ‘Indi’ is the indigenous name for the Murray River.
Texts channelled in this post include R. M. Williams 2025 ‘Moleskin: a heritage fabric for the future’ webpage, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism and the Climate (2014), The Border Mail (8 May 2020), ‘Rabbits - Sue Campbell OAM’, U3A Benalla and District Newsletter (5 June 2018), Charles Massy’s Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth (2018), Juan Ford: A Survey [exhibition catalogue essays by curator/editor Dr Vincent Alessi, Mardi Nowak, Amelia Winata, Julie McLaren, Louisa Waters & Michael Brennan] (2024), Joan Ross: Those trees came back to me in my dreams (2024) [exhibition catalogue essay by co-curator Coby Edgar], Eleanor Dark’s Return to Coolami (1936), Peter Andrews’ Back from the Brink: How Australia's Landscape Can Be Saved (2006), Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2011) and Alexander Appleton’s 2023 Langworthy Bros research blog.
With thanks to Di Campbell, Sue Campbell, Denise Corrigan, Juan Ford and Joan Ross.