John Olsen: the landmark biography of an Australian great

PART 1

BEGINNINGS

ONE

‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.’

Pablo Picasso

Opposite the long central window overlooking Sydney Harbour, a man in paint-splattered jeans and T-shirt stood on a scaffold in the foyer of the Sydney Opera House concert hall. Not far away was his audience. Leaning against the shell-shaped walls were the workmen who had helped construct one of the great buildings of the modern world. Their job was winding down. With time on their hands, they filled the hours by heckling the painter. ‘You’ll be sued for this!’

In 1973, John Olsen, in his mid-forties, was completing one of the highest-profile commissions ever bestowed on an Australian artist — a mural, seventy feet by ten, to grace the architect Jørn Utzon’s masterpiece. Utzon’s advice to John had been: ‘Swing it from one side of the harbour to the other.’ The artist had been offered his pick of sites inside the Opera House; he chose the back wall of the concert hall, positioned at the prow of the building that imitated the curve of the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the west and the sweep of undulating sea leading out to the Heads to the east. ‘We’ll let that wall roll, man,’ John told a journalist.¹

It was a challenging time. John had laboured on the painting for almost a year in his warehouse studio. But once it had been moved to the site, he found to his dismay that the light off the water, the vast scale of the building and the strong purple carpet of the foyer had, like the sea itself, swallowed up the images. ‘It needed muscle,’ he said. ‘I’d been too aloof, intellectual; if it’s not an affair of the blood, it is nothing.’ So here he was, remixing paint at the eleventh hour, his panic subsiding as, against his background of phosphorescent midnight blue, the shapes and forms of the harbour were re-emerging with renewed colour and strength.

What was to have been a time for finishing touches had become, despite help from two assistants, a frenzy of intense work. The clock was ticking. After seventeen years of financial, political and emotional turmoil created by the construction of a building of such wonder, Queen Elizabeth was on her way to declare it open. Adding to the pressure, journalists and an ABC film crew covering all aspects of the process were shadowing his every move.

But what left him ‘physically trembling’ and ‘on the verge of a breakdown’ was not so much the weight of the great honour, but indignation at the abuse that was being hurled, day in and day out, by a group of thirty or so construction workers. ‘Hey, sport, what’s this about?’ ‘My child of four could do better.’ Nearby a sign read, ‘Please do not interrupt artists while they are working’; someone had scrawled, ‘What artists?’

John Olsen was no stranger to the cruelty of ignorance. When he was just five, his mother made an appointment to have his portrait taken at a photographer’s studio. A fine seamstress, she had dressed him in her newest creation, a double-breasted checked coat with wide lapels and large black buttons. She had made the bow-tie and the woollen scarf and arranged them with precision. His blond hair, parted severely and sculpted with brilliantine, capped his top-to-toe polish. While he stood waiting for his mother outside his house, three boys approached. When they said, ‘What a nice coat,’ John flushed with pleasure. ‘Turn around and let us have a look at it from the back.’ As he proudly complied, he received a swift boot up the bottom. ‘Take that, you pretty little shit,’ one boy yelled as the group screamed with laughter. The incident left him feeling ‘cheated and mocked’; ‘mankind was not to be trusted’. Perhaps it was this experience that prompted him, shortly after, to shrug off the fine clothes made by his mother, don his father’s waist-coat, drag a wooden wheelbarrow into the front garden, stand on top of it, and pronounce to the passing citizens of Newcastle: ‘Jesus Christ will get you bastards.’

The front garden of the small bungalow was his stage. On the night of 21 August 1934 he had gone to sleep in a house full of bustle and murmurs and woken to new sounds, new smells. That morning the excited six-year-old stood high on the fence and broadcast to anyone within shouting distance: ‘I have a sister! … I have a sister!’

Most minds on that day were on the other side of the world in London at the Oval, anticipating the crucial last test of the Ashes. Bradman and Ponsford were batting Australia to victory over England and into sporting history — a brief lifting of the collective spirit of a country in crisis. When the Great Depression had begun with the Wall Street crash in 1929, more than one in ten Australians were out of work. By mid-1932 almost every third person was unemployed. Few other industrialised countries would suffer so severely.

John’s father, Harry, was one of the lucky ones. He held a regular job on a decent salary at the Cooee Clothing Company in Hunter Street, Newcastle’s main street. At twenty-something, his frame wasn’t quite as sleek as it had been when, before he married, competitive cycling kept him fit. These days he sported a three-piece suit set off by a low-slung pocket-watch chain that swayed importantly on a nourished stomach. To finish the picture, on his handsome head sat a bowler hat. It made Harry a standout in the coal-mining town, a place full of cloth caps and work boots.

Many of those boots were pounding the streets looking for work. These were streets that carried a history of sadness stretching back to 1802, when Newcastle was a penal colony and earning the title of ‘hellhole’ for its brutal treatment of the convicts in the mines. Then there was hunger, insufficient clothing and shelter, and appalling standards of health care. More than a hundred years later free men walked the streets, yet their circumstances were chillingly similar.

Cooks Hill, where the Olsens lived, was Newcastle’s oldest residential suburb. The city was dedicated to the necessities of coal mining. Streets were planned to align with mining company railroads. Plots allotted to workers were as modest as the houses built on them. The dust of industry fell where it pleased and the city kept time to the powerful rhythm of coal and steel: the clanking of cranes and coal cars and the whistling of trains. At night, Newcastle became an Armageddon. Furnaces roared and industrial chimneys belched out sulphur and smeared the sky with an ominous green. John’s final lullaby each night was the eerie melody of the night coal trucks shunting back and forth.

His first memory of Newcastle was from the perspective of his baby stroller. He would be wheeled from the Olsen house at 132 Dawson Street, along the five unusually long blocks to where the street butted up against a civic park. Crowning Dawson Street were two imposing buildings perched like Scylla and Charybdis: the Baptist Tabernacle and a spire-topped Presbyterian church, guarding the suburb with a firmness that only tons of brick and strict Protestant conviction can assert. From the park the view widened to include Hunter Street, revealing the wharves carved with rail tracks, the mouth of the wide Hunter River, the heavily laden cargo boats and the ocean beyond.

Only a kilometre or so away and less than two years before the birth of John’s only sibling, Pamela, a riot had broken out in the adjacent suburb of Tighes Hill. All across the increasingly jobless Australia, people were failing to pay their rent or make their mortgage payments. Evictions reached a record high. Shortchanged landlords often left houses standing empty and bitterness was rife. When officials came to remove women and children from a house in Tighes Hill, some forty men carrying pickets and a variety of make-do weapons charged from the verandah of a house towards a police force that outnumbered them by over two to one. It resulted in a bloody exchange and subsequent arrests.

Such scenes also proliferated in Sydney, where more than fifty per cent of the unemployed of New South Wales resided. Here the phrase ‘being on the bread line’ was made visible daily. Long lines of men — maintaining as much dignity as they could muster, with shoes polished, dressed in suits or jackets once worn to work — would queue for one small roll of bread. As for the evictions, the circumstances were all vaguely the same, give or take the number of children: a family deposited on the footpath with one or two sticks of furniture. It had become so commonplace that children played ‘Evictions’ rather than ‘Cops and robbers’. Clashes with the authorities became the stuff of folk songs:

For we met them at the door,

And we knocked them on the floor,

Bankstown and Newtown,

We made the cops feel sore.

They outnumbered us ten to one,

And were armed with stick and gun,

But we fought well, we gave them hell,

When we met them at the door.²

The Tighes Hill riot was alarmingly close to the Olsen home, but there was trouble closer still. The Olsens’ next-door neighbour was laid off from the steelworks and reduced to scrounging for food at the nearby local market. John recalls the sack the desperate man would take to fill with discarded cabbage leaves and any other scraps being thrown away. On one occasion he returned with nothing but onions to feed his large family.

Few days went by without John watching his mother, Esma, open the door to a man willing to do any kind of job — dig the garden, mow the lawn, cut the wood — just for something to eat. Esma was a sweet-natured woman and a shield against this unhappiness. Until the arrival of his sister, she spent all her time enveloping her son in loving attention.

Esma was a country girl of Scottish ancestry. Her grandfather had worked on the land and her father, Jim McCubbin, was the owner of a ten-strong dray horse team that ran a heroic route between the mining town of Yerranderie to Camden railway station. Reining in his team of colossal draft horses, he would guide them down through the adventurous slopes of the Blue Mountains, around the Burragorang Valley, hauling the equivalent of a small house — ton upon ton of silver ore packed in hessian bags, stacked over four metres high and wide.³

Esma was one of nine children. Her father taught her about hard work by example. Her mother preached the strict rules of her Methodist faith, taught her the skills of a homemaker, and passed on her prowess as a seamstress. So much so that Esma described her occupation as ‘tailoress’. When she married she quit her job, for it was seen to emasculate a man if his wife worked. But Esma never gave up her talent.

From his waist-coated father, John learned savvy and swagger and the precariousness on which the world turned. Harry was born Henry Rufus, youngest son to Alfred Olsen, a Swede from Nordmaling, a small town about 600 kilometres from Stockholm and on the edge of the Baltic Sea. Alfred had arrived in Australia as a young man under dubious circumstances; no one in the family was sure if he had jumped ship or arrived as a stowaway.

Alfred was in his early thirties and working as a railway fettler in Quipolly, near Werris Creek in NSW, when he married a local seventeen-year-old girl called Fanny Dorrington. In the next ten years, Fanny would bear him five children. Then Alfred left home, never to return. The manner of and reasons for his leaving were not discussed. All Harry and the other children ever knew was that their father had once again jumped ship, heading off with sieve pan and pick to fossick in any hill that held the promise of gold or gemstones.

Fanny struggled on alone and raised the children through housekeeping jobs and eventually running a smallgoods store. There was great hurt and bitterness among Alfred’s sons over their father’s abandonment. By the time they themselves became fathers, Alfred’s name was barely mentioned and although he was living within an easy distance, few of his grandchildren would ever meet him.

Esma and Harry were both twenty-two when they married in Camden at St John’s Church of England. The bride was heavily pregnant, with less than four months until the arrival of her baby. In a country community, the distress caused by the lateness of the wedding must have been considerable. Maybe it was Esma’s fear of confronting her deeply religious mother (whose own mother had been a colonel in the Salvation Army) that delayed the wedding. Or did it take time for Harry to step up to the plate? No one would ever know the reason for the late walk down the aisle, which simply served as a prelude to a disastrous marriage. John’s sister, Pamela, would learn about the circumstances of their parents’ wedding only when sorting through papers after her mother’s death in the 1980s, and even then she chose not to tell her brother.

The only poem John recalls his father reciting was ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling, and the only book discussed, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. These two instructive texts seemed to have served Harry well. Presentable, smart, a good talker, he was successful as a salesman — one of the boys. After settling in Newcastle he turned the athleticism he had shown as a prize-winning cyclist towards rugby. He liked to meet his mates at the pub and was drawn to the horse track.

John remembers a relatively harmonious time between his parents in these early years in Newcastle. Life had a comforting pattern. He walked to his school at Cooks Hill; and although neither of his parents was religious, on Sundays he regularly attended scripture classes. On occasion he would accompany his mother to the Civic Centre for community singing or stand with her on the sidelines of the rugby pitch to watch his father play. John still remembers the pride and excitement he felt the day he led his father’s team out on to the field, holding the ball tight, knowing the men were keeping pace with the gait of his short legs, all jogging in a long line behind him, their mascot.

Most importantly, every evening just before bedtime, at the twist of the radio dial, Bobby Bluegum, the first children’s radio show in Australia, would whistle down the airwaves.⁴

For some time the four-year-old believed that Bluegum lived up inside the tall wooden wireless cabinet. Inching himself between the legs of the cabinet, he would lay splayed on his back, his eyes scanning the dark interior, desperate to catch a glimpse of his hero who spoke to him as the grown-ups spoke to each other. Bluegum’s instruction to be good — ‘Be the fellow Mother thinks you are’ — with that one small inflection offered a world of understanding and a deep camaraderie.

The program started with a theme song, sung by Bluegum, which began:

When songbirds are singing

Here’s all they keep singing:

‘Hello Bobby Bluegum, hello!’

The actor Frank Hatherley was Bobby Bluegum. He played records, read stories and sent ‘cheerios’ to his young listeners. More often than not a child would be bidden to ‘follow the string from the wireless’. The string would lead to a gift. Very magical … just how did Bluegum reach out and tie the string to the wireless? Apart from allowing parents a quiet hour in the early evening, Bluegum urged children to ‘bring sunshine, not only to less fortunate children but to mums and dads’. In many households one could have heard, ‘Now what would Bobby Bluegum think of that behaviour?’

Certificates were awarded to followers: ‘Dear John, this card certifies that you are accepted with pleasure into the BIG ARMY that promises at all times to SPREAD SUNSHINE.’

It wasn’t exactly the Army that John’s great-grandmother with her silver hair twisted up in a bun under her Salvation Army bonnet, had in mind. But Bluegum’s optimistic creed would appear to have, in the years to come, a far greater impact on John than religious scripture. As a small boy he became Bobby Bluegum. Wielding his father’s ashtray on a stand as if it were a microphone, he would impersonate his idol, enthusiastically making his own daily broadcasts to an empty living room.

While the radio encouraged imagination, the notion of art barely existed in the house. The only picture hanging on the wall was a coloured photograph of a seascape, mournful and lacklustre, full of large black rocks that looked like coal heaps. Certainly there was never any discussion about painting, even though William Dobell had lived just streets away a decade before the Olsens arrived in Cooks Hill, and was now overseas winning prizes at the Slade in London and painting in Paris.

John seemed to be born with a pencil in his hand but he would be a young man before he first set foot in an art gallery; for Harry and Esma it simply wasn’t on the agenda. Perhaps his obsession with paper and pencils had begun by watching his father writing descriptions and price signs for the Cooee Clothing Company store, for Harry had beautiful handwriting. Initially Esma didn’t chide her son for drawing over everything, but eventually it reached a point where she was compelled to say, ‘It must stop.’ No blank piece of paper was safe. He was insatiable; any scrap would do — a used brown paper bag, the white edge of a newspaper column and particularly the pages of cookbooks.

Esma’s kitchen ran at full pelt. She produced delights that remain in John’s memory: jam tarts, iced sponge cakes, and pastry-topped steak-and-kidney pies. And while his mother cooked, her son’s pencil meandered across the pages of recipes, through the sunburst of eggs, the greens, reds, oranges and purples of the fruits and vegetables, the browns, blacks, greys and whites of the creatures of the earth — among all the things that filled the house with comfort and separated the Olsens from the hard world of the hungry outside their door.

Some years after Esma’s death, in the first decade of the next century, a painting by John titled Love in the Kitchen sold for a record-breaking price of over a million dollars.⁵ But Esma, having always taken pride in her son’s remarkable success, had long since learned that some forces just cannot be stopped and that money has nothing to do with it. She had seen that talent will surface where it will and from an inexplicable need seek expression, taking inspiration from any number of things: egg oozing into flour like paint soaking into paper; the swirl of cream like titanium white spiralling on to a painter’s palette; or the twisting line of a needle through cloth, like a line of landscape in an artist’s eye as he threads it into memory.

In Europe treaties were failing, borders falling. Soon Hitler would declare war on Poland. This would change the Olsen family forever. Meanwhile, the Cooee Clothing Company was opening a branch in Sydney and Harry Olsen, seizing the moment, saw a chance at promotion and accepted a job as buyer for juvenile boys clothing. In 1935 the family packed their bags and headed for Bondi Beach.

TWO

‘Childhood is the barrel they give you to go over the falls in.’

Linda McCarriston, ‘Girl from Lynn Bathes Horse’

The Olsens had moved from a working town to a resort. Now they lived just a block away from the horseshoe curve of one of the world’s greatest beaches. At the end of Curlewis Street and overlooking the beach stood the Hotel Bondi, with its many balconied storeys and clock tower that rose above the sea, calling the faithful to the bar. Their small flat on this main artery road rang to the noise of clanging trams ferrying people to and from the playground of Sydney. Everyone could afford the beach.

On weekends Sydney threw itself parties. Friday and Saturday nights there were gatherings in the grandly proportioned, colonnaded Bondi Pavilion built in a mix of Mediterranean and Georgian Revival style and still glamorously fresh. Concerts were conducted in the outdoor amphitheatre and inside there was a ballroom, a restaurant-cabaret, a Palm Court, private dining rooms and every Saturday night the ‘De Luxe Supper Dance’. At the northern end stood a complex called ‘Beach Court’ that housed refreshment rooms and ‘Tiny’s Dance Hall’. Around the corner from Curlewis Street on Campbell Parade, the ‘Casino’, one of Sydney’s first nightclubs, stretched for nearly half a block. During the depths of the Depression the ballroom had been converted into an ice rink but it reopened briefly as a dance venue, the ‘Rex Palais’. It was all as close as Australians could get to Astaire and Rogers, the Californian big bands and the dreams that flickered from across the ocean.

By day, during the summer months, people wandered in colourful streams down paths cut through sandy lawn and young Norfolk pines towards Marine Drive, solidly fringed in the blacks and browns of Fords and Dodges. There the promenade thronged with boulevardiers and flaneurs dressed high and low, the more glamorous — and they were the majority — in white flannels, sports jackets, and bowlers or panama hats, or calf- or ankle-length floaty frocks topped with trim bonnets. People took tea under the shade of the Pavilion’s verandah, or tested themselves in talent quests conducted in the Pavilion. Those wishing simply to promenade did so to music ringing from loudspeakers that broadcast crooners, jazz and swing.

Below the esplanade was another world, and over it flew the flag of the world’s first official lifesaving organisation. On any given summer weekend, tens upon tens of thousands of people would gather on the beach — an astounding 100,000 on one occasion. Men wore long-legged, high-waisted trunks and singlets, and women one-piece costumes. Others, with no intention of getting wet, lolled in the sand fully dressed and wearing shoes. There were people in deckchairs, children building dams and sandcastles, surfers and waders, the young and the old, faces to the sun or shaded by a parasol or tents, all spreading out like fallen confetti over the kilometre of sand and shore.

Bondi in the early 1930s was being marketed as not simply ‘a daytrip destination for landlocked Sydneysiders’ but a holiday destination for the discerning international traveller — ‘the playground of the Pacific’.¹ Jet travel was yet to deliver international travellers in any significant numbers, but holidaymakers from interstate and the country kept Bondi’s main streets, hotels and boarding houses busy during the summer months.

In the solid houses and blocks of flats, the working-class suburb got on with its daily business. The regimented roads radiating from the beachfront squatted on drained sandy soil that only decades before the building boom of the Twenties had been a place of swamp oaks, banksias, paperbarks, giant ti-trees, wild honeysuckle and waterlily-covered freshwater lagoons. In the winter and after heavy rains these lagoons would swell and link together, forming an inland waterway between Bondi and Rose Bay. Wallabies kicked through the water and rowboats skimmed across the pretty passage.

Long before the neon-signed storefronts, the thrown-together high-rises and the plundering of front gardens to accommodate cars there was, even then, in the early twentieth-century newness of the town, a faint underlying seediness, the staleness of the morning after. Rainy days produced a melancholy: seagulls in dirty puddles, redundant deckchairs and empty fun fairs.

But Bondi was Bondi. There was nothing else like it and John loved it all. He revelled in the tram ride that delivered him home via the steep southern end of Campbell Parade. He would always scramble to sit in a right-hand seat, anticipating the moment when the carriage swung around the wide bend, when the headland appeared, sun glinting off the steel rails, sea air streaming in through the windows of the tram, and the whole world turned blue.

On his five-minute walk to school the streets were quiet. The odd horse and cart was still in service and cars were a luxury. While there were few cars, there were even fewer trees — not one on the pavements of Curlewis Street. The rare glimpse of green came from the paintwork on passing trams.

John joined a crowd at North Bondi Public School.² In 1937 the school hit a peak of 1,449 pupils. Built just above the beach, it took up an entire block. It was against the rules to play on the grass at the entrance to the school. Instead the playground was sited at the back of the building, away from the sea and covered in hard asphalt with inadequate weather shelters. In the winter the coal-fired potbellied stoves did little to stave off the cold and in summer the brick walls baked.

The school wasn’t a place for the faint-hearted. A neighbour and playmate of John’s, Eugene Stockton, didn’t last long. ‘My first day at school, a kid got me by the shoulders and hit me against the wall. There were a lot of tough kids in that school. Teasing and bullying was the order of the day. My mother pulled me out soon after I joined.’

Male teachers outnumbered female, and medals on many of their lapels declared they had fought for their country. A teacher who remains in John’s memory is Bill Dennison, a member of the First Light Horse Brigade and veteran of the Gallipoli campaign. Having survived what he described as ‘that dreadful war’, naturally enough Dennison and his fellow returned soldiers and colleagues were adept at wrangling a bunch of unruly children. Any unfortunate who broke ranks received either a quick cut of the cane or was issued six of the best in the headmaster’s office. ‘We knew just how far we could go before we got the cane,’ recalls one ex-pupil with a sense of respect. ‘Once you got it, you never did it again.’

John — or ‘Lolly Legs’, as they called him — wasn’t a strongly framed boy, nor was he tall, but his build didn’t deter him from giving it a go. He was one of the boys with enough steel to collect the cane more than once. He immediately joined the Bondi Amateur Swimming Club, taught himself how to swim and became so proficient at backstroke he came third in the state championships.

He was a joiner, a member of the flute band. Every morning, after the third and final bell, the band would pipe the long lines of pupils into school with ‘The Men of Harlech’ while the girls marched off in strict lines to another area of the segregated school. None dreamed that both John and the head of the flute band, Don Burrows, would one day collect a stream of honours after their names. Burrows would be an Australian jazz musician of legend, playing alongside Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Dizzy Gillespie. And John Olsen would be considered, by the turn of the century, Australia’s greatest living artist: decked in awards, beloved by the public, admired by his peers, and feted by prime ministers. But in that playground in those Bondi school days it was Don Burrows — the boy with the ‘Pied Piper’ personality — that every student noticed. Few remembered the boy named John Olsen.³

Life at home was becoming a struggle. The move to Sydney had produced a seismic shift in the family’s happiness. They had chosen the location of their flat because Harry Olsen’s mother, Fanny, ran a milk bar-cum-general store and lived above it in the building next door. Her youngest and most favoured son wanted to be near her. He adored his mother and she radiated that emotion back. The ‘society of two’ left John’s mother in the cold. If there was any kind of problem Harry would seek Fanny’s counsel and, more often than not, her money. Perhaps Fanny held that notion, so bandied about in those days, that Esma had ‘trapped’ her son into marriage. While she gave Harry a totally sympathetic ear, her head would turn sharply away when listening to Esma’s side of any story.

Neither did she have much time for her grandchildren. She complained when John and Pamela and the other children played on the forecourt between the flats and her shop. She threatened them with a local institution called ‘Bondi Mary’, a woman who wandered the streets in a long black frayed dress, an old army greatcoat and a battered cloche hat. Craving the company of children, Mary would hang around the school gates beckoning those in the playground to come over and talk to her. She was toothless and harmless, and carried all her possessions in an old sugar bag swung over her shoulder. Fanny told Pamela and John that if they were naughty ‘Bondi Mary’ would carry them away in her bag. The time Fanny picked Pamela up, holus bolus, and put her head down the toilet did nothing to win her granddaughter’s affection. She would remember Fanny as ‘a nasty old lady’.

Harry’s sister Ida also worked in the shop and lived with Fanny in a flat above. Pamela, relating what she must have gleaned from her mother throughout the years, describes the atmosphere as a ‘them and us’ situation, and the place ‘a hornet’s nest’.

Harry Olsen’s inclination for gambling and alcohol had begun to take hold in Sydney with its manifold temptations. And now, during these years of arguments and accusations bouncing around the walls of the tiny flat, John began to develop a debilitating stutter. Although Harry was a ‘hail fellow well met’ type of man to the world, in private he was very different. He saved his dark side for his family. His snide remarks were often directed at physical imperfections; he would make fun of his son struggling to enunciate his thoughts and feelings, and chide his daughter by telling her she had two left legs. He was highly critical of his wife and constantly argumentative; ‘What would you know?’ was his favoured riposte. There was no remorse or compensation. ‘Father wasn’t one to give hugs or say I love you,’ Pamela recalls. John cannot remember any instance of his parents cuddling. He doesn’t know how they met, because, as he puts it, his mother seemingly ‘never had any romantic memories’. Later he would judge that his father showed no care, just sentimentality. ‘He wanted a family, but he wasn’t really a father; he was a vapour.’

As Harry’s gambling and drinking became more of a problem and as money grew tight, Esma began working from home as a tailor. Perhaps it was the need to juggle her work in the confines of the tiny flat, but Esma didn’t allow Pam or John to invite friends home. And her rules of behaviour were strict. She was quite horrified when one day John and Pam arrived back from the shops full of excitement, having hitched a lift on the horse and cart of the ‘Bottle-O’, the man who collected empty beer bottles.

But there was always the beach just a block away to escape to, always ready to entertain with its different moods in high and low tides. There were breakers to jump, rocks to hop, bluebottles to pop, crabs to chase and the fun of the tribe; all running against the gold and the blue, smeared in war paint — gentian violet to defy the bluebottles’ sting, and white zinc to taunt the rays of the sun. And there was other fun to be found in the quiet backyards and streets, where the local children chased the iceman’s cart to scrounge pieces of ice and rolled old tyres down the road, where bats beat balls and billycart wheels rattled down the footpaths.

John’s friends Eugene Stockton and his brother Mark lived in the flats next door. The building was one but divided by a central staircase; one side was named ‘Egmont’ and the other ‘Havilah’. Under the staircase was a small storage room with a dirt floor. ‘Doctors and nurses’ was played here, and out the back in the laundry-cum-headquarters, ‘cowboys’ and ‘Indians’ gathered for action. In the unkempt backyard strung with washing lines, the boys made ‘ammo’ by rolling prickly chestnuts in clay, stockpiling the hand-made ‘bombs’ for the next pitched battle with the neighbouring gang.

When the real war broke out and the movie theatre began pumping out propaganda films, John taught the Stockton brothers to draw fighter planes and soldiers in profile. He had moved on from drawing over his mother’s cookbooks and was avidly copying his favourite comics. He was beginning to learn that when he put his pencil to paper, people paid attention.

After school, John would stand opposite the Hotel Bondi on the corner of Campbell Parade and Curlewis Street, selling newspapers. But by the age of eleven he wished that he could earn a living drawing comics. Instead he was packed off to Paddington Junior Technical School, where it was hoped he would learn a trade. He was entirely unsuitable. He had no interest in how to join two pieces of wood together nor in anything mechanical; he had no desire to know what lay under the bonnet of a car: he didn’t want to fix it, he wanted to draw it.

Through these years the tension at home was relieved by holidays with relatives. From an early age, every year John spent a week or two in Dungog, a small country town around eighty kilometres north of Newcastle. Harry’s older brother, Oscar, had been an officer in the Air Force and made good after returning from World War One. A skilled engineer, he opened a local garage and with foresight purchased the sole Ford franchise in the area. He was the only member of the family with a car.

Dungog, believed to be an Aboriginal word meaning ‘thinly wooded hills’, sits in the foothills of Barrington Tops, which extends for twenty-five kilometres between a series of extinct volcanic peaks in the Mount Royal Ranges, an easterly offshoot of the Great Escarpment. Although Oscar’s house was in the heart of the little town, it took only minutes to be out in the country. John, along with his cousins Jim and Jeff — five years younger and five years older respectively — would swim in the Williams River, or ride on trucks heading out to the timber mills. Most days John would go out into the forest and sketch.

Jim Olsen rated his uncle Harry as ‘the greatest bloke’ he ever knew. ‘He was always talking to us kids and that was unusual in those days.’ Harry was a complete contrast to Jim’s ‘serious, hardworking’ father, who ‘didn’t have time for chatter’. The brothers both recall John as a quiet boy who was ‘dependent on his father’, a ‘real city boy’ who looked at the horses and cows with a hesitant eye.

It was on one of these trips that Harry and one of his brothers took John out to meet his Swedish grandfather, Alfred. He was living in Tingha in a miner’s humpy in very poor conditions. His English was shaky and he still found trouble pronouncing certain words, dropping his ‘j’ when he exclaimed, ‘By Jiminy!’

This was the first and only time John saw his grandfather. Alfred Olsen died shortly after, in 1938, at the guessed-at age of seventyfive, for no birth certificate was available to verify his actual date of birth or the names of his parents.

When John’s maternal grandfather, Jim McCubbin, was still the proud owner of his horse team, Christmas would be celebrated in Camden with Esma’s family. John loved those times: the Nepean River running past the town and the delicious rarity, as it was in those days, of roast chicken for Christmas dinner — free range from the McCubbin garden.

Jim had once believed that the car would never replace the horse. But the times conspired against him. He lost his livelihood, and was forced to sell his beloved horse team and move to the city. Christmas celebrations moved to the Western Sydney suburb of Concord, and it was here John would stay with his grandparents for the summer holidays.

In Concord West, hundreds of Federation houses with red-tiled roofs and low brick fences lined miles of straight, flat, treeless streets. Row upon row and back-to-back on four-car wide roadways, the combination of house brick, concrete and tarmac fired the breathless inland heat.

Jim McCubbin was a remote figure to his grandson, but a man to admire. This great horseman had one indulgence: once a week he would visit the racecourse. Firmly set in his strict Methodist ways of no gambling, he never laid a bet. He made the weekly journey simply to admire and be close to the horses. If Harry was no role model, Jim was. John remembers his quiet grandfather, of average height, as ‘an extraordinary man, a countryman … a man to respect’.

During these lean times, to make ends meet, John’s grandfather went to the markets to buy fruit and vegetables that he boxed and sold door to door. When John visited in the school holidays, he helped out. He and his slightly older cousin, Mel, would divide up the streets and door knock. ‘People were mostly nice,’ John recalls, leaving a gap with the word ‘mostly’ that fills with images of rude responses, slammed doors and crushing embarrassment to the stammering boy. But he forced himself: ‘I did it for them because it was a way of bringing in a little extra for the family.’

Experiencing these rejections may have made him more empathetic towards the man who once arrived at his grandmother’s door in MacNamara Avenue, near Concord Road. ‘I watched as Sarah Jane opened the door. He was selling something, obviously a poor bugger, and my grandmother told him to go away. I felt it was very mean. I never forgot it.’

Money was tight and so was space. The McCubbin daughters — Lorna, Stella, Dulcie — still lived at home, their wages crucial. It was a time when families needed to stay together to survive. The closeness in this family extended to the girls all sleeping in the one bed. A ‘paying guest’ found accommodation on the verandah. John and Mel joined him there. None of this dulled the fun when the families descended on MacNamara Avenue. There was always a place to be found to bunk down.

When Harry joined his brothers-in-law, furtive behaviour in the dry Methodist house followed. John remembers the merriment coming from the backyard where the men would carouse behind the garden shed, indulging in the ‘evil drink’. The only blot on John’s memory of holidays with his McCubbin grandparents was keeping house rules on the Sabbath, which required attending not one service but two: Sunday school at 11 a.m. and then Evensong. It sickened and killed the day for him; the observance was ‘a blight’, Sunday was ‘dead’.

There were other small holidays. John’s godmother, Esma’s sister Elsie, took her nephew on a small but very grown-up trip to Katoomba. It was a place that had been in transition just prior to World War One, turning itself from a mining town into a resort town. By the Thirties it was full of guesthouses and hotels. John climbed the newly opened Giant Stairway, a Depression project, watched the birds flying past and wondered at the vastness of the mountains and the remarkable rocky pinnacles of the Three Sisters.

In the summer of 1939 the family stayed at a caravan park with Harry’s brother Robert and his wife and various nephews. John camped with the other children, swam every day and caught his first fish. He remembers it as a ‘good time’, but it would prove to be the last holiday the family would spend together.

In July 1940, Harry Olsen joined the Australian Army. He enlisted despite his employers assuring him that, given he was thirty-five years old, they would be able to arrange an exemption without difficulty. Why leave his young family so early into the war? Maybe Harry had something to prove. The youngest son of Alfred and Fanny could at last set himself apart from his brothers, doing something they were now too old to do. John and Pam firmly believe there were other reasons. Their father loved being in the company of men, being ‘one