Sidney Nolan

Speaker 10:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. This is the only extract the BBC has of this episode. The surviving recording did not include the music, so we've recreated the programme, adding the castaways' choices. For rights' reasons, the music is shorter than on the original broadcast. The presenter is Roy Plomley. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:27

In what part of Australia were you born, Mr. Nelvin? In Melbourne.

Presenter0:30

How far back do your family roots go in Australian soil?

Presenter0:34

They go back about four generations. That's a long time in terms of Australian history. Yes, if you get much further back it gets pretty murky.

Presenter0:43

Newland, of course, is is an Irish name.

Presenter0:45

Yes, very. I you know, I've even heard people in Australia in the timber camp sing in Gaelic late at night.

Presenter0:52

While most young children take a a delight in drawing, was there any one who encouraged you to express yourself victorially, so that drawing meant more to you than other children?

Presenter1:01

Well, my family have always encouraged me, but I think they would encourage me if I'd taken up weightlifting.

Presenter1:07

So it in no way was your your talent inherited? No, I didn't think so. I think there's just a compulsion to to paint from the beginning and and that was it.

Presenter1:16

Were you acknowledged as outstandingly good at art classes at school?

Presenter1:20

No, I think I was too erratic to to be outstanding. As a child, what was it your big ambition to be?

Presenter1:27

I think to be an explorer, mainly because these are kind of things that one was taught a lot about at school there, Australian explorers. What was your first job when you left school?

Presenter1:37

Painting on glass in a in a sign factory. Doing these illuminated signs on glass. How long did that job last?

Presenter1:45

Well, it didn't last very long because jobs didn't in in those days and then I had quite a number between then and the next seven years, the last twenty-one. Yes. You were at this time going to an art school? I was going to an art school at night. It was an art school connected with the the National Gallery of Melbourne. Yes. In which we used to draw in a very old-fashioned way from um plaster casts.

Presenter2:07

And after seven years you you took the plunge and decided that you would earn your living as a serious painter? Well, it was a case, yes, of just jumping off the cliff really and and and painting anyway. Mhm.

Presenter2:17

Where where was your work first exhibited?

Presenter2:20

In Melbourne in uh nineteen thirty nine. What sort of pictures were you painting in those early days?

Presenter2:26

Well, uh, completely abstract, because that was the way I started to paint, that was the way I thought. Yes. How long did you stay with painting abstract? About three or four years. You served in the Australian Army during the war. Did that stop you painting completely?

Presenter2:40

No, funnily enough, I seemed to have more time than ever before. It was in a in a beautiful part of Australia, and I enjoyed painting.

Presenter2:47

Great deal.

Presenter2:48

After the war you did a great deal of travelling in Australia. Yes, with my wife and daughter we criss crossed um

Presenter2:55

All over Australia.

Presenter2:57

In your paintings of that period you seem to be trying to express the the essence of Australia on canvas, landscapes naturally, and also Australian history, Ned Kelly, the Eureka Stockade and so on.

Presenter3:10

I is that a fair comment of of what you were trying to do? Yes, I think it's true of a number of young painters in a way about that period. They're all bubbling with something to do with Australia.

Presenter3:19

and each in their own way got on to something, and Ned Kelly for some reason fixed in my mind, mainly, I suppose, because my grandfather had told me a lot about him.

Presenter3:27

And when it had seen the armour on on visits to the aquarium, it was placed in the middle of the aquarium. Yes. Now to you, he wasn't just a romantic figure, a Robin Hood, and obviously not just a thug. He he conveyed something much more important. Yes, he did represent certain social injustices, I think. There were a lot of people on his side in the area that he came from, and I mean there were about two or three hundred police after him for three or four years, which indicates that he had a certain amount of support for his views. But in fact, he was a very good bushman.

Presenter3:58

And he was very brave and um he had lots of vices, but he probably had some virtues. Otherwise he

Presenter4:04

Uh he wouldn't have persisted, I expect. Let's move on to your your next record.

Presenter5:07

When did you first leave Australia, mister Nolan?

Presenter5:09

Uh in nineteen fifty.

Presenter5:11

And you had your first exhibition in London the following year? Yes.

Presenter5:15

How many countries have you lived in since then?

Presenter5:17

Um, oh, three or four. We've lived in Greece for a fair while and uh Italy, France and America for two years. Yes. Where do you consider your headquarters now? Well, I think I've probably got two headquarters, one London and one in Sydney.

Presenter5:33

Now your work was naturally influenced by the country you were painting in, but you have continued sometimes to paint Australian subjects while you've been away from Australia.

Presenter5:43

I think that looks like going on forever.

Presenter5:46

You seem sometimes to allow yourself to be possessed or or obsessed with with a single subject which you feel you have to paint to exhaustion. F for example, at your last major London exhibition, nearly every canvas was a different treatment of the same subject of Leda and the Swan. This has happened to you quite frequently.

Presenter6:04

Yes, I seem to paint better if I get steamed up about the theme, and while it lasts, uh you know, I'm I'm content to go along with it. Mm-hmm. Some of the critics became amateur psychologists and tried to surmise what this subject meant to you, that you were looking forward through the subsequent birth of Helen to the tragedy of Troy, and that Troy took on for you the associations of Gallipoli. Was any of that consciously true, do you think?

Presenter6:29

Well, I think it's it's a literary parallel and it might have its truth, but and it's true in the sense that the leader exhibition came in between uh the Glipley paintings. Uh but essentially I think

Presenter6:41

Uh as an Australian, the Glipoli uh

Presenter6:44

campaign, the Anzac Landing, looms very large in the kind of Australian psyche really. Mhm. And uh it it it's something that everybody thinks about out there and one was read with people talking about it with photographs of soldiers in front of it and

Presenter6:58

And every twenty-fifth of April is a terrific day in Australia. Yeah. And it's natural that ultimately one would, you know, would come round to to painting it.

Presenter7:07

I believe you've gone back to Gallipoli as a subject w with with your present work, the work you're on. Yes, I've come onto it again on a on a

Speaker 17:11

Yes, I've met

Presenter7:14

larger scale really, on a on a more complex scale of trying to fit a

Presenter7:18

a number of figures onto a beach uh uh on on the actual landing and and the sight of these hundreds of kind of warriors on on this barren beach is is something that rather obsesses me I suppose. Yes. Whereas in your first Gallipoli phase it did use a rather horrible expression. There were just a few figures. Well mostly a single figure. The emotion was focussed around a single figure, whereas now I'd like to spread it in in in a multiple way over many people. Yes.

Presenter7:42

And you've also prepared an exhibition of of paintings inspired by your journeys uh across the United States. That's to be a book, isn't it? Yes, to be a book in the form of a diary, of an illustrated diary, which I kept in America.

Presenter7:54

That's our record number four.

Speaker 27:57

Janani Mava Me

Speaker 28:04

Bhaarati Jaya Jani Ma Mahmiye Ba Rati Jaya Janani Ma Mawi

Presenter8:25

Mr. Nolan, you designed the decor and costumes for the Royal Ballet's production of The Rite of Spring. Is that your first work for the theatre?

Presenter8:33

Er no. I I did some work for a ballet in in nineteen forty, in Melbourne. Leifi was out then, and I did take off his ballet.

Presenter8:41

It's called Icarus. Yes. Does this interest you? Would you like to do some more? Yes, I'm very interested in it.

Presenter8:47

It's rather marvellous to see one's kind of ideas on on a big scale, you know, much bigger than one could um express them in in the studio.

Presenter8:55

Are you a disciplined worker? I mean, when you have a productive period, do you like to work regular hours? Once the ideas are straight I do, yes. I like generally to get into the studio about nine o'clock and sit there for an hour and work for about four hours, and then have the afternoon doing something else and come back to painting again at night for another four hours.

Presenter9:13

I believe you like to use rather unorthodox materials.

Presenter9:16

Well, they're often a stimulus, and seeing there are so many technological kind of um

Presenter9:21

breakthroughs now in in materials, it's a good idea to try some of them, I think. There seems a great creative movement going on in Australia now in in painting, theatre, music.

Presenter9:32

Um, all of a sudden

Presenter9:34

Yes, well it's been building up, I think, and it seemed to to come to a peak just after the war, and it's been going on like that since. There seemed to be

Presenter9:42

A great number of very good painters were, you know, coming along, and younger ones, and still younger.

Presenter9:49

Is your career working out the way you wanted it to?

Presenter9:53

Well, yes, I've worked hard at it to the best of my ability. I I suppose one of the the the few things uh I could say that I would like to perhaps paint in a way that wasn't so much of a protest, you know, and has hopes that the world

Presenter10:09

w would be a a somewhat different place one day and that uh people, particularly young people, wouldn't uh have to protest so much. But um generally speaking, uh yes.

Presenter10:20

We got to record number five.

Sidney Nolan10:22

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, It perched for Vespers nine.

Sidney Nolan10:30

Whilst all the night, through fog smoke white,

Sidney Nolan10:34

Glimmer the white moonshine.

Sidney Nolan10:39

God save thee, ancient mariner, from the fiends that plague thee thus Why look'st thou so?

Sidney Nolan10:47

With my crossbow I shot the albatross.