Peter Clague: 'Anyone can take, but not everyone can make', IB Art Exhibition Opening — 2024

9 February 2024, St Leonard College, Brighton East, Melbourne

Peter Clague is the principal of St Leonard College

Wominjeka and a very warm welcome to you all.

It is the proud duty St Leonard’s College to host this year’s Art Exhibition for graduates of Victorian & Tasmanian IB schools. Part of that responsibility includes providing the Guest Speaker who will address this formal opening tonight. You are doubly blessed as a result of that. Not only does it mean that you are shortly to hear from one of our inspiring Old Collegians (who speaks superbly), but that also means less time listening to me.

In fact, I only have two things that I want to share before Olivia speaks. The first is that this is a guilty pleasure for me. Along with my fellow Principals who are here tonight, I spend a lot of my time attending functions relating to school activities.  And the Big Book of ‘How to Be a Successful School Principal’ says that you must show equal enthusiasm and no bias in all College events.

People should never guess that you enjoy watching Basketball matches more than Hockey, or that you secretly like the Senior Jazz Band’s concerts more than you do listening to the Year 3 strings group torturing their violins. If you were a Geography teacher before you landed this job, you should always appear to be equally interested in Mathematics or French.  And so on. You mustn’t have favourites when you are the principal.

However, the St Leonard’s Art Department have already cottoned on to the fact that I have a huge soft spot for their endeavours. Which has a lot to do with the fact that, many years ago, my own son did Higher Level Art in his IB Diploma, and it changed his life. Which was remarkable given the fact that Year 11 was the first time he had ever shown any artistic inclination. 

Not only did he excel in his IB course, including in his Extended Essay, which was on whether the work of a little-known artist was actually art. (This was 15 years ago, and the newcomer was some fellow by the name of ‘Banksey’). He then went on to complete a Bachelor of Fine Arts and then Master’s Degree with Honours. I am proud to say that he is, today, a fulltime artist. And before you all get too excited, he is penniless.  Poor as a church mouse. Although he wears that as a badge of honour, I might add.

He is also one of the most self-actualised, intellectually curious, and delightfully grounded people I know. And I lay most of the credit for that at the door of the IB Diploma Art programme.  So, this is my happy place.

The second thought I want to leave the young artists in the room with is this. Even in the 15 years since my son graduated, the world has changed enormously. Social media, incessant shouty texting, and the rabbit holes of the internet dominate almost every aspect of our lives.  Even those who strive to resist it have become consumers of vast amounts of content. Unimaginable volumes of ideas and imagery spill out of small screens and flood our lives every day.

I am not going to stand here and tell you not to be passive consumers – just about everyone is. But I would plead with you to continue to be creators. Because creators are a far rarer breed than consumers. Anyone can take, but not everyone can make.

I marvel at the magical, mystical process that happens between your neurons as you sit in front of a blank canvas or an inert lump of clay. It is wonderous to create something where once there was nothing.

In your Diploma portfolios and in your own private artwork, you have established the skill of being a maker. So, whatever you do from here forth, whether you become a professional artist or not, I would implore to keep on being creators throughout your lives.  It makes for far more interesting people and, if my son is anything to go by, far more content ones as well. You fill me equally with awe and gratitude. So, thank you, and please enjoy consuming one another’s creations this evening.  

Nicholas Gruen: 'Erwin Fabian’s magnificent portrait allows us to gaze back through time', unveiling of father's portrait -

Last night I attended the unveiling of a facsimile of a portrait of my father painted when he was fresh off the boat in 1941. Thanks go to Bruce Chapman above all, but to many others for organising. To Erwin Fabian, who pained the portrait all those years ago. It’s been over 16 years since Dad departed and I’ve made two other speeches reflecting on things, one at his memorial after he died, another, more general one using Dad as a foil to reflect on ‘the asylum seeker issue’. I needed to make another one!

I.

When Heinrich Schliemann unearthed a gold mask in Mycenae, he was reputed to have said “I have gazed on the face of Agamemnon”. In a more modest way Erwin Fabian’s magnificent portrait allows us to gaze back through time – upon the face of a very different person to the one we all knew.

When Dad arrived in England in 1936, he was 15 and alone. He must have been scared. Met by a teacher from Herne Bay College where he was to board, Dad had no English. “Salve” he said, greeting the teacher in Latin. No dice: He was the gym instructor.

The portrait was painted just four months after the Dunera arrived. To find him in those days you just followed the signs in the main street of Hay to the “Concentration Camp”. Dad must have wondered where his mother Marianne was; how she was. She was taken to Theresienstadt. It was a way-station to Auscwitz.

It also had creepy similarities to Hay. Theresienstadt was Hitler’s home for Europe’s Jewish cultural elite. So, as the inmates quietly starved, it doubled as a set for Nazi propaganda showing how well Jewish ‘resettlement’ was going. As she waited to discover her fate, Marianne would sometimes have attended lectures, recitals, poetry readings, and concerts, just as Dad was doing in Hay.
II.

I’ll return to the person in the portrait shortly, but I thought I’d list some propositions I take from my father’s success.

You make your own life
But look after people
Knuckle down. Work hard. Get on with things
But don’t be a workaholic
Take yourself seriously
But not too seriously
Don’t be shy. Chat with strangers.
If you’re nice to them, they’ll probably like you
Believe in, invest in, your own integrity and that of others.
Don’t get on your high horse or start a fight unless it really matters
You’ll know it really matters if, maybe only if, real injustice is done to someone who can’t easily defend themselves
If you want your intellect to make a positive contribution to people’s lives, the trick is to combine a warm heart with a cool head.
There is no shortage of people with exceptional intelligence and no damn sense
Listen carefully to those who disagree with you.
Listen like they might even be right.
Build, don’t destroy
But turn your back on things if you have to
Appreciate life
It ends

III

To me anyway, it’s important to remember that, however accomplished Dad was, however enjoyable his company, however much Max Corden praised his scrupulousness as a scholar, describing him as a one person Royal Commission, it was all built on the normal human difficulties and frailties.

In the last month or so we had plenty of long talks. In one he said “That’s the last time I really understood you. When you punched a hole in the wall of your room. That was the sort of thing I might have done at that age. Later I decided I needed to knuckle down. Work hard. Get on.”

The thing was . . . I’d not punched a hole in the wall. In a move that can only be fully appreciated with some understanding of adolescent AFL fans, in the dying moments of some unspecified Grand Final, I’d taken a magnificent ‘speckie’, descending from my ecstasy into the softness of my bed, only to learn that I’d not defied gravity by digging my knee into some obliging opponent’s back. I’d simply thrust it through the accommodating canite of my bedroom wall.
IV

At Dad’s memorial I read a Yiddish poem from the child of Holocaust survivors:

Sleep my dear parents but do not dream.
Tomorrow your children will shed your tears

I recall five years later – perhaps ten – sitting in a barber’s chair and some unusual – indeed ridiculous – facts came to mind. I fantasised again, not, this time the unheralded adolescent superhero. I’d become a great poet (again mysteriously undiscovered). I was composing a great poem that would uncover the sublime from the ridiculous.

The pity of it is, as you will appreciate, I’m no poet. I barely understand a lot of poetry. Still, sometimes a poem speaks for itself. As when I first heard this extraordinary fragment – a single sentence in eight lines of free verse – tossed off by John Keats in the margin of a page on which he’d been writing another, longer poem. Keats was 23, desperately in love with Fanny Brawne. And he knew he was dying:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d – see here it is –
I hold it towards you.

What did Keats mean by this last gesture, reaching across the chasm separating the living from the dead?

In any event, as the barber snipped away, tears swept down my cheeks, my mind flooding with grief for my father, rekindled by the beauty of this poem I’d never write. Self-conscious, I added to the surrealism of the occasion by managing to smile: Beatific, if somewhat zoned-out. The bemused barber asked if I was OK. “I’m fine” I said with such nonchalance that I surely convinced him, however momentarily, that his customers usually haemorrhaged tears, smiling blankly into his mirror.

The poem might have been called “Three moustaches: Three ages of man”. I expect moustaches were more important for the generation of my Dad’s father Willi than they were for Dad’s. In any event as a newlywed, Dad briefly experimented with growing a moustache. He and Mum both agreed it looked ridiculous.

Unable to grow their own, Dad’s young sons urged him to grow it once more. It was a long time coming. Then, with David and I in our twenties, on a cruise to Hong Kong and perhaps the last time we spent any sustained time together as a family, Dad’s moustache arrived unannounced; initially unnoticed, but then unmistakable, becoming quite the full huntsman spider in the middle of his handsome face, before yielding, perhaps to my mother’s conviction that it was as ridiculous then as it had ever been.

Then within a week or two of the end … the professor dying … that moustache crept up on us again, initially mistaken for some slip in Dad’s shaving routine. But after the second day and until his death, and in the coffin as he lay there, it stared back at us – as mysterious as it was unmistakable.

We can only speculate about what it meant – on what he meant. I guess like Keats, he was trying to say something across the chasm.

He was saying:

“See here it is. I hold it towards you.”

He was reminding us, that no matter how much we love someone, they always remain, as life remains . . . a mystery.

Justin Heazlewood (The Bedroom Philosopher): 'Painter John Brack has asked 40 Melbournians to stand pefectly still during busy peak hour', response to 'Collins St, 5pm' - 2015

August 2015, Wheeler Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia