Book launch: Charles & Barbara Blackman by Christabel Blackman

Emma Jolley: Good evening everyone. Welcome to the National Library of Australia and to the launch of a wonderful new publication by Christabel Blackman, 'Charles and Barbara Blackman: A Decade of Art and Love'. Isn't that a great title?

My name is Emma Jolley. I'm a senior advisor in the collection branch here at the library, and it's my pleasure to welcome you tonight to this very special event. As we begin and always at the beginning, I'd like to acknowledge that we are actually on the land of the Ngunnawal and the Ngambri people, and I pay my respects to their elders both past and present and through them, to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I would like to thank them particularly for the stewardship of the land of which I grew up on and on which we meet tonight.

Tonight's event is a celebration of two remarkable Australians, Barbara and Charles Blackman whose contribution to the creative arts in Australia across numerous fields is matched only perhaps by their love story. It is particularly poignant, as Barbara passed away recently aged 95, and the Library would like to express its condolences to her family and friends for their immense loss.

'A Decade of Love and Art' is a celebration of her parents' first 10 years together. It is based in part on a folder of letters sent and received by Barbara and Charles before and after their marriage. Barbara Blackman was a celebrated writer whose notable works include 'All My Januaries: Pleasures of Life and Other Essays', and 'Portrait of a Friendship: The letters of Barbara Blackman and Judith Wright'. However, she was also a poet, librettist, radio broadcaster and interviewer, artist, artist model, activist, and a dedicated philanthropist to name just a few of her talents.

In 2012, she was appointed an officer of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to the arts and to the community as a supporter of artistic performance through philanthropic contributions and as an advocate for people who are blind and partially sighted.

Charles Blackman is one of the most celebrated Australian figurative artists of the 20th century, noted in particular for the Schoolgirl, Avonsleigh and Alice in Wonderland series of the 1950s. He made a significant contribution to the post-war story of Australian art. His work is represented in Australia's major galleries in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in London. In 1977, he was appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to art and culture in Australia.

Barbara and Charles met in 1949 and married in 1952. Christabel's book set against the burgeoning cultural art scene of 1950s Melbourne is meticulously researched and beautifully produced and reveals her parents' devotion and blazing creativity. In addition to the narrative of their lives, 'A Decade of Art and Love' also features over 160 works from Charles as well as never before seen sketches, letters, documents, and photos.

We're especially pleased to be launching this book tonight as both Barbara and Charles have contributed significantly to the Library's collection and are represented across several collecting branches at the Library. The library's relationship with the Blackmans goes back as far as the mid-1960s and continues with the latest transfer of Barbara's personal papers received in March this year with another instalment occurring at the end of this year.

In addition to her personal papers, we hold portraits of her, four different oral history recordings with her as well as many of her publications, collaboration and reviews. Barbara also conducted 157 oral histories for the Library. This time as the interviewer, recording the lives and memories of prominent artists and literary figures. For this work, she was awarded the Australasian Sound Recording Association's Award for Excellence in Broadcasting, and the collection is considered as a significant record of 20th century art history.

Similarly, the Library holds various portraits, exhibition catalogues, biographies, critiques relating to Charles and his work as well as three different oral histories with him in 1965, 1979 and 1985. The correspondence and work of both Charles and Barbara are also represented in the Library's broader collection of personal papers, including the papers of Judith Wright, Sydney Nolan, James Gleeson, Rosemary Dobson, Alex and Roslyn Poignant and Kate Fitzpatrick to name it a few.

Christabel Blackman has clearly inherited the talents of both of her parents. She's a successful artist whose works are held in both public and private collections in Australia and overseas and is trained in fine art conservation. She's a published author across books, newspapers, and catalogues. As the daughter of Barbara and Charles, she was perfectly placed to tell a key part of their story.

Jeremy Thomas was a close friend of Barbara's with a strong interest in literature and the arts, and I'm sure he will provide Christabel with thoughtful and insightful questions. It is my a pleasure to now hand over to Jeremy and Christabel.

Jeremy Thomas: Thank you very much for that introduction and also thank you more generally to the Library for hosting this event tonight. Barbara had links to many of the cultural institutions in this town. She was I think one of the first advocates for a portrait gallery in Canberra. She donated many works to the National Gallery and to galleries all over Australia, but I think with your opening, you really touched on what it was with Barbara, this was a really special place for her.

I do wonder if her ghost is here with us somewhere tonight. People with greater psychic power than I have might be able to see that, but I can assure you she won't be in the back row. She'll be up the front here or maybe even right next to us. That's right. So if anyone sees a little purple haze, that's going to be Barbara.

So thank you. And yes, she gave so much to this institution over such a long time. It's fantastic to be here. And why am I here? I probably should say a few words of introduction about myself, if that's all right, Christabel?

Christabel Blackman: Yes.

Jeremy Thomas: But yeah, my name's Jeremy. I knew Barbara for about the last 30 years of her life. As many people would know, she lived in Kangaroo Valley for much of the '80s and the '90s. And there she had a kind of cultural centre, a beautiful property with a house with a single bedroom where she lived with a husband, large kitchen, wonderful dining room, and then a lot of little houses around the property where people could stay and there was a library and a theatre and all sorts of things.

And in the mid-90s, my brother went down there to live with her and to be her general live-in secretary, dog's buddy, cook, all sorts of other things. And so I first met your mother probably in 1994, came down a number of times to visit my brother, and then I moved to Canberra in 2000 from Sydney. And Barbara followed me in 2002, and I ran into her in this very building, had an opening. Had a bit of a chat with her, reintroduced myself and offered to come and help her with her papers like my brother had done.

And that was going to last a few weeks, but really what it led to was 22 years of beautiful friendship of many dinners of, I was going to say glasses, but it's probably more bottles or vats of wine with Barbara. I helped her a lot with the papers and so on, read a lot to her, 'Wind in the Willows', 'David Copperfield', 'Passage to India', my favourite, 'Diary of a Nobody', but a great love developed between us.

And I met Christabel who was living in Europe at the time when she came to visit Barbara in Canberra. And then when Christabel moved back to Australia, saw her much often. So it's a very personal and close connection between Barbara and me and also between me and some of the other Blackmans.

But let me start by saying congratulations on this wonderful book.

Christabel Blackman: Thank you.

Jeremy Thomas: And my aim here is to make sure that you have a little blush, Christabel. This is a book, but it is more than that. It's a number of books. It is a biography of two of the most important creative Australians from the second half of the last century. It's also a history of really interesting people, a cultural and artistic group of people in the 1950s with many, many names would be known to people here today.

It's also a social history. You delve into Barbara and Charles's childhood and what their upbringing was like. And it's a childhood that's very different from pretty much everyone these days, I think. It's also a coffee table book. If you open it up these beautiful images throughout, and it's a sort of thing you can leave in the house and your guests are going to start flipping through.

And it's also a story about you and you are very frank sometimes in your disclosures about life and the Blackman family, but it's also a beautiful love story. So are you blushing yet?

Christabel Blackman: Yeah.

Jeremy Thomas: Because there's something more than that as well, I wanted to say that is that it's almost like a work of art to me as well. This is kind of a collage. And so what you've done is that you've started with the letters from your dad to your mom, and you brought in these incredible photographs, many paintings and drawings from your dad, oral histories and all sorts of other things and you've stitched it all together, as I say, like a collage. So it's a marvellous book. Thank you so much for writing it. It just told me so much about Barbara that I didn't know. Yeah.

So what I wanted to start with is the origins of this book. So all books have an origin, and I'd be really interested in you talking about how you came to write this book and a little bit about the process.

Christabel Blackman: Well, I think the origin is probably just me being their daughter, but specifically, I sort of always had the idea on the back boiler that I'd like to do this book. And I mean, I'd done interviews in 2003 with various people and I had letters and things in it, but when Barbara turned 90 and there's a image of her when she turned 90 here, I went down to stay with her for a week and I took her a coat that I'd knitted from different cottons for her because she was allergic to wool. And I thought, "Well, I'll make something creative and nice for my mother."

But I took about 10 years to make it and I kept bringing it out to Australia and then I'd take it back, one of those things. But I finally finished it and took it to her and we spent about a week together just sort of enjoying and chatting and receiving guests and listening to music and having coffee and champagne and the general life at Barbara's home and you would've been there for dinner a couple of times.

And we came across these letters, this folder that was with a pink bow, and I opened it up and it was full of all my father's letters, his love letters to her when he would've been in his 20 or something. I thought, "That looks like my dad's writing, but it sort of looks like a young man."

And then I started reading them and I went through it systematically over that week and read her all the letters one by one and just in any order, and it was delving for us both into the beginning of a meeting with Charles that changed her life and changed his life and it was all written down.

Jeremy Thomas: How did she respond to the letters after all these years? I imagine she hadn't had them read to her for a long time.

Christabel Blackman: Well, when we were reading the letters she was listening on loop almost to the cabaret song, 'Who Cares, So What'. So she was a bit sort of blase. I'd be reading, I'm going, "Oh, that's the most amazing letter." And she'd go, "Oh, how sweet. Yes, that's nice."

So she just wasn't into it like I was.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: I brought up this incredible story of the past and how they'd met and then later on me. And so for me emotionally, it was really important as well as I could see historically it was important, the stories that were being told in the letters and the love story and the story of those times.

And the letters themselves that were documents that sometimes they were just written on the back of a telegram form because he had nowhere else to write or a piece of paper he had nicked out of a yacht club or sometimes on an aerogramme when he could afford it. So it was just an inspiration. I said, "This has got to be something."

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah. And look, I know that coat. I know that coat was worn very often and strangely, quite often worn with a beret that I crocheted for her. And I guess there's something so special about making something like that for somebody.

Christabel Blackman: There is. There is.

Jeremy Thomas: I remember when I was a youth, there was a premier called Barry Unsworth in New South Wales. And to a young person, he was definitely not cool. And okay, this is coming from someone wearing corduroys and buckle up shoes. But I remember he was asked by a journalist on one occasion about why wore cardigans rather than proper suit jackets and so on. And his answer was, "Made by my wife, and there is a kiss in every stitch." So it's a lovely thing. And she loved that until the end of her life.

Christabel Blackman: It is. It is.

Jeremy Thomas: It was a beautiful thing to give her. This could have been quite a different book. It could have been, and this is kind of what I was expecting before I'd even seen it. It was going to be about edited letters and it's definitely so much more than that.

Christabel Blackman: I wanted that. I didn't want to have to do all the work I had to do for this. I just wanted a little tiny book, like the pillow book of love book. A little tiny book that you could put in your dressing gown pocket and something that was easy to do, just put the letters together and that was it.

And I went to, first of all, I spoke to a friend who's the director of Heidi, Kendra Morgan. And she said, "I'll introduce you to the people at Thames and Hudson."

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: And I told the story about the letters and how I want to do this book. And I said, and then Charles and Barbara went on and did this, this and this. And they wrote back and said, "We wanted this, this, and this as well."

Jeremy Thomas: Okay. All right.

Christabel Blackman: "We don't want... It's great, the letters." But they wanted more of the story. So I just went, "Okay. No more than the Antipodean Manifesto because otherwise I will never do it. I'll be one of those people who you meet who says, "I'm writing a book." And you see them 25 years later and they say, "I'm writing a book."So I said, "No. No." And I had the publisher going, "Come on, next bit. Come on, next bit." And I'd be there, lucky I could touch type. I'd be there Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday onto it so.

Jeremy Thomas:

So it didn't start with a big vision of what you've got now. It started with something smaller and then grew over time. I'm interested in the process. When Barbara moved to Canberra, she used to have something called PSA's, which I know a number of people here, went to pleasant Sunday afternoons.

Christabel Blackman:

Yeah.

Jeremy Thomas:

And she would supply champagne and people would bring chippies and olives and.

Christabel Blackman:

And a friend, someone unknown.

Jeremy Thomas:

And a friend quite often. Yes. Yes. And then usually at the end of the afternoon, after a few beverages, Barbara would make a speech and always commenced with attenzione. And maybe not always, but quite often there'd be a thing about making sure you've got proper records. And she would encourage people to give this little chant, which was, "Date all documents, caption all photographs." And we would chant that together.

How do you rate Barbara as an archivist? Because obviously you're using a lot of material. Were the documents dated and the photographs captioned or was it much more difficult work?

Christabel Blackman:

I think she put that formula in my book when I was little.

Jeremy Thomas:

Okay.

Christabel Blackman:

Document everything, file everything, have everything in its place. And I feel terribly like I'm doing the wrong thing if things aren't in their place. But the order that she created, which is probably something that also gave me my profession of this thing of order, of getting a big problem, untangling it with the order, you solving one thing at a time. And you can only be very, very organised to do that.

So she was extraordinary how she kept everybody's letters, always had them filed because that was one of my early jobs, file the letters, you could tell by the different types of handwriting who that's Max and that's Judith and that's Al or whatever.

And so she kept everything and her letters were like treasures for her. Other people would keep, I don't know, jewellery or linen tablecloths or something. They were her treasures, her letters and her documents.

And then the other great thing that she did was the archival interviews with the National Library, which were an extraordinary help for information. First hand information, things I could quote from people or really get a feeling because the thing that I was concerned about with this book was just having only my point of view or only their point of view, not having. I wanted to create a story that gave voices to all the characters who were in it, but seeing they're all real characters, I wanted to give their real voices to it and their attitudes to it.

I didn't want it to just be cream cakes full of sugar and jam and more. I wanted there to be everything in it as far as people's attitudes were concerned as much as I could embrace that.

Jeremy Thomas: Look, that's an interesting comment. Just strikes me now because one thing that Barbara was a bit of an incorrigible name-dropper, and when you chatted with her, it was always about Barry, Mary Humphreys or famous painters and writers and so on. But they were never celebrities for her. And I think maybe that's something what you've captured, and these were important people, interesting people, but you haven't dropped the names in there, look at all these people.

Christabel Blackman: Well, she knew a lot.

Jeremy Thomas: You knew growing up.

Christabel Blackman: She knew a lot when they were pre-celebrities.

Jeremy Thomas: That's right.

Christabel Blackman: That's the whole thing. That book is full of celebrities of the Australian art scene and philosophers and writers and poets and musicians, but they're all in a sort of incubating state. They're all the pre-, This is before everybody are the stars or legends or the headliners that they later became, the blue chip investments that they later became.

They were then, I don't want to say the struggling artists, but they were the determined artists and writers. They knew that's what they wanted to do and they didn't want the ordinariness of life to get in the way. They dealt with that ordinariness in whichever way that they could. But they had this sort of, not a higher purpose, but sort of their missions almost.

Jeremy Thomas: That determination is a really interesting comment for me because I've known a lot of artists and aspiring artists and so on, and there's this thin group of them who have this incredible drive, which I think probably your dad had in, maybe even before he thought he was going to become an artist where you have someone at the dinner table who can't but help themselves grab the pizza box and start drawing on it or something along those lines.

And it seems like your dad and many other people who became well-known artists had that incredible artistic drive right from the beginning. Would you say that?

Christabel Blackman: I think so. I think they all had a bit of, St. Francis of Assisi getting the calling kind of thing. They knew that is what they were and it's not what they wanted to be. They knew that's what they were, and it was finding a way to do it. And particularly with this group of people, finding a way to make what they were doing come to the public, get people to notice that's what they're doing.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: And they invented all different sorts of ways to do that.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: And Barbara was extraordinary inventive in her. She was good at taking over and becoming the administrator of things and then very inventive in the way that she did things. So I remember one, meeting an old school friend once, and I said, "What do you do?"

And she said, "Oh, I'm in PR." And I said, "How did you work out what to do?" She said, "I got it from your mother." I said, "What do you mean from your mother?" She said, "I saw your mother." She took a piece of paper out of a waste paper bin, took it out, unfolded it. And said, "That's a letter from so-and-so to so-and-so. That's a manuscript. That's worth a manu-"

And she started a manuscript collection of a hundred manuscripts from the most renowned authors and journalists and writers and essayists and poets of Australia, and sold it to one of the wealthiest people in Australia who then toured it and I think has donated it.

Jeremy Thomas: Years ago. I remember the story.

Christabel Blackman: And all out of subject she pulled out of the bin.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. And also an ability to pass those things on as well when she'd finished with them.

Christabel Blackman: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Thomas: So things like radio for the print handicapped, taking to a certain point, moving-

Christabel Blackman: To cede it.

Jeremy Thomas: ... onto other things as well.

Christabel Blackman: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy Thomas: Just talking a bit more about the writing of the book. I guess in reading it, I'll read a few little snippets here and there. Her writer's closet of forgotten words is one phrase with two 17-year-old sons, this is quite relevant for me, like odd socks, finding a plausibly matching partner, methodical Presbyterian upbringing, little kind of half pun with Methodism and Presbyterianism, her failing eyesight left a ravenous for readers and a composite of creatives. Any of those phrases to me could have been written by Barbara. I'm just interested in.

Christabel Blackman: Yeah. But they weren't.

Jeremy Thomas: What's that?

Christabel Blackman: They weren't. They were written by me.

Jeremy Thomas: I know. I know. It's her influence.

Christabel Blackman: Yeah. I think she did. And I think it was always the question with Barbara was before she said, "hello, what's your name? What you do?" It would be, "what book are you reading?"

Jeremy Thomas: What book are you reading? Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: So literature was very important. I came from a very literate minded home and I wasn't really quite sure how to write this book because I know it's very a la mode to have quite a simple writing, what Barbara referred to as Jack and Jill writing.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: But I came across a South American book that a woman had written about her mother, and her mother was quite an ordinary mother, what we'd see as an ordinary mother, but somehow she could untangle all the complexity of this woman and with a slightly more flora than usual language. And because I do speak quite a large proportion of my time in Spanish, I felt that kind of floradness would be good and there's no way I could describe these people or these times or the events that were happening in a simple way.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: It wasn't the way to do it. And often when I read the words in the research, it was done in a simple way. I definitely did not want Wikipedia language.

Jeremy Thomas: No. And you haven't got that and it's not over the top either.

Christabel Blackman: Yeah.

Jeremy Thomas: You've got a lovely balance. And I'm wondering, did Charles also influence the language you write?

Christabel Blackman: Well, he would because he'd have his one-liners and his snapbacks or when you're getting too involved and too sentimental to come out and say. You'd have the introduction that Emma gave, then it made me feel like saying, "Hey, we should have all got a sleeping bag at the door if we're going to hear everything they did."

He had this slightly comical approach. So I wanted to keep some things light. There's nothing worse than the reader going, "Oh, yeah. Maybe I'll start the next chapter." I wanted to draw people in, make it exciting, because it was such an exciting time that I'm writing about and such extraordinary people.

I wanted the writing to have that tension and have that nostalgia and have that sadness. And I wanted that to be in it as well, just in the writing style.

Jeremy Thomas: And you've done it. Yeah. Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: Thank you.

Jeremy Thomas: Something else I was interested in, I think we all bring our previous selves to whatever job we're doing at a particular point. So I'm a public servant and I work on policy for legislation, but my background, my first degree was in ancient languages. I did Sanskrit and ancient Greek and religious studies, so studied Indian religious traditions and so on.

And in one sense you think, gosh, what's it got to do with each other? But every way when you get a draught, a piece of legislation and how you analyse it from a linguistic perspective and philosophical ideas you can bring into your policy work and so on, it's all relevant.

Now we touched on your training, but I thought maybe you want to share a little bit about studying in Florence and what your study was and what your ongoing practise includes.

Christabel Blackman: Yeah. So I did have one of those St. Francis moments with fine art conservation and in some ways when I applied for my first job, it was in a private gallery, a commercial gallery that I think was one of the only galleries in Australia that sold commercially indigenous artworks.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: And so I started caring for the art works then when I saw the bark paintings leaning against each other. I looked at the owner of the gallery and I said, "This is not good. See those Mimi spirits, they'll come and get you." I didn't even know what Mimi spirits were, but anyway.

So I started working with conservation a bit there, and then I had my calling in Florence on a train. I was sitting on a train and I met. I was staying at Arthur Boyd's place outside of Florence. I was going into Florence to see art. I met this woman on the train and she was from Oxford University and she said in Oxford University, if you learn a language, your secondary language is you have to go and spend a couple of months in each place in Europe and get the level up.

So she was going to Florence to learn Italian. And I said, "Great. Do you mind if I copy that?" And we shared a room in the... It was called Hotel Esperanza via Dell'Inferno, which means the hotel of hope in the street of hell in Florence. And I studied Italian and it came to me. This is my calling and I have to come here because there were two places you could study restoration then, fine art restoration, which were Canberra or Florence.

Jeremy Thomas: And which Institution in Florence?

Christabel Blackman: My choice was purely on the coffee.

Jeremy Thomas: Okay. Okay.

Christabel Blackman: So-.

Jeremy Thomas: And this was at the Uffizi or.

Christabel Blackman: I went to Florence, so it was the people who worked at the Uffizi who were teachers because they worked there in the morning and in the afternoon we were taught by them, extraordinary people, and a lot of them are still there, and I still know. Beautiful people.

And then after I graduated from there with flying colours, I went to Valencia and I worked in the National Gallery on Gothic and Renaissance paintings mainly.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: I think they had me of this person who lived from a long way away, so that if I did really big jobs that other people would not do, they'd go, "Oh no, that's too hard. I wouldn't do that."

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: And I'd go, "I'll do it. I'll do it." And they'd given this quite big things to do. So I worked there for a long time. I went up with colleagues to the National Gallery in London where we learned a lot. And then they worked out that I'd be good as an interpreter for conferences and things because I knew the language and so I did a bit of that.

And then I started representing Spain in Europe when we were all trying to get with the Bologna Process, trying to get education on the same level all around Europe so people could do the Erasmus. I don't know if people know what that is, but you spend six months from a European university in another one in another country, and a lot of young Europeans do that.

So we were working on getting all the education on the same level, which is very complicated. I was there for a bit representing Spain, but it's very complex thing.

Jeremy Thomas: So with that training, and you still have a restoration practise in Australia and do some really interesting work, did that influence how you prepared the book? Is it like a work of restoration of a time period?

Christabel Blackman: I think so.

Jeremy Thomas: Am I going too far with the energies there or?

Christabel Blackman: I think that when there were big pieces missing, that was the challenge. That was probably the challenge for me because people go, "Oh, it's got all the photos." I said, "I don't have any photos. I don't have any photos of anything." Even up to when I moved back to Australia 10 years ago, all those photos are still in Spain. I don't have anything.

And all my childhood ones were wrecked in the flood. So I started saying, "Okay. Well, where am I going to find photos?" And I'd ask people and I'd go, "Oh, no, we haven't got anything. Oh, we have..." So I started searching. And I must say that some of them, some of the pictures in here have come from me with my iPhone with a film on TV and my iPhone going, click.

Jeremy Thomas: Oh really?

Christabel Blackman: I mean, one second, click. And they did a miraculous job of turning that around and making it a viable thing to publish. But that was a challenge. But in the end, I think I got enough.

And really one of the last places, the last bus stop on my journey, I came here to the National Library and went through Barbara's papers and there were I think three boxes. And some of them had sketches by Charles. And I thought, "Oh." And I could take iPhone photographs. I did some of those and they went into some of the columns and there's even a beautiful one of Joy Hester sketching on the ground like that.

And I thought that area at that time can only be one person. And so they all went in, we're up to third pages or something with the publisher, but they all went in and so that's beautiful that they're embellishing the story.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah. All right. Well, let's get to know Charles and Barbara a little bit and maybe you start with the one generation up because it was obviously something in common where they both had very influential mothers and fathers who are absent in different ways and so on. Can you tell us a bit about Charles's parents to start with?

Christabel Blackman: Well, Charles had, was a family of four, it was at one stage five, but a child was lost at childbirth, which is relevant because my father was just given that child's birth certificate which was a bit complicated, made life a bit complicated. But his mother was quite a theatrical and emotionally charged person.

His father was a very loving man, a bit too loving. So his marriage to my grandmother kind of overlapped with his next marriage. One day my grandmother said, "Oh, look, he hadn't come home from work." And so she rang up work and said, "Is Charles there?" He had the same name as my father. And they said, "Oh, no. He's not. He's on his honeymoon. He married the boss's daughter." And so she said, "Well, this is his wife and four kids at home waiting."

Yeah. So she had to struggle quite a lot as a single mom with bringing up four kids and sometimes couldn't. So she would put him into the ward of the state, which is when he'd be separated from his sisters. So he had a feeling of abandonment from both sides really. And I think it affected him enormously as a child and his sisters all their lives they were affected by that and probably it was a massive influence on a lot of things in his life.

But he left school when he was 13, which was quite normal then that people left school at 13 and went into apprenticeships. So he'd started drawing and his mother thought, "Oh, well, it might be good for art." So he went into an art cadetship, he went as a copy boy at the Herald and then went into the Art Department thing.

So he started going to night school and learning how to, more about art. And that's when he decided to seek art, the artistic crowd of Australia and went up to Brisbane.

Jeremy Thomas: So in the meantime, Barbara.

Christabel Blackman: In the meantime, Barbara-

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: ... was born in Brisbane and she was... My grandmother had married quite late because her beau had been killed in Gallipoli. And so she met someone quite late and she was almost 40 when she was pregnant with my mother and her sister. They were twins.

And when she was seven months pregnant, she went to give her husband a kiss goodbye. And I think because the dog felt threatened or something, because with a family dog attacked her and she fell back, had the babies at seven months, and my aunt survived for two weeks and my mother was put into. They didn't have humidity cribs, so they put her in a crib with pure oxygen and cotton wool to keep her warm.

And that was how she lost her sight, but she didn't lose it then. She lost it gradually, but it meant the atrophy of the optic nerve. So she was brought up, her father died quite young. When he knew that he didn't have long to live, he took my mother and my daughter to live with the Butchulla people in the Palmerston Passage near Bribie Island.

And he was acquainted with them because he was a topographer, which is people who measure, I can't remember what they call it. The surveyor, a surveyor.

And so the Butchulla people welcomed him in his state into their culture, their life, their families and they lived there for, I think, about six months or something.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: And I think that would've had a big effect on Barbara on her... the way she shared things, the way her laughter, her sense of humour, her attitude to a lot of things. Anyway, she lost her father not long after that. And during the war, she went to live in a big boarding house which was full of male boarders.

And so in a lot of ways between having had lost her sister and her father and losing her sight, she was thrown more into. I mean, she went to university and did child psychology, but she was thrown more into the world of words and a literary world, which she believed that that was the world of her father as well. Anyway.

Jeremy Thomas: One thing that was very interesting with her, for a person who couldn't see, was a way in which she did maintain a visual memory. And I've read about other people who have lost their eyesight as young adults and so on. And after a time, they quite often enter this state of deep blindness where they don't remember what sight was like.

And obviously everybody's experience of disability is different. But with Barbara, she had quite a strong visual sense. You could see it in the clothes that she wore. She would sometimes try and get me to match up her clothes, which is quite unfortunate because I'm colour-blind, but I'd also find from time to time I'd be going through her book with an exhibition catalogue or something like that.

I'd start to describe one of Charles's paintings, and I would say it was called, it didn't ring a bell, and then I'd start to describe it and then she would describe the rest to me. So this is something that she may have partly seen when she was a very much, much younger woman or maybe even only ever had it described to it, but she did maintain quite a remarkable visual memory as well, I thought.

Christabel Blackman: Yeah. There was a big difference. So I remember her going to a conference of the Royal Blind Society, as Vision Australia was called, and she came back with all these stories about how different people, people who'd suddenly regained sight or people who'd been born without any sight, and like I said regained it and just been mesmerised in front of the fruit shop, watching the guy and pile up the oranges or gone to a classical concert and said, "Oh, what a disappointment. We thought they'd all be there going like this and they're just like that."

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: And then the other thing about the thing of dressing was that I remember my mother did, you could always tell who'd taken the shopping by the types of clothes she'd have, but sometimes she got really comfortable shoes. She'd get, "Oh, can I have that? What other colours have you got?" "I have them red and green and yellow." And then she'd turn up all dress and she'd have one red shoe and one yellow shoe so.

Jeremy Thomas: It didn't always work. And Barbara always spoke very fondly of her mother and said she was the most wonderful woman, but also a wonderful straight man is what she said. So from your days living in London, when Gert would come and visit Spike Milligan apparently used to like coming around because he could throw the jokes at her and her straight batting of whatever he said was always so hilarious. And also is the person I understand that Liz Patterson was named after so.

Christabel Blackman: She was. I mean, she was maybe a little bit straight in some ways, my grandmother. I mean, she was born in 1887 or something.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: And so sometimes with Barry Humphreys, he'd say something and my mother would say, "Don't tell Mrs Patterson. Don't tell Mrs Patterson that." And Barry would say, "We need one Liz Patterson in the room."

Jeremy Thomas: Okay.

Christabel Blackman: And that's how Liz Patterson-

Jeremy Thomas: Wow. Okay.

Christabel Blackman: ... the name came up, the cultural attache from Queensland.

Jeremy Thomas: All right. Look, we've got about five more minutes and I've over prepared as usual, but I just wanted to sort of touch on Charles and Barbara's relationship because this is a love story and wondering if you wanted to just reflect on what that early relationship was probably like and even read a bit if want to do it. Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: Yeah. I might just read one of the letters, which is reproduced in the beginning of the book. They've just done a beautiful job with such an enormous amount of material, I must say.

"Darling B, here is a note torn from the depths of a painter's fanatic mind. It is so hard for me to make contact. My energies are obsessed with paintings. The problems are endless chain upon chain. My personality is completely sucked under. I'm a shimmering mass of intense energy, carving a steady path into myself. The word love is mild. I am yours, Charles."

So he was good with words too.

Jeremy Thomas: Good with words.

Christabel Blackman: Not just pictures.

Jeremy Thomas: A word that's often used, was Barbara his muse or was it something more than that?

Christabel Blackman: I think Barbara was his muse for almost three decades, and probably in his mind longer.

Jeremy Thomas: The creative energy was obviously already there, did she increase it? Did she channelled it? What was the relationship?

Christabel Blackman: I think it was the meeting of both of them because this is what we didn't get to. Anyway, you have to read it in the book.

Jeremy Thomas: Christmas is coming. Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: And they used to say it, he'd say it in interviews. He'd say, "Between two people who are sort of not quite there together, we make a unit that works." And so he was able to fill up the images with images what she was missing in his descriptions. And at the same time she would sort of describe them back to him, giving them the meaning.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: And she also introduced him to literature in a way that he was not familiar with. And it's not the same to say, oh, you can go and read the classics, get the little thing to the very deep and extraordinary voyage into literature that they had. And into poetry and philosophy. I mean, all those things.

My father used to call himself a gutter snipe and she was a blue stocking. He would strut into places and I'm the original hippie kind of thing. But when he met her and her mind, that's what I'm missing, and the same as Barbara with him. So it was an extraordinary union, an extraordinary love story that a lot of people live their lives and don't know such depths of love, really. It's rare.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: So it's the story of their love, but also the story of how they could have complemented each other and how they did push each other into their extremes.

Jeremy Thomas: Yeah.

Christabel Blackman: You want to go there? Come on, go. They were fantastic like that. Not only the encouragement and support and endorsement of each other, but when they do first meet, she says to him like. If you meet someone and you fall in love with him, you don't say, "Okay, off you go." You say, "I want you here. I'll give any excuse in the world for you to be here." But she said, "No, you need to be in Melbourne and that's where all the artists are. That's where the people you have to meet."

And that's why we got the letters and then the letters are just the unfolding of the story of that decade. So yeah.

Jeremy Thomas: All right. Look, we're at 10 to, and going to have a bit of question time now, but let me say you'll be signing afterwards. As I say, Christmas is coming, lovely gift. It's a beautiful book and you must be entering your 40s now, and just sorry you didn't start writing earlier. Is there going to be a chapter two? Are you going to do the London period or-

Christabel Blackman: That'd be nice.

Jeremy Thomas: No. All right. So maybe if we open up for questions, please don't ask until you've got a microphone. Is there anyone who'd like to ask Christabel something? Have we covered it all? It's always the first person. Here we go.

Audience member 1: Christabel, thank you. Thank you for so wonderful presentation and I commend everybody who put the backdrop up. It's sensational. Absolutely sensational. You don't have to answer this, but I'm just curious about how the rest of your family reacted to your writing. Often families have different points of view and I wondered how that landed when they knew you were writing this story.

Christabel Blackman: Oh, I just really wish I could hear you better.

Audience member 1: Oh, I'll try again. I can speak louder.

Christabel Blackman: Yeah.

Audience member 1: I was just curious about how the rest of your family reacted to the writing of the story. There are different points of view. I'm just curious.

Christabel Blackman: Really, my brother, when I showed him the book. He burst into tears. He gave me a big hug and he goes, "I'm so glad you've done it. I'm so glad you've done it." Because I felt an obligation. I really felt an obligation. I had to tell this story. I think I'd read somewhere in someone's book something that wasn't right, and I said, "I might not get it all right, but I probably got it a bit less wrong than other people." So I really felt that. And then the other people, I really started writing it when my brother Barnaby died because I felt, "Hey, I can't put this off anymore because I could be next so I better do it." And so in a lot of ways, perhaps he was my muse of doing it.

And then all other family members, because my father went on and married two more times, and I have another three, two brothers and a sister. And then I have my children and then I have other nieces and nephews and it's like, "Everybody, this is your story." So they're so happy because a lot of them are younger and have not known these great people in this time. They've known them perhaps in more fragile times when they're older and not able to be part of their grandchildren's lives or even their own children's lives. So it's fantastic for them to be able to have this story.

And I also felt, in some ways, so I must say that a bit, oh, if I write it, maybe Barbara might not like it. But then I actually had some indigenous friends who said, "Your ancestors' stories are your stories." So this is my story.

And when I give this book to my other family members and younger family members, I say, "This is your story and it's important that we know that this is where we come from." And so my whole family's been really embracing the. I wouldn't have been able to reproduce all of these images if it wasn't for all my brothers and my sister and my nieces giving permission to do so. So they've all been a great contribution.

And now that I'm here, there's no way I could have done this book without my beautiful partner who's here, who's just incredible support and really looked after me so much and was encouraging because I'd just get to moments where I'd go, "I'm not doing it. I've had it. That's enough." And he was just extraordinary. Yeah.

Jeremy Thomas: I think we had another question around here somewhere. Yeah.

Audience member 2: Thank you. The 1950s in that period was very conservative in Australia and a lot of artistic people including say Barry Humphries ended up moving to London and Europe. But it sounds to me as if your parents spent more time in Australia, how did that come about?

Christabel Blackman: Well, so it's a post-war period where people are re-identifying what it is to be Australian. They are defining the Australian identity in a lot of ways, culturally, that's what's happening in this period. Until really the prizes came along, Helena Rubinstein, who was born in Melbourne apparently, and who had the big cosmetic tycoon, and she had taken an interest in the arts.

And she started giving people, Australian artists a prize. There was a prize to go to London for six months, and it was like a catapult. Every year one would go, "Boom. Boom." And they meant to go there for six months and they all just stayed there.

They all just stayed there. And Arthur Boyd was there, Fred Williams was there, Colin Lanceley was there, they're all there. We all lived in the same area together. We'd all see each other. And I think they're all hoping to have international success, which they did in a lot of ways. But then they realised you could only show in London galleries once every two years, not more than that.

And then they were having success here and really the weather got too cold and it was sort of called Charles and Barbara back, and a lot of other artists started coming back at the same time. So it was the early '60s, that excitement, that new era. You're getting rock and roll and the first E-type Jag and all these exciting things happening and the miniskirt, everything's happening in London. But I think they also start putting excitement into their paintings. But that's the '60s, the next book maybe.

Jeremy Thomas: All right. We've got time for one more question. Here we are.

Audience member 3: I just wanted to share that Barbara had told me when they got back to Australia that Charles had actually told her, he said, "Look, there isn't art here, so we've got to do our own." Barbara took that very to heart.

Just one thing I was going to ask you, Christabel, is your parents were so amazing together and they just were such an amazing catalyst for each other, but they were also amazing apart. I mean, when they were no longer together, they still thrived. And I just wonder if you could just say something about that. Yeah. Their time apart, even though they had 30 amazing years together.

Christabel Blackman: Someone asked me, why did you write about just the '50s? So I said, "Well, that's just beginning." And it's actually one period because the love story, as I said, went on. And in this book I've tried to include a lot of different friendships with people as well that are often kernel friendships that have gone on for their whole lives.

So they were extraordinary together and they were extraordinary apart and extraordinary in other relationships that they had. Barbara was married to Marcel Veldhoven for 10 years, and they did extraordinary things with the esoteric studies and his mud brick architect and all these incredible things.

And Charles went on and married Genevieve de Couvreur and went on to paint extraordinary paintings and do opera and ballet sets with Australian Ballet. And even when they were together, they were doing things apart. I mean, it's not that their things that they're creating was always together. Barbara was writing poetry and essays.

And so it was, as she said, much of a muchness, always highly creative and creative cooks and creative. I mean, they were sort of got to a stage where they were la mode. And Women's Weekly would come around, photograph us and Vogue and all of this, and they'd say, "They've painted all the walls white. Just hung with paintings and they've got bricks on the floor." And it was like all this.

So they were influencers from way back, from really early. And they were icebreakers. They were all icebreakers. They were up against the establishment, not against the establishment. That, okay, we're doing something else. We want the world to know about it. This is important. We're painting important things. We're writing about important things. The emotions, and we're helping you define who you are.

And this is what they felt that Australia needed and time has proved them all right.

Jeremy Thomas: Right. Yes. All right. Look, we're at seven o'clock, so I think, Emma, are you going to close up? So thank you again for a wonderful book. It's been absolute pleasure to talk to you as always and.

Christabel Blackman: Thank you, Jeremy. It's beautiful. Thank you.

Emma Jolley: Well, thank you so much Christabel and Jeremy for such an engaging and thoughtful discussion. And please do write volume two. And thank you to all of you for joining us this evening at the National Library on beautiful Ngunnawal and Ngambri country.

I hope that, I'm sure, that many of you're as keen to enhance your Christmas present and stocking list this evening. So in good news, copies are available to purchase from the National Library bookshop upstairs and Christabel will be available for signings. I highly recommend the book. I had intended to read the entire thing for tonight, but I've actually read half because I don't want it to finish. So I'd limit myself to a few pages each night so I can extend it. It's like a warm embrace. It's just wonderful. So I'd ask you all to make your way upstairs. National Library staff are available to assist you. Thank you all again for coming and have a lovely night.