the standard news warrnambool

The discovery of a famous painting hidden away amongst the bookshelves of Warrnambool’s library by teenage art student Don Edgar in the 1950s stirred up a hornet’s nest in the art world.

It was a find that exposed a painting in the National Gallery of Victoria as a copy rather than an original, an event that probably revived the city’s interest in its artworks that had long been neglected and ignored.

And it all stemmed from a year 12 art project.

While Warrnambool’s original gallery in 1886 was among the first in regional Victoria, by the early 1900s it had closed and the paintings ended up being hung randomly on the walls of the public library under the care of the librarian.

And that is where Don found valuable paintings by Louis Buvelot, Hugh Ramsay, Robert Dowling and Eugene von Guerard – left to gather dust and barely noticed by bookworms.

“They were the remnants of one of the first regional art galleries in Victoria, a collection built up over the years since 1886, but long neglected and ignored,” he said.

Needless to say, Don ended up with honours for his matriculation art assignment, and he has gone on to attain a PhD degree from Stanford University in California and a distinguished career in family research and policy writing.

When he went off to University in Melbourne the next year, he was invited to the National Gallery who were amazed by his discovery that its Louis Buvelot painting Waterhole at Coleraine was in fact a copy of the original which had formed part of Warrnambool’s collection.

His discovery, along with the chequered history of the Warrnambool Art Gallery, forms the basis for Dr Edgar’s new book on the history of regional art galleries called Art for the Country, a book that has been 66 years in the making.

Dr Edgar grew up in Warrnambool as one of five kids to a single mum who was forced to work full-time to support the family after his father was killed in an accident. Don was only 10 at the time.

When World War Two broke out, Dr Edgar’s father tried to sign up but was knocked back because the trucks and tractors from his road building businesses were considered essential services for the war effort.

The family was sent to Tasmania where his dad would cart timber to the Burnie pulp and paper mills which would make the plywood that was used to build aeroplanes.

“All those aeroplanes were made of plywood and wood with an aluminium coating,” Dr Edgar said.

When a log came off the back of a truck, it crushed his father.

“Unfortunately that happened just after the war so Mum wasn’t eligible for a war widows pension or anything like that,” Dr Edgar said.

“He died at age 41 without a will. It was pretty tough there for a while.”

The family moved back to Warrnambool where Don would often cook dinner for the whole family because his mum, who worked at the Fletcher Jones Factory, didn’t get home from work until late. He and his brother did all the gardening and house repairs and his older sister went to work with Warrnambool photographer Ralph Illidge to help out with the family finances.

He said the move back to Warrnambool was good for him – he knuckled down with his studies, and became leader of Eva Gaspar’s Mozart Youth Orchestra, also playing violin in the Warrnambool Symphony Orchestra and winning a state medal for violin presented to him by famous pianist Hepzibah Menuhin.

After year 12 Dr Edgar took a teaching bursary to study in Melbourne which he said was the only way he could afford to go to university.

“Looking back, at the time you didn’t really think it was tough. No one really had much money in those days,” he said.

After getting his Bachelor of Arts degree and Diploma of Education, he started teaching at Geelong High and married Patricia Etherington. Her father was a mayor of Mildura who was instrumental in setting up the first new regional art gallery there and also was the country representative on the Melbourne Arts Centre building committee when the new gallery and iconic spire were being built in the 1960s and 70s. That renewed his earlier interest in country art galleries.

Dr Edgar said his book explores the huge battles that regional art galleries endured in order to survive and thrive. Mildura’s new gallery inspired others to want a share in the state’s arts resources and a gallery of their own, but many were opposed.

“People have no idea that country galleries were not really wanted by a lot of people,” he said.

Dr Edgar said the push for a gallery in Hamilton was “highly controversial”, as it was in Benalla, Horsham, Ararat, Sale and other country towns. In the post-war era, there were many who wanted to see money spent on sewerage, roads, football fields and swimming pools rather than what was labelled “airy fairy, arty crafty stuff”. His study is one of conflicting community values, political skills and skulduggery.

Even after his discovery of Warrnambool’s prized paintings languishing away in the library during the ’50s, Dr Edgar said it still took years to get support for a gallery to house them properly.

In the 1880s, local policeman Joseph Archibald, who had been brought from England to Australia to maintain law and order in the growing colony, decided there should be a museum and collected some artefacts and pictures.

With help from the National Gallery in Melbourne, he was instrumental in Warrnambool purchasing some paintings. “They weren’t just any old thing. Warrnambool really had an excellent collection from the start,” Dr Edgar said.

“Because I did that project it meant the people at the National Gallery realised there were some good paintings in Warrnambool but they’d really just been shoved aside and the engineer’s department of the council wanted to push them out into the back blocks and not have a gallery at all. The same was true of the other early galleries at Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong which were languishing.

In the 1960s and ’70s, there was a push for a Warrnambool gallery, led by mayor Jack Welsh which was at first set up in the old ANZ Bank on the corner of Timor Street.

Controversy followed, with some classic paintings being cleaned with Ajax, others re-varnished and even touched up with oil paint. Some of the gilded frames were removed and replaced with plain wooden ones.

“There are lots of stories like that at all the regional galleries,” Dr Edgar said.

After starting his career as a teacher, Dr Edgar went on to get his PhD at Stanford, became assistant professor at the University of Chicago, then returned to Australia to teach sociology at Monash, then La Trobe University in the 1970s where he began to think about writing a book on the history of regional art galleries.

That was until he had to put it on hold after he was appointed foundation director of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, a federal government research agency.

“That was set up under the Family Law Act. It was to examine the status of marriage, the impacts of divorce, child custody and access arrangements, but we expanded into many other areas of family research, including maternity leave, homelessness and childcare. We did masses of research,” he said.

The institute’s research brought about reforms in child care, changes to family law and in many ways was responsible for bringing in the child support system. Census questions were changed based on their research to give a more accurate picture of Australia.

“A lot of the welfare provisions were changed because of our research. We did work on the cost of children that affected adoption and foster care payments,” he said.

“Our research was also showing very clearly that marriage was changing. Young adults were staying home with their parents longer. They were delaying getting married. They were delaying having children. So the whole thing had shifted.

“You had conservative politicians like John Howard talking about the white picket fence family in a traditional family home, yet our research was saying: ‘Hang on, it doesn’t really exist any more mate. Families are more diverse than that and policies need to adapt to that change’.”

Dr Edgar said it was important research that stopped the government from talking about ‘The Family’ as always just mum, dad and two kids where the mum stayed at home and dad went to work.