We decided not to go away on holiday this Christmas as we had a very expensive one to Australia last year, spent our money and needed to make up for our excesses. At least that was the thinking before the Christmas torture and the SWAT team arrived, but as the advert goes “We bin having it!” and in our case that was a bit of everything, the good, the bad and the ugly.
We bin having Christmas since mid November. It started when a tree was cut from our garden by our overenthusiastic six year old son, Jack. He adorned it with decorations he made at school, recycled old toys as presents and when the first tree withered a second “real” Christmas tree was bought. In order to create the right ambience during this extended Christmas period, the curtains were drawn, the Christmas lights displayed and Boney M’s Christmas songs were played, at full volume, ad nauseam.
If I felt sick, my children felt worse as they bin having the mumps. I would have argued that the best place for them to be was in the tranquil security of home, but that was to prove false.
Hillcrest is usually a quiet and safe suburb, although the sound of shooting is not unusual. I am more suspicious now but usually think that this is someone trying to scare away the monkeys and I take no more notice of it than I do of a car alarm. Even when the shots were followed by my dogs barking I did not expect trouble, I expected to find an animal like the monkeys or our resident porcupine to be the problem and set forth to investigate. The monkeys turned out to be human and were leaping with primate agility over my electric fence. The dogs and I gave chase until he pointed something at them and, fearing the worst, I called them off and ran to tell my wife to alert the police.
I am not sure what my wife said to the police, but the response was magnificent. Within minutes, a military style helicopter was circling my property, it landed and out strode four men in camouflage uniforms, all of whom looked like the Terminator. They were armed to the teeth with automatic rifles and pistols and had all the gear of a SWAT team. This, however, was just the beginning as they were followed by detectives, then the dog unit and later still a second blue police helicopter. It is not the kind of response I have had in the past and we were shocked and frightened. We locked ourselves in our house for fear of being caught in the middle of the showdown that was imminent.
There was a lot of marching up and down in my garden by the armed men for most of the day, but we did not see the police arrest anyone. Eventually, after a long and stressful day, everyone went home quietly. The last to leave was Bruce. No one knew who he was or what he was doing there, but he was parading up and down my property with a hunting rifle and a shot gun, flattening whatever foliage was left standing by the police. By the time Bruce left, we had had it. We were too fraught to go to our friends for their New Year’s Eve party and we needed a break.
We bin having a holiday at Shelly Beach on the South Coast. It was short but sweet and just what was needed. We trawled through the book shops, galleries and orchid nurseries. I managed to catch and release a large shark and the kids and I managed to catch four crayfish that were delicious and my wife caught a tan.
My new work ‘Arno’ is not intended to be the Terminator, Arnold Schwartzenegger, or any of the policemen, nor was it intentionally a portrait of my friend, Arno. However it does look like my friend, who is a blond, blue eyed, surfer boy. It is inevitable that artists work with visual material that is familiar to them. In the past the habit of depicting familiar bodies in my work has not always been to my advantage as I have occasionally sculpted an old girlfriend and thereby offended the new one. In this work I was focussed on the graphic marks and interrelationship between the flat surfaces and the three dimensional spaces. I had been thinking about Picasso and his folded paper cut-outs. I nevertheless hope that my depiction of my friend is a little kinder than Picasso’s portrayal of his women.
