PRESENTATION OF A~ dARDS TO SCHOOLS OF ART
AND ARCHITE'CTURE ROYAL MELBOURNE INSTITUTE
OF TECHN6LOGY, MELBOURNE APRIL. 1961
Speech by the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Sir Robert Menzies.
Sir and Ladies and Gentlemen
I am pretty good at giving things away, but I regret
to say to those who are waiting to get the awards in their
clutches that they have to l~ isten to me for a few minutes first.
This seems to be the drill.
When you said, Sir, just towards the end of your
remarks that you hoped the day would never come when a lot of
data was fed into one end of a computer and a painting in oils
came out at the other, I wasn't half so surprised as you were.
I've seen quite a few of late that looked as if they had been
produced in exactly that fashion. ( Laughter) However, I am
never controversial about these matters. I won't go further
than that. Butl~ it's quite true Sir that here we celebrate
the marriage of science and ari. 1his is a very great
technological institute, very well known all over Australia,
and in a technological age ithas a very great deal to
contribute to the life of thetcountry. But art has its own
place and, I hope, an enduring one, and however scientific we
become, I hope we will never quite lose our sense of beauty,
our sense of capturing in some form or another something that
we can Jive with and enjoy and something that we can pass on
to succeeding generations as part of the proof that we are
civilised, A lot of people think that civilisation is best
expressed by supersonic aircraft, by the telephone which never
stops ringing and on which you sometimes get the caller
television in which my taste I am happy to say, is of tUe
Tese are all very useful things to have around but
they are not any necessary proof of civilisation. But here,
particularly in this section, you are dealing with matters of
a different kind, matters I think which will recommend us to
our successors even more than some of the applied scientific
affairs with which we become increasingly familiar,
Architecture, as I was reminded just before I sat
down iste father or mother or is it both? ( Laughter) of
all thesarts. I suppose that's because the primitive Eskimo
built an igloo and left a pormanent mark on architecture, or
somebody else leaned something up against a cliff and left
another permanent mark on architecture. I am prepared to
admit that architecture is one of the great and enduring arts,
today a science an engineering feat. All I venture to say
is that I hope It will never lose its conception that in
addition to being a scientific affair and an engineering
enterprise it is a contribution to art, whatever the form
of the building may be.
One of my troubles about that, if I may say this
to my architectural tutor, is that I do think nowadays that
we are tending to lose a little individuality that we are
tending to internationalise architectural design. I sometimes
fear that in fifty yearst time, it will be very hard except by
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looking for some water, some stream, some lake, to distinguish
one city from another. This, I think, would be a tragedy.
You take London, which is already beginning up in
the city to incorporate some of what I will call the international
ideas on architecture, Well, when I first knew it indeed as
a great deal of it still stands, London has character, a
character of its own, Quite true that the buildings tended
to be lower; quite true that a place like Bush House could at
one time be referred to enthusiastically as a skyscraper when
it wasn't. But London and Portland Stone and the whole quality
and character of the architectural landscape had a unique
quality, I think, of its own.
I remember many, many years ago we -ere having lunch
with James Bone ( Muirhead Bonets brother)ΓΈ James Bone was the
London Editor of what was then called the " Manchester Guardian"
and a brilliant writer and essayist, and he said to me, " What
is your most vivid impression about London." I said, " Oh,
Portland Stone. Look at it. ' Jashed white and brilliant where
the weather takes it and full of dark velvety shadows where the
weather doesn't take it, maturing so quickly, getting a quality,
a patina of its own so soon." He said, " Man your observation
is right." He said, " This is it." " ell," I said, it is
almost to me a thuab-print of the London scene,'" He promptly
then, to my immense satisfaction, pulled dovrn a book that he
had written in which he had used that very expression, a book
called the " London Perambulator". It is so good that it has
never been a best-sellera ( Laughter)
Do you see what I mean? It will b a poor day when
any nation loses its own character and becomes merely part of
the general mass of mankind, It will be a poor day when our
own architecture in Australia doesn't possess some quality of
its own which indicates to us and to the onlookers something
of the feeling and spirit of Australia. Itts all right to say,
as no doubt people do occasionally that the Georgian architects
of Nash Adam, so on, the Adam Brothers, are now outdated and
they diL't know much about the problems of lighting and all
this kind of thing, but they did, and those like them, make a
,.; ontribution to the century of good taste which nobody has quite
succeeded in destroying. T has disappeared in many places
but there it is. It is something that you don't see anywhere
else, And the same, Sir, if I may say so, goes about art,
about depictive art, Let's take painting. Now, I have no
feeling of resistance to any form of experimentation in painting.
Some I understand and some I don't. I suppose that occasionally
applies to the painter himself for all I know but there it is,
and so be it that he has learnt the elements ol his craft, so
be it he does know about drawing and about putting on paint and
about getting a sense of modelling and composition-give him
all that and he is a free man to investigate any field that he
likes and I do hope again that we won't develop into a state
of aflairs in which a particular composition, a particular
abstract, a particular whatever-it-may-be looks as if it might
have been painted anywhere in the world. In other words,
that this is just part of a uniform international movement,
Letts have our own character in our work and see that
it interprets something of our own feelings, our own environment,
our own upbringingg our own sense of our own nationality. I am
not a great believer in uniformity. I would hate to think that
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the time would come when neither our buildings nor our pictures
nor our sculpturescouild be distinguished from the buildings and
pictures and sculptures of any other country in the world.
Let's have a bit of good, healthy individualism on this matter.
And I think the right way to bring that about if
I may say so, is to do what you do here, to have people taught-,
those who were enthusiasts those who want to do these magnificent
things, to have them taughi the elements, and it is essential
that they should be, Nobody could make a speech that anybody
would listen to unless he understood the language that he was
using and had understood its composition, how it is made up, how
it balances itself. These are all part of the rudiments of the
kind of education that ultimately enables a man or woman to get
up and make a speech or to write something that may be understood
and enjoyed, and similarly, you cannot, at your peril, neglect
the basic training in any of these arts.
Nowl Sir, yon said quite rightly that I have suffered
considerably from artists in my time. There are two classes of
portrait-painter fcr example, One is the chap who really
legitimately gets you to sit for him. If he is an imaginative,
gay character, he chatters to you and you chatter to him a~ nd in
the meantime he gets down some resemblance to you on canvas.
There is the other and more earnest fellow who poses you in the
chair and then says " You see that knot on the window over
there? Now, if you iwouldn't mind that's right, put your
head back a bit, yes just watch that." And as you
watch that ( Laughter) you go to sleep. I may say I am not a
bad sitter because I lo stay awake. On each occasion when Ilve
been sitting for a portrait, I have devoted the whole of the
time to preparing a speech on the Budget, ( Laughter) On one
occasion I composed an entire policy speech under the influence
of Ivor ? Iele. This is, I think, a good thirg.
But I was told by one portrait-painter that he had to
paint a famous general, and the famous general wanted to be painted
in a rather heavy uniform and it was very hot weather in a veiry
hot country an'. the famous soldier nominated after lunch for the
sittings. He had a good lunch and he would come in and sit and
in three minutes he would be asleep. It is very difficult to
paint a sleeping mane The artist said, " Well, I wonder whether
you can bring your personal assistant with you, Sir?" having had
three awful failures, you see, " and talk with hm and this will
help to keep you awake and give me a chance." So the personal
assistant came the next time and sat there, and in three minutes
they were both asleep. ( Laughter) The artist then said. " Sir,
I am terribly sorry, could I have just one sitting after
breakfast?" and he had one and, without mentioning any names,
you may see it in the War Memorial at Canberra. One sitting.
The other experience, of course, that I have had is
being sent portraits by people who have never seen me ( Laughter)
but who have looked at alleged photographs of me in the Press.
These arrive at quite a steady rate at my house a couple of times
a year, and these are very embarrassing because they are not
always good. ( Laughter) I must confess that I have only been
modelled if thatts the right word once and that was when I
had to come up here and sit for Victor, you see, on several
occasions, and he put me in a chair, perched me up a bit, had a
look, got this great mass of stuff and slapped it around and
then began to do this and that. He seemed to me I being of an
ample build, to devote too much time to putting bits on ( Laughter)
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and too little time to taking bits off, But still, after a
couple of these sittings, I thought that he had a most
encouraging head, but the next time I came up, he had done
two more. He was practically running a raffle with himself
as to which one of them he regarded as being the best,
( Laughter) But I must say that he was quite civil about it,
I enjoyed it, Each time I arrived downstairs, I received a
warm welcome from such students as were around and when I
left, I received an equally warm farewell. AnA therefore~ I have,
in a sense, suffered from people of thf. s kind but . L rematn
their friend and I remain their admirer.
I for one, am tremendously proud of the stream
of Australian art in all its stages going back to the original
work done in the beginning of the nineteenth century yes,
it's old-fashioned to us, you see every leaf on eve.-y twig but
it had a qualicy of its own. It nowr has tremendous historic
interest, Then we have moved onthere through the influence
of the impressionists and have come on now to a later stage
with other influenc3es and I really believe that if you were to
mount a perfect and wall b& lanced historical exhibition of
Australian painting and trallan drawing, you would have
just about as interestin g/ liece of history as you could find.
I know that we did it up to 3 point in the exhibition that
went to the late G~ lery in London, But a comprehensive one.
It would be splendid. All the people who like the very oldfashioned
would be down that end of the gallery and people~
like myself who have a secret and not-so-secret passion for
the impressionists would be about here and all my more modern
and up-to-date friends one or two of whom I see hero today,
would be up at this ena of the gallery. But we could move around
and get to know each other and feel that we were looking at
something of historic interest0
There are many things for which we think we may be
remembered but for which we may ' turn out to be forgotten and
I believe that art is long and art is enduring, wvhether It is
the art of the architoct or the art of the painter or the art
of the draughtsman of the decorator all these varied forms
that I have been glancing at this afternoon this is something
Ei., during. It doesnt disappear with yesterh. yts newspaper,
it doesntt find the fate of something that is written on water,
I believe it endures and your business here is to see that those
who come through here, through this division of this Institute,
will be all the time aiming to make their contribution to
something that has an enduring quality and an enduring
chara cter. And I know that the work here is done well, the
instructional work here is on a very high level and I am
therefore delighted to have been with you this afternoon, to
have stood for a few minutes between those who have been
awarded the prizes and the prizes that they will receive.
I am told I hope rightly all I do is to hand over an
envelope. This seems to me to be an admirable idea because
you can't put anything heavy in an envelope but you can put
paper that folds, so I hope it works out that way. Thank
you very much.