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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2019-02-27 Daily Xml
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Heysen Cultural Legacy

Mr CREGAN (Kavel) (12:48): I move:

That this house—

(a) recognises the significance and value of the art of Sir Hans Heysen OBE and Nora Heysen AM to South Australia's and Australia's cultural heritage;

(b) recognises the work of the Hans Heysen Foundation and the Nora Heysen Foundation in preserving and promoting the work of Sir Hans Heysen and Nora Heysen; and

(c) acknowledges the value and significance of The Cedars as a cultural precinct.

I think that it is right that I outline for the house the background to Sir Hans's life by way of illustrating his contribution to the rich cultural heritage of this state.

Sir Wilhelm Ernst Hans Franz Heysen was born in Hamburg on 8 October 1877. He was the sixth child of Louis Heinrich Wilhelm Heysen and his wife, Maria. Louis migrated to South Australia in 1883 and Maria migrated the next year, bringing with her their five surviving children. The Heysens came believing in the same necessary dream that other immigrants believed: that a more secure life could be found here and that their children would benefit from their foresight.

Louis became a merchant, although, at the outset, far from a successful one. The new settlement had a narrow and unreliable economy. The Depression of the 1890s brought great hardship to the Heysen family. It must be remembered that 13 banks failed in the Depression of those years, including the Commercial Bank of Australia, one of the country's largest, which suspended operations.

Sir Hans was educated at five schools in Adelaide, leaving in 1892 to work in a hardware store. Later, he assisted his father to sell produce from their market cart. Importantly, he went to stay for a period with a family friend in Hahndorf. This way, he was not a first settler in the town but would become its most famous resident. Artist and teacher James Ashton took a keen interest in young Hans's work and was, I think, the purchaser for value of his first painting. His success was materially supported by many wealthy benefactors in South Australia. Robert Barr-Smith paid Hans's fees at the school of design within the Art Gallery of South Australia for 12 months, a significant gift.

Importantly, in 1899, a group of four businesses offered Hans a remarkable contract. They would loan Hans £400 to ensure he could study in Europe. The condition was that they would sell the works that he painted there to recover the money that they had outlaid. Heysen agreed to this bargain. When Heysen returned to South Australia, he achieved immediate success and recognition. Importantly, state galleries acquired two of his major works and, in 1904, his painting Mystic Morn won the Wynne Prize for the finest Australian landscape painting. He would win that prize nine times.

Lou Klepac's work to document Hans's life is both faithful and accurate and records that in 1908 Hans and his wife, Sallie, moved to the Adelaide Hills and later purchased The Cedars. It should not be overlooked that Nora Heysen, Hans's daughter, was the first woman to win the Archibald Prize for a portrait and the first female Australian war artist. Her life is extraordinary in its own right and I will turn to that subject in a moment.

Achieving fame as an artist in your own lifetime is, I understand, very difficult and seldom possible. Hans Heysen was Australia's first celebrity artist. Members might say that at least in Sir Hans's time fame was a measure of talent and usefulness. Hans's art is not a historical artefact; it remains vital and important. As Robert Hughes said in his work The Shock of the New:

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

It was new and shocking for an Australian artist to paint Australian scenes with a spiritual wonder and with an Australian colour palette. As Lou Klepac has said, what to others was 'the bush', for Heysen was the mystical essence of nature. As members would know, my mother was an art teacher and so art and the history of art was at least a passing subject in our household.

Members opposite might be surprised to know that I once discussed the value of Heysen's work with the late John Bannon, whose own father was an art teacher. John's view, a view I accept, was that Heysen made it permissible to reflect on Australian landscapes as South Australians, and Australians had not done so in their own right but instead as Europeans, bringing a European mind under Australian stars. Heysen did something quite different. Instead, Heysen, with Germanic precision and patience for perfection, was willing to record not only the emblematic quality of South Australian landscapes but also their power over us. He was capable for the first time of expressing the continuity of the landscape, our place in country, the inconsequence of our strivings and the arrogance of our plans when faced with nature.

Heysen was the first successful celebrity conservationist in South Australia, and we are grateful that he was. He famously paid off local farmers to preserve the local landscape and to prevent them from turning majestic gum trees into 400 fence posts. He also consolidated his holdings, where possible, in order to ensure that others in his community would appreciate what he, for many years, had appreciated. He did not want to destroy the local landscape for any short-term or short-sighted economic purpose but to preserve it for us today.

Heysen was courageous. He had the courage to be a new artist in a new country and to say new and different things about how we should relate to landscape. The artist John Olsen said in this sense that Hans Heysen was the first non-Indigenous artist to understand Australia's interior, and his paintings of the arid Australian interior are particularly moving. I believe that it was a trustee of the Art Gallery of South Australia who also once quipped that Hans's iconic work did for the gum trees what Norman Lindsay's work did for the nude—it made them fashionable.

Nora Heysen's legacy is of equal value to Hans Heysen's legacy. She was a determined artist of profound skill and passion. Her portraits are remarkable. They have a clear-eyed quality, which is sometimes haunting. Nora completed over 170 pieces while an official war artist. She said of her work, 'If I was going to do war subjects, I wanted to be as near as I possibly could.' She spent seven months in New Guinea in the course of the Second World War and returned to Australia suffering from dermatitis.

Her portraits of work in medical clearing stations are particularly moving. All war correspondents and even war artists face criticism, some of it unfounded. Nora was criticised for painting real scenes of military personnel at work, sometimes well behind the front lines. It is this work that is now particularly valuable. It provides a remarkable historical record of lived experience of service personnel, particularly women. It is hard to imagine a journalist taking photographs of the subjects that Nora had painted because, without the artist's brush, they do not have the same power and influence. They are, in this way, the only true record of her subjects performing very necessary everyday tasks. Their cultural and social value is inestimable.

In the time remaining I want to record the value of the work being undertaken by the Hans Heysen and Nora Heysen foundations to preserve and promote the significance and importance of the work of Hans and Nora Heysen. It must be remembered that transactions necessary to give rise to the Hans and Nora Heysen foundations required substantial generosity on the part of the Heysen family. Without that generosity, it would not be possible for a substantial body of work to be located in one place, and it might instead be the case that that work would be elsewhere in private collections. It is not. It is housed at The Cedars. The Cedars is significant to Hans's work and also to Nora's work.

I also commend the members of the foundation committee and the corporate directors of the foundation trustee for the work that they do as volunteers and for the work of the many volunteers at The Cedars. Without their work it would not be possible to maintain the facility. Of course, members will know, and I understand that it has in fact been recorded in this place, that George van Holst Pellekaan recently received a Medal of the Order of Australia for, in part, his services to the Hans Heysen Foundation for the conservation and preservation of Hans Heysen's work. Equally, Allan Campbell received an Australia Day Award and Medal of the Order of Australia for work to preserve and promote The Cedars, Hans and Nora Heysen's contribution and legacy.

Mr TEAGUE (Heysen) (12:58): I very briefly rise to endorse the motion. I hope that the motion is passed immediately by this house. In the short time available, I wish to recognise the work of Hans Heysen, for whom my electorate is named, and his daughter Nora and the significance of The Cedars, which was his home for 56 years, from when he purchased it in 1912 until his death in 1968.

The Hans Heysen Foundation has done wonderful work. I encourage everyone to visit, if they can, the National Gallery of Victoria's Two Generations of Australian Art that is commencing shortly. In amplifying and endorsing what the member for Kavel said, I emphasise that this is a living legacy that we all share. I endorse the motion.

Ms STINSON (Badcoe) (13:00): As shadow minister for the arts, I would like to speak on this motion. I seek leave to continue my remarks at a later time.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Sitting suspended from 13:00 to 14:00.

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