Just Another Frustrating Day

It was just another frustrating day at the office, another call for inspirational dreams wasted; pearls before dots, he muttered in a failed joke. Everything fell flat when it could all have been a masterpiece. Well it was a masterpiece, until the brutality and banality of the page took over. Wind him up and point him in the right direction; a guided missile eloquently capable of taking out its target. How to tell your target, determining what the bosses wanted and what will be published, that was half the problem. The actual writing, that was the easy part.

It was just another assignment on the evening shift, a "fine" art auction with a Brett Whiteley painting up for sale; one of the first auctions of a season expected to break all records as millions of dollars slushed around the top echelons. Stockbrokers, financiers, trust managers; these were the new rich with money to burn. They just needed a few paintings to stock their second or third mansion. Baby boomers awash with cash in a booming economy.

A Brett Whiteley painting is a status symbol. In Sydney, the centre of the Whiteley market. having a Whiteley on the wall shows you've arrived; particularly if the painting matches the harbour views from your own windows.

Because, of course, the meaning of life in Sydney is to own a water view; and many have dedicated their entire working lives to achieving just that end. "Water glimpses," as the real estate agents say. It's a flimsy basis for the raison d'etre of everything; bright colours and burning, flashy heat.

Bidding began at one million dollars and climbed in $50,000 increments to $1.25 million. That's $1.5 million with the twenty percent buyer's premium. The buyer or the man representing the buyer had a bald circle on his head, and the minute the bid was made he dashed out the door. An anonymous bidder, as the papers said. It all had the feeling of a ruse. They thought it might go for $1.5 million and that's exactly what it went for.

The painting was a view from his studio window in Lavendar Bay, with the harbour painted a dark wine red; foreboding and ecstatic all at once. It was painted a year before his death from a drug overdose in a very ordinary motel room in Thirlmere south of Sydney. Despite all his millions, that was where he went when he wanted to get plastered; ordering in the scotch and the smack and the smoko in a redbrick motel. None of the locals had any idea who he was; that they had Australia's most famous, successful and wealthy artist in their midst. Nor, probably, would they have cared. Art was not high on their agenda. Money and drugs most certainly were.

I saw Brett not long before he died. We used to go to the same cafe, the Tropicano in Kings Cross. I had a job as a reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald, a job which saw my name jump up regularly on the front page and in that circle of lost hope and small recoveries carried a lot of kudos. And he was Australia's most famous contemporary painter; knew everybody and cut quite a figure with his moppish hair and his little white BMW; when most of the people hanging around there were fresh out of detox and couldn't afford a coffee, clinging to each other in the fight not to drift down the road to the Cross and all it represented.

Both being famous in our own ways, because the Sydney Morning Herald was regarded as the bible of the chattering classes and in those days I was used to being someone that others were curious about, we got to know each other. There was something wrong with my car, last time I saw him, and he dropped me off at work that Sunday morning, whizzing in that georgeous little car through the for once quiet streets to the old Fairfax building in Broadway.

In those days; before everything turned into just another office, there were trucks lined up at the delivery docks, and the wrappings and sheets of newspaper drited in the grimy wind.

We agreed, in a rapid fire conversation as the coffee took affect, that most of the people we knew from meetings were all a pack of pygmies - quivering little drones just out of detox and rehab who had never done anything with their lives. They might be straight for once in their lives, but they weren't doing much now either. We confessed, in our own oblique but knowing ways, surrounded as we were by twelve step zealots, that we had the occasional little dabble; and he told me how he used to go down to Thirlmere where nobody knew where he was, for his own private party.

Within weeks came the news that one of Australia's most famous charcters, the internationally renowned artist Brett Whiteley, had died from a drug overdose in a cheap motel room on the the south coast, in a seaside suburb most people had never of called Thirlmere.

THE BIGGEST STORY:

The Oz has just published an excellent piece by Michael Fullilove from the Lowy Institute on Iraq, saying it's time for a bit of ruthless honesty from the pundits and neocons who once supported the war.

He writes that in sharp contrast to their American counterparts, Australia's prominent intellectual supporters of the Iraq war are not owning up to their own errors.

"The balance sheet on Iraq is now pretty clear: it was a mistake. Yes, a murderous tyrant who brought suffering down on the heads of his people has been ousted.

"But the country is a bloody mess and numberless Iraqis have lost their lives; the fabled weapons of mass destruction were not located; the jihadist fire has been fuelled, not smothered; the Middle East has been reordered only to the extent that Iran has been strengthened and emboldened. The blood and treasure spent by the Americans totals well over 3100 troop fatalities and $US400 billion ($513 billion).
Most analysts believe the eventual financial cost of the war will be between $US1 trillion and $US2 trillion, but the cost to US prestige and influence is even greater."

I don't know Howard has got away with leading Australia into such an unpopular fiasco; and why he has not had the gumption to own up to the fact that it was all a terrible mistake and Australia should never have been involved.

Fullilove concludes that "Iraq was a once-in-a-generation, system-shifting foreign policy decision, and we got it wrong. Now we need - in fact, we are owed - an exercise in due diligence on the part of the commentators who cheered Canberra on."