GEORGE GITTOES

George Gittoes is a celebrated Australian artist, an internationally acclaimed film producer, director and writer.

Gittoes’ work has consistently expressed his social, political and humanitarian concern and the effects of injustice and conflict - www.gittoes.com

"I believe there is a role for contemporary art to challenge, rather than entertain. My work is confronting humanity with the darker side of itself."

As an artist Gittoes has received critical acclaim including the Blake Prize for Religious Art (Twice) and Wynn Prize. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of NSW. His films have won many International Awards and in 2015 he was bestowed the Sydney Peace Prize, in recognition of his life’s work in contributing to the peace-making process.

Red Tornado

1.

At night for weeks the birds shriek at reptile predators heated by day to blood heat, in the quiet hours of the morning when I wake to the chattered warning from the bird-families in our forest, rosellas and cockatoos, birds of prey, wrens and thornbills, firetails, magpies, kookaburras and galahs, lots and lots: whistling honey-eaters and on the unquiet ground the snake.

2.

On the first day, the fire looked remarkable, but containable.

3.

On the second day, the bush flamed like a red tornado, the fire brigade burning off until they lost it at a fire-trail; later fought that under control.

5. On the third night the blaze was cut with skill to size. This is not the wind from a burning woman, I thought, thinking of my dead mother; no, this is the burning earth. No, this is not the same wind, this is the bush alight, aflame, and around us the dense dark closed in, amid conversations on a firetruck about technology and war.

6. Day five. Two roos alive down Gams road, mother and child, l loping along all grey amid the ash, when I check on them. Third swim of the weekend and a few hours with tools; the fire gone and the rain massed.

7.

“The fire’s angry,” I told my daughter.

“Is it alive?” she asked.

“No. It’s personified. That’s poetry.” you’d want a car like that if you drove a thousand k a week; Tom and Barry and Barbara: she in her black and white music-note printed pants; the Hellfire Trio, live from Bundabah, local kids like heroes from a high-school novel, their parents silent, marching to a different drum.

4. At home that night I’d close my eyes and flames would dance in after-images of smoke and heat; odd quirks of thought about Joan of Arc strayed in.

8. The women bring the men lunches, as my mother did on blazing canefields sixty or seventy years ago in a community effort which does not quite invite a feminist critique.

9.

With a psychologist some talk of the troops massed in Kuwait turns to talk of psychopaths, dull and bright; the dull ones are in jail, the bright ones are in politics and you see them on TV at night.

10.

At home for a week I’ve been reading Jack Kerouac, fireman and Buddhist, sailor for a week, friend to the dark and mysterious Doctor Sax.

11. 11. The faces fit into view: Ron, who must worship Smoky the Fireman, durrie in his mouth; John, always active, very efficient; Ron the mechanic who fixed the desperately dilapidated motor; Ross who went to Malaya with Ghurkas and told of the moment when Benny Murdani nearly met his death by the muddy riverside, snatched from the gunsights by a redheaded woman whom the assassins mistook for a spy; conversations on Barry Jones and altruism; a microchip that shorts out spastic muscles, giving a human being in a cage of flesh a chance at life; Brian with brown eyes, some ancestor nicknamed a Moor, And the handle stuck; Kevin, often called Einstein, Driving the truck, and latera deep grey Magna, very stylish;

12.

Here’s to the artist and a portrait of what she paints: great pelicans with muscled keels flashing white against the cold dark blue of the river at Tea Gardens; but this is superb: a baby kookaburra in her forest garden, feeding, and my daughter peering at it.

Epilogue

Sky cerulean blue, or something like it

(the Bible has two hundred words for the heavens); swifts in a dance, homeless, and the trees a moss sponge sprayed onto blue hills with a brush.

- Peter J Brown © 2023.