Jordan Prosser

history, Fullwood’s close female companion from around 1905, Frances Prudence, was clearly an adventurous and independent single mother.)

Like Streeton, George Lambert, and others, honorary lieutenant Fullwood was energised by his time on the Somme battlefields and behind the lines, writing later that ‘modern war, for all its horrible features, was magnificent pictorially’. Although the Australian War Memorial holds his two large war paintings in oil, the scheme’s administrators in London felt that his strength lay in capturing details of soldiering that were best suited to the small scale of watercolours and drawings. Werskey quotes Richard Holmes, that master biographer, on the ‘idea of finding a central but relatively neutral or unfamiliar figure to tell the story of a famous group or circle’. Holmes continues, ‘The difficulty is that the “neutral” figure usually becomes of absorbing interest in his or her own right’ – as Fullwood certainly does in Werskey’s hands. The other difficulty is the temptation to claim for that unfamiliar character too much influence in the ‘famous group or circle’, and to be combative about why he or she is less celebrated than others. Bringing someone in from the cold doesn’t mean pushing aside or discounting those already around the heater.

My one disappointment with Picturing a Nation is the confusing lack of clarity in the use of art-historical ‘labels’. Quite correctly, Werskey writes that Fullwood ‘was highly regarded by critics and peers alike as an important contributor to the movement of “Australian Impressionism”’. He says that there is continuing debate about what’s meant by the term Australian Impressionism but also ‘current consensus among scholars’ (unfortunately there’s no bibliography). Fullwood is said to have had ‘his own brand of tonal “Impressionism”’ across all the media in which he worked; to have shared Roberts’s and Streeton’s ‘“tonal realist” style and plein-air preferences’ and to have ‘cemented his relationship with Roberts and Streeton [in Sydney] at the zenith of their Heidelberg moment’. ‘Roberts’s Heidelberg’, the ‘fabled era’, and ‘the Heidelberg era’ all figure, but the origin of the now sometimes contested term ‘the Heidelberg School’ is not mentioned. Nor is John Russell, who worked with Claude Monet and whose letters from France about Impressionism Roberts showed to Streeton (and surely also to friend Remus?). Both Fullwood and Russell returned to Sydney from overseas in the 1920s and died there in 1930.

To quote Holmes again, biographers can never quite catch their subject’s fleeting figure, but Werskey’s pursuit still brings Fullwood vividly to life. He was obviously well liked, in part because he wasn’t pushy. Was he simply too poor, despite periodic successes, to maintain any substantial presence in the art world? As an ‘English/British, Australian/colonial/imperial artist’, was he too many things to be singular? Did he drink too much perhaps? We know he consulted fortune tellers.

I owe Fullwood an apology. Way back in 1985, selecting loans for the nationally touring exhibition Golden Summers: Heidelberg and beyond (we deliberately avoided the term ‘Australian Impressionism’, though we knew the power of its brand), we were unable to borrow his lovely Early Spring near Richmond, NSW, then in England, nor the charming Hop Pickers, New Norfolk, Tasmania (1893), which is still in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. We therefore represented him with Sturt Street, Ballarat, the black-and-white illustration Werskey calls his ‘most acclaimed contribution to the Atlas’. I knew his nineteenth-century reputation called for more. And he deserves more now than the single painting in the National Gallery of Victoria’s She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism (until 22 August). I hope that Gary Werskey’s efforts, and a planned retrospective at Macquarie University in November, bring more of his missing pictures to light. g

Jane Clark, a former Curator of Major Special Exhibitions and of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, now Senior Research Curator at Mona, the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart.

Streaming

Knotty traumas

A sophisticated depiction of mental illness

Jordan Prosser

Spoiler alert: at the end of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Randle Patrick McMurphy is lobotomised. It’s a tragic defeat for a counter-culture hero and a barbaric victory for the institution housing him. The psychiatric facility is depicted as a prison, its residents the doomed inmates, and its head nurse, the villainous Nurse Ratched, the warden. In that story, madness is analogous to freedom, and the final image of Chief making his escape for Canada is a much-needed glimmer of resistance and hope.

Wakefield, the eponymous establishment in the ABC’s terrific new series, is worlds away from Kesey’s sterile psych ward: it’s a safe, colourful, pleasantly cluttered place, perched on an improbably majestic bluff in the Blue Mountains. The staff are flawed but dedicated caregivers, and the Nurse Ratched standin is a put-upon middle manager named Linda. The patients, or ‘clients’, are not grappling with a vicious institution – only themselves and an array of knotty traumas. At Wakefield, mental illness is not something to be hidden, suppressed, exorcised, or lobotomised. And if the distinction still weren’t clear enough, in one episode nurse Nik Katira tells a patient, ‘This isn’t One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, before escorting her to a restorative session of electro-shock therapy.

Nik (brilliantly played by British actor Rudi Dharmalingam) is the star nurse in Ward C at Wakefield. Beloved by colleagues and clients alike, Nik is naturally empathetic, passionate, and hands-on: a paragon of modern mental healthcare. But as Nik vies for a promotion in order to unseat Linda (Mandy McElhinney), struggles with his feelings for head doctor and ex-fiancée Kareena (Geraldine Hakewill), helps his lonely father (Shapoor Batliwalla) get back into the dating game, rebuffs his mother’s (Nadie Kammallaweera) fanatical Christianity, prepares for his sister’s (Monica Kumar) wedding, and corrals the eccentric inhabitants of Wakefield, he might just be losing his mind. It begins with a simple earworm, a song stuck in his head: ‘Come On Eileen’

by Dexys Midnight Runners (we’ve all been there). Then, images. Hallucinations. Or are they flashbacks? Snippets of childhood memories that don’t quite add up, hinting at some buried trauma. Nik’s deterioration becomes the show’s main through-line; inevitably, we will see him being pacified by his own patients. Maybe one incessant 1980s chart-topper is all that separates the lanyards from the straitjackets.

Created and penned by Kristen Dunphy, with writing from Sam Meikle, Joan Sauers, and Cathy Strickland, and wonderfully directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse and Kim Mordaunt, Wakefield bites off a lot – stylistically, thematically, and dramatically – and

manages to chew almost all of it. Functioning as melodrama, social realism, and Lynchian dreamscape, it constructs its eight episodes as a series of overlapping vignettes, revisiting certain events from different perspectives, a neat trick that makes each encounter even richer the second or third time around. It expresses its characters’ mental states in unique and often bewitching ways: huge images projected on a retaining wall as a young woman flees through a Gothic courtyard; a naked man reclining on a single bed in a forest of blackened trees, surrendering his flesh to the wood and ash. Bizarre but brilliantly choreographed dance sequences – a coping mechanism for Nik – burst with light and energy. In fact, the entire series is gorgeously vivid. Cinematographer Martin McGrath wrings every last drop of colour from the picturesque surrounds of Wakefield, thankfully eschewing the default modern-day mystery-thriller palette of grey, blue, and more grey.

Central to both style and plot is Moorhouse and Mordaunt’s handling of Nik’s intensifying flashbacks. Less creatively assured television tends to wield flashbacks as a blunt instrument, assuming that the more frequent and jarring they are, the more impactful they will be (see HBO’s woeful The Undoing). In Wakefield they are a scalpel, sudden and all the more frightening for it, expertly integrated through Gabriel Dowrick and Nicholas Holmes’ top-notch editing. Then there is the all-important earworm. ‘Come On Eileen’ is stuck in Nik’s head for the entire series. He begins to hear it everywhere: a song at a wedding, on the radio in a change room, as a tune plucked on a patient’s guitar. The sound design finds endlessly creative and nefarious ways to weave ‘Come On Eileen’ into the aural fabric of the show; it may be the most sophisticated representation of underlying trauma in this or any other show like it.

Stories about mental illness require a special synergy between writer, director, and performer, and Wakefield achieves this across the board. There is not a single crude or lacklustre turn from any member of the enormous and embarrassingly talented cast. Dan Wyllie plays Steve, the burnt-out businessman trying to close a real estate deal in London from Wakefield’s broom closet. Harry Greenwood is Trevor, the ward’s class clown, wonderfully funny and tragic in equal measure. Bessie Holland is great as Tessa, a milliner and hoarder with a fiery left hook. And Harriet Dyer and Ryan Corr are especially good as couple Genevieve and Raff, fighting to retain the memories of their relationship after Gen’s disturbing schizophrenic relapse. Then there’s Wayne Blair, Colin Friels, Kim Gyngell, Matt Nable … the list goes on. If it wasn’t clear that we were meant to laugh from time to time, Wakefield also casts notable comedians Felicity Ward and Sam Simmons as Nik’s nursing offsiders. The cast is so good and each of their stories so beautifully observed it almost makes you wish the writers had given us a full, unbroken hour with each of them, rather than sprinkling their scenes across the full run of episodes. Wakefield’s structure is one of its most notable innovations, but also its biggest stumbling block. Torn between a traditional ‘case of the week’ set-up and a more long-form puzzle-box mystery, it does occasional disservice to both, particularly in the middle stretch of episodes when the deluge of cryptic clues about Nik’s past hits saturation point. Tap shoes, puzzle pieces, bathtubs, butterflies – we’re drip-fed these beautiful but vague sensory memories and asked to simply file them away for later. Nik is both victim and detective in his own mystery – here, Dharmalingam doesn’t miss a beat – but for a few hours his storyline feels inaccessible, and not necessarily any more compelling than Wakefield ’s other characters’ – just eight times longer.

When that eighth episode arrives, though, all is forgiven. Wakefield ’s finale delivers on its many, many promises, in a near-perfect hour of solid and heartfelt payoff. It focuses all of Wakefield ’s stylistic experimentation, twisting narrative devices, and dense symbolism into a cunning and unabashedly emotional climax. If the middle stretch of this entrancing and unusual show begins to frustrate you, don’t dismay. Stick it out. There’s method to its madness. g

Jordan Prosser is a Melbourne-based writer, director, and performer, and a graduate of the VCA School of Film & Television. His short films have screened at dozens of international festivals, and he has appeared on stages across Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom.

Promotional image for Wakefield (ABC TV)