The Devonport Flagstaff Page 31
February 10, 2017
Fairburn’s artistic curtain call in Devonport Rex Fairburn, one of Devonport’s bestknown literary figures, has a collection of his artworks featuring in an exhibition at the Depot next month. In 1954, the poet made 12 sets of fabric curtains in his King Edward Parade study with hand-printed images of Maori rock drawing. Eight sections of those curtains are part of a Fairburn Rocks exhibition this March to commemorate Fairburn’s death 60 years ago at the age of 53. Dinah Holman, Fairburn’s youngest daughter who grew up on Mays St and now lives in Northcote, is putting the show together. She inherited the curtains and has researched their history. In 1947, Fairburn was sent tracings of prehistoric Maori drawings by his friend Theo Schoon, a Dutch-Indonesian artist who was recording South Island rock drawings for the Department of Internal Affairs by sketching and photographing them, she says. Fairburn turned the images into lino blocks to help preserve them. He first made calico images that sold at the UN Gift Shop in New York. Fairburn’s friend John Male, who worked for the UN Human Rights Commission at the time, was the go-between her father and the shop, says Holman. Fairburn also gave prints to Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier when they visited Auckland in 1948. Fairburn hand-blocked the drawings with Morrison printing ink onto a dozen creamy white curtains for Male, who hung them in his Connecticut home until 1964 when he returned to New Zealand. The curtains became a feature in Male’s Mahurangi East home. When Male died in 2003, Holman inherited them. “I looked at them one day and even though they were all a little bit damaged, they also all had some good parts,” says Holman. She decided to get the best preserved sections framed behind conservation glass, giving four to her sons Tristan and Nathaniel. The remaining eight, all of them in a different size, will be on display, and for sale, at the Depot. “They are the last examples of A.R.D. Fairburn’s rock drawing works,” says Holman. She remembers her father working on the curtains at 7 King Edward Parade, where he also wrote on his typewriter. “He had a big table on which he put a thick blanket and then a top sheet. The fabric was so coarse that he had to hit it with a mallet to transfer the ink. My two sisters and I and my brother were his assistants. We would hand him the mallet or the roller,” she says. They will be presented in a “community context, because no one does things just on their own,” Holman says. Her father was surrounded by a group of other creative people living in Devonport between 1946 and 1957, when it was his home. These included Katherine Mansfield biographer Antony Alpers, author and activist Sarah Campion, Shakespeare scholar Sydney
Artistic and literary legacy… Rex Fairburn (above). Dinah Holman (below) is keeping her father’s Devonport connection alive Musgrove, clarinettist Frank Gurr, pianist Lili Kraus, painter and guitarist Keith Patterson, potter Barry Brickell and his mother Shirley, pianist Tessa Birnie and architects Ivan Juriss and Bruce Rotherham. Holman remembers them all and says most were friends and would come for dinner regularly. “The Devonport community allowed my father his eccentricity,” she says. Fairburn’s Devonport connection took root when he married Jocelyn Mays, whose father built the house at the bottom of Mays St. The Fairburns moved there when Holman was nine. Jocelyn’s great-grandfather Oliver Mays was one of Devonport’s early settlers. • Fairburn Rocks runs March 4 – 22 at the Depot Artspace.
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