Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Hansard source

Margaret Olley's life spanned a great arc of Australia's art history and indeed the history of my city and her city, Sydney—and indeed the eastern suburbs of Sydney, where she lived for much of her life, in Paddington. That is where she lived right at the end of her life and where she did much of her greatest work. Hers was an extraordinary life and a very fortunate one in many ways. Margaret had great challenges—she suffered from depression for a period but overcame that, and certainly in the last 10 years of her life, when I saw her from time to time in the eastern suburbs, she was always full of life and energy. The thing that stands out most in my recollection of Margaret Olley—an indelible recollection, really—is her extraordinary feistiness, even though she was so old. And she looked very old too, as the portrait by Ben Quilty in the Archibald only this year demonstrated. She was an old lady—88 years of age. She had not attempted to look like anything else, but she projected energy and life. She not only did this with very emphatic and often rather startling bouts of political incorrectness and frank advice to people about whether they were fat or thin whether she liked what they were wearing, let alone whether she approved of the art she was surveying, but she emphasised this with a walking frame which I always suspected she did not need at all. I remember I tried to engage her on this and she would not respond. She would come into a conversation with this walking frame and plonk it down with a thud, and that not only established that she was there but silenced everybody else and then she would hold court on whatever subject was taking her fancy at the time.

Many artists are very shy people, immersed in their work and awkward on social occasions. Sir William Dobell is a very good example of that. He painted her in 1948 for the Archibald. It is a magnificent painting of her. It is a voluptuous painting. She is dressed in an old wedding dress. It is one of Dobell's greatest paintings and one of the greatest Australian paintings and portraits. It was a very controversial painting, as many of Dobell's portraits were described. It was criticised for being more of a caricature than a portrait but, when you compare it to his painting of Menzies or his portrait of Dame Mary Gilmore or even that rather devilish portrait he did of Brian Penton, the great Daily Telegraph editor, the one of Margaret Olley was certainly not a caricature. Nonetheless, it was controversial and that always helps the traffic at the Archibald and so every director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales wants to have a controversial winner because that gets the people through the doors. It certainly did so in 1948.

But she was painted then as a young woman of 25, a beautiful, young artist by a great artist, a much older man, one of the greats of our art history and our artistic landscape. Then 63 years later she was painted again by a very young artist, Ben Quilty. She had those two paintings book ending, as it were, 63 years of her 88 years of life—the painting of the beautiful young woman and the painting of the old lady who is not frail, not beaten down and not disillusioned but still full of life and with every year of that life and experience in her face. It is a remarkable thing for her to be described with those two artistic bookends at either end of her life.

She was also extraordinarily generous, and other members have spoken about this. I would not say she was a very wealthy woman but she was a financially successful woman not simply because of her artistic work but because she was actually a very shrewd property investor. She was able to accumulate quite a lot of real estate at different times and the wealth that she accumulated in very large measure she shared with the people of New South Wales largely through gifting paintings or assisting with the purchase of paintings by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, notably the works of Degas that the art gallery holds. And she donated many of her own works. She could be pretty scathing about other people's paintings when she did not like them. Some years ago, honourable members may recall, Edmund Capon was extremely proud to have acquired a triptych, that is to say three paintings, by the American artist Cy Twombly, who painted a lot on classical themes. There are three pictures which have representations of what appear to be ancient galleys. He called it Three studies from the Temeraire, reflecting on the great painting of Turner, The Fighting Téméraire, where the Téméraire is being dragged off as night falls to be broken up. Edmund was incredibly proud of this. I recall that the Art Gallery of New South Wales spent $4½ million dollars or thereabouts on it, so it was a big deal and a great triumph for the gallery. Margaret was not very positive about it and, indeed, described it to Clive James as being three parts of nothingness. To Barry Humphries she was even harsher. She looked at it and said to him, 'There's nobody at home.' I thought that was pretty tough, but it gives you a feeling of her bluntness and her candour.

We should all celebrate Margaret Olley. The wonderful thing about her life, for her, is that she lived it right through to the very end. How many of us would live to be 88 and be as alert at 88 as we were when we were 28, be working right down to the end and die, effectively in mid-brushstroke, just as we were still working on a painting? There were no years fading away in a nursing home for her, no years of frail dependence on others. Always independent, always at work, always alive, right up to the end, and then the curtain came down and she left our world—but left us an extraordinary collection of work and the memory of an extraordinary woman.

I will quote some remarks that Barry Humphries, who was a very good friend of Margaret Olley's, wrote in his memoir of her. They very touching. He talks about seeing her only a few weeks before she died. She used to go and stay in his apartment and paint, because there is a beautiful view from his apartment in Sydney. He writes:

I spent a long time with her on that last visit and most of her talk was about the importance of finishing that last big painting and her concern, too, for troubled friends. She had found what so few of us have been able to discover: the antidote to depression is concern for others. Last Monday night she slept, the panoramic painting of Sydney Harbour at last completed, and at some time in the early morning, Death surprised her.

I do not know whether death surprised Margaret Ollie or indeed that anything could surprise her, but when death came to take her, they took her as full of life as she had been when William Dobell painted her, working right to the end—a great Australian never to be forgotten and so eloquently remembered by honourable members who have spoken before me. All of us in this parliament thank her for her work. We honour her. We say, 'We salute you and we farewell you—ave atque vale.'

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