Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On indulgence, I rise to speak on the life of Margaret Olley. One of the great tragedies of life is that you come into this place and you get to speak on the lives of people who you never get to meet. Margaret Olley has been one of my favourite artists for an awfully long time. Born in Lismore in 1923, she was educated at Somerville House in Brisbane. I am sure she had nothing to do with those terrible green uniforms they are walking around in now! During her lifetime she was the subject of over 90 exhibitions, a great favourite of Philip Bacon, who is a fantastic art dealer in Brisbane and throughout Australia. She wanted to paint and she wanted to focus her life on it, and she did. She sat in her house and she painted what she saw.

A thing I love about Margaret Olley is that she said the painter was never finished. Philip Bacon would always tell the story that, if you put a painting down in front of her and it had been hung in a gallery for 20 years, he would turn his back and then turn around and she would be just brushing up and changing something. She was a true artist, where something was always ready to be done—something more could be added.

I think the other thing I love about her is that she must have been tremendous company. She was a successful painter and subject. Two portraits of her went on to win the Archibald Prize. Of course, we all know the one by William Dobell in 1948, and this year was the one by Ben Quilty. Lots of prominent Australians painted her, and while she must have been an incredibly interesting subject I think she must have been even better company. To sit there and watch her paint, to sit there and watch her potter around the house with a packet of smokes always handy—it must have been lovely just to be around. I think everyone needs an aunt or a grandmother like Margaret Olley.

She was named a Member of the Order of Australia in 1991 and was made a Companion of the Order in 2006. She was very generous with her time, very generous with her art and generous to all the people who really counted. She did not ever count herself as a 'big head'—in Townsville we call them 'big heads'. She never got above where she was. She was just a painter, just an artist; that is all she wanted to do and she never wanted to be anything more.

The big thing I would like to say is that all the words that will be spoken here today and spoken about Margaret Olley throughout Australia will not mount up to five precious minutes in front of a Margaret Olley oil. To stand in front of something like that and see the depth and the talent and be drawn in is truly something spectacular. Vale Margaret Olley. Thank you for what you have done for this country. Thank you for what you have done for my life. May you rest in peace.

Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On indulgence, I want to associate myself with the remarks of the member for Herbert. I know that there will be contributions in the parliament from those who did know Margaret Olley well and from others like me who had the good fortune of meeting her and spending a little bit of time with her in her home in Paddington. It is the case that we have lost one of our most distinctive painters, somebody who was absolutely true to her vision through a life of extraordinary output. Given that she won the inaugural Mosman Art Prize in 1947 and has passed away in 2011 after a career of painting—in particular, in the latter stages of her working life, the still lifes for which she is so widely appreciated and known—it is a testimony to the endurance, the vision and the feisty character that Margaret Olley had. It is appropriate for the House to both recognise her contribution and reflect on her life as a painter, which is what she considered herself to be. As the Sydney Morning Herald said, she died with paint on her fingers. We can make an appropriate assumption or guess that that is as she would have wished it. She was a distinguished Australian and has been recognised as such. She was awarded the Centenary Medal for services. She was made a Companion of the Order of the Australian in 2006, an extremely high award in our country. Then there was her generous benefaction to public galleries the donation of artworks—many from her personal collection—and the writing of cheques. I have seen some estimates that her donations exceeded the sum of $7 million. I do not know whether that is accurate, but that is what has been reported. But the point is clear: she was an extraordinarily generous person.

The thing that strikes one when reflecting on Margaret Olley's career is that she was no great follower of fad or fashion. It is true that she was influenced to some extent—or inspired at least—by some of the French painters, painters whose names we know well, such as Bonnard, Matisse and others. It is also true that in her early career she had a wide repertoire, painting landscapes and portraits as well. Over time, she increasingly came to paint what she saw in her own home: the still lifes, the proteas and the domestic scenes that strike a chord with people, whatever their appreciation, understanding of knowledge is. Margaret Olley's paintings touched everybody.

She is represented widely in galleries around Australia, including, I am pleased to see, in the Lismore Regional Gallery close to where she was born. We saw some very eloquent testimonies to her life when she passed away. I noticed that Barry Humphries wrote about her, saying that she was someone who did good without being found out, reflecting on the fact that she had a tremendous sense of understanding for others. And yet she was in no way bound by the fashions and trends of her time.

In this House we recognise, as we should, artistic endeavour. In giving tribute to someone who has made such a significant contribution as Margaret Olley has made it is entirely appropriate for us to reflect upon the contribution that artists as a whole and that individual artists make to Australian society and to our polity. Capon in his tribute said 'she was one of the most if not the most unforgettable people I have ever met.' I met with her on occasion. The member for Wentworth will be speaking as we mark this condolence motion and I am sure that he will have something to add to this. But it is true that anybody going to her house for the first time, as I did, and engaging with her in discussion was taken into another realm. There were certainly no niceties or any unnecessary observances of the rituals of meeting with politicians. She was an extremely forthright and outspoken and had a distinctive personality. She wholesale someone whose directness was completely refreshing.

At the same, she was someone who quite clearly had a vision to paint what she saw and what she loved. That is what comes through these paintings. The delight in colour, as Capon said. Her work is a continuing celebration of the great tradition of painting, painting as we know it and painting as we will always love it. There is a universality in Olley's oeuvre that touches a chord with so many.

It is appropriate to not only recognise Margaret Olley's contribution but to recognise the contribution of those who work with a singular vision over time, regardless of whether they achieve high levels of recognition or not, and who continue to persevere with that creative spirit and to express it for Australians. In Margaret Olley's case, she did it across a span of many decades and with work that was of a very high order. We appropriately recognise her contribution in this House.

I would like us to reflect on one of her distinctive bits of commentary, where she said

I’ve never liked housework. ... If the house looks dirty, buy another bunch of flowers, is my advice

The fact is that she not only gave her advice but also then went on to paint those bunches of flowers and gave Australians immeasurable joy as a consequence.

Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

To say that our country has lost a national treasure with the death of Margaret Olley on 26 July is not an exaggeration but a statement of fact, Margaret having been named as such on the occasion of her being awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia. Margaret Olley's significant contribution to the art world will long outlive her, and I count myself fortunate to have met her on several occasions. Once asked how she would like to be remembered she replied:

Ah ... l don't know, for helping people I think.

Indeed she will be. This artist and philanthropist will remain an icon for her art, which is such an important part of our society. Creativity brings life and innovation. Margaret Olley enriched Australian galleries with her own work and the donated work of others—masters and unknowns alike. In addition to gifting the works of such luminaries as Picasso, Cezanne and Degas, worth literally millions of dollars, she encouraged struggling artists by buying their paintings to donate to galleries to help build the artists' portfolios. Margaret Olley, as a true artist, referred to her work as 'the only thing I like doing ... the only thing I've wanted to do all my life.' Celebrity was not important. Indeed, as a young woman when William Dobell won the 1948 Archibald Prize with his portrait of her, she said she was embarrassed to think that people were looking at her.

Although technically born in New South Wales, Margaret Olley grew up in our state of Queensland, where we claim her and where her talent was first recognised during her time at Somerville House. Of course such a talent would not be confined to one place or town and she travelled the world painting and studying before choosing Paddington in Sydney as her home, where she lived a long and full life in her famously eclectic home. When asked what her final words might be she replied:

I might say to the good Lord: 'Just one minute. I haven't finished that painting'.

It is therefore truly fitting that she died after a full day of painting. She was a vibrant soul until the end and her vibrancy will survive her. This is a woman who in her later life was forced to make use of a walking frame but equipped it with both a bicycle bell and a car horn—definitely not a woman to be ignored. The last time I saw her she also had a glass of carefully balanced on her walker as well. She was passionate not just about art but about social and political issues as well. Her vigour and persistence made her a role model. She encouraged emerging artists, including Ben Quilty who—fittingly in this last year of her life—won the Archibald Prize with his stunning portrait of her. When he asked why she painted so many works at one time, she said:

I'm like an old tree dying and setting forth flowers as fast as it can, while it still can.

Indeed, those flowers will continue to blossom through not only her own works or the works she so generously donated to the people of Australia but also in the success of the young artists she mentored and who will continue to enrich our culture through their work.

What a life, and what a legacy has been left to us. Margaret Olley once described her philanthropy with the simple analogy of a turning wheel, that all of life was about giving and receiving and therefore linked—simply adding 'so I like to give'. The art world and indeed all Australian people are so fortunate that we were the ones to receive.

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Link to 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.'

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also pay tribute to a great Australian who is sadly lost to us but will always be remembered. I last saw Margaret Olley at the opening of the National Gallery of Australia's new wing—the wing that houses our Indigenous art collection. She was there as an honoured leader in Australian cultural life but also as a great philanthropist and because of her own work as an artist. She had been a great friend to that national collection, quite apart from what the member for Wentworth talked about in terms of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She was an artist, a philanthropist, a passionate advocate for the arts and a fantastic mentor to young people coming through. She was all of that because she believed in the importance of the arts and its expressive content and believed in conveying the importance of it to younger people. She encouraged them to also be their best.

Last week we had the meeting of cultural ministers in Sydney. We were at the Art Gallery of New South Wales with Edmund Capon—the director for so many years and soon to retire. He was as effusive as ever, still talking about projects that are going to be undertaken well beyond his retirement. He was also a very close friend of Margaret. We spoke about her, but he was interested in showing us around. We had an opportunity to view the gallery with the other ministers. He took great pride in identifying the gifts to the gallery that Margaret had made. Reminiscing about her, he told the story that the member for Wentworth told about her criticism of what Edmund thought was one of his greatest acquisitions.

She was dedicated to her creativity and her craft. It led to a body of work which has engaged and enriched Australians in private and public collections. Her friends were with her as she worked to her last days to capture her vision of Sydney Harbour—a landscape on canvas. It was the legacy that she was so determined to complete. Those who were at the gallery told stories about a woman who was also generous in her donations to Australian galleries; a woman who delighted in helping local audiences access great international work. Her generosity to the National Gallery of Australia, the great collection that we house there—and I am going to a function tonight, along with other members of parliament, to see the Fred Williams collection—tells the story of her diversity and spread of interests. There are 15th and 17th century architectural pieces, including Indian marble carvings from the Moghul era, a beautiful Degas drawing and a number of works by prominent Australian artists.

In her youth she was one of a new generation of Australian artists growing in confidence about their role in developing a strong Australian presence in the visual arts. It was an important and exciting time in Australian cultural life. She was great friends with the likes of William Dobell, Russell Drysdale, Donald Friend and Jeffrey Smart. Margaret has left another legacy to Australia because of her unstinting record in helping younger artists. In recent years she supported and encouraged a new generation of creative Australians with a frank and wise approach as a mentor.

Just this year, her portrait by Ben Quilty won the Archibald Prize, six decades after William Dobell won in 1948 with an earlier portrait of her. It says a lot about her longevity, her inspiration and the quality of the artists who sought to depict her. As Ben Quilty said: 'She's such an inspiration.' He also said that she was a feminist ahead of her time. He described her as vigorously passionate about social and political issues as well as art, and enormously compassionate. He said Margaret had an infectious attitude to both life and death. Quilty noted how many new works she had on the go. He said Margaret came up with a powerful metaphor to explain her work:

I'm like an old tree dying and setting forth flowers as fast as it can, while it still can.

These are the words of a tenacious, passionate woman dedicated to making use of her talent right till the very end. Quilty met Margaret Olley when she was a guest judge for the 2002 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, which he won. She was a friend and a great supporter of his work from then on.

Born in Lismore in 1923, Margaret Olley was awarded the Order of Australia in 1991 for service as an artist and to the promotion of art. In 1996 she was awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia. I am told that she was also a good businesswoman, which allowed her to become a philanthropist on a significant scale. I might also note, in relation to her birthplace of Lismore, that she was an active benefactor and supporter of the extensions to the gallery in Lismore. So many of our artists come from the regional parts of Australia, and they do not forget their roots. Whilst the whole of the country can view on a regular basis great collections that Margaret Olley has contributed to in Canberra and in Sydney, it was also important for her to continue to inspire in the place that she was born.

Margaret deserves every accolade that can be directed towards her. She got every award and deserved every one that she received. I have said before that a creative nation develops a more tolerant, more expressive and better citizenry, but it also underpins ultimately a more productive nation because it inspires, it develops innovation and it creates those linkages which are such an important reason that Australia performs so well on so many fronts.

Margaret Olley embodied this. She understood the importance of her talent, and she chose to keep working and expressing that right to her dying days, but she also understood the importance of putting back to the community that had given her opportunity and putting back to the future generations of artists that will continue to promote the legacy of which she has been such a proud standard bearer. She will be sadly missed, but her works and her inspiration will live on forever.

John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to associate myself with the tributes that have been paid to this great Australian by honourable members, including the member for Hotham, the member for Wentworth and, particularly, the member for Kingsford Smith, who talked about visiting Margaret Olley's home and referred to Edmund Capon's comments on her passing. If memory does not fail me, he described her home as an 'archaeological tip' with many treasures still to be unearthed, as those responsible for her estate will doubtless reveal in the coming weeks and months. Vale Margaret Olley. May she rest in peace.