Hi friends!

As the weather in Sydney (finally) cools off and film work ebbs and flows, I’ve been trying to get back into my old rhythm of going on a bushwalk every week. Given all the madness going on in the wider world, I’m always glad to step away from the computer, bury the phone in my backpack, and spend a few hours just wandering.

Some of my favourite trails are on the north side of the harbour, through the thin tracts of bushland that run from Hunter’s Hill to Manly. They’re a fascinating cross-section of Sydney history, from the petroglyphs and shell middens of the Cammeraygal (Gamaragal) people to the gussied-up relics of the industrial age. Even the bush itself has a history, whether it’s survived the city’s frenzied waves of development or is a result of the recent push towards reforestation.

On the way I’ve found a few sites and stories that I thought might be worth sharing. This is my first; the tale of the bohemian artists’ camp at Little Sirius Cove that was once the unofficial HQ of the Australian Impressionist movement. I’m thinking about doing a series of these ‘Harbour Histories’, so let me know if they’re of interest!

The Impressionists at Curlew Camp

On a fine, sunny morning in June 1890, young painter Arthur Streeton first set eyes on Sydney Harbour. He’d arrived on a steamer from Melbourne in the company of his mentor, Tom Roberts, and recounted the experience in his typical flowery style:

This was more than your regular sight-seeing tour. These three stops — the urban bustle of Circular Quay, the ocean cliffs of Coogee and the waterfront bushland of Mosman — were prime painting grounds for the loose-knit group of artists we now know as the ‘Australian Impressionists’. During this brief trip, Streeton was intoxicated by the quality of the light and luminosity of the water, and painted a series of canvases up and down the foreshore. But the duo soon returned to Melbourne, which until now had been at the heart of their domestic artistic revolution.

They wouldn’t be gone for long. Two years and one national financial crisis later, both men would be living in tents just a short hike from Mosman Bay, in the small bush commune known as Curlew Camp.

Today, the slopes of Mosman are dotted with mansions, and the bays are brimming with gleaming white yachts. Only a narrow corridor of red gums and scrub remains, wedged between the ocean view properties, Taronga Zoo and the sea. But travel back 135 years, and you’d find this whole swathe of northern Sydney was still largely unbroken bushland. The land’s Cammeraygal owners had been ruthlessly driven off the north shore in the earliest days of the British invasion, but a century later only a handful of old settler homes had taken their place. That made it a popular destination for day-trippers and tourists looking to escape the bustling, polluted city and savour a little fresh air.

Oxford Street cloth merchant Reuben Brasch initially built Camp Curlew as a weekend retreat for his family on the quiet eastern foreshore of Little Sirius Cove, but within a few years it had blossomed into a permanent artists’ camp. A motley assortment of painters, poets, musicians, journalists and sportsmen called this little settlement home throughout the 1890s. They were ‘bohemian’ squatters with straw hats and thick moustaches, living in tents strung up between the trees. Streeton described languid summer days “sailing, getting sunburnt, painting a bit”; at night they’d drink, sing along at the piano or play billiards. For a few shorts years, Curlew Camp was the most important artistic site in the colony. The work Streeton and Roberts completed in this unassuming camp wasn’t just the finest of their respective careers; it also went on to profoundly shape Australia’s fledgling sense of national identity — for good or ill.

It wouldn’t have been possible without two movements that began decades earlier in France (as most fads did in the 19th Century), and slowly made their way to our shores.

The first was ‘en plein air’ painting (i.e. painting outside). The Barbizon Painters got the trend going in the 1830s when they set up their canvases in the forests around Fountainebleau and worked directly from nature. These weren’t just sketches for future studio commissions, but complete landscapes in their own right. The French Impressionists — Monet, Renoir, Sisley & friends — took this approach one step further, prioritising movement and the fast-changing qualities of light over academic perfectionism in their art.

The second was ‘bohemianism’: the anti-establishment, hard-drinking, poverty-stricken and art-loving Parisian lifestyle popularised by Henri Murger’s short stories in the 1840s (if in doubt, think Moulin Rogue!). Inevitably, what began as an authentic sub-culture of the French ‘demi-monde’ — prostitutes, ‘fallen women’, queers and political radicals — soon became fashionable, emulated by any bourgeois young man who considered himself an artist.

In Australia, these two movements converged in the person of Tom Roberts. As a British-born immigrant growing up in Melbourne, Roberts cultivated a love for his adopted land’s native flora that was rare among 19th Century artists. Awarded the opportunity to study at the Royal Academy of Arts in London for four years, when Roberts returned to Australia in 1885 he wore a trendy ‘bohemian’ opera cape lined with red satin, and under his fashionable ‘crush-topper’ hat was a mind teeming with the influences of the French Impressionists and aestheticist James McNeill Whistler.

A recent convert to plein air painting, Roberts set up a series of bush camps outside Melbourne — most famously at Box Hill and Heidelberg — where he and his fellow artists could work informally, expressively and directly from nature… and indulge in heavy drinking away from the prying eyes of the local morality police. The results were something new to settler art: a self-consciously ‘Australian style’ which drew its visual language from the colony’s unique landscape. Joining Roberts on this adventure were Frederick McCubbin, Charles Conder and the young Arthur Streeton — only a fresh-faced, nineteen-year-old art student when Roberts first discovered him painting at Mentone Beach. The movement’s female members didn’t get the same bohemian opportunities; the accomplished Jane Sutherland and Clara Southern, despite sharing a studio with Roberts in the city, were not allowed to stay overnight at the camps with the men, and were limited to occasional day trips.

The group hit the mainstream in 1889 with their 9 by 5 Impressions Exhibition in downtown Melbourne, featuring over a hundred plein air paintings on 9 inch by 5 inch cigar box lids. But just as the public were warming up to the newly-christened ‘Australian Impressionists’, the colony was plunged into a severe, years-long depression (thanks to a banking crisis caused by a speculative property boom — tale as old as time), and ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ suffered the worst of it.

Up in Sydney, the depression transformed Curlew Camp from a weekend retreat into long-term accomodation. Young men, under-employed and driven out of the city, flocked to ‘bachelor’s camps’ up and down the foreshore. At Curlew, ‘Camp Father’ Reuben Basch offered his bohemians friends bed & board for under 12 shillings a week. For that price, they were treated to wooden floors, a piano, a billiards tent, a dining hall, a regular handyman named Luigi, and even a live-in cook! Visitors were instructed to take the ferry to Mosman, hike over the narrow headland to Little Sirius Cove and call out “COO-EE!”, then wait for a row-boat to whisk them across the bay to the cluster of tents on the eastern side. The campers were technically squatting, but landowners were willing to turn a blind eye because their presence helped to deter timber thieves.

It was a good deal for Melbourne’s struggling impressionists: in Sydney the weather was warmer, the rent was cheaper, and the galleries were buying. Julian Ashton, a progressive champion of plein air painting, had muscled his way onto the Art Gallery of NSW Board of Trustees and compelled them to set aside £500 a year to buy new Australian work, a local first. Streeton was an immediate beneficiary, and made that first excursion to Sydney with Roberts to close a major sale with the gallery. During the trip both men were introduced to Curlew Camp by Reuben, whose brother-in-law Louis Abrahams had been a participant in the earliest bush camps (and supplied the cigar box lids!). Streeton painted his first Curlew study in the spring of 1890 on a cedar ‘dress board’, originally used to store dresses at the Brasch shop.

Roberts permanently settled in Curlew Camp in September 1891, and Streeton joined him a year later. They would be a fixture in the camp for the next five years. The presence of Melbourne’s two most promising painters instantly made Curlew the most desirable artists’ camp in Sydney, usurping an earlier settlement up near Balmoral Beach. They were soon joined by Julian Ashton, cartoonist Livingstone Hopkins, teacher AJ Daplyn, and the unfortunate A.H. Fullwood, who’d lost all of his life savings in the stock market crash. Waxing lyrical in a letter to a friend (as he often did — spend too much time with Streeton and he was liable to start reciting Lord Byron’s poetry at you), Streeton conjures a image of Curlew life at its idyllic best:

Of course there were downsides — petty feuds, financial anxiety, creepy-crawlies in the night, and an oppressive loneliness. But the “brotherhood of the bush” stuck with it; in one sense, the depression had given these men the opportunity to live out their long-standing bohemian fantasies. Nonetheless it’s easy to detect an air of play-acting to the whole enterprise. The camp was underwritten by a wealthy benefactor — Reuben even supplied boards and fabrics from his shop to paint on — and its residents were never far removed from the creature comforts of the city.

Roberts would often pop over for meetings with one of his many bohemian associations, like the ‘Dawn to Dusk Club’. While celebrating themselves (via a poem by Victor Daley) as “brave Bohemians” who “keep the soul alive in man”, most of its members simply came to enjoy a good debate, a glass of wine and a decent meal, and then returned home to the suburbs. Not exactly a hot-bed of revolution. Poverty was fetishised as a phase in an artist’s life which could be set aside when he inevitably got married and embraced middle-class respectability. Women were invited to Curlew for day trips and painting lessons — that’s how many of the bachelors met their future wives — but they remained on the fringes of an art movement that increasingly defined itself through “boy’s clubs” and masculine iconography.

For Roberts, Curlew was above all a useful (and cheap) base. He rarely made impressions of the camp and surrounding bushland; more often, he’d catch the ferry into the city to paint studio portraits for his high society patrons. He frequently left on week-long expeditions to find subjects for his increasingly nationalistic realist paintings — think of the heroic drover in A Break Away! (1891), the bushrangers in Bailed Up (1895), or the shearers in The Golden Fleece (1894). This strain of jingoistic painting was cheered on by Robert’s mates at the influential Bulletin Magazine, including bush poet Henry Lawson, who were actively steering the country towards Federation.

Streeton also made trips out of the city to find new subjects, travelling to the Blue Mountains for Fire’s On (1891) and the Hawkesbury for The purple noon's transparent might (1896) — my personal favourite Australian landscape painting, which perfectly capture the unique glare of the down-under sun — and brought his canvases and sketches back to Curlew to finish them. Legend has it that when the Art Gallery of NSW bought Fire’s On, Streeton and his fellow artists transported the picture across the harbour by row boat, and then carried it from Circular Quay to the Gallery in a triumphal procession.

It was the Harbour above all that dominated Streeton’s work in the Curlew years. The camp was simultaneously a rich landscape subject, a studio, and an opportunity to experiment. He painted dozens of works featuring the camp, along with gorgeous studies of Manly, Redfern, Coogee and the Quay. He played with form, such as in the radically narrow Sirius Cove (1895): a glimpse of the bush as if viewed through the slit of an open tent. His work left an indelible mark on his adopted city; Streeton painted Sydney with a light, bright palette, contrasting the shores, sea and sky of the Harbour. He anticipated and helped to define Sydney’s hedonistic 20th Century identity: a city of sun, sand and surf. In 1900, the Bulletin proclaimed Streeton “the discoverer of Sydney Harbour”, and he returned the love, dubbing Sydney “an artist’s city — glorious”. He was fiercely protective of it too, campaigning relentlessly to stop a nearby coal mine development and painting the sublime Cremorne Pastoral (1895) as an ode to the beauty of the land. His accompanying letter to the Telegraph became known as ‘Streeton’s Shriek’:

But what’s most startling today about these “happy pastoral” visions of the landscape is the complete absence of the land’s rightful owners. Tellingly, when Streeton and his mates passed through their celebrated the ‘virgin’ bushland on Little Sirius Cove, they carelessly trampled over the ancient middens left by the Cammeraygal, evidence of thousands of years of community gatherings and meals on that exact site.

Yes, the Impressionists sought to create an new Australian artistic tradition… but their influences were almost entirely European. Both Streeton’s vast, empty landscapes and Robert’s heroic tableaus of pioneers ‘taming’ the country were conscious instruments of the nationalist project. Their shared vision could be summed up by the Bulletin credo “Australia for Australians” — which eventually went 'mask off’ and was amended to “Australia for the White Man” after Federation in 1901. The country’s white, masculine-coded settler past was seen as the only legitimate source of Australian identity — an orthodoxy that would endure for decades, a grim legacy. Curator & historian Andrew Sayers highlights the contradiction:

The set of illusions — of bohemianism, patriotism, self-sufficiency and separation from the ‘normies’ of the wider city — that held Curlew Camp and its “brotherhood of the bush” together couldn’t last. The economy improved, and the city expanded; by 1897 there was an electric tram running all the way to Mosman Wharf, and new homes popped up along the ridgeline. The number of visitors to the north shore ballooned, and local art shows were soon overflowing with impressions of the camp and harbour, painted by Streeton’s eager imitators.

One by one, the community moved on. Reuben Brasch left for London in 1896; months later, Tom Roberts got married and settled down in Balmain. Streeton, like many Australian artists then and now, could not resist the siren call of London — his friend Charles Conder had decamped for Paris years earlier, and become a fixture at the Moulin Rouge alongside Toulouse-Lautrec. But none ever reached the same artistic heights. Streeton’s sales in Australia kept him afloat during lean years in Europe; eventually he’d return as an art critic and champion of the Impressionist’s legacy.

Curlew Camp assumed a new identity under the management of Freddy Lane, an Olympic swimming champion who transformed it into a retreat for athletes and sailors. Bachelor camps soon had competition — Sydney legalised daylight bathing in 1903, opening up the beaches to generations of swimmers and surfers. Then in 1912 the ridge over Little Sirius Cove was acquired for Taronga Zoo. The last sunburnt bohemians finally moved out, and the lions moved in.

But a small sliver of bush has survived to this day. Follow the dirt track down the eastern side of Little Sirius Cove, turn right at the Zoo’s water treatment facility, take the wooden walkway downhill… and there you’ll find the remains of Curlew Camp. It’s commemorated by a series of weathered plaques, a few notches in the sandstone boulders, and a coral tree planted by Arthur Streeton (hilariously, given his bush activism, it’s an invasive species). Nature has reclaimed the rest. Find just the right spot between the gum trees and the rocks, and it’s still possible to imagine you’ve escaped the city — if only for a moment.

Arthur Streeton certainly believed so. Years later whilst visiting Sydney for a career retrospective, he returned to his old campsite. Arriving via the electric tram, with a canvas tucked neatly under his arm, Streeton followed the freshly-paved streets to the cove, and wandered into the bush. He set up his easel beneath a tree, and began to paint. Flush with nostalgia, he wrote to his old friend Tom Roberts:

To write this piece (which, as always, ended up a little more involved than I expected!), I drew on Bohemians in the Bush: The Artists’ Camps of Mosman by Abie Thoms, monographs on Australian Impressionism from the NGV, AGNSW and National Gallery London, and Andrew Sayer’s superb history, Australian Art. Also worth checking out Tim Bonyhady’s excellent piece on Streeton’s Shriek in The Monthly.

Night Blooming Jasmine

David Lynch, one of my favourite artists in any medium, passed away earlier this year from complications with his chronic emphysema following the horrific California wildfires. I miss him — no more daily “weather reports” on YouTube, no more surprise drops of music or paintings, and no more movies. But what a wonderful body of work he left behind.

Last week his daughter Jennifer Lynch shared a photo of his tombstone, now set in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles. Just three words for his epitaph: “Night Blooming Jasmine”. Ethereal, evocative and mysterious, in true Lynchian fashion.

What does it mean? In an interview with AnOther Magazine in 2014, the director described the mood and character of his adopted city of Los Angeles:

Lynch’s films aren’t exactly love letters to LA — in Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and Lost Highway he savagely skewered the desperation, violence and poverty underpinning Hollywood. But beneath the clear-eyed critique a nostalgia for the dream LA of the past endures, floating somewhere between memory and myth. The golden age that never truly was. Apparently, it smells like night-blooming jasmine.

So it’s fitting that he’s commemorated in Hollywood Forever alongside many of his beloved artists from lost era, including Wizard of Oz director Victor Fleming, Fay Wray, Douglas Fairbanks, Cecile B. DeMille, and of course Judy Garland. He’s an irrevocable part of that DNA now too.

And for a fix of David Lynch at his most delightful, please enjoy this short film in which the great director cooks quinoa (badly), and tell us strange stories from his youth on his ciggy break.

Odds & Ends

• For any Wolf Hall and Tudor fans out there, a rare bit of good news from New York — the marvellous Frick Gallery has finally re-opened, which means that the legendary Henry VIII counsellors and nemeses Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More have resumed their century-long staring contest across the Frick fireplace. Two of Holbein’s finest portraits — gosh I’d love to see them again.

• After decades of campaigning, it’s finally happened — Stunties are getting their own Academy Award! The Oscars have announced that the new category for ‘Achievement in Stunt Design’ will be awarded for the first time at the 100th Ceremony in 2028. It’s only decades overdue.

• The wonderful Cinema Reborn festival of newly-restored classics kicks off in Sydney and Melbourne at the end of April! Check out the program and come along — there’s a whole lot of exciting films on offer, including Touch of Evil, Cría cuervos, my favourite Katharine Hepburn rom-com, Holiday.

And that’s it for this week, thanks for reading! I have no idea where the next newsletter will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange…