Everything to Learn

Giles Auty died in September, just short of his eighty-sixth birthday. He had been a valued friend and contributor to Quadrant ever since he arrived in Australia in the 1990s to write for The Australian. This memoir is the last of a series of three that he wrote for Quadrant this year; the previous installments appeared in the May and July-August issues.

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All I ever wanted to be was an artist—or a painter, to be more exact. That was possibly a wartime bonus for my mother, who could set me highly complex subjects to draw or paint while she got on with the more essential tasks which befell a housewife during the Second World War.

For example, vast formations of distant enemy aircraft were often visible from any elevated point in our garden in East Kent—such as the semi-circular top of our recently constructed outdoor air-raid shelter. I could thus make an attempt at rendering the appearance of these formations, which often seemed to fill large parts of the…