A Recent visit to Kiama and Gerringong, in the Illawarra region on the South Coast of New South Wales, brought back vividly to mind the life and work of Lloyd Rees, one of this country’s greatest painters in the tradition of representational art. It was assisted, as a matter of memory, by the fact that a friend with whom we dined there (a distinguished former administrator, with now a more than passing resemblance to Rees) quite unselfconsciously sported to dinner the same type of black French beret that Rees habitually wore. From the 1940s onwards, Rees and his wife Marjory…