Russell Erwin: The Young Archies, The Archibald Prize 2016

The Young Archies, The Archibald Prize 2016

He is the father. He is so slender, slight. Vietnamese: that slightness of generations

which keeps the spark of genes passing through thickets of famine and war

by not demanding very much, so imprinted in him is gentleness, courtesy,

self-effacement, self-abnegation, survival.

His daughter has drawn his son. She too is reed-slight. She is diffident, teenage-shy

—not in an Australian sour-pouting way. But confident somehow

—not in a brash, ugly way; maybe just that she knows she’s done something pretty darn good,

though that is past and she is beyond what it required (as all art must be left behind).

She knows the way to and from that country. And that is enough.

The brother she has drawn—yes, drawn out of their lives somewhere in the suburbs

—the gabbling company of kids at school and Saturday soccer, their family’s quiet purpose

—and placed him here, on the walls of the Archibald. He must be a character, a jaunty kid,

cheeky in the way his mother might despair and we all love, delighting in the life of boys.

The father is slight. He is proud. He points, “This, my son. And she, my daughter. She …”

he gestures a drawing hand, “the artist. I am famous two times.”

Later I see them again, standing in a queue. I cannot help but place him

as one in a crowd who by their dignity is distinct,

as he stands there waiting, in the middle of his life.

The father is slight. He is what fame hungers after.

A wind passes over and the reed gives with it.

He is a father in his generation.

Sunday Night’s TV Drama

On the screen, another country—maybe no country.

The setting is murder-grey, the light stained melancholy.

What else in a land starved of sun? Yet we are drawn

in, as to a story-teller’s fire. It is familiar enough:

it is what we see every day in our houses

of flat planes, interiors of hard angles. So, we are led

to a deserted kitchen, with nothing out of place;

a hall going where? (We must remember the way back out);

or looking out a large window, a wind-raked landscape

and shivering a chill, are aware how susceptible we are

as we’re shifted by a camera, the angles, the shot,

the way the light strikes or filters or floods us into feeling.

Then there are faces. Living in cities, we’re used to the generic,

walls of shifting bodies, their harassed Noh masks,

pressed out of which are those, being familiar, are family,

are unique and human, and ours to hold and to know.

Tonight’s drama has us in the simple countryside,

every face, chipped from the wind, is as definite

as Millet’s “Man Bending over a Hoe”.

The people we watch are us: we would know them

if we saw them in the street or tending their garden.

Strange then that when we get up from our cosy burrow

of the couch, turning off the soft light; our wine almost finished

as the credits slip, the images losing their grip;

the kitchen can wait till the morning, we close the blinds

and turn down the hall into our bedroom,

turn from what we know

—that mystery now revealed, the murderer unmasked,

into the familiar dark and a moment when we don’t.

Russell Erwin