GoodWeekend
GW
FEBRUARY 4, 2012
MARK DAPIN
IS BACK
Let the
games begin
HOW IT FEELS TO TRAIN
LIKE AN OLYMPIAN
Ghosts of
the past
A FATHER’S BID TO PROTECT HIS
DAUGHTER’S INNOCENCE
ARCHIBALD PRIZE WINNER BEN QUILTY CAPTURES THE BRUTAL
REALITY OF LIFE ON THE FRONT LINE. BY JANET HAWLEY
g
Cover story
growing up, the prospect of becoming a
soldier horrified Ben Quilty. Approaching 18, he
became paranoid about being conscripted into a
war like Vietnam. Yet 20 years on, he leapt at the
chance to become an official war artist, joining
the Australian troops in Afghanistan.
The invitation arrived as the artist celebrated
his 2011 Archibald Prize win for his portrait of
Margaret Olley. The Australian War Memorial,
which administers the scheme, informed Quilty
he had three days to make up his mind.
“I grabbed it,” says Quilty, “knowing it would
be a life-altering experience. For an artist who
takes his work seriously, that’s what you seek.”
But when Quilty flew into Afghanistan for a
month last October, he felt as if he’d landed in
some apocalyptic version of Star Wars meets
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
Still pumping with war-zone adrenalin when I
visit his home, first in November, Quilty gropes
for words to explain his artist’s vision, calling
Kandahar Air Field base (KAF), where he spent
the first week, “bizarre, perilous, surreal …”
“It’s a massive crucible bristling with fortifications, that looks like it’s landed from another
planet in the midst of the arid Taliban heartland,”
he begins. “Inside KAF, some 35,000 International
Security Assistance Force soldiers and a few
thousand local civilian staff live eerily strange,
dangerous lives.”
Quilty watched an unnerving, “almost violent”
hockey match between Canadian troops on a
central sports field, itself surrounded by a boardwalk crammed with junk-food outlets. Strolling
along with his backpack of paints, pencils and
sketchbooks, he struck up conversations with
American soldiers, assault rifles slung over their
shoulders, sitting around in McDonald’s, KFC or
Starbucks. Supermarkets sold T-shirts emblazoned
with the words Afghan Fighter – I’m Doing This
For My God, “popular with Americans”. On the
boardwalk you might also bargain for an Afghan
rug; in the gym, take a salsa or spin class.
“But 24/7 you’re on alert to take cover when
enemy rockets land inside the base or a fanatic
suicide bomber breaches the walls,” says Quilty.
“Meanwhile, the war against the Taliban relentlessly continues, and to me it seemed like some
macabre contemporary dance.”
On come the international forces with their
spectacular Star Wars choreography, including
über-sophisticated planes, helicopters, rockets
and tanks. Then on come the Taliban, using their
ancient guerilla-war dance steps and lethally efficient home-made improvised explosive devices
(IEDs) hidden in everything from plastic shampoo bottles to rice cookers.
“And each group of dancers sets out to kill the
other, before the dance ends,” notes Quilty. “It felt
so surreal to be hurtled into the midst of this
weird scenario, with a month’s mission to interpret it all in artworks.”
last year was quite a year for ben quilty.
Already the art world’s heavily courted wonder
boy after winning the 2002 Brett Whiteley
Travelling Art Scholarship, then the 2009 Doug
Moran National Portrait Prize with his portrait
of rock singer Jimmy Barnes, he was anointed
“Australia’s most promising painter” by art elder
John Olsen. And then there were the Archibald
Prize accolades (his beloved mentor Olley died
soon afterwards) and a sell-out exhibition at the
Korean International Art Fair.
Quilty is an interesting mix: a tall, strong,
blokey artist who outgrew his wild teenage years
as a member of a gang who called themselves the
Maggots to gain two university degrees, including
a unit in women’s studies and an extra course in
Aboriginal studies. Now 38, a passionately
thoughtful man, he’s also fit and resourceful
enough to keep up with the soldiers in the field.
“We’ve been watching Quilty’s work mature
greatly over seven years, since his early Torana
paintings, and he was top of our wish list when
the Australian Defence Force offered a war-artist
posting to Afghanistan,” explains Laura Webster,
Australian War Memorial curator of art.
That aggressively masculine Torana series, like
much of Quilty’s earlier work, delved into the
rites of passage of young men. Specifically, during the perilous decade from 16 to 26 when he
and his Maggot gangmates flirted with death by
driving hotted-up Toranas and wiping themselves out on alcohol, drugs, debauchery.
Quilty would photograph his mates, and himself,
totally inebriated, then later make luscious paintings of the collapsed faces. He’s gone on to look
more broadly at Australian identity and history.
Webster adds, “Afghanistan is a highly confronting war zone, and we considered Ben would
feel an affinity with the young men and women
of the ADF, understand their concerns and interests, and paint something meaningful about the
Australian war experience.”
A selection of Ben Quilty’s Afghanistan paintings will be added to the Australian War
Memorial permanent collection, to join the long
tradition of war artists that began in World War I
with Arthur Streeton, George Lambert and
Frederick McCubbin.
B
en quilty’s home life couldn’t
be more in contrast to dusty, wartorn Afghanistan and the mayhem
and human horror he witnessed.
The artist lives with his wife, scriptwriter Kylie Needham, and their two children,
Joe, 5, and Olivia, 3, amid the lush, rolling fields
of a quiet semi-rural hamlet outside Sydney.
Their house is surrounded by a gorgeous cottage
garden he’s planted, a vegetable patch and chook
yard. His nearby studio is a large converted
potato storage shed, now lined with a silver foil
ceiling and interior white walls, where Quilty can
paint, hang and contemplate an entire exhibition
of his always dramatic pictures.
The lilting sounds of a Mozart flute concerto
are swirling through the studio as I arrive to find
the artist poring over his Afghanistan sketchbooks
and photographs. “I needed to play something
like this, after the soundtrack of Afghanistan.
Over there, the soldiers play ultra-heavy music like
System of a Down. I can’t listen to it here, it’s such
thrashing heavy metal, it’s almost suicidal music.
But over in Afghanistan, where you’re lumbering
along in Bushmaster armoured vehicles expecting
to be blown up by IEDs, it makes perfect sense.”
Quilty is an engaging, intelligent character, and
part of his charm is the way he readily admits to
the wild years that defined much of his earlier
life, and how he’s spent much of the past decade
trying to understand them. “I was determined to
be a rebel, even though I’m now ashamed of the
hurt and despair I caused my good, middle-class
parents, who raised and educated me in a loving
home,” he says, sighing.
tour Duty
It’s a dirty job:
Ben Quilty came back
from Afghanistan
full of admiration for
Australia’s servicemen
and women.
12 GoodWeekend FEBRUARY 4, 2012
of
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW QUILTY
BEN QUILTY HAS LONG BEEN FASCINATED BY THE RISK-TAKING BEHAVIOUR OF YOUNG MEN. SO WHEN
HE WAS INVITED TO AFGHANISTAN AS AN OFFICIAL WAR ARTIST, HE COULDN’T REFUSE. BY JANET HAWLEY.
FEBRUARY 4, 2012 GoodWeekend
13
14 GoodWeekend FEBRUARY 4, 2012
F
eeling honoured to join the ranks of
war artists, Quilty read voraciously on
Afghanistan, completed a week’s military
training in Sydney, then last October joined
Australian troops for four days’ force preparation
training at Al Minhad Air Base in Dubai. He wore
a navy-blue uniform, with the Australian Army
patch on one shoulder and an Official Artist patch
on the other, civilian body armour and a helmet,
and had the honorary rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
“The training ran from applying tourniquets,
spotting IEDs, coping psychologically under
attack, to how to behave if you’re taken hostage
–including how to avoid being raped – to how to
fire and disarm a rifle,” Quilty explains. “I wasn’t
carrying a gun, but they told me, ‘Mate, if shit
happens, we want you to be able to use a gun.’ ”
Kandahar Air Field is claimed to be the world’s
busiest single-runway airport, with military aircraft of every variety continually flying missions
in Afghanistan. “The noise level is extraordinary
and constant, with aircraft taking off and landing, vehicles, diesel generators,” says Quilty. “I
instantly understood the meaning of the term
‘war machine’. I felt like an insect inside this enormous living, breathing machine.” (It’s something
he’s now trying to paint.)
For the first week, Quilty bunked in shippingcontainer-style accommodation with the 250
Australian troops stationed in Camp Baker, a section within KAF. The first night, he was smoking
tobacco in a Turkish water pipe with some
Portrait of the artist
as a military man:
(anticlockwise from
top left) Ben Quilty in
his official war artist
uniform in Tarin Kowt;
with his sketchbook;
back in his studio in
semi-rural NSW, as
photographed by his
cousin Andrew Quilty.
B
ack in his studio two months on,
Quilty almost looks to be at war with the
canvas. He paints in a monster-like fume
mask, rubber gloves and overalls, after suffering
adverse reactions to the paint he uses. He paints
rapidly and in such thick, multiple layers that he
orders large archival oil-paint canisters by the
boxload, and squeezes the paint out with a caulking gun. Piles of discarded canisters dribbled
with every hue grow in the corner, like a wondrous sculpture. His colours are mixed, like
mounds of lava, on a wheeled table, and applied
to canvas with a palette knife, spatula, even cake-
the official war artists scheme began during world war i, when 10
artists, including Lambert and Streeton, were embedded with Australian
troops for three months. Five other artists, including McCubbin, who were
already serving with the Australian Imperial Force, also became official war
artists. During World War II, William Dargie, Donald Friend, Nora Heysen,
Frank Hodgkinson and Arthur Murch were among the artists to spend
several months with the troops. Some travelled to the war zone on troopcarrier ships, but today’s war artists fly in and the postings are shorter.
The aim of the large collection of war artists’ paintings held in the War
“I HAD SUCH EXTREME FEELINGS ABOUT THE SMELL, SOUND, EMOTIONS
Memorial in Canberra is to provide a visual account of war with a
different interpretation from the camera or written word. The
OF BEING IN AFGHANISTAN, SUCKED INTO THE VORTEX OF A GIANT WAR
paintings portray soldiers preparing to fight, and in battle, as well
as performing the more mundane daily tasks of living in wartime
MACHINE – I WANT TO CONVEY THIS.” decorating tools. His favourite colours are dioxcamps or being out on patrol.
The dilemma for a war artist in Afghanistan is what to paint when
azine purple, cadmium orange and white. The
there is no front line, nor grand, decisive moments as in wars of old. While
chai tea while I drew the general’s portrait.
paint surface is so thick, he might well use a
images and news of war were slow to be conveyed in World War I, nowa“Yet I felt an eerie sense of foreboding that day: gelato scoop.
days the public is deluged with immediate pictures in mass media and
the group of 400 ANA men seemed an easy target
His painting style is fearless, with bold strokes.
social media, so war is a familiar subject. Quilty, who excels in portraiture
for a Taliban attack. It never occurred to me that, “I love things to happen quickly, I love the exciteand capturing the drama in a face, initially decided to portray the Afghan
within days, at another training parade, an ANA ment and energy of a new work; if it goes well I’m
war experience by painting portraits of men and women serving there.
soldier would turn his gun on the Australian on a high doing it. I can’t imagine anything worse
“They’re facing situations of mortality and survival far more extreme
troops and kill three men.”
than spending weeks or months labouring on a
than anything I’ve ever experienced, so their portraits became more meanHe learnt of the incident the day he left painting, like so many other artists do.”
ingful,” he says. “I want to show the emotions that soldiers are going
Afghanistan to fly to Dubai for three days’ deFor him, drawing is one thing, painting anthrough – the vulnerability and darkness, the energy and adrenalin, the
briefing with departing troops. “Despite their other. “I don’t start a painting with a working
horror and mayhem – but also the compassion, loyalty and tender human
shock and anger, the Australians were adamant sketch – I go straight to the blank canvas.
moments. I drew portraits in my sketchbook in the field as references, and
they wanted to stay in Afghanistan and finish the Sometimes I might draw the outline of a face
now I’m making big, painted portraits on canvas in my studio.”
job they went there to do. They stressed it would with an aerosol can, then start painting.”
As another reference, Quilty photographed each portrait subject in the
dishonour the lives of all 32 Australians who’ve
Since Quilty returned from Afghanistan, he
same pose. He asked them to look towards the sun – with their eyes closed
died in Afghanistan to pull out now.”
has been processing the maelstrom of image and
– then open their eyes, staring into the blinding light. He took the photograph at that instant. “To me, this symbolises what they’re facing,” Quilty
explains, “something immense, overwhelming.”
In addition to the portraits, Quilty is painting large abstracts. “I had such
extreme feelings about the smell, sound, emotions of being in Afghanistan,
sucked into the vortex of a giant war machine – I want to convey this.
I’ll end up examining the whole tragic meaning of war, my attempt at
Picasso’s Guernica.”
On the other hand, he doesn’t want to make all his paintings too dark
and bleak, because, he says, “our soldiers still have to serve in Afghanistan
for years to come”.
“I’ll paint the contradictions of war – you see horror, waste, beastly, evil
behaviour, but war also brings out black humour, mateship and the
noblest, heroic qualities in human beings.”
gerous than I’d ever anticipated. Nothing is safe
in Afghanistan. Next morning I decided if my
number was up, so be it: I was staying.”
in the following days, talking intimately
with soldiers about their experiences as he
sketched them, Quilty found many preconceptions disappearing.
“I suppose they’d expected I’d be some limpwristed artist,” Quilty says, chuckling. “Likewise,”
he reveals, “I’d anticipated a lot of macho Rambos,
two-dimensional guys who fit the stereotypical
image of soldiers; the sort of macho guys that my
work has been about for many years.
“But I have never met such an impressive bunch
of people. The Australian soldiers were intelligent,
thoughtful, balanced, fine young men and women,
many with university degrees. They’d read a lot of
military history, to gain insight into the politics
that got us into this war, and in and out of past
wars. They’re making huge efforts to understand
and respect the Afghan people, aware it’s crucial
for their mission to succeed. Books on military
history, documentaries on Afghan politics, culture, language, circulate around the base.
“They discussed the concept of warfare as
more about controlling and less about killing. But
a big disparity in Afghanistan is that the modern
international forces are risk-averse, that is, not
wanting to suffer one casualty, while the old-style
Taliban are still willing to suffer mass casualties.”
He felt in awe of the Special Forces men, for
touching to see. We’re asking these 18- to 20-yearold soldiers to be international diplomats, and
they’re trying their darnedest.
“A few days later on in Tarin Kowt, I attended
the marching out parade of 400 ANA soldiers
who’d completed the training process under the
Australian mentoring taskforce. It was very moving to see the huge pride in the faces of the ANA
men, and equally the huge pride in the faces of
the Australians.
“I later sat with the head of the Afghan
National Army in Tarin Kowt, General Nurullah,
and his aide fed me dates, dried peas and
A
fter a week at kaf, quilty flew to the australian base at
Tarin Kowt and joined patrols and operations in the Uruzgan
Province. Flying in Chinook helicopters, he looked down on the
fertile green zones beside rivers, the marijuana crops, goats, bright yellow
squares of corn cobs drying on rooftops, washing hanging out to dry, the
sense of normality.
But lumbering along in Bushmasters, heavily armoured vehicles with a
metal inverted V-shape underneath to deflect IED explosions, he felt on
edge. “The soldiers inside still get concussed, but not killed,” Quilty explains. “Bushmasters now have an attachment like giant steamrollers out
the front, to hopefully detonate any IEDs first. It looks like Fred Flintstone
invented it, another bizarre aspect of this war.”
One day Quilty flew to Somad, a small, remote patrol base where
14 young Australian soldiers live in spartan conditions together with
30 members of the Afghan National Army (ANA) they’re mentoring.
“The base is built in a desolate expanse of barren, magnificent nothing,”
Quilty begins, “at the foot of lilac, purple and tan ribbons of granite, which
rise up to majestic mountains. It is the most hauntingly beautiful countryside. It reminded me that once Afghanistan was a favourite, friendly place
on the overland hippie trail to and from London. My aunt and uncle did
the trip in the ’60s and remember the Afghans as warm, hospitable people.
But the extreme irony is that today this glorious countryside is riddled
with hideous vipers’ nests of Taliban waiting to strike and kill you.
“The Australian guys had been at Somad for five months, often under
attack, and the real friendship between them and the Afghan men was
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His father, Richard, is a former solicitor; his
mother, Dianne, has artistic talents and helped
young Ben develop his. The eldest of three sons,
he grew up in then semi-rural Kenthurst, in
Sydney’s north-west, attended Oakhill College,
Castle Hill, and went on to study visual arts at
Sydney University’s College of the Arts. (Brother
Simon became a doctor who works with
Aboriginal communities, James a soil scientist.)
Later, he completed a degree in visual communications at the University of Western Sydney.
“I had no reason or excuse to be such a stupid
rebel,” he says. “Every so often when I was drinking and taking drugs to the point of getting violently ill with my mates, I’d start asking them,
‘Why are we doing this?’ They’d just groan that
Quilty was going on again.”
Quilty counts himself lucky that, after starting
work as a television editor, he met scriptwriter
Kylie Needham, who cut her teeth on Home and
Away, moved on to Crownies, and is now developing her first feature-film screenplay.
“Kylie wouldn’t stand for the bad behaviour,
and I wanted her more than I wanted the idiot
behaviour, so I stopped it, and soon decided to
put all my energy into painting.”
All the mates (except one who drowned) finally
outgrew the Maggots and remain good friends.
“All now have families and jobs and are considered
quite respectable people,” says Quilty, grinning.
Quilty began to believe that a lack of traditional male initiation processes in contemporary
society, together with a shrinking list of clearly
defined male roles, was causing these confused,
lost years of flawed masculinity.
“For so many generations, young men at 18
became soldiers and went off to war, to fight for
their country. It was a very brutal initiation ceremony, many died, returned damaged, but for
those who survived, it got them through their
mad, dangerous period.
“They found a sense of purpose, responsibility,
mateship; it tested their strength and courage and
brought out their finest qualities.
“That’s certainly what’s happening with these
fine young men we’re sending to Afghanistan.
They hold themselves so well, and I often found
myself being astounded at their maturity when I
discovered how young they actually were.
“They’re doing something that I long feared
doing – and I found them an inspiration.”
their calmness and philosophical attitude to their dangerous role. “I
watched them in a yoga meditation session, and you’d have no idea they’re
trained to kill with their bare hands,” says Quilty. He heard it said that
Special Forces men are so cool, they have no pulse: instead of feeling fear,
their instinctive reaction is to prioritise managing any situation.
(THIS PAGE) PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN MARTINKUS; ANDREW QUILTY. (PAGE 12) MAKE-UP: LEAH TAYLOR
“I WAS
TERRIFIED
THAT FIRST
NIGHT AND
JUST WANTED
TO GO HOME.
THIS WARARTIST GIG
WAS WAY
MORE
DANGEROUS
THAN I’D EVER
ANTICIPATED.”
younger soldiers when three Taliban rockets
landed inside the base.
“Sirens started screaming and I was petrified,”
Quilty admits. “The irony is, the Americans fire
laser-guided missiles at the Taliban, who respond
with cheap Chinese rockets they aim by eyesight,
the fuse ignited with a cigarette. Yet the Taliban
weapons cause so much damage.
“Then the guys told me 11 rockets hit the base
the previous night. And a few weeks earlier, a
Taliban suicide bomber in a truck full of TNT
came careering through the bollards and hit the
barricade wall a few metres from Camp Baker,
blowing a huge hole in the wall. Inside the truck
was a massive industrial container of butane gas,
which failed to explode.
“The soldiers joked that if it had detonated, they
and everything would have been destroyed within
a 600-metre radius. I heard constant stories of mass
casualties not happening through luck or mismanagement, as well as horrific casualties that did.
“I was terrified that first night, thought of my
wife and two young children and just wanted to
go home. This war-artist gig was way more dan-
hardybrothers.com.au
information overload inside his head, as well as
closely following events in the war zone and
staying in touch with soldiers he befriended.
ANDREW QUILTY
O
n my second visit to quilty’s studio
last month, a senior officer we’ll call
John, who’s seen far too much active
service in Afghanistan and other war and disaster
zones and is taking early retirement, is sitting for
a portrait. A compassionate man, John admits he
feels the death of each Australian soldier in Afghanistan as deeply as if they were his own family.
He slumps in a chair as Quilty paints him, then
rises to eye the result. “I look haunted,” he says,
staring at the canvas. “It’s exactly how I feel.”
Quilty explains, “The War Memorial told me I
was free to paint whatever I wanted; there’s no
expectation that I’ll romanticise this war. I talked
freely with the soldiers; I wanted to know why
they joined the army, and for several it was because
“AFGHANISTAN WAS HUGELY LIFE-CHANGING.
they were 16 or 17 and didn’t know what
else to do, but found the concept of servI CAN FEEL A NEW SERIOUSNESS COMING INTO MY
ice to country highly fulfilling and became utterly committed. Their loyalty to
their military peer group is paramount.”
Quilty asked them what it felt like to kill and
quizzed them on the psychological instruction
they received to deal with the horrors of war. “I
asked them about sex, and the soft-porn calendar
pin-ups they have in their barracks. I asked how
it felt to be in Afghanistan for eight months’ tour
of duty, then hear your steady girlfriend or wife
has left you. All this happens, and I need to get all
these emotions and strain in their eyes and faces.”
Still overwhelmed by memories, Quilty says,
“Afghanistan was Star Wars, Apocalypse Now,
A C C 0 0Catch-22,
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3 : 4 3 PM
M*A*S*H,
MadRMax
dome, and more. I keep recalling conversations
with young soldiers, shaking as they admitted they
suffer terrible traumas and nightmares. They witness ghastly events. One group finally shot a feared
Taliban sniper and, approaching his hideout,
found him still alive, his face completely shot off
below his eyes. The weird contradiction is that after
trying to kill each other, they then called in Black
Hawk medical evacuation, to try to save his life.
“Several told me that seeing Afghan children
killed was the most difficult thing to deal with. A
soldier with three young children at home witnessed 11 Afghan children killed by an IED explosion in a suicide attack. It left him plagued
with nightmares about losing his own children.”
He says that while the ADF offers psychological
counselling, “a lot of young guys think they’re
bulletproof … Many are going to have to deal
with deeply disturbing psychological issues when
they get home. Several soldiers told me that they
don’t tell their wives and families
WORK.” what’s really going on, as they don’t
want them to be scared.”
Quilty admits that the experience
“sucked the energy out of me, yet it also re-energised me in a new way. It was hugely life-changing. I can feel a new seriousness coming into my
work. Even though I’ve painted dark topics before
– the mates laughing in the face of death, hooning
a car like it’s some great adventure – there’s been
a lurking, ironic, self-mocking humour.
“I’m moving away from that now. These pictures
will be far more serious. Afghanistan was a new
awakening for me, a deepening of my thinking
about life and humanity, and how the world’s
people relate to each other. I’m sure the whole experience will echo inside me for years to come.”
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