Longneck
July 2013
When I heard that the Australian artist Jeffrey Smart had died, my thoughts turned to a fat man dressed in a blue-grey suit. In Smart’s famous 1962 painting ‘Cahill Expressway’, this unnamed man stands on the cusp of an empty road that leads into a dark, sinister tunnel. Above and beyond the man (he’s not privy to the vista) another road arcs up towards a lifeless landscape of building and lightpoles – and on to a monument upon which a figure reaches out and up, as if singing to the sky or beholding the wasteland of suburbia. I’m guessing it’s not supposed to, but for some reason ‘Cahill Expressway’ always makes me feel happy.
Smart was, he said, all about “putting the right shapes in the right colours in the right places” … with people, fat or otherwise, employed to deliver scale. And, sure, there’s something both gorgeous and utterly frightening about the arrangement of lines and curves in ‘Cahill Expressway’. But it is Smart’s blue-suited man who has always fascinated me. Peter Garrett-bald but less fit, he looks, at a distance, a touch surly – or perhaps he’s one of those people with inadvertently sour features. His front leg angles as if he’s holding a yoga position, strong but calm. His hand is shoved into a jacket pocket, or so I’d always thought: it turns out that the whole arm is missing, and sleeve pinned. According to Smart, “I gave him one arm in the Cahill Expressway picture because I happened to be thinking how unnerving the shape of a coat looks with one empty sleeve tucked into the pocket.”
Smart’s fat man is fascinating because he’s the only person in plain sight … perhaps the only human being left on earth. He’s fascinating because, as Smart once said, “Man has made prisons for himself in every city; and for the ordinary person escape is very difficult.” He’s fascinating because I don’t know what the hell he’s thinking – and I desperately want to know.
‘Cahill Expressway’ adorns the cover of Peter Carey’s debut collection of short stories, The Fat Man in History. For me, Smart and Carey remain inseparable. I imagine a cocksure young Carey – decades before he wrote True History of the Kelly Gang – studying ‘Cahill Expressway’ and then furiously writing his short story about a household of anti-revolutionary fat men who band together (sort of) to make ends meet while plotting to blow up – or eat – a political monument.
I don’t actually think that Carey wrote his story while staring at ‘Cahill Expressway’. In fact, in 1977 he told an interviewer that it was inspired by “a tribe called the Sirono in Bolivia or somewhere”. But even now, as I stare at my copy of The Fat Man in History, the painting jammed into the front cover’s bottom half, its colours faded and sunned, I feel as if the three of us – Smart, Carey and me – are in cahoots, in joint possession of secret knowledge about how people survive (or don’t) and resist (or don’t) and grow (or don’t).
I don’t know what art aficionados see when they look at a Smart canvas, but I see unsettling, thrilling stories. For years, I’ve wanted to write my own short story inspired by ‘Cahill Expressway’ (as a rule, writers spend a heap of time planning to write all sorts of stuff). As far back as 1989, Helen Daniel stole my idea (before I’d even had time to think of it) when she invited a bunch of Australian writers to pen stories in response to ‘Cahill Expressway’. I own a copy of the book she curated. But even though I hear it’s very good, I’ve never been able to talk myself into reading it.
Now is the right time for me to write my story – as a homage, however off the point, to Jeffrey Smart, prodder of imaginations. I have no idea what it’s going to be about, but in the meantime I’m standing my ground: no matter what Smart says, not matter that he painted the picture, my fat man’s arm is intact and his hand is firmly in his pocket. I don’t know why yet. Maybe he’s got a half-eaten tuna sandwich in there. Maybe he’s cut a hole in his pocket, and another in his business shirt, because he likes to be able to stroke his skin. I don’t think he’s a bad man … not all bad, at least. Neither do I think he’s trapped in a desolate world — he just hasn’t found the way out. Or in.
@PatrAllington
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