War

Always on the lookout for those rare early paintings of Brisbane, Kevin Lambkin located a highly accomplished oil of a Brisbane River scene at auction in Sydney in 2024. The painting was simply signed ‘Huston’, a name unknown to Kevin and to the painting’s Sydney auction cataloguer who suggested a New Zealand artist. The 1930s style of the painting’s original frame was a starting point for an intensive search of Trove. ‘Huston’ was Wyclif Emmanuel Huston, a highly talented youth from a dairy farm on Queensland’s Darling Downs whose art was much acclaimed in Queensland in the 1930s. His promising future, however, was interrupted by the war and after army service and moving to Melbourne his name virtually disappears from the record of Australian artists. Was he, as art historian the late Glenn Cooke suggested, yet another artistic casualty of World War II?

It is timely to showcase the lively drawings of an Australian on the Western Front in the Great War 100 years ago. Although the young man fought in those terrible trenches, most of his images have a quiet dignity. Only in the heat of a battle in which he was wounded, do you feel the horror of it all; his frantic charcoal marks leave an indelible impression of conflict. Miguel Mackinlay went on to become the ‘talk of the town’ being ‘hung on the line’ at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions in the competitive art world of early 1930s London. He never returned to Australia.

Dr Annette Gero’s article “Wartime quilts” in the May 2015 Australiana stimulated Peter Lane to contact her about an Anglo-Boer War keepsake. Trooper Ernest Worrall of South Australia had drawn images and words on this rather small scrap of khaki fabric in 1902. Mementoes of that war are rare and Dr Gero included it in her exhibition at the Manly Art Gallery and Museum. Here Peter reconstructs the sad life of Trooper Worrall.

Seldom do prisoner of war trench art objects indicate where they were made. One that does is carved from wood in the shape of continental Australia, with the words and date “Murchison den [the] 24.8.1941” together with a stylised Australian coat of arms.

World War I began 101 years ago. Galleries all around the world, including many in Australia, are having exhibitions with memories of this war. The Gallipoli campaign is particularly significant to Australians and New Zealanders this year, with the centenary on the first landing on 25 April 1915, and the withdrawal of the last Allied troops in January 1916. Dr Annette Gero is curating an exhibition of war quilts, and here she reveals some of the quilts that will be displayed at Manly Art Gallery and Museum from July.

The centenary of the First World War has Lesley Garrett bringing out her family’s mementoes of “the war to end all wars” – and regretting the loss of their context.