Breaking Bread: Gavin Fry - writer, publisher and artist

The 72-year-old writer, publisher and artist is looking at not just the water but something that flows through his paintings. 

Fry finds inspiration in harbour life, in the buildings around its edges, and in the vessels that glide across it. His paintings are currently being exhibited at Cooks Hill Galleries.

For Newcastle viewers, the subjects are close to home.

The harbour landmarks, from Nobbys to the grain terminal, feature in Fry’s bold and geometric compositions, in an exhibition titled Home Port.   

“There is a very basic rule, and that is ‘paint what you know’,” he explains while eating pumpkin risotto at The Wickham Boatshed.

“And I know about the harbour, I know about the sea, I know a bit about ships. It’s the thing I see all the time, I’m familiar with it. I love the forms, you could look at the [grain] silo from every different angle and it’s totally different.

“When you see something across the water, you’re able to get a perspective and a clarity you don’t get purely on the land.”

In the past few years, Fry has gained a new perspective and clarity in his own working life.

During his long career in Australia’s cultural landscape, he has written books about art and artists, and he’s held senior positions in galleries and museums, including about 12 years as the director of Newcastle Museum. 

But by picking up the brushes and making marks on canvas to depict the harbour, Fry has returned to his own creative home port. He has re-engaged with what led him to a career in the arts in the first place.    

GAVIN Fry was born in 1946 in Melbourne, the youngest of three children of a police detective father and a mother who loved art. 

For young Gavin, being surrounded by pictures was part of everyday life. His mother and maternal grandmother knew local artists who were making a name for themselves, such as Danila Vassilieff and Adrian Lawlor, and their paintings ended up in the Fry home. 

“The paintings we had at home weren’t like the pictures other people had at home, if they had pictures in any way at all,” he recalls, adding that their presence taught him “art is a nice thing to have around, and it made your life more interesting”.

It also provided source material for later in Fry’s life. For his Master of Arts, Fry wrote a thesis on Adrian Lawlor.

When he was at school, Fry says, “I really wanted to be an artist, but I have to say I knew that being an artist was a fairly precarious occupation”. 

He enrolled in courses to become an art teacher. But once he was working in high schools in regional Victoria, Fry was unfulfilled.

“I liked teaching, but I didn’t like schools very much,” he says. “They were just dull. I’d look at the principal or senior master and say, ‘Do I aspire to that? Is that what I really want to do with my life?’. I knew I wanted more. I wasn’t quite sure what ‘more’ was.”

While he was doing a little painting in his spare time, the demands of the job meant his creative energy was going into being a teacher. Painting drifted further away, but the study of it came closer.

Fry and his new wife, Colleen, a fellow teacher, moved to Melbourne. He landed a job as an art lecturer at the State College of Victoria and headed to university for further study. Fry had answered the “more” question. He wanted to work in galleries and museums, “and it all bowled on from there”.   

In 1980, Fry received two job offers on the same day. He had a choice. Director of Bendigo Art Gallery. Or the curator of art at the Australian War Memorial. 

“I had no idea what a bloody curator did!,” he recalls. 

But Fry did know about Australian war art. As a boy, he would flick through his father’s collection of armed services Christmas books, which were illustrated by war artists, so “I knew all those pictures off by heart”. 

Fry opted for the Memorial job. He was aged 34: “So I’m starting behind most of my peers, and I knew I had to get ahead more quickly. I thought I’d learn more and pick up more in a big institution than I would in a small one.”

Through the Memorial, Fry came to know some of Australia’s best-known artists, such as Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and William Dargie. 

He learnt more about the power of war art, how a painter such as Ivor Hele could portray a battlefield burial of three soldiers and say so much without words.

Fry began telling the stories of artists and their place in Australian life, through writing. He has written more than 20 books. 

“With the art books, I don’t go into great detail about a picture,” he says, adding he avoids art theory. “If I write a book, I want to answer the questions ordinary people ask. If you can tell the stories of why something is so – and there is always a story there, and I like to tell the stories – then people can better understand what the picture is, and why it’s like it is.”

By the mid 1980s, Fry felt the urge to “kick things along”. So he, Colleen and their two sons spent a year in England. He did a Master of Philosophy at the University of Leicester, studying the architecture of recent British museums, “which was a good excuse to go around the countryside”. 

But there was a deeper reason for doing the course.

With Australia’s bicentennial year approaching, Fry figured the nation’s growing desire to look back would lead to new museums. He was right. In 1987, he became involved in creating the Australian National Maritime Museum at Darling Harbour, as its deputy director.  

While he relished the opportunity to work at a new museum, Fry doesn’t have salt water in his veins. He is not obsessed with ships (he much prefers cars), although he did own a small sailboat for a while in the 1990s: “One of the things I knew from the museum was … how much boats cost. Intimately how much they cost! And that would scare the pants off anyone!”

By the early 1990s, Fry was exhausted from helping establish the maritime museum, and his marriage had ended. He headed to Canberra for a while, “playing being a public servant”, before returning to Sydney to run a small museum at Fairfield.

Then in 1999, the director’s job at Newcastle Museum came up. Fry was interested: “I’d done the big museum. I’d done the really small one. And this was Goldilocks, this was the one in the middle. I thought it was big enough to do stuff, but not too big that you’d have to play politics all day long.”

Fry had been to Newcastle before, in 1988. He’d been invited by a Navy friend to sail out of the harbour on HMAS Canberra.

As he recalls that visit, Fry looks across to the Carrington wharves, where the William the Fourth paddle steamer replica is berthed.  

“I can still remember the bloody William the Fourth coming alongside,” he says, wincing, of his day on the warship. “If I’d known then I was going to be responsible for that thing, I would have got in and sunk it!” 

As museum director, Fry had to navigate the financial and logistical storms besetting the ship. But he had other huge challenges, including moving the museum from Newcastle West to the former railway workshops at Honeysuckle.

“Being immodest, it was my idea,” Fry says of the move. “I was riding my bike around there one day and looking in through the windows and thinking, ‘Great big spaces, look at the location’. The buildings were perfect.”

From the moment he peered through the windows to the official opening, a decade of planning, negotiations and controversies passed by: “I still think it was the right thing at the right time in the right place.” 

Newcastle Museum opened in the new location in August 2011. Fry retired two months later. 

“I was 65. I had so many things I wanted to do,” he explains. “I had a number of writing projects I was doing.”

However, Fry had learnt that when he immersed himself in telling the story of an artist’s life, it was counter-productive to him pursuing his own art: “You’re head is so full of what they do … you’re going to end up being influenced by them, even if it’s unconscious.”

But soon after he retired, Fry was in Victoria, and his mother and a friend encouraged him to start painting again.

He did a “trite little landscape”, but it was enough for him to think, “Yeah, maybe there is something for me to do here”. After a four-decade break, he was back to his brushes.

Now Fry is painting his “home port”. He has stayed in Newcastle primarily because of “true love”. He met his partner of about 13 years, Rebecca Gresham, at the art gallery.

But he also likes the “personality” of Newcastle and, as a place to paint, it offers “an infinite variety of subjects and textures”. 

He will keep writing, but Fry is relishing his rediscovered joy of telling stories through painting.  

“There’s nothing more satisfying than someone saying, ‘I really like that, and I’ll buy it’,” he says. “It’s not about the money, it’s that somebody wants it enough that they want to live with it.”