Gallipoli Art Prize salutes Geoff Harvey's paintings of Stockton War Memorial's silent warrior

The images were painted by Geoff Harvey, a Sydney painter whose father enlisted in World War II aged 16. Harvey's mother was born in Newcastle, and his partner's family also lives local.

"I come to Newcastle a lot, I'm familiar with it, and very fond of it," Harvey says.

"I do lots of Newcastle paintings."

The image on the cover of his just released book of paintings about Gallipoli is based on Fort Scratchley melded with thoughts of his father as a young enlistee.

"He used his brother's birth certificate," Harvey says.

"The fort symbolised what he was going to step into, going to war."

Harvey's father served in New Guinea. When his real age was discovered he was removed from the fighting forces to work in casualty clearance, helping to move wounded soldiers.

"I can't imagine how horrific that would have been for a 16-year-old boy," Harvey says.

"A lot of the time I'm thinking about my war imagery, I'm thinking about Dad, it's a connection I have with him."

In Harvey's book, The Gallipoli Series, images he painted are married with extracts of Ion Idriess' war diaries, which were first published in 1932 as The Desert Column.

Idriess started the diary as he readied to disembark a ship off Gallipoli. It "was a very young soldier's idea", he wrote, so that as an old man he would have "a private picture show" to refresh his memory.

He returned from the battlefields to become a celebrated author, and his war writings continue to shed light on a young soldier's brutal awakening: "I've only been here a few hours, but, by Jove, I've seen some dead men."

While Harvey paints war "out of my imagination", he has always used primary source material to develop understanding - starting with his father's wartime photographs.

"Like most fathers of the time, he never spoke much about the war," Harvey says.

As an art student is his early 20s, Harvey started to work from the photographs, which were printed in small scale. That imagery, like a silent way of speaking with his father, has been the most recurring theme of Harvey's work across more than five decades.

Wherever he travels Harvey is sad to note that every country town has a memorial, along with so many communities within cities. Such was the impact writ by more than one time of war.

On a trip to Newcastle last year, when he was out looking for a scene to paint, Harvey came across the war memorial at Stockton.

"I love Stockton," he says. "It has a very surreal feeling. There's a little bit of an Edward Hopper or Jeffrey Smart feel."

The memorial captivated him. "It's in a beautiful position, against the sea, container ships moving back and forwards across Newcastle Harbour," Harvey says. "There's something very poignant about ships coming and going, I think it's symbolic of the movement of the troops". To Harvey, war memorials stand eternal for those who didn't make it home. They are "stone warriors . . . silent sentinels of remembrance in an ever-changing landscape".

"I came up with the idea that it's actually the four seasons," he says of his Stockton images. "The fact that the lone soldier stands there throughout the changing of time, so it's a sequence of time represented in that."

Harvey has won the $20,000 acquisitive Gallipoli Art Prize twice with past entries, his last award was in 2021 with a work about waler horses and their lighthorsemen.

The publisher who brought Harvey and Idriess together in print, Tom Thompson of ETT Imprint, is an ancestor of Colonel Robert Scobie, of Maitland, who was one of the commanders at Gallipoli. Scobie was killed and buried at Lone Pine less than a year after he enlisted.

The Gallipoli Art Prize exhibition runs until May 8 at Cleland Bond Store, The Rocks

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