Hutcheson, Margot

University of Queensland eSpace

FEBRUARY 2016
FRYERF olios
ISSN 1834-1004
Fryer Library, The University of Queensland
Volume 10 | Number 1 | FEBRUARY 2016
LAST WORDS: THE GALLIPOLI DIARY OF  
ALLAN WILLIAM NASH (1879-1915)  3
Simon Farley
DIARY OF A TURKISH SOLDIER 6
Laurie Hergenhan
FROM THE COLLECTION:  
IN THE LAND OF THE BUNYA 10
Marion Diamond
JAMES GEORGE DRAKE, THE BOOMERANG 
AND QUEENSLAND POLITICS 12
Lyndon Megarrity
ROMAN PAVLYSHYN ARCHITECT: PATRIOT 16
Don Watson
PETER AND THE CHINOOK 20
Margot Hutcheson
GEORGE LANDEN DANN:  
A DRAMATIC HISTORY IN QUEENSLAND 21
Susan Davis
JUDITH WRIGHT IN QUEENSLAND:  
A CENTENARY TRIBUTE 24
Ruth Blair
GREGORY ROGERS’ WORK FINDS ITS WAY HOME  
TO THE FRYER LIBRARY 25
Robyn Sheahan-Bright
WHAT’S NEW 28 
Simon Farley
DIGITISATION UPDATE 32 
Elizabeth Alvey
FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY 34 
Erin Pearl
OBITUARIES: META TRUSCOTT, PAUL SHERMAN 38
Penny Whiteway, Robyn Sheahan-Bright
Editors  Marion Diamond, Simon Farley, Chris Tiffin, Penny Whiteway 
Photographer Kaylene Biggs, Anjanette Webb, Penny Whiteway, Andrew Yeo
Graphic designer Lilly Borchardt
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Front cover: Map of a railway line from Berlin to 
Adrianópolis. In ‘Diary of a Turkish Soldier who 
fought at Gallipoli’, F592, Fryer Library, University of 
Queensland Library.
Last Words:
The Gallipoli Diary of
Allan William Nash
(1879-1915)
UQ LIBRARY2
Peter and the Chinook
Living in two leaky cabins on the edge 
of a rainforest without running water, 
electricity or any form of modern 
communications, without any modern 
conveniences at all, was in some ways 
a utopian dream. I lived in a valley in 
South-East Queensland on three blocks 
of land, which added up to about three 
hundred acres. In this community there 
were twelve to fifteen other households, 
people living in buildings of similarly 
eccentric construction to mine, all 
reflecting their owners’ little foibles. One 
house was built of stone, like a fortress, 
inaccessible by vehicle.
I wanted to live for a time outside of 
society, I had no real political philosophy, 
except a rejection of authority and 
an intent to do it differently. However 
amongst all of us in the valley there was 
certainly an environmental ideology and 
an overwhelming desire to live a good 
life. The community ban on tree felling 
has surely paid off. After forty years of 
bush regeneration the valley is alive, 
drumming out life, wherever you look 
trees grown huge and elegant. Even 
forty years ago it was insect noisy there 
but now it’s like a huge bush symphony. 
Of course there is always trouble in 
paradise and problems came in cars 
with policemen, and by helicopter 
with the army. I never knew what they 
were doing flying over at tree-top level, 
like a lost scene from Apocalypse 
Now. We seemed such a harmless 
mob, but the Queensland of the 70s 
hated hippies and all non-conformists. 
When in 1979 I went to visit a friend in 
Nambour Hospital and a top cop pulled 
me into a room to show me a map 
and ask me where I lived, with all our 
houses marked accurately and some 
of our names, it became obvious that 
they’d been researching the valley for 
some time. This is what the Chinooks 
disturbing our peace meant, mapping 
the hippies, and I had thought I was 
invisible, living an anonymous hippy life 
in the Queensland bush. We must have 
been so obvious.   
When I saw the photo of two rustic 
cabins and some fruit trees for sale in 
a Queensland rainforest, posted on a 
handmade ad in the Balmain health 
food store window in Sydney in 1976, 
I didn’t know any of these things. I just 
knew I had to buy it, live there in that 
strangely welcoming, enticing, green and 
curious  place.  I was imagining an exotic 
paradise to leap into, to paint, pick fruit 
off the trees, be with other people who 
also wanted to live differently, the only 
thing to fear would be the serpents.   
I must have been dreaming. Even then, in 
the time before instant communications, 
before Google, the Internet, mobiles, 
before everything terrestrial  was known 
and documented; who was living and 
where they were living was known. It’s 
just that I didn’t know that it was all 
recorded. Paranoia sneaked in with me to 
this idyll.
So I painted Peter in his beautiful Hibiscus 
Hawaiian shirt standing in the vegetable 
garden, the cabbage white butterflies 
fluttering about in between eating the 
cabbages, the rainforest and a banana 
grove in the background, pawpaw trees 
along the fence line, a choko growing 
along the fence that kept the wallabies 
from eating everything. Then from the 
corner of the eye, the noisy insect war 
machine which can’t be ignored, the 
maggot in the luscious fruit.
I painted the largest work I’d yet 
attempted in the bedroom hut, beside the 
bed. It must have been winter because 
in the photos I have a jumper on. It hung 
on the wall in the other hut until I left the 
valley and then in the kitchen in Louisa Rd 
for some years. I’m very happy that it has 
found a new and permanent home in the 
Fryer Library, some two hours drive from 
where it was painted.
MARGOT HUTCHESON is an English 
artist, based in Buckinghamshire, who 
has lived and worked for long periods 
in Australia and Spain. In 1974, she left 
Britain for Australia, where she lived with 
the writer Peter Carey in an alternative 
community in Yandina, Queensland 
before moving to Bellingen on the mid-
North Coast of NSW. 
In 2009, her painting Wasn’t the 
Fitzgerald Inquiry fun? was part of an 
exhibition of The Fitzgerald Collection 
at Queensland College of Art College 
Gallery. Margot’s work is held in the 
collections of the National Gallery of 
Victoria, the University of New South 
Wales, Artbank and the Museum of 
Contemporary Art, Brisbane.
The Margot Hutcheson Collection, 
acquired by the Fryer Library in 2015, 
includes correspondence, photographs 
and artworks. 
Image: Peter and the Chinook (c. 1979), Oil on 
canvas, 130 x 160cm
MARGOT HUTCHESON
UQ LIBRARY20


Peter and the Chinook

http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:383545/ff10_1_2016_p20.pdf

Peter and the Chinook

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