TIME AND CHANCE

This brief biography of the extraordinary life of the artist Ralph Podolski was written to accompany the retrospective of his work to be mounted at Gosford Art Gallery in January 2024.

My name is Ralph Podolski. I am a painter, of course among many other things. I live on the Central Coast of New South Wales. The year is 2023. I am 95 years old, and this is my story.

I was born Raphael Podolski in the eastern Polish city of Lublin on 22 November 1927. However, my passport and other official papers, including my birth certificate, give my birth date as 1 January 1928. That was my mother’s doing, her way of making sure I could avoid doing four years of National Service in the Polish Military. The school year finished in June and as a graduate then I would have had to do the obligatory military service. But if I finished high school on 1^st January 1928 I would be eligible to go straight into university, and in that way the Army could not touch me. Even today, my NSW driver’s license gives my date of birth as 1 January 1928.

My mother, Maria, was a primary school teacher in a school in a suburb of Lublin. My parents met on a little bridge over the Vistula River there. It was love at first sight. I was their only child.

My father was Jan Podolski. In 1912 he was banished from what became Poland (which country didn’t in fact exist politically until independence in 1918 – and even that was temporary) because he’d become involved in an anti-Tsarist movement. He managed to migrate via Trieste in Italy to the United States, where he was housed at Ellis Island in New York harbour. It was the largest immigration station in the US. More than 12 million people were processed there in the 60 years to 1954. Ellis Island is now part of the Statue of Liberty National Park.

My father started studies in medicine. In 1917 he was drafted into the Medical Corps of the United States Army as a medical orderly during World War 1. He was honorably discharged in 1920.

After the War he started a large shoe-making company called Polus with branches in 13 American cities. In 1925 he returned to Poland to set up the shoe making business there, with factories in nine cities. Then came the Great Depression in 1929, when all the businesses in the United States and everywhere else went belly-up. My father’s assets were all in America and he didn’t manage to transfer them to Poland, so his company went bankrupt and he lost an enormous amount of money. The big company in competition with Polus was Bata, and because their business was based in Czechoslovakia, not in America, Bata survived and flourishes to this day. The Polus factories for shoe making in Poland were turned over by the authorities into spaces for the homeless.

When I’d just been born, father came to the hospital and said to mother, “I’ve bought a property in the country.” Mother burst into tears. I spent my first three years in Lublin and then with my parents moved to a country estate in central eastern Poland. From here, I first saw the movies, and theatre, and heard music. I can’t remember the name of the first movie I went to with my mother – I was very young – but perhaps it was Dracula, because I do remember my mother covering my eyes when she thought there were bits I shouldn’t see.

Our place was three and a half kilometres through a thick forest to the city of Jozefow, where I had two friends, a boy and a girl, the children of the Mayor. One day when I was about 6 I got up very early and went to the lady who did sewing and domestic work on the farm to get her to do up the buttons on my trousers for me, since I was too small to manage that myself. Then I set out through the forest to visit my friends. I arrived about seven o’clock in the morning, to their surprise. What they didn’t realise was that by then one of the large lakes on our farm had already been drained as people searched for my drowned body. But luckily the lady who did the sewing said “Oh yes, he must have gone somewhere, because I had to button his trousers.” Anyway, I became famous as the 6 year old boy who walked alone through the forest!

Later we moved to a suburb of Warsaw, where I started high school at age 12, just as the war began. On 1^st of January 1939, my first day at school, I saw the first German plane fly overhead. It was about 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Little silver planes flying left to right in formation of threes. They were going to bomb the airfield near us, and the bridges, and the centre of Warsaw. Everyone was at their windows and balconies, looking up. One old lady was shouting, “get out, go away” and she was very angry when they took no notice. After that first day, the bombers started at 4 o’clock in the morning, bombs everywhere. When the sirens went we went to the centre of our house, but we were in a suburb of Warsaw, which wasn’t bombed.

After that my education was spasmodic and was in secret. You were not allowed to get a high school education under the German occupation. Even in primary school no history was to be taught, and no Polish language to be used. Only trades were allowed to be taught – good preparation for slave labourers. My education, such as it was, happened privately, in the streets, so to speak. Groups of four or five of us would go a teacher’s house, or if you could afford it you would pay for a teacher to come to your house three or four times a week. You had to be careful. There were machine guns at the corner of streets. There was a curfew from 8pm. If you were on the streets after that time you were arrested – or shot.

Our property was taken over by the Germans, we weren’t allowed in. My mother and myself went to a nearby city of Jozefow, which was the centre of the Polish Underground and where food was available and there were teachers. I found out that my teacher, Konrad Bartoszewski, was the Commanding Officer for this area of the Underground. His pseudonym was Zadora. He was in charge until 1943 when he was shot and spent time in hospital before returning to command in Josefow.

 Initially, the Underground developed spontaneously and involved everyone –soldiers, teachers, shop keepers, students, clergymen, doctors, whole families. There were many different groups, all of them well organized but also secret. The unifying goal was to collect and store armaments and ammunition, and use them against the Germans. Activities included destroying German supply lines (bridges, roads, railway lines) and providing intelligence reports to the British. Part of this intelligence, from 1942, was a report to the Polish government-in-exile in London, and also to the British and US governments, on the Holocaust of the Jews. This was ignored or disbelieved, or thought to be exaggerated.

Eventually the various Resistance groups took on a military character, with squads, platoons and companies, and training camps for infantry and for nurses. It is estimated that the Polish Resistance organization was the largest in Europe, with a strength of 650,000 people. The Nazis insisted on calling members of the underground army “bandits”.

We were all in different branches of the Polish Underground, I was in Kedi. Our duty was to be always armed, and always on call, 24 hours a day. I was armed with a 9mm handgun in the back waistband of my trousers. I was still going to my education whenever I could, but one day – when I was 15 and a half - I’d been on duty in the forest when I was wounded. I still have the scars of two wounds in my lower leg, nearly 80 years later.

This is what happened. The German grenades were an explosive ball on the end of a wooden throwing stick. We, the Resistance fighters, were armed with automatic weapons. Rifles are useless in a forest setting. In fights in a forest, when you shelter behind a tree, you turn your back to it to protect your back. And you’re always erect, to minimize you as a target and to be ready to move quickly. You work in threes, one to run, the others to cover. The Germans worked in fives, and were always confused about who was supposed to run, who to cover. On this one occasion I came to a tree, looked around, and was noticed by three Germans. One of them threw a hand grenade at me. It came to my right hand side. I threw myself to the left, flat onto the ground. When the grenade exploded, two pieces of wood and metal stuck in my leg. The explosion had caused me to lose consciousness. When I woke up, the Germans were dead. When the other Resistance fighters came to me they said “Oh , you’re alive, we thought you were dead.” They pulled the pieces of metal and wood out of my leg – and luckily, because they were so hot, they had cauterized the wounds and I didn’t bleed to death. The Resistance notified the Polish government in London, who notified Warsaw, who notified my parents. My mother was hysterical and insisted I be transferred back to Warsaw, where I recovered while living with my mother and father.

I’d got into the Underground at first by working in printing works that were in the forest. I was doing leaflets, drawings, all sorts of things for the whole area. There was a weekly bulletin printed by the Resistance, called Biuletyn Informacyjny. It was clandestinely pinned up on lamp posts, or left on tram seats, or in hallways of apartment buildings.

The fighters said to me, “Look if the Germans grab you they’re going to shoot you anyway, so we may as well swear you in.” I was the youngest sworn-in boy in Poland, at 15 and a half I was a line soldier, a Private First Class. When you are being enlisted, they test you for your ability to shoot. I was sensational – skill with a rifle of one in 100,000 people.

1^st of September 1944 there was an Uprising in Warsaw. It was the largest military effort by any Resistance movement in WW2. It was timed to coincide with the retreat of the German forces from Warsaw ahead of the Soviet advance. The idea was to liberate Warsaw, so that the government-in-exile could return and prevent a communist takeover. But the Soviets halted their advance, which gave the Germans time to regroup and defeat the Poles – and destroy more than 80% of the city in retaliation for the Uprising. About 16,000 Resistance fighters and 200,000 civilians were killed, mostly in mass executions. The Soviet army and air force, which could have supported the Poles, instead held back, presumably hoping to see the Resistance crushed. The Uprising lasted 63 days and ended with the surrender of the Polish forces. The main beneficiary was Stalin, who was able to impose a communist government with little fear of armed resistance.

During the Uprising, the area that I was in at the time was in a suburb on the other side of the Vistula River from central Warsaw, where most of the Polish Underground was fighting the Germans. On my side of the river, where there about 7,000 of us, the Russians were coming, still about 25 kilometers away. At this stage of War (before Hitler decided to invade Russia), the Nazis and the Russians, along with the Italians, were allies. All of them wanted to conquer and rule our land.

 The Germans had their famous Panzer (tank) Viking Division and their other tanks as well. Oh, you can’t fight the tanks. We were wiped out. My best friend was shot dead. It was pitiful. Our commanders said, “Drop everything. Bury the weapons and pretend to be civilians.” So I changed out of my uniform and joined my mother and father, as civilians. We were arrested by the Gestapo (which means Secret Security Police). The Germans rounded up all the civilians and those they didn’t execute straight away were  put into a labour camp or a concentration camp.

Between 1933 and 1945 Nazi Germany established more than 44,000 camps and ghettos. One of these was a concentration camp to the east of Lublin, to kill targeted groups – Jews, members of the Resistance – and to provide slave labourers.

I was taken with my father to the Mittel-Dora concentration camp five miles from Nordhausen and then to Gross-Rosen, which was south west of Wroclaw. It is now part of the Polish territories that were recovered from the Germans. We were transported by overloaded cargo train for six days and five nights. The train came to a stop well after sunset. We waited a long time listening to outside sounds until a man peeked out and said “We’ve arrived. Guards are lined up with dogs. Place is called Gross-Rosen.” The doors of the carriages slid open, letting in the night and the sight and sound of the screaming guards and letting out the filth and stink of the journey. The cold air was a relief but our legs were quivering from lack of use.

“Raus! Schnell! Aussteigen!” (Out! Quickly! Exit!)

The SS guards lined us up under arc lights, five per row, a long line of scarecrows in the weird illumination. My father and I had been in the carriage that was emptied first, so we ended up at the head of the marching column.

The hamlets we went through were really charming: neat houses, neat orchards, neat fields, neat pastures. Along the road every person living there was lined up to watch the spectacle of scarecrows trudging along to their destination, the concentration camp already visible as a glow in the distance. It was Saturday evening, party time in Germany, we could hear music. Silent watchers in holiday finery relaxed in front of their houses, lights full on, no blackout or smell of burning people and buildings, no rattle of gunfire. There were girls in pretty dresses, and a sprinkle of military uniforms, soldiers on leave, all wearing side-arms. Oh yes, all was well in German territories in August of 1944.

The Gross-Rosen Koncentration Lager brimmed with lights. The gate was built of stones, arched, with machine gun nest on top and the infamous sign Arbeit Macht Frei. Two SS officers, one each side of the column of men, counted and recorded each line of 5 people on chalk blackboards. Very good at keeping records, the Nazis. The dead who hadn’t survived the train trip were brought in by wheelbarrow.

There were barbed wire fences, five rows of them, one electrified. Anyone approaching them was shot without warning.

Right past the gate was Appellplatz, the Muster Square. There 30,000 men lined up twice a day for a roll call, rain, snow or shine. The dead were brought in for the count too. In wheelbarrows.

The 1200 men from the notorious Gestapo prison Pawiak in Warsaw stood for 6 hours being processed by so-called Camp Administrators (prisoners appointed by the SS, mostly German, and mostly thieves or murderers).

I followed the man in front of me to a rapidly growing pile of clothing, where everyone stripped naked. Five piles: haberdashery, shoes, coats, trousers, underwear. Shivering in the buff I faced tables with stacks of forms to be filled. An SS man looked in my mouth and rectum to check for valuables. He ripped off a gold medallion given to me by mother for my First Communion when I was 9 years old, with an image of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa carved in solid gold with my name on the reverse and the date of the ceremony. The clerk processing me was middle aged, tall and spoke perfect Polish. “Look,” he said, “I’ll try to get this medallion back to you later. Can’t promise anything though.” Usually gold was melted down. The medallion didn’t come back to me.

I was given my number: a strip of white cloth, 12cm X 5cm imprinted with the number in black and a colour triangle, red for a political prisoner, yellow for Jew, green for criminal, black for saboteur, pink for homosexual. My triangle was red, my number 11711. My father was 11712.

There were 10 tables, so two rows of 5 prisoners could be handled at once. With 9 others I ran to another control point where my body was again scrutinized. Next came a hangar-like building with benches in 10 rows. Until now we were running along a corridor of SS men and dogs but now we sat down to have a haircut and then stood up for removal of all body hair. The man with the razor had the lilting accent of eastern Poland and the gnarled hands of a farm labourer but he was deft with the straight razor. He said, “Is your number 11711? That is a ‘dead number’ – someone had it before. I knew him. He was from Ukraine. Died quite a while ago. Kapos (prisoners who worked for the Nazis) beat him to death for stealing bread.”

I sat down again while another barber shaved a wide strip down the centre of my skull from forehead to the back of my neck. The barber explained this is called the louse highway. I just knew the hair would grow back uneven. I thought if I ever get out of this bloody place it will take eight months to regain normal appearance.

Father and I walked to a tent marked Bad (Bath). Inside was a waist-deep 20-foot wide ice-cold pool of cream-white liquid stinking of concentrated disinfectant. You had to wade across while SS men waited at the edge with sticks, to push your head under.

Finally clothes were issued: jacket, trousers, round visorless cap and wooden clogs like the Dutch wear. All clothing was from the same material, a mix of rough cloth and paper in stripes of blue and white. It would burn like paper when set alight.

Next came the barrack – our numbers were checked again then we were ordered to lie down in tight rows on straw spread on the floor. Hundreds of men hunched down, drying our wet clothes with our body heat. And we were the lucky ones. By chance we were inside and with nearly a whole night to rest. There were nearly 1100 men to be processed after us and they were standing out in the cold in their rows of five.

Over the next 11 months, between 1944 and 1945, I was in seven different concentration camps. Part of the time I was in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, 5 miles from the town centre of Nordhausen, where I was forced to work on the construction of V2 bombs.

The V1 and V2 flying bombs – also known as doodlebugs or buzzbombs, because of the sound they made in flight – were winged bombs powered by jet engines. The Nazis unleashed them on London between June 1944 and March 1945 in revenge for the Allies’ D-Day invasion of German-occupied France (the V stands for “vengeance” or “retaliation” ).

The V2 rocket, which stood as tall as a 4 storey building, blasted its way to the edge of space before falling back to earth at supersonic speed. Its targets were random and the silence of its final fall made it terrifying to the ordinary people below. The V2 rockets caused more than 30,000 English civilian deaths and left hundreds of thousands homeless.

V2 rockets were put together by tens of thousands of slave labourers from occupied Europe. Conditions were so brutal that it is said 20,000 slave labourers died making the V weapons. The Central Works, where I was forced to work, was a vast underground production plant, dug into the side of a mountain, near Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains in northern Germany. In fact for a concentration camp it was a “good” job for those of us working in underground tunnels, because we got just enough food to stop us from starving, when we wouldn’t have been able to work.

As the British were coming closer, we prisoners were forced to move from camp to camp, by open rail cars or on foot through mud and snow (the so-called death marches) as the Nazis tried to hide evidence of mass killings by moving prisoners from place to place away from advancing troops. About 250,000 prisoners from concentration camps died on the death marches.

My father eventually was left in Nordhausen while I was moved from camp to camp and ended up in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. There were 120,000 prisoners there, with no food, water or sanitation. More than 70,000 died, about half of those from starvation, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever or dysentery. Anne Frank died of typhus at age 15, two weeks before Bergen-Belsen was liberated. The other half of the 70,000 were killed by the Nazis. People were so sick that even after liberation another 14,000 died.

My father died in Nordhausen concentration camp, literally hours before the camp was liberated. He was 56 years old. I have a photo of his body taken after his death from dysentery. It is a still photo taken from a filmed record of the liberation of Nordhausen by the American 7^th Armoured Division, which I was able to see on a computer. He is lying slightly on his side, naked apart from some sort of ragged cloth covering part of his middle. His head is turned to the side and he was instantly recognizable. On the computer I had been going through chapter after chapter of the history of the 7^th Armoured Division. It was the 7th Division that took over Nordhausen, which was a transit camp, with people who were to be used to replace slave labourers as needed. I had been taken away to one of the work camps but my father already had dysentery then and he was left to die in Nordhausen.

I had been trying for 30 years to get information about him. One day, on the computer, in the records of the 7^th Division, this photo came up. I sent a copy of it away to Poland, and everybody recognized him. For the photo to be revealed to me on a computer screen after so many years of searching and wondering was miraculous, and horrifying.

My father was buried in a mass grave in Nordhausen. I have never been to see it. I have never been back to Poland, the country of my birth. I never could go back. I’d been in the unit of the Underground which was opposed to Russia. Poland came under communist control and my name was on a list that meant I was sentenced in absentia to 12 years hard labour.

All the concentration camp prisoners poured into the British area of attack. The Germans – who knew the game was up - agreed to allow the British to release all the prisoners. When the British were no more than 8kms from Bergen-Belsen, the Nazis offered to withdraw 18kms back to let the British deal with the thousands of dying prisoners.

 There was no food, nothing. I weighed 29 kilos, I could only walk by leaning against a wall, I was nearly comatose. That night I was on a wooden bed, lying head to toe with an officer from Yugoslavia. He died that night. He was dead in the morning. Not malnutrition alone, not dysentery alone. He was exhausted. He just died. I was still alive, but I was pretty close to death. I was 18 years old.

An orderly (one of the less-sick prisoners) came and said “Oh yes, you’re free.” I said “It’s too late, it’s too late.” He said “no no,” and two people took me under the arms to the window of the first floor of the building I was in and I saw my first two soldiers. They had little pom poms on their berets so I knew they were Scottish. I remember it all. I retain images, I have always been very visual.

They put me in the sick bay and slowly gave me milk and sugar, which was the right thing. Initially the British had started giving normal food to the prisoners, who died in terrible pain, their stomachs could not cope after all those years of starvation.

I was in the military hospital for 10 days, then I was measured for a uniform and I was back in the Polish Army, the 1^st Armoured Division, in Hanover. I could not actually go back to Poland, so in 1945 I went to Belgium, where I got a scholarship from the Polish government-in-exile to study drawing and painting at L’Acadamie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. I won three drawing and composition awards there. I still have one of the medals, with the coat of arms of Brussels.

It was my art work that had helped me survive in the concentration camp at Gross-Rosen – I made drawings of people in the camps for the prisoners, who sold them to the Germans; the currency for the sale was bread.

The scholarship was for 2,000 Belgian francs a month, which was very very tight. I lived in a tiny little attic room and I was doing very well. However I lost that scholarship when the communist New Polish Government was recognized by all the other countries. All the Polish money had been taken by cruiser to England in 1939 and deposited in the British Treasury. After the war, when the communists were in charge, they demanded the money back. The British gave it back, and in that moment, the scholarship ended. The Soviets offered to continue the scholarship, but on the condition that when the scholarship ended, I would go back to Poland. To 12 years hard labour!

When the communists took over Poland, the government-in-exile in London had no further existence, so by default I was discharged from the army.

From then on I had a pretty hard time. I had no money and no job – Belgium had too many people and too few jobs. Anyway as a foreign student I was not allowed to work. I slept on railway stations, but you can’t sleep on the same one for more than just one night, so I moved from railway station to railway station.

On and off I found work in Paris, designing advertising titles for the movies. I hitch hiked between Brussels and Paris, I could not afford the train.

At this time the Soviets were in control in Poland. After the official end of WW2 in 1945, the Soviets actually established more than 200 new concentration camps, as well as using existing ones. They ruthlessly hunted and killed Resistance members and civilians, an estimated 200,000 of them. So of course, with my background, I could not risk going home. New Polish Resistance groups formed – more than during the Nazi occupation. Even so, it was not until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 that the People’s Republic of Poland was free of the communists.

Eventually I applied for migration to Australia. For this to happen first I had to go back to Germany, to a Displaced Persons camp. After the war the Western Allies established DP camps all through the Allied-occupied areas of Germany, Austria and Italy. The first inhabitants of these camps were the survivors of concentration camps and many of the DP camps were in the grounds of former concentration camps or German army camps. So having survived horrors, the DPs were once again behind barbed wire, still existing on inadequate food and suffering from shortages of clothing and medical supplies.

I left from the port city of Bremerhaven – which is the largest city on the German north east coast, though during the war the Royal Air Force had almost bombed it out of existence. I arrived in Australia in March 1950 on the Migrant Ship Fairsea, with 1200 other people escaping Europe. We sailed via Port Said and Colombo. We were not allowed to leave the ship. We were supposed to be learning English but the teachers weren’t very experienced and they used only the “chorus method” with everyone repeating the same phrase at the same time.

We arrived in Melbourne and then went by train to Bonegilla Migrant Camp, east of Wodonga in north-east Victoria. It had been an old army camp that was transformed to house new arrivals while they were processed and allocated jobs. It had its own cinema, banks, churches, sporting fields, hospital, police station and railway platform. Most of the migrants – there were 300,000 of them by 1971 – were from non English speaking backgrounds, a complete novelty for Australia. Migrants had to work in Australia for a minimum of two years.

From Bonegilla the Commonwealth Employment Office sent me first to work at Geelong Grammar School (yes, where Prince Charles later was a student) as a labourer, working in the kitchen. After a year I got a bit of a better job in Melbourne, doing labourers’ work in a place that made pottery.

Then I was lucky to get almost normal employment, as a freight clerk with Ansett Airways in Melbourne, and I was there till my two years ended. After that I was able to start looking for work as a commercial artist. I got a job in a printing work in Latrobe Street, Melbourne, skilled work, well paid. And automatically I was accepted as a member of the union, the Printing and Kindred Industries Union (PKIU).

From there I worked my way up to become as close to a commercial artist as I could.

After two years I was able to declare my intention of becoming an Australian. After three years I confirmed it officially, and after five years I was sworn in.

My mother had been interned at Ravensbruck - the largest concentration camp for women, situated in northern Germany, 60 miles north of Berlin. In January 1945 there were more than 50,000 women in Ravensbruck. By April, when the camp was liberated by the Red Army, there were fewer than 3,500 malnourished, sickly and brutalized women. My mother was one of them. She went back to Poland. Initially she went to Lublin, then Warsaw, but our house had been ripped apart. So she went to the coast of the Baltic Sea, where she worked in the shipping industry in a secretarial capacity.

Once I was in Australia I tried to get my mother out of Poland to join me. I was almost through the process of getting the paperwork to allow her to come to Australia, when the Petrov affair ended diplomatic relations between Russia, Poland and Australia, and that door for my mother closed shut. My mother never left Poland and I never saw her again.

Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov had arrived in Australia in 1951, supposedly as diplomats at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra. In fact each had spent almost 20 years in the Soviet secret service (KGB). Joseph Stalin died in March 1953 and his ally Lavrently Beria was arrested and executed. The Petrovs were accused of being Beria supporters, and would probably have faced execution in Russia. In early 1954 Vladimir decided to defect – he did not inform his wife, who was told he had been kidnapped.

Evdokia was placed under house arrest in the Soviet Embassy in Canberra. Two burly couriers arrived from Moscow to “escort” Evdokia home. A large anti-communist protest at Mascot airport in Sydney failed to stop the plane from taking off for Darwin but ASIO radioed the pilot and when the plane arrived there, ASIO officers were waiting. After a well-publicized struggle - one photo of a distressed Mrs. Petrov losing a shoe while being man-handled went around the world - she was separated from her Moscow escorts. She was asked if she wanted to stay in Australia. After talking by phone to her husband and at the last moment before the plane took off, she chose to say yes.

The Petrovs were given new identities, as Sven and Anna Allyson and lived quiet lives in the Melbourne suburb of Bentleigh. Vladimir worked developing films (as he had done for many years for the Soviets!) and died in 1991. Evdokia worked as a typist and died in 2002.

I continued to work as a graphic artist in the printing business in Melbourne for a long time – it was a very well paid job. That was the time when I tried to bring mother over to join me in Australia. That could not happen but I settled down in Melbourne to a comfortable existence, living in tower block and then in a little flat in Toorak.

In 1959 I went to Canada to study at the Ontario College of Art, where I took part in several exhibitions. Then as Art Director at an art studio in Toronto and similarly in Vancouver, I travelled to many of the major cities in the United States as a consultant.

 In 1964 I returned to Australia and moved from Melbourne to Sydney, where until my retirement in 1982 I was the Visual Aids Officer at Institute of Technology (UTS).

Meanwhile I had met Rhonda Coogan. Rhonda was an Xray technician. The Coogan family was a very famous furniture manufacturer, with a chain of stores in Tasmania. Rhonda and I became friends and eventually married, in a church in Launceston.

Our daughter Yolanda was born in Sydney. She was always musical and by the time she was 14 she was organising and performing in school productions in Forestville, where we lived. It was obvious that Yolanda would pursue a career in music, and after Matriculation she studied at the Conservatorium of Music and went on to further training and singing (as a mezzo soprano) with Opera Australia. That was her life, first as Yolanda Podolski and after marriage to Ronnie as Yolanda Lorenzato, until the Covid pandemic closed down Opera Australia. 954 performances had to be cancelled and 80% of performers – including Yolanda – had to be stood down, on part wages. And then, post-pandemic, performers were re-hired when opera could be staged again, but only part time, as the company was re-structured to make sure it could stay viable. Yolando and Ronnie’s son Nino is now (in 2023) 16 years old. I am so thankful that Nino is not, as I was at 16, having to fight for his homeland’s existence.

Apart from my work, I was always doing my own painting, and took part in several exhibitions, including a very successful retrospective at the Journalists’ Club of NSW.

 I’d been drawing and painting since I was five years old, when I drew on the wall of our family home in indelible pencil. That was not the most appreciated of my creative efforts! 

As for my philosophy of art, the best way to explain this is to talk about the Archibald Prize. It’s a little parochial, a little local. The standard is based in producing winners. One of the most successful of the Archibald winners was John Olsen. As far as I’m concerned, his work was not good; little squiggles. My standard is the Masters: Rembrandt, van Dyck, van Gogh, people of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo. When I paint, these are the people I work towards. In 1971 I spent a year painting a portrait of Mr John McMillan, the Registrar of the NSW Institute of Technology (now UTS). I was surprised when such a classical style of portrait was named a finalist for the Archibald, but not surprised when it didn’t win.

In 1994 I moved to Killcare, on the Central Coast of NSW. I continued painting until, over the last few years, my failing eyesight would not allow that any more. It is very sad, but I am surrounded in this neighbourhood by lovely people, and my house is like my private art gallery of a life time’s work. I am so pleased too that my latest exhibition, a retrospective, is to be staged at the Gosford Art Gallery in NSW in January 2024.