Newtown 1978 & 1999

I was part of the generation of young people who moved into the Newtown area of Sydney’s inner west in the early 1970s. It was a place where houses were falling down, rent was cheap, and you couldn’t buy a coffee on King Street, let alone a smashed avocado. Painting on site over a couple of years, I made a number of small sketches of the suburb’s houses and factories, which I composed into the large painting Newtown. Exhibited at Watters Gallery in 1978, this was purchased for the Art Gallery of NSW by Patrick White.

In the late 1990s, after a number of years of rural life, I returned to Newtown. In my absence it had become a place with tree-lined streets and renovated terraces painted in ‘Heritage’ colours. Many of the factories were gone. So were the old battlers. I explored and painted Newtown again. This time, the finished work (exhibited at Watters Gallery in 1999) was purchased by a mortgage broker: a sign of the times.