Sea of Dreams explores artists’ portrayal of Port Phillip Bay

THE Sea of Dreams exhibition deals with representations of Port Phillip Bay by artists in the 20th century.

Kept at bay

THE seaside has a long association with melancholy. In the first expression of this emotion in Western literature, Achilles walks along the beach, then sits staring out at the sea and weeping, after his confrontation with Agamemnon in Book I of the Iliad. Odysseus too, exiled on CalypsoÂ’s island, spends his days on a headland looking out over the waves and longing for home, although he finds consolation at night in CalypsoÂ’s bed. Again, it is near the seashore and beyond the Pillars of Hercules that Odysseus finds the entrance to the underworld.

For sailors, the sea is a necessary evil: the only way to travel anywhere else yet always fraught with menace. A subgenre of poetic epitaphs on those lost at sea arose in Greece, reflecting on the grim fate of men who drowned and whose remains could never be given the funerary rites necessary to ensure safe passage into the next life.

In one of the most mysterious passages in the Aeneid, sleep overcomes the helmsman Palinurus. He falls into the sea and drowns, while the poet apostrophises him in a rare and solemn instance of second-person address. In the 20th century, Cyril Connolly took the fate of Palinurus as emblematic of the modern condition - and adopted the name as a pseudonym - in his little book The Unquiet Grave (1944).

For the romantics, the sea was a quintessentially sublime subject evoking, like other majestic spectacles of nature, an inhuman power beyond our control that inspires us at once with terror and exhilaration. It was not until the later 19th century, when railways allowed easy access to the coast and the growth of cities made escape to the country more urgent, that the seaside became domesticated as a holiday place.

This was the subject of an exhibition at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery a couple of years ago, Sea of Dreams (2012), which dealt with early images of the various towns and resorts of Port Phillip Bay, the enormous body of water - so extensive that one can almost forget it is enclosed - on which Melbourne is situated as well. This year’s exhibition is the sequel to that earlier show, dealing with representations of the area by artists in the 20th century.

It makes one reflect on the place of seascapes in Australian art history. As a people who came here by sea and who live almost entirely along a narrow coastal fringe, one might expect the water to be central to our painting. In fact, however, the most significant figures in the landscape tradition that is the backbone of Australian art have concentrated on inland views: John Glover, Eugene von Guerard, Louis Buvelot, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Hans Heysen, Sidney Nolan, Russell Drysdale, Arthur Boyd and Fred Williams.

It is in the inland that we have found the imagery of discovery, of settlement, and later the symbolic setting of alienation and existential struggle. It is away from the sea that we seem to locate the site of serious engagement with the land and even our quest for identity.

On the other hand the seaside, which we discovered as a place for leisure at the same time as others in the Western world, has become for us even more important as a place of pleasure and escape. Perhaps because the inland is such a serious place, we have had to convert the seaside into our playground.

But here we encounter once again the contrast between Sydney and Melbourne, which I discussed in reviewing the first half of the exhibition. For if the beach in Sydney - the ocean beach with its restless surf - tends to be sensual and even bacchanalian, the beach in Melbourne has a very different character.

The earliest pictures in the exhibition emphasise the stillness of the enclosed sea, more akin to the waters of a vast lake than to those of the ocean. In Streeton’s little painting - a rare example, for him, of a house-portrait - of the beautiful beach house of Arthur Baillieu at Point King (1920), the father of Sunday Reed, we could almost be looking at a quiet day on the Mediterranean coast. In Penleigh Boyd’s much broader view of Portsea (1921), seen from a higher vantage point, the stillness is more explicitly revealed as a general condition rather than a passing phase.

Boyd’s painting shows something else, too: the long wharf speaks of the shallowness of the water, further emphasising the quietness, the seeming harmlessness of a sea in which several other pictures, including one by his nephew Arthur as a teenager, show children paddling. Only the shady thickets of coastal scrub in the foreground hint at any darker or more secret dimensions to this seaside world.

Some of its most eloquent evocations are by Clarice Beckett, whose paintings in fresh but subdued colours are permeated by a sense of inner life and yet remain as reticent as her little picture of a woman on the beach with a parasol, turning her face away from us. In Boatshed, Beaumaris (c. 1928), a man stands on a jetty outside a boatshed, characteristically with his back to us so that we don’t confront him but rather share in his own absorption in the moment. The quietest and most minimal picture of all, Silver Morning, near Beaumaris (c. 1931) is a monochrome sketch of the sea at dawn in which an unpainted stretch of cardboard stands for the sand of the beach.

It is an environment conducive to inwardness and alien to the sublime, and yet there is an element of menace beneath the flat stillness, and this naturally tends to be expressed by artists during World War II, projecting their own fear and anxiety on to their environment. Thus Sidney Nolan painted his ostensibly sensual, if in fact rather claustrophobic, Bathers in 1943, based on childhood memories of the St Kilda Baths, and two years later produced the more overtly frightening Fire at the Palais de Danse, recalling once again, but now with an angst not recognised at the time, a scene he had witnessed as a child.

St Kilda was also the inspiration of Albert Tucker’s pictures deploring what he saw as an outbreak of debauched behaviour during the war - in one case combining a couple of his stylised harlot figures with their truncated limbs and red scimitar mouths with a recollection of his own, perhaps neurotically exaggerated terror at nearly being run over by an approaching tram. Tucker’s wife, Joy Hester, produced her own image of the sinister reality that could lie behind the party-time world of St Kilda: an inert and characteristically flattened figure of a woman lying on the ground in front of the grinning mouth of the St Kilda version of Luna Park (1946).

Less socially specific in the malaise they imply are a tormented landscape by John Perceval (1946), with gathering clouds on the horizon, tangles of inhospitable coastal vegetation and shallow water ebbing and flowing fitfully around rocks, and much later an almost empty beach by his brother-in-law Arthur Boyd, in the middle of which lies a stranded stingray (1968). It turns towards us its quasi-human features, a metaphor of anguish for the artist, while a dog races across the sand as though to tear it to pieces.

Most disturbing of all is a small painting by Charles Blackman, Man Floating (1953), in which what could be a pleasant summer relaxation seems to be transformed into the torment of a damned soul in hell, the anguished body reaching up out of the dead calm of the water against a blood-red sunset sky.

In more recent decades, artists have recorded the devastation of the environment by urban sprawl and industrial development. Jan Senbergs’s Geelong Road (2004) reveals a landscape blighted by overbuilding and scarred by the expressway cutting through it; Jon Cattapan’s Footscray Chemical (1989) recalls a disastrous fire at a harbourside chemical dump, at the time the worst that had ever occurred; as it happened it was soon outdone by an even more destructive conflagration.

At the same time, it is fascinating to see the darkness of the bay, dormant in the earlier period, awakened into images of clouds, winds and storms. Julian Twigg’s Five Ships, Melbourne (2011) depicts a gathering storm with livid sky and threatening, choppy water. A sudden squall that blows up and overturns a fishing boat is the subject of one of Richard Lewer’s simple and touching animations. Rick Amor, who was born in Frankston, also has a small but striking storm painting: under the massive timbers of an old wharf, a man runs along a narrow wooden jetty, alarmed by the huge swell of the sea behind him.

Frankston today has a bad reputation as a centre of unemployment, welfare dependency and crime, while other former beach resorts have simply been overrun, like so much of the Australian coastline, by an relentless suburbanism, even as formerly rudimentary but charming beach houses have been replaced with massive concrete bunkers.

There is even further from the handsome Baillieu house painted by Streeton, perched on a headland in what was still nearly virgin landscape, to the world of the caravan park evoked in Matthew Sleeth’s photograph, part of a series inspired by a place in which the artist used to spend holidays as a child. The series is called Rosebud, and while the artist no doubts intends some recollection of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, there is a place called Rosebud, farther south beyond Mornington.

Caravan parks can be fun for holidays in the right circumstances, but their permanent residents are not on holiday. They are usually poor, often single men, and they frequently suffer from loneliness, depression and alcoholism. The figure in Sleeth’s photograph is typical enough. Overweight, dishevelled, he sits in camp chair in front of one of those lean-to extensions to caravans that are crammed full of furniture, television sets and refrigerators. Neither living in a house nor camping in a tent, his is an existence surrounded by all the paraphernalia of suburban life without the benefit of a proper home.

Far from the drama, pathos and grime of human existence Siri Hayes’s little video of seahorses, with a musical soundtrack listened to through headphones, makes a charming and even bewitching finale. The tiny creatures with their improbable and poetic forms twist and dance underwater as they guard their territory, reminders of another order of existence and another kind of depth and complexity that lies under the impassive surface of Port Phillip Bay.

Sea of dreams: Port Phillip Bay 1915-2013, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery to March 2