Hair-razing brush with history

A NEW exhibition surveys the facial hair of Australian men since colonisation.

Henry Parkes

FOR some men, facial hair is a matter of faith. For others it's a matter of practicality. But for most men the decision to grow a beard is a matter of taste.

Featuring everything from Henry Parkes's Moses-like beard to cricketer Dennis Lillee's handlebar moustache, a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra untangles the culture of beards, mos and sideburns from 1788 to the 1980s.

Jo's Mo Show (with Beards), opening on Friday, features 61 works from the gallery's collection by artists such as Tom Roberts, George Lambert, Lionel Lindsay, and photographers Julia Margaret Cameron, Harold Cazneaux and Max Dupain.

Curator Joanna Gilmour says the idea for the exhibition came to her after years of looking at facial hair as a clue to the period of undated portraits.

"Women's fashions changed so dramatically between, say, 1800 and 1900. With blokes, the clothing is less of a clue, in which case facial hair becomes a really useful gauge," she says.

Having trawled through portraits of men with beards, burns and mos for the past few months, Gilmour offers some explanations as to why different trends in facial hair evolved. "Sideburns were fairly standard in the 1830s and 40s," Gilmour says.

The pair worn by William Kinghorne, captain of a government ship that ferried convicts between Hobart and Sydney, travelled down his face to the tip of his collar.

"You can see from Kinghorne's portrait (by Thomas Lempriere) that sort of Regency, that kind of Jane Austen era where men's fashions involved shirts with high collars. Having a beard wouldn't have been practical or comfortable in that sort of shirt," Gilmour says.

Respectable people during the first half of the 19th century would turn up their noses at bearded folk, she adds: "Men who wore beards were perceived as being slightly on the margin or suspicious."

But as perceptions of masculinity changed, so did facial hair. And by the 1850s beards were back in fashion. "They were seen as an outward emblem or sign of all of the sorts of values that were most prized in men in Victorian times," Gilmour says.

Ill-fated explorers Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills had beards. So did bushranger Ned Kelly. Gilmour says the gold rush also contributed to a revival of hair.

"There were men leaving their wives at home in the city and going out to the goldfields to make their fortune, so there was this anti-domestic, sort of frontier, mentality."

As Federation approached, the "rugged ungovernable bushman" look was beginning to lose its edge and some men got out their razors.

"It wasn't uncommon for Australian men to start constructing themselves as being a bit more urbane and responsible . . . as youthful proud men who were populating this wonderful new nation," Gilmour says.

But Parkes, the father of Federation, whose portrait by Tom Roberts appears in the show, was not one to bend to fashion. "He maintained the old wise man beard," Gilmour says.

The popularity of beards continued to wane towards the outbreak of, and during, World War I, because they were against military rules.

In the decade that followed, Gilmour says a variety of styles in facial hair flourished, from writer Henry Lawson's scruffy, early handlebar moustache in the work by Lindsay -- "the best mo in the collection" -- to artist Lambert's twirly mo and Shakespearish wisp of a beard, as shown in his self-portrait. Then Hollywood arrived, bringing with it a new wave of trend-setters. "By the 1930s people like Errol Flynn and Clark Gable started to have an effect on what men back in Australia were doing," Gilmour says.

Renowned for his roles in romantic films such as The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Adventures of Robin Hood, Flynn, in the photograph by Hollywood snapper George Hurrell, sports a sparse, understated line of hair above his top lip.

"He looks a bit smarmy, doesn't he?" Gilmour muses.

It wasn't until the 60s that beards, in all their free-flowing glory, came back with vigour. "In the 50s, which was a very conservative time, the fashion was to be clean-shaven -- a moustache maybe -- but beards were definitely less common. With hippies, hairiness came back as a sign of rebellion, creativity or youthfulness," Gilmour says.

"Given the date of this portrait of (Bee Gees frontman) Barry Gibb (by Australian photographer Rennie Ellis), I'm assuming he's part of this trend."

Then there was the porn-star moustache, brought to the mainstream by actors such as Tom Selleck and Burt Reynolds during the 80s.

At the end of this journey, Gilmour is left confused about one thing: the fascination with facial hair, moustaches in particular, among Australian sportsmen. The exhibition includes portraits of cricketers David Boon, Merv Hughes and Australian football legend Ron Barassi.

"I've never been able to figure out, in the 70s and 80s, why there are so many sporting people who had moustaches," she says.

Gilmour, however, believes facial hair is no frivolous matter.

"People tend to think of fashion as being a bit meaningless. But when you look into it, fashion -- not just facial hair fashion -- has very strong connections to what's going on in the bigger picture."

Jo's Mo Show (with Beards)  opens at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra on Friday and runs until April 1 next year.  It features an online component  at www.portrait.gov.au.