1001 Nights Cast

He had enlisted for King and country and had been shipped off to Gallipoli to be a sniper. A country kid, Ted learned how to aim and shoot early so that he was a recognised dead eye with the rifle by any reckoning. He told the story that to keep from going insane in the trenches, they all made up games that involved shooting at the enemy when they were heading to or more like it, actually in the latrine. ‘Not that you would shoot to kill, no, just scare the bejeezus out of them, when they had their trousers round their ankles’, he said. ‘They didn’t know where the sniper was but everyone sure trod lightly when going to the latrine.’

Ted survived the trenches, the muck and death. I heard it from him that the Turks had left rolled-up barbed-wire under the water on the beaches of Gallipoli so that the first poor buggers would get hooked onto the wire, drowning in the dark and the next ones just had to crawl over the corpses to get to the beach. Ted had his fair share of memories but never dwelt on them. He always considered that those awarded medals like a V.C. were the blokes who’d slipped into that insane zone where they didn’t know front from back. ‘Much better to snipe at latrines’, he thought.

After Turkey he fought in France and after the war, it was France that offered life and love. He trained as a sculptor and learned all the skills that would remain with him for the rest of his life. His sniper’s eye turned to carving and moulding, spacing the features on horse of stone or face of plaster. Memorials and graves, hundreds and hundreds of graves. Rows of headstones, specially engraved with loving testament to lost souls and Ted’s sculpted figures watching over them. Marble faces looking down on fresh flesh. He was able to convey the cheek-bones of familiar form, marking the place of remembrance for all those left to remember. He met royalty and rubbed shoulders with society, selecting patrons according to what challenge was offered, testing his skills with the tolerance of a matador. Ted could draw lines of geometry over a face just by looking, never raising a pencil, never defining the line, only observing. Ted reckoned that a person’s power was in their face. A stare, floppy jowls, a tilt of a head, a raised eyebrow, all provide the character and sensual power of a person, a portrait. He pressed into flesh, spaces and forms, taking years from some, making the formerly scruffy formal, neat and trim.

Ted eventually brought his deft powers of observation home but worked in plaster on flamingos for gardens and crucifixes for the Catholic Church. What market was there in Australia in the 1930s for a sculptor who had fashioned clay for the King of Belgium? He barely scraped a living but created his own masterworks privately in his studio. A gallery of rogues grew in his back shed, double life-sized reflections of prominent politicians and crusty royalty, seen only once in a photograph, never in life. He made his own tools. He sourced his own clay and made his own stands that could hold up to a ton of clay at a time. Demonstrations of how fast he could work to create faces from clay entranced the locals like a Barnum and Bailey curiosity, and like a circus magician he would conjure the spirits of famous people by moulding and forming likenesses so real, you watched them closely to see if they would blink. Even though the faces were the colour of ivory or terra cotta somehow you still had to look intently to see if the muscles would tire and sag. They breathed, they spoke and they lived. Ted also spoke to his horses, sculpted in plaster and he said they replied. Although never life-sized, they appeared to twitch and swish their tails, nuzzling each other in compositions of grace and fidelity.

Ted grew old. Although his hands had aged well, his body could not move the weight of clay needed to create his life companions so his studio began to fill with smaller pieces, miniatures of equestrian delights and stylised reflections of humans unknown, unseen. No one came to his studio except immediate family and no one commissioned these towering works of pomp and ceremony. He worked on his own.

Over the years he spoke longingly about the friends of stone and concrete he’d left behind in France and Belgium but said he didn’t want to return, not really, in case they had forgotten him, in case someone had forgotten them. He imagined them quite neglected, broken and damaged and then there was the second world war which could very well have destroyed his favourites. What of the portrait busts of lords and ladies? Would they still be held in awe, placed on pedestals of wood or stone, protected from the elements or would they too be shoved to the side, used as garden ornaments and green with growth and neglect? He put off the trip till the last, always procrastinating that some commission possibility was occupying his time or the competition he heard of was going to change his fortunes and then there was all the preliminary work, the maquettes…but really he did want to visit the site of his early years, his triumphs and achievements as an artist who had worked in Paris. He left one April and returned later the same year. He had found his champion pieces that he remembered with such fondness, and they had spoken to him. He had left as Ted and come back as Edward. He was noticeably sprucer.