1001 Nights Cast

Sometime ago I came across an extraordinary document that has, for reasons that will become apparent, slipped through the net of art history. It was a letter written from Australia to Walter Benjamin on a sheet torn out of a sketch pad. On the back in pale watercolour was a yellow circle on blue. I recognised it immediately as a doodle of ‘Moonboy’. At the time I was obsessed by ‘Moonboy’: that’s a strange little painting by Sid Nolan whose blankness divided Australia’s art world in 1940. Back then no one had seen anything quite so expressionless or depersonalised—two flat colours—a pale yellow inner globe and a dark blue outer frame. It enraged many artists, one called it ‘the lavatory seat’, several moderns actually resigned from the Contemporary Art Society on the basis that it was not art. Nolan may have felt obliged to provide a narrative as he explained how he had caught sight of the full moon behind his friend’s head and combined the two, though the optical effect is more like a hallucination or after-image caused by temporary blinding, with its narrow stalk neck and large circular disc. A friend once described it to me as ‘Malevich’s black square in a Léger space’. Another friend rendered a thumb-nail sketch of it in petit-point. Nolan continued to play with ‘Moonboy’ in various forms over the following year, turning it into a theatre backdrop and then painting the yellow head onto the roof of Heide, an outer suburban homestead owned by his friends and patrons, the Reeds. ‘Moonboy’ communes with the moon ‘…like fullest moon on happy night.’ Though that didn’t last long, it being wartime, the military got jumpy, claiming it was dangerous being close to a strategic bridge across the Yarra River and it could draw the Japanese to make an aerial attack. Such once was the power of art! It was painted out.

However that day in the archives it was the letter written in blue pencil on the reverse that really surprised me. I was unable to photocopy it, so I copied it out by hand, if you can bear with me I’d like to read it. It begins:

Dear Walt,

I have just read your essay on technical reproduction and found it quite useful. In the antipodes we intuitively understand the loss of aura, as we have never known any other condition, perhaps that’s what makes the state of being avant-garde here fearless, at least on a good day under a clear blue sky that seems to go on forever. You must visit after the war, you’d find our light here has a more patterned…[words indecipherable] than that of France. I have never been to the capital of the 19th century but when I read Rimbaud, at night with a torch under the blanket in a tent I share with three other conscripts, I know exactly what he means, when he cries: ‘Je est un autre’ ‘I is another’. I can think of no sharper statement of my predicament as I am completely estranged from myself. I know Rimbaud was only 16 at the time, and I’m a few years older but the devastation I see in newspapers and newsreels disrupts all that passes for the common sense of modern life. Back in Melbourne I’m part of the dissident rump of the avant–garde, the militants who are in the Party demand that art obey and serve its ‘social commands’. To me the workers’ art is in the fairground and on big street hoardings. I answer these comrades with Rimbaud’s words ‘Poetry will no longer take its rhythm from action; it will be ahead of it’, ‘elle sera en avant’. A date is set now for our Anti-Fascist Exhibition, if you could send some words by early December we could print them on the catalogue.

I wish you well ‘Robin Murray’.

When I found the letter at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France it was still in an airmail envelope, sent from ‘Nhill 1942’. To the French ‘Nhill’ sounds like somewhere in a Samuel Beckett play but I knew it to be a small town on the Wimmera wheat belt where Nolan spent months training during the war, before he went AWOL and assumed the name of Murray. The envelope was stamped with a German eagle indicating that it had ended up in the Vichy office of dead letters. No one had ever claimed it.