All this is a way of saying that whilst you may not appear to have a lot of academic aptitude, you can surprise yourself. What you’re like at one stage of life can look and be very different to what you’re like at another. You just have to find your thing. Your thing is the thing that interests you beyond other things. It quietly grabs your attention and nags you to attend to it. It’s what you prefer doing over watching TV. It gets in your head and has you thinking about it and where it may take you next. It’s the thing that you never feel like dropping, and at some point, make a personal commitment to see through to the end, whatever that end is.

Having the blessing of life is like winning Tattslotto a million times over. It’s a gift. We are so incredibly lucky to have it. Of all the sperm and egg to meet in the right second of the right time on the right occasion, it was ours. It could have been a million others but it was the sperm and egg that became us. The gift of life. But we pay a high price for that gift. That price is the challenge of living life, given all that it throws at us. It’s dealing with the loss of those we love. And it’s the realization of our own mortality and eventual death. We get an incredible gift and pay a high price for it. It is what it is.

Art and sport are often, though not always, seen as being somehow inherently different, and to an extent, conflicting, pursuits. This was said to me many times in teaching the subjects, never as a criticism, but simply as an observation about the two areas I taught. I’ve never thought this myself, seeing little difference between the two. You like them or you don’t. But I am well aware that there is a common view that they are not necessarily compatible.

Paul Caine has, for many years, been photographing remnant trees, mainly river red gums, in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne and beyond. He has an extraordinarily keen eye for spotting significant trees, and especially the large old ones. Often ignored, it’s a miracle these trees have survived the unstoppable onslaught of development. Paul captures a moment in time for them, many of which were standing long before European colonization. May they all stand a little longer.

The trip took my mother, Helen and I to the prairie provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, on what for her was a journey through the past. Helen was raised in a farm that adjoined Elcapo Lake, about 5km south of the prairie town of Broadview in Saskatchewan in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Years ago, my friend Paul had two dreams, some months apart. He was at two concerts and a band was playing at each of them. He was in the audience for both shows. Apparently, they were very good.

Thomson was able to capture the moods of Canadian landscapes in ways that none before him ever did, and few, if any, have achieved since. By the time of his death, he was painting prolifically, and a master of his craft.

Emily Carr grew up in the city of Victoria on Vancouver Island. As an artist, she was, for decades, isolated from the modernist art movement in eastern Canada by the mass of its Rocky Mountains and the vastness of its prairies. Remote as she was, she painted iconic images of the First Nations’ culture and landscapes of her province. 

In mid-2024 I travelled to Canada with my two daughters, Hannah and Lucy. We went primarily to visit family on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. I had been there before, but for Lucy, it was an introduction to a good few members of the Canadian family. Hannah has lived and worked in Canada, and for her, it was a revisit. 

It took me around 25 years to complete my first book, Merric Boyd and Murrumbeena: The Life of an artist in a Time and a Place. It took my father, Philip Smith, about the same number of years to research and write his family history, The Blacksmith’s Family. I really can’t remember when he started it, but it became his major focus and passion in the last decades of his life.

My mother, Helen Smith was an artist prior to becoming a gallery guide at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1970. Helen drew and painted for 20 odd years (and perhaps longer). The earliest of her artworks in my family’s possession are from the early 1950s. The last are from the late 1960s when she gave it away to become a gallery guide. Her art consists mainly of still-life works, and landscapes. Her early still-lives are mainly drawings, and the later ones, oil-paintings. Her landscapes are predominately oil-paintings.