Design and Art Australia Online

He was born 29 September 1891, the youngest of nine children of Annette Thorpe and James Fairweather, Deputy Surgeon General of the Indian Medical Service. In keeping with the culture of the time, the baby was left behind in Scotland with his aunts while his parents returned to India. The family was not reunited until 1901, when his father completed his Indian service. They then moved to Jersey, where his mother’s family lived, but the young Ian was sent to school in London. In 1912 he joined the Army and was sent to Officer Training School at Belfast. He was commissioned as an officer in June 1914. Two months later he was captured by the Germans, and spent the rest of the war in POW camps in Germany. He used this time to begin studying Japanese, learning drawing and illustrating Prisoner of War magazine, which alternated with attempts to escape. In 1918 he was repatriated to the Hague, where he began to formally study art. At the end of the war he enrolled at the Commonwealth Forestry Institute, in Oxford, but changed directions and a year later he enrolled at the Slade School in London under Henry Tonks. While studying art by day, he spent his evenings at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London learning Japanese and Chinese. He was beginning to see the inadequacy of the western visual tradition. One of the most important friends he made in London was H.S.Ede, a young curator at the Tate Gallery, who was to become a life-long friend and supporter. Thanks to Ede, Fairweather held a successful exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in London and at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1937, at a time when he was essentially a vagrant artist in South East Asia.
Fairweather’s wandering took him to Canada, where he worked as a farm labourer, and then to China. He travelled to Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, before setting out for Bali. He landed in Australia for the first time at Broome in 1933.
Fairweather arrived in Melbourne in February 1934. The quality and originality of his art impressed fellow artists George Bell, William Frater and Arnold Shore and he had a successful exhibition at Cynthia Reed’s gallery. Within six months he had left for Davao in the Philippines, which he travelled to via Sydney. After painting there for some months he returned to Beijing, then Formosa (Taiwan) and Hong Kong, fascinated by the Chinese calligraphic tradition. He also travelled to Borneo. In Manila, in 1937, a house fire destroyed much of his earlier work. Fairweather was not especially mindful of his health. He lost a part of a finger after it was infected. Back in Australia, in Brisbane, he could not afford paints.
In June 1939 he travelled north to Cairns and lived with Aboriginal people near Alligator River. At about this time he turned from oil paintings to using gouache, often painting on the fragile surfaces that make his art a challenge to conservators.
In May 1940 Fairweather left Australia to join the British war effort. After a short stay in Singapore, he was transferred to India, and ended up as a captain in a prisoner of war camp for Italians. He was discharged in 1943 and returned to Melbourne. Again, thanks to Ede, his work had been exhibited in London, including at the National Gallery in 1940. He travelled north again to Cooktown, but had problems with obtaining materials so he tried soap and casein as a way of holding the pigment.
Frustrated with poverty, Fairweather applied for the vacant position of Director of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales. Hal Missingham was appointed in his stead, while Fairweather took a job as a labourer in an aircraft factory.
In March 1945 he set off in a lifeboat, without any plan for the voyage, and landed at Bribie Island, off the Brisbane coast. He stayed for seven months, but after his diaries were stolen he travelled down to Melbourne where he stayed with the community of artists, including fellow Scot Jock Frater, who were supported by Lina Bryans at her Darebin Hotel studio at Heidelberg. He stayed two years.
At the end of 1947 Fairweather travelled north to Cairns. He had made arrangements with Macquarie Galleries in Sydney to both exhibit his work and to organise materials. He was to hold annual exhibitions with Macquarie from 1949 until the rest of his life. In 1949 he moved to Townsville and then Darwin, where he lived in an old boat. On 29 April 1952 Ian Fairweather set off to sail to Timor in a raft he had made from discarded junk. It was assumed he had died from from his own foolish misadventure. Sixteen days later he arrived at the beach in Roti, Indonesia.
The years after World War II were less than kind to adventurers. Fairweather was interned, sent to Singapore and then after a spell in a home for derelicts, was deported to England.
He dug ditches to raise the money so he could return south. Fortunately his British relatives helped with funds and he was able to return to Australia. He arrived in Sydney and went straight from there to Bribie Island. Here he built two thatched roof open-walled huts, and this became his home and his studio. This period at Bribie Island was the most productive time of his life, as he was able to easily work and there was no shortage of materials. Unfortunately his fame led to many curious onlookers. In 1965 he briefly left Australia for Singapore and England, but he soon returned. In 1966 he travelled to London to investigate the possibility of basing himself there, but again returned to Bribie. His last major painting, House by the Sea, was painted in 1968. In his last years he was both honoured for his art, and financially well rewarded, although he had little understanding of how successful he was.
He died of a heart attack on 20 May 1974.

Writers:

Joanna Mendelssohn

Date written:

2012

Last updated:

2021