cartoonist, commercial artist (from necessity), landscape painter (by choice) and amateur photographer, studied at the National Gallery School, Melbourne. In the 1920s he met Rex Battarbee at C. Leyshon White’s Commercial Art School in Melbourne and they became close friends. (Battarbee had no fine art training.) Both worked as commercial artists doing advertising art but wanted out. Alison French says that Gardner drew cartoons for various [travel?] magazines.
Gardner and Battarbee visited Hermannsburg in 1932 (in a model T Ford sedan converted into a caravan) and again in 1934. Batttarbee took most of the photographs on the trip (and later taught Albert Namatjira how to develop them), but Hardy states that Gardner possibly took the photograph of Battarbee painting at the Finke Gorge in Central Australia in 1932 (Hardy, p.147). Battarbee left crayons behind in 1932 and Gardner apparently claimed to have given Albert Namatjira lessons in watercolour painting before Battarbee did (see Geelong Advertiser 20 July 1987, Kleinert etc., cited Hardy & Megaw x 2). This would still have been in 1934, on Gardner and Battarbee’s second trip when they were accompanied by Robert Croll, another keen collector of Aboriginal artefacts. Namatjira certainly saw the exhibition of Gardner & Battarbee’s paintings in the Hermannsburg schoolroom in 1934 (described as the first ever held there by Croll in the Melbourne Herald , cited Hardy – however, this may have been preceded by an exhibition by Jessie Traill ); it was then he made his famous remark that he could do that too. Gardner drew a decorated map for R.H. Croll’s travel book, Wide Horizons: Wanderings in Central Australia (A&R, Sydney, 1937) and contributed to the Teague sisters’ exhibition to help raise money for the Hermannsburg water supply. Battarbee’s 1936 trip was made without Gardner, but Gardner and Croll returned to the Centre in 1938, for a time being joined by William Rowell .
Gardner left humorous pencil sketches behind at Hermannsburg in the 1930s. So did the Adelaide cartoonist John Quayle . Gardner is likely to have drawn some with the boys around their campfire. 'Cartoon-style humans and animals were copiously drawn by the children during these and later years at Hermannsburg’, e.g. pencil drawing of a cowboy [not at all cartoon-like, but straight commercial art] by anon, SAM Semmler Collection (ill. Hardy, 158).
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2007
