..anything at all!
Anyway, it was a perfect early autumn morning when we pulled over outside the Selwyn Gallery in Darfield, a two-horse town twenty minutes west of Christchurch where the snowless Southern Alps loom over the parched Canterbury plains, this day under a blank blue sky.
Unlike the other very fine galleries we’d visited on our trip, it was more your typical country town-style gallery, not particularly auspicious. I really wasn’t expecting a lot, you can tell.
Nevertheless I was delighted with what I found displayed inside, as was Maria, who had only heard about the existence of Maurice Askew for the first time the previous evening.
Maurice’s works aren’t strictly water colour paintings. They’re mostly drawings, a little reminiscent of Paul Klee says Maria, neatly executed in pencil and black ink and quite architecturally rendered, with delicate water colouring overlaid, or alternatively what Maria terms textural ‘mark-making’ repetitively applied.
Some of them do have a naïve quality, but the interpretation of the landscape or townscape varies with the subjects and possibly the time period they were done. The subjects reflect Maurice (and his wife Doris’) travels round the world – there’s even a depiction of Uluru – and I was so impressed I’d happily have purchased one or two of them if I’d had the cash to splash.
In the event I settled for buying one of Maurice’s two available biographical books, (at sixties and seventies), and determined to read it on the way home to Melbourne on the plane. I signed the Selwyn Gallery guest book and added a reference to my once being a student of his, but he’ll probably not notice it, or even if he does he won’t remember my brief sojourn at the old Okeover homestead at Ilam.
I actually did start reading Maurice’s book on the flight back to Melbourne. I did see a lot of names I recognised too, some of whom have gone on to bigger things in the graphic design world and the Art world generally.
My eyes soon began to tire. I took a break and plodded on. Reading books on planes can sometimes give the impression of shortening the trip, but my watch seemed to be going backwards.
I put the book down and turned to Maria. ‘Thank God I decided to be a musician’ I said and we both laughed.

A red car pulled up beside us at the level crossing as we were driving home the other day. The bloke at the wheel had fair hair, thinning at the crown, probably in his mid-fifties, possibly an ex-surfer. His radio was playing an Oz Crawl track, I don’t remember which one. I thought it could be a line for one of my songs, a random snapshot that might resonate in the same way as a Steely Dan song.
He pulled up beside me in a red coupe
The radio was playing Oh No, Not You Again
Perhaps I should just start making a collection of one-line observations and throw them together and see if an internal logic develops.
I dunno what else to do. Nothing’s coming to me. I’ve got a queue of tunes waiting for lyrics and they’re just not coming. They say you should write about what you know, the things that are getting you down, but I can’t really write about the things that are troubling me. Things that trouble the young, like love and confusion, are perennially fascinating, but then you’re not so young anymore you don’t really want to be singing about constipation and high or low blood pressure etc.

Somebody asked me if I’d ever had a ‘real’ job the other day. I think it might’ve been Daryl now that I think of it, while we were driving home together in the van from South Australia. (Daryl daylights with the Darebin Council incidentally). I told him that I’d worked a real job a couple of times. The first was after my band The Chants arrived in Melbourne from Christchurch in 1966. At first things were OK money-wise, but the occasional gigs we were garnering weren’t enough to sustain us so we jointly decided to look for something menial but not too demanding and we all ended up driving together in our Sheldon’s Nappy van to the NAMCO factory in Port Melbourne, which manufactured laminated home and office furniture.
There were mostly Greek immigrants working there, as well as some other stray ethnicities. We didn’t have a lot in common, us being essentially a Kiwi band in a bubble (except for the laconic Matt Croke, of course), but I managed to get on friendly terms with a young Greek fellow with a big schnoz called Spiros. And I found a stray cat who became our family pet cat, the indestructible Fang, the Wonder Wombat.
I ended up working on the circular saw, cutting laminated boards to size. Pretty crazy job for a musician really you’d think – and so it turned out to be. One lunchtime I was showing the other guys in the band what my job was - we had been split up early in the piece and located in different parts of the factory doing different parts of the assembly.
Anyway, I was demonstrating how I cut the laminated board on the circular saw and thought I should finish up with a safety message.
‘One thing you should never do’, I said, lifting the guard off the blade which was whirring to a stop ‘is try and stop the blade with your hand’ – and promptly brushed my right index finger against the still spinning blade.
Blood spurted everywhere. I was lucky not to lose the tip of my finger. My life may have been very different had that been the case.
The chaps were duly impressed and went thoughtfully back to their stations while I went to see a doctor.
I resigned not long after. Being an idiot musician is difficult enough, but not as risky as being an idiot musician working on a circular saw.