As I grow older, my interest in war history and the role our Australian troops played in both world wars has increased. This is due mainly to becoming more aware of the large number of relatives involved in some of the major battles in both wars. There would not be too many families in Australia that did not have a relative involved in some capacity, although most are probably unaware of this fact without a bit of digging back.
Personally, I had two great grandfathers that fought on the Western Front in WW1 (one British, the other Australian – who won a Military Medal at the Battle of Polygon Wood), a grandfather who flew Wellingtons and Lancasters over Europe in WW2 and a great uncle who was killed on the beaches at Normandy on D-Day after surviving Dunkirk and a stint in Italy. My wife’s grandfather also saw service in New Guinea in WW2 and his younger brother (her great uncle) was killed at Gallipoli in 1915, only a week after landing on what we now recognise as Anzac Day.
This keen interest meant when we visited Canberra a number of years ago, a trip to the National War Memorial was high on the agenda. I was totally blown away by the detailed dioramas of the First World War and the large paintings depicting various infamous battles of all wars involving the Australian troops. One painting in particular caught my eye and gave an insight into the harsh conditions the troops had to deal with when fighting in the New Guinea jungle in WW2. These images had a profound impact on me but it seems strange to think now that at the time I didn’t give much thought to who and how these images were painted.
While reading Robert Hannaford – Natural Eye, much was spoken of the regular visits Robert made in his younger years to a mentor, another local South Australian artist named Ivor Hele – who I had never heard of at the time. With my interest piqued, I found a book on his work by the same publisher titled “Ivor Hele – The Productive Artist” and it was here I learned that despite the landscape, portrait and figurative paintings illustrated in this particular book, Ivor was also a renowned war artist during WW2 (in North Africa and New Guinea) and the Korean War. I was able to track down another couple of books specifically about his work for the Australian War Memorial (The Heroic Figure and The Soldiers’ Artist) and instantly recognised many of the images from our trip to the Memorial some years earlier.
All three books gave a fantastic insight into his life and techniques (from his chalk sketches, pen drawings and fabulously detailed oil paintings) and will no doubt act as a source of great inspiration and motivation for me to strive to create thought provoking works of art myself.
