Opening the view

When I was invited to be part of the Art Gallery of NSW’s From My Window project there was a big red truck parked outside our front window and our bedroom window faced a wall. ‘Would a view from the front door be OK?’, I asked.

My partner Jan and I rent an 1880s one-bedroom cottage in a cul-de-sac, one of about a dozen similar houses, in Adelaide. We and our neighbours often leave our front doors open for air, and in the belief that only friends will wander in. A grapevine stretches across three houses on our side of the lane and on sunny afternoons the hanging leaves glow cadmium lemon in the light. Our next-door neighbour Tanya puts her washing on a clothes rack in the middle of the lane as her backyard is small and dark. When the lockdown happened we decided to be ‘virus buddies’ with Tanya and her 17-year-old daughter Eloise as we were already a de facto household, eating together two or three nights a week, in and out of each other’s houses to borrow onions and books and to watch the footy, and working side-by-side on our communal garden in a narrow strip of land out the back.

During 2019 I’d been back and forth to Sydney a lot, where I still have three rooms in our house, my workshop, my library and 45 years’ worth of my paintings, drawings and journals. In late January new tenants arrived, friends, to rent the rooms upstairs and that was my last trip east.

The change wrought by the coronavirus pandemic in Adelaide was very sudden. In the weeks leading up to it, the city had been crammed with visitors, from interstate and overseas, attending all the arts festivals. In the nick of time, as COVID-19 started to dominate the news, Writers’ Week, WOMAD and Fringe were over. The workers in high-vis started bumping out all the stalls, stages and seating from the city parks, and the groundkeepers started watering the bare eroded turf.

Then the city went very quiet.

Tanya bought two chooks. Our neighbour Kelly found them on Gumtree and drove 60 kms north to a farmgate at Dublin to pick them up – two ridiculous-looking black bantams in a cardboard box. I built a stylish coop for them, with the help and advice of the whole lane it seemed, out of scavenged timber and some marine ply that I’d been hoarding for my paintings. The chooks started laying straight away, two small pinkish eggs a day. I painted a still life of the first four of them.

I continued my morning ritual of walking up Gouger Street to the Central Markets to buy food and get a coffee. The bench where I’d sit to drink my coffee and to write in my journal had a sign taped across it: ‘For resting only – no eating or drinking’, but I found another bench in a more remote corner of the empty shopping mall.

The bearded man who sleeps on a neatly made bed under the awning of the shops now had any number of premises in front of which to lay his thin mattress, as all the restaurants, bars and travel agents were closed. His habit was to lie there into the late morning, dismantling a stack of cigarette butts into rollie papers and sipping at a take-away coffee with lots of sugar.

The other morning, as I returned home carrying my bag of fruit, veg and Tommy Ruff fillets, I saw a stranger, leaning over the mattress, talking. He handed the cigarette man what looked like a green 100 dollar note: ‘If I’d got all six numbers I’d be a millionaire’ he was saying. Was I witnessing an extreme act of generosity in this time of crisis?

In the evenings at home Jan started knitting socks, a tricky task, and initially she swore loudly when she made a mistake. Soon she had it sorted. I was reading a lot, cutting and preparing wood panels for my paintings, and making reed pens. I’d gathered a bundle of dry dead reeds at a place called Mannum Falls, an hour’s drive east of Adelaide. It’s a rocky gorge amidst the open wheat and sheep country. I cut these reeds into sections with my fine-toothed Japanese saw and sliced the ends with a sharp knife and split them. Not all came out well, but I ended up with three that made a good line and held enough ink.

I used one of these to make my first drawing of my bike in the hall, looking out the front door, the hanging grapevine in the sun. I added washes in Japanese ink. Next I worked on views out our bedroom window, the wall just beyond with another window in it just like ours – a window through a window. Our neighbour, another Tom from across the road (who had helped me with the chicken coop), took his big red truck for a drive to get firewood, opening up the view from our front window. I quickly got out the reed pen and drew the wheelie bin outside and the neighbouring house. The truck returned and I had to wait two days, until the day the project was due, for Tom to take the truck out again and add watercolour to my drawing.

View a selection of Tom Carment’s works for From My Window.

Tom Carment is a writer and artist whose work is represented in the Art Gallery of NSW collection and has been exhibited in the Archibald, Wynne, Sulman and Dobell Prizes.