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Coming soon
Die Laughing: The Biography of Bill Leak

Bill Leak crammed a lot into 61 years: a typical Australian childhood in the bush and suburbs; gleaning artistic inspiration while travelling around Australia and Europe as a young man; starting a family in Germany; a spectacularly successful career back in Australia as an illustrator and cartoonist; and a long and futile campaign to win the Archibald Prize for portraiture. Add to that his alcoholism, turbulent relationships with women and his fearless need to pursue and articulate the truth regardless of the consequences, and you have the makings of a cracking biography, which is what Fred Pawle, a long-time friend and colleague of Bill’s, is writing now. The book, a candid and thorough telling of Bill’s eventful life, will be launched in Sydney on March 10 2021, the fourth anniversary of his death.

Chapter six: Darlinghurst Confidential

Robin Gibson Gallery, where Brett Whiteley and Tim Storrier exhibited, was only a few hundred metres up Liverpool Street from Bill’s studio, and in 1982 Bill secured an informal arrangement to join the stable. 

Gibson had cornered much of the increasingly lucrative inner-city gay market, who naturally were interested in male nudes. Bill obliged by producing a series featuring his friend Michael Hennessy, of the Sydney Dance Company. 

One day Bill and his wife Astrid were dropping off a few pictures to be included in a group show at Robin Gibson gallery, in Darlinghurst, which was already up on the walls of the gallery, when they saw Elton John coming out wearing a loud shirt and a pair of orange-check shorts. Bill pulled a $20 note from his wallet and offered it to Elton, saying, ‘Here you go, Elton, buy yourself a decent pair of strides, mate.’ Elton laughed it off and kept walking.

Inside, Bill asked Robin what Elton had been doing in the gallery. ‘He was very interested in your male nudes,’ Robin replied.

Bill whispered to Astrid, ‘I think I might have just done myself out of a few large sales.’

But most of the time, Bill was roaming these inner-city streets without Astrid, and his routine was becoming increasingly complex. Days spent in solitary creativity in front of the easel were followed by the opposite extreme: nights out with a rotating gang of misfits in the city, often ending up at Arthur’s, a magnet for the arts crowd that started to get lively at around midnight and stayed open till dawn (the eponymous owner’s stepdaughter was Claudia Karvan, later a famous actress). Heroin was yet to pollute this part of town, although Whiteley’s now famous addiction to it added to the drug’s mystique and made its rise around here increasingly likely. But for now alcohol remained the primary vice, fuelled by clandestine hits of coke and speed. ‘Bill wanted to be the next Brett Whiteley,’ says Neil Taylor, who also showed at Robin Gibson and was a close mate of Bill’s at the time, but he drew the line at heroin, mostly because it didn’t suit his excessively social personality. ‘Coke and speed are very socially loosening drugs,’ Neil says. The consequences of this yin-yang routine was felt most keenly at home. ‘You spend all this time solo, then you go out and over-celebrate,’ Neil says. ‘For a wife and kids to tolerate that total swing, it’s very difficult. What room is there for them? It’s a marriage destroyer. There were very few people [in the arts crowd] who stayed together.’ 

Bill’s first solo exhibition opened on June 18, 1983, with 21 works, the most expensive of which was a self-portrait for $800. 

Nick Vickers, another artist friend, had seen the works in the exhibition come together. ‘Bill was a painter's painter,’ he says. ‘He was very much into the ancient practice of applying all the knowledge that he had into his compositions, whether it was still lifes or nudes, of which he did thousands. Anyone in the art world would have revelled in his compositions.’ Then Nick adds an adjective that portends much of the trouble that awaited Bill both in the immediate future and again much later. ‘They were tremendous compositions, but they were conservative, not radical.’

Gibson’s two other big artists at the time – Whiteley and Tim Storrier – were producing abstract, idiosyncratic work, and riding the booming art market, financed by nouveau-riche money. Bill, being a ‘conservative’ artist, was not in their league.

The exhibition sold out, but was not profitable after taking into account the framing and the wine and cheese for the opening. At the end of the opening, Nick, invigorated by the excited vibe of the night, told Bill, Astrid and his wife Lee he would shout them to a celebratory dinner at the nearby Bayswater Brasserie, a fashionable and moderately expensive restaurant a few blocks away. Nick sweated through the whole meal. He’d rashly offered to pay but didn’t have a cent on him. After a few courses and an abundance of wine, Nick told the other three to walk to the car while he settled the bill. He waited till the staff were distracted and slipped out behind them. ‘Walk a bit faster, mate,’ Nick said when he caught up with Bill.

‘Nick, did you just do a runner?’ Bill asked.

Nick nodded. Both thought it was hilarious.

In the car home, it was impossible to keep the swindle secret. Astrid was not impressed, and Nick felt obliged to deliver a bunch of flowers to her the next day as an apology. ‘I still didn’t go to the restaurant and offer to fix the bill, though,’ he says now with an embarrassed smile.

It was emblematic of both couples’ financial challenges. Bill was forced to look elsewhere for work. He did some illustrating for the Readers’ Digest and illustrated a humorous book profiling famous cricketers as various breeds of bird called Great Budgie Batsmen & Bowlers, written by Ian Moffitt and Philip Gore. He designed similar pun-illustrations of Australian animals – a ‘madpie’ in a straitjacket and ‘Herbert von Koala’ conducting an orchestra – and screen-printed them by hand onto T-shirts in the studio, which Astrid sold at flea markets around the city.

All of this was simply to pay the bills for his young family. Bill believed none of it compromised his artistic ambitions, which remained resolute. 

One of the regular visitors to his studio was Margie Jacoby-Lopez, an artist at the time and now a poet living in Arizona. She would visit mid-morning, when Bill had at least partially recovered from his hangover, and stay for a couple of hours, the studio smelling of oils and booze, watching him work and discussing art – his from reality, hers from abstract images. 

‘How do you do what you do?’ Bill asked, genuinely interested. He was incapable of even starting a painting that wasn’t figurative.

‘My world view was very different but we really connected,’ she says. ‘I was in awe of what he could do.’

They concocted a plan to write and illustrate a book of recipes featuring ingredients that were absurdly impossible to obtain, but couldn’t find a publisher for it.

Like Nick’s observations about Bill’s conservatism, Margie too identified a characteristic that suggested Bill’s return to Australia had changed him, and that a reckoning might lie ahead. 

‘He was totally authentic, and an outlier,’ she says. ‘I think that’s where the genius came from. He was not afraid of being an outlier. But the thing Bill couldn’t do was reflect. A lot of artists do reflect. But I never saw him reflect because he just had so much confidence. He really was an egomaniac. He believed in himself more than most people. He didn’t ascribe to any religion, but he painted in a way that was incredibly religious.’

Artists were, and still are, the gods of secularism, their flaws becoming the unavoidable flipside of their genius, a pardonable original sin if the artist is charismatic enough. 

Bill’s confidence wasn’t going to feed his young family, however. He had always had an eye for the side hustle, and would soon need to follow one through to survive. Three years earlier, while still in Germany, he was inspired by a book of cartoons by Australian Bruce Petty which his sister Lynne had sent him, and started to scribble his own caricatures in a scrapbook. He contemplated earning a few marks on the side by setting up an easel and drawing caricatures for punters at markets or beer festivals, but never did so. To most artists, even the idea of this would seem an awful compromise, but not Bill. ‘It would do my drawing good; besides, I love cartoons, and always have,’ he said in a letter to his parents.

His mum Doreen reminded him of this after the Robin Gibson exhibition failed to assure him that art would be lucrative enough to raise a family. Bill didn’t need much more encouragement.

From Die Laughing: The Biography of Bill Leak, by Fred Pawle.

About the author

Fred Pawle was a journalist for 27 years, working for newspapers and magazines in Perth, Adelaide and Sydney. He is one of only a few journalists to have been employed by all three of Australia’s most prestigious publications – The Australian, The Australian Financial Review and The Picture, a humorous weekly publication dedicated to working-class libertinism that recently became another victim of our increasingly disdainful times. He was nominated for a Walkley Award in 2008 for his profile of Matt Branson, the first professional surfer to come out as gay. Pawle was a close friend of Bill Leak’s for 23 years.