Maximos' Blog

Ghosts - from the Hiroshima Panels

Despite the wartime censorship many were aware of increasing Japanese naval activity along Australia’s eastern seaboard.  After Pearl Harbour, and the defeat of an Allied fleet in the battle of the Java Sea, there was little to stop the Japanese navy gaining access to Australia’s coastal waters. Australian’s sense of vulnerability was in no way ameliorated by the subsequent failure the Japanese seaborne invasion of Port Moresby.  Eventually, in May of 1942, people’s fears were confirmed when three midget submarines made their way into Port Jackson.  It was said that some residents ran to the promenade on the beachfront at Coogee carrying their rifles, believing a Japanese invasion had begun.

Threats of imminent Japanese attack encouraged more affluent residents to leave the suburb.  Often they vacated large properties that were subdivided later providing space for an influx of residents from the smokey inner west and harbourside industrial suburbs like Balmain and Pyrmont.
The end of war and the subsequent baby boom transformed places like Coogee.  It was an idyllic place for children.  The ocean was vast and generally benign behind the protective barrier of Wedding Cake Island. A rocky sandstone coastline, rolling foreshore parks and access to large private spaces surrounding the sumptuous mansions of another era enabled luxurious opportunities for play.

The suburb gained social and cultural diversity as the 1950s progressed. Relatively cheap apartments and flats drew waves of migrants, particularly from Central Europe, to Sydney’s east, yet its dominant culture, expressed through beach life, club, pub, horse racing and rugby, remained a solid British and Irish mix. Memories of the war were fresh.  Great reserve was still expressed about the Japanese. Living evidence of wartime brutality was everywhere.  Ian Crow’s dad had been in Changi while Ray Kelly, down the road, fought on the Kokoda Track and Ted Lennox from the Bundy, just round the corner, regaled us with tales about his exploits in New Guinea.  His party trick was to solemnly reveal a small box that allegedly contained the severed finger of a Japanese soldier.  As it turns out it was a macabre joke, with his finger inserted through a hole at the side and covered with powder. Some people kept real souvenirs.
Forgiveness was difficult for many people.  Although they were aware of the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they struggled to let go of their grief and resentment.

As stalwarts of the Australian Labor Party, mum and dad frequently discussed politics.  Our connections with the Party dated back to its earliest years. Edward Darnley was elected to represent Balmain in 1891 the first year the Labor League members entered parliament.  So politics was dinner table talk, so was the war and at times they merged.  The other great passion was Rugby Union, I new where all the great Rugby players lived in the neighbourhood and venerated them as living icons.

Dad’s involvement in the war had been at a distance.  During the early years he was a meber of the Militia and worked at Cockatoo Island dockyard.  Later as the youngest Marine Engineer in the Merchant Navy on active service, he participated in the final stages of the battle for the Bismarck Archipelago of 1945.
Dad seldom talked about the war.  His direct involvement was at a time when the once great Nankai Shitai had been reduced to strings of lonely jungle graves along the Kokoda track or in the foxholes and coastal sands of New Guinea’s northern coastline.

Mum expressed strong views about the war.  She was a Coogee girl who’d grown up with lots of boys who’d gone into the infantry. Some she never saw again; some she remembered meeting after the war, skeletal figures returning from Changi and the Burma Railroad, remnants of robust lifesavers she’d known from the beach; others she seemed to deify as war heroes. She was a passionate woman strongly nationalistic, but in no way a lover of war.  She was a woman with a fine sense of justice, but in 1950s Australia, like many others, she hated the Japanese.

I played with toys labeled Made in Japan and even when they broke, which was often, they demonstrated cleverness in conception. I marveled at their simple yet elegant mechanisms.  What I saw of Japanese art seemed delicate, precise and sensitive. My father’s aunts had finely painted wooden Japanese dolls while after my grandparent’s married their first acquisition had been an elegantly crafted Japanese vase.  Stories of war were true, the brutality was beyond question, yet there was another level.  There was a lack of consistency in the story.  In the present I could see beauty and ingenuity.  Even my father’s war souvenir, the neat set of a Japanese pilot’s ear plugs in a crafted wooden box, conveyed a sense of order and concern for detail.

Mum and dad were friendly with a local man called Harry Jensen.  Educated at St Joseph’s College in Hunters Hill, he had an urbane but somewhat proletarian disposition.  A charismatic character, he became Lord Mayor of Sydney in 1956.  Harry was a man of great vision in many respects although when it came to his appreciation for architecture his plan to demolish the Queens Victoria Building and replace it with a multi-storey concrete car park was a major aesthetic blemish on his character.

With business interests straddling the electrical and foot wear trades Harry’s was quick to look for opportunities in the Asia Pacific region.  Through her connection with Harry, mum received an invitation to civic reception for Japanese Prime Minister Kishi, in 1957.  Although a visit of great significance, the first one of its kind since the war, mum was unmoved and politely refused.  Privately she announced,
“ I couldn’t bear to shake his hand”.

Harry played an instrumental role in changing post war attitudes. As Lord Mayor he and his wife Alicia went on to visit Japan in 1960.
The Hiroshima Panels, eight works on rice paper depicting the impact of the Hiroshima bomb on the lives of ordinary people, were a watershed in attitudes towards the Japanese people.  Iri and Toshikio Maruki who both lost family members in the bombing created the panels as a first hand record of the bomb’s impact. With shattered infrastructure, and while ministering to the needs of survivors, they worked in a small studio, with the simplest of materials creating works of profound significance.

Four years and eight hundred sketches later their first 6ftx24ft panel was complete.  Seven more panels followed before the Hiroshima Panels were ready for exhibition.  In their small studio it was impossible to assemble a complete panel they could only guess at the final effect.  The Australian Women’s Weekly reviewer of the time observed that while their choice of materials – Indian ink, vermillion, and rice paper was largely due to their poverty, there was no poverty in the conception of their work.

The Panels were a sensation.  In Adelaide 10 000 people viewed the Panels in less than four days, the biggest crowds ever attending an art show. Just five days after the exhibition opened at the NSW Art Gallery, police were called as 15 000 visitors crammed the gallery overflowing into a jostling crowd outside.

In the exhibition brochure, Vance Palmer wrote, “These eight Hiroshima panels have come out of a deep emotion that has been restrained and shaped by the discipline of art.  And so they do not merely affect the nerves but awaken basic feelings – pity, love, compassion, and a sense of the oneness of human beings in the face of suffering.  Finally, they compel those who see them to vow that such diabolic visitations shall not occur again.”

Emotions in Australia were still raw.  There were profound reservations about the Japanese.  Debate raged in the press, and while most praised the works as some critics most reluctant to grant an opportunity for Iri and Toshikio to tell of their people’s tragedy.

Revealing a profound lack of empathy the Mirror’s art critic wrote: “Abject poverty of thought and expression emphasized by stale repetition of motif, characterizes the “Hiroshima Panels” on view at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. .  .”  The critic went on to write, “The imagination of every intelligent visitor will certainly recoil at being required to regard mere multiplicity of bare backsides as Art, however many roods of rice paper it covers”

“Such a display – if I should sink to its level by adopting Carlyle’s phrase – merely feeds the art lovers belly with the east wind.”
She drew a strong rebuke from Lloyd Rees who considered the works so sensitive and powerful as to be beyond the reach of any artist in Australia, with the possible exception of William Dobell.

Stark and uncompromising, I remember them vividly to this day.  As a child of eleven I was confronted and challenged by them on many levels, particularly by the tensions inherent in the work. The human forms were both realistic and iconic.  On reflection the Herald’s art critic came closest to understanding the body of work.  He saw their poetic inflection almost opposing the horror portrayed.  This he identified as an acceptance beneath the work’s protest, a form of Oriental fatalism.  Perhaps he just missed the Buddhists acceptance of suffering as a part of life.  Of course as a child much of this discourse was beyond me, yet at a spiritual and an aesthetic level the Panels provided a touchstone that was to prove fundamental in my own life.   Initially their impact was mainly to infuse me with an opposition to war and nuclear madness.  I had no way of knowing or understanding the significance they’d ultimately assume in my life.

One returned prisoner of war, Harry Evans, summed it up the Panel’s impact when he said, “After seeing the Panels I wouldn’t wish that bomb to fall anywhere, even though the Japanese gave me a rough time.” Mum had much less to say about the war now.  I think we came to understand that whatever the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers they could be no worse than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The true atrocity lay in war itself. Besides I wasn’t inclined to dwell too long on the past, children are present oriented, so forgiving is intrinsic to the nature of childhood, a process made all the more easy when they are raised with the affluence and freedom we enjoyed.