Olive Cotton by Helen Ennis

Author:Helen Ennis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 4th Estate
Published: 2019-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

Ross McInerney, 1942, National Gallery of Australia, gift of the artist 1987

Meeting Ross

In the midst of running the studio and going through her divorce, Olive found herself in an entirely unexpected situation. She fell in love with Ross McInerney, whom she met through Jean Lorraine – he was the younger brother of Jean’s husband, John. Olive’s daughter, Sally, once told me that she had seen something Olive wrote to Ross, thanking him for bringing her back to life. I haven’t come across that revealing statement yet, but there is something I think of as its visual equivalent: Olive’s portrait of Ross taken at the Dupain studio in mid-1942, probably in June. Olive later gave a short explanation of how her relationship with Ross began.

Ross . . . called in to the studio on brief leave from the army training camp at Bonegilla [in New South Wales], and I suggested that I should take his photograph just as he sat there at the window, to give to his parents. After that we saw more of each other whenever possible during the war years, and we married about two-and-a-half years later.1

The portrait, one of Olive’s best, rewards close examination. In it, the relaxed, fit young man, dressed in his army uniform, is looking at Olive as she takes the photograph. He is half-smiling in a way that might be interpreted as being slightly self-conscious but intimate nonetheless. The lower section of the composition is dominated by his bare forearms and hands, while at the bottom left, his thigh, which extends out of the frame, is rendered out of focus by the proximity of the camera. Olive is almost pressing up against him, eliminating any physical distance between the two of them, and compressing the pictorial space. Although she said that she initiated the portrait as a gift for Ross’s parents, it is an erotically charged image that speaks of her and Ross’s mutual attraction and their emergent relationship. This impression is confirmed in another portrait, possibly from the same session, where she moved closer still, creating a head-and-shoulders view of her handsome subject with his hazel eyes and thick, wavy brown hair.

These portraits of the man who would become her second husband invite comparison with Max after surfing, because of their erotic power. The differences are telling. Olive photographed Ross with no coyness or obfuscation and his eye contact introduces a directness that is absent from the elaborate set-up with Max.

* * *

Like Olive, Ross came from a strong family but one that was different in a great many respects: they were Irish, not English; Catholic, not Methodist; and lived in the country, not the city. The McInerneys had a deep, ongoing connection to land in central western New South Wales – Wiradjuri country. Ross’s Irish-born grandfather, John McInerney, settled there in 1863, only forty years after the European invasion, which led to violent frontier conflict, and dispossession, disease and starvation in the Wiradjuri population. McInerney was among the wave of new settlers who established themselves as farmers.

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