‘Hooked into our souls’: Andrew Turley’s globetrotting Sidney Nolan saga
Adelaide based soldier turned art sleuth Andrew Turley spent twelve years following the trail of Sidney Nolan. His book, Nolan’s Africa, is an epic of travel and arts writing.
Whose life is more fascinating? The artist or the art scholar?
Australia’s most recognised modernist painter, Sidney Nolan OM AC CBE, has been dead for decades. But Andrew Turley is breathing new life into him in a way no one, not even Nolan could have imagined.
With the publication of Turley’s first book, Nolan’s Africa, there is arguably no one alive who knows more about Sidney Nolan than this expert who never met him. In so doing, he has revealed himself as a fascinating new character on the Australian arts landscape.
It was a brush with death that piqued and enabled the writer’s own immersion in the Sidney Nolan phenomenon. Like Nolan, Turley had military experience. Originally from New Zealand, Turley saw service in Cambodia following his four years of officer training at Duntroon. He was a young commissioned officer in the Engineers.
“Working on combat demolition, land mine warfare, booby traps, and all that,” Turley tells InReview.
It was in Cambodia, aged only 23, that Turley came down with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a mysterious autoimmune disease that science still cannot pinpoint a precise catalyst for.
Turley was in a coma for between 24 and 48 hours and, partially paralysed, flown by Russian chopper to Thailand where he says he was “lost in the medical system”. When he finally returned to New Zealand, he was so close to death that a surgeon had to fly with him.
Author Andrew Turley. Photo: Supplied
It was another six months until he could walk again, barely, while his motor nerves were so weakened that he recalls being unable to even turn a door handle.
“On one occasion I got locked in the toilet for three hours because I could not open the door,” he explains. “I went from being Superman-fit, running 10 kilometres a day, to being chair-bound.”
Years of diligent gym work helped his nerves find new pathways, and his subsequent life has involved plenty of adjustments to keep the syndrome at bay — including leaving the military to transition into a career in communications. The 56-year-old still bears still slight symptoms of Guillain-Barre but, he says, he’s regained enough function and strength to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro which segues neatly into his Sidney Nolan story.
A lightning bolt moment
Turley’s Nolan pilgrimage all began by happenstance, on a spontaneous drop-in to the Menzies Gallery in Sydney. Therein was a Nolan painting simply called Gorilla. It was not even Turley who first was moved by it; his partner Rachael felt the gorilla’s soul sear into her the moment she spotted the painting. She couldn’t look away — indeed, it sent out a “lightning bolt” for both of them.
“What we felt was seething and writhing under the paint that hooked into our souls,” Turley recalls.
There were no explanatory catalogue notes. But the couple was desperate to know more. They had the work taken down from the wall and on its reverse found clues as to its provenance.
“There were notes, labels, and place names”, reports Turley.
“‘Folkestone’, ‘Marlborough Fine Art’, ‘1963’, ‘Sidney Nolan Retrospective’ and a large red ‘Not for Sale’ scrawled in Sidney’s hand. That’s where it all started.”
The subsequent mission consumed twelve years of their lives, culminating in this massive tome called Nolan’s Africa. It is not Turley’s first work on the artist — and will be far from his last.
“I looked for answers to the Gorilla conundrum and found few,” he explains. “Weeks later, by pure coincidence, I stumbled across a portrait of Sidney taken by Axel Poignant. There he was in the studio, down on one knee, his painted gorilla, cradled in the mist floating behind him.
“It slowly emerged that the painting had been seen by Queen Elizabeth in a private viewing, a smaller version was gifted to Princess Margaret and Sidney had declared Gorilla ‘perhaps his favourite from the African series’. That did it! I began to try and piece together parts of the puzzle.”
A twelve-year puzzle
It really is an extraordinary saga. For years Turley ran his communications business by day and continued his Sidney Nolan deep dive by night. Eventually, as his own body of work began to take shape, he devoted himself entirely to Nolan, digging into his savings with the support of Rachael, a former sportswoman and adventurer turned corporate sales director.
They both travelled extensively through Africa, assiduously following in the footsteps of Nolan on his 1960s expeditions to explore and record its increasingly endangered wildlife .
Ironically, while Turley was becoming a voracious consumer of all things Nolan, the pioneer modernist was slipping off the radar in the contemporary arts markets.
Turley is hoisting him back.
In the course of his efforts to know Nolan inside out, he has sought out those with living memories of him, including his daughter Jinx.
In his new book, he quotes from Nolan’s own brief, daily-diary entries as well as, comprehensively, the fantastically detailed journal accounts of Cynthia Nolan, the artist’s wife through the 60s.
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Cynthia was the sister of John Reed, the husband of Sunday Reed, who was the wealthy patron who had not only supported Nolan’s early years but also been his lover in a famous ‘ménage à trois’ arrangement at Heide in Victoria.
Turley’s travels took him as far as Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains. Photo: Supplied
Interestingly, Nolan’s second wife, Mary, was a member of the famous Boyd dynasty of Australian arts figures; her brother was leading modernist Arthur Boyd, and her ex-husband was the beloved modernist painter, John Perceval.
Thus was Nolan’s inner sanctum strongly connected to his emerging influences, the 1940s Heide circle of writers and artists revolving around the Angry Penguins magazine and the great arts hoax of the Ern Malley Affair.
Turley’s tome does not dwell upon this part of the Nolan life or oeuvre. Nor does it give depth to the other thing that he and Nolan have in common, military service. Nolan was a conscript corporal and his life in service was as brief as it was reluctant. It ended with him mysteriously severing two left hand fingertips and going AWOL under the name of Robin Murray. That was when the Ned Kelly likeness was suggested to him.
Speaking to InReview, Turley is reluctant to be drawn on this aspect of Nolan’s life, focussing his narrative on the 1960s during which the artist had become resident of the United Kingdom while also travelling extensively.
There is a strong geo-political thread within the book’s thorough narrative; Turley believes Nolan’s painted responses to his experiences were driven by his strong belief in social justice and the ghastly history of man’s brutality to both man and animal.
Turley’s research unearthed many if not all accounts of Nolan’s travels and related art output, from Auschwitz to Antarctica. Nolan’s African expeditions were much influenced by the travels and erudition of distinguished Australian journalist, war correspondent, and author Alan Moorhead. Turley intertwines Moorhead’s African accounts with Nolan’s and Cynthia’s and then with his own, since he also was an Africa aficionado and had already made extensive trips long before he encountered that catalyst in the form of Gorilla.
“Mali, Cameroon, Angola, Namibia, Tanzania — from Kilimanjaro to the Serengeti et cetera,” Turley explains. “So I had a good ‘sense of place’. Africa had soaked through me.”
Epic of unprecedented detail
As a result, Turley’s Nolan’s Africa evolves as a travel and arts epic of unprecedented detail and proportions. And it’s a history book; Turley scoured the country’s arts records from which he has been able to describe and illustrate a first showing of Nolan’s African animals in Adelaide in the 1960s, opened by Moorhead and attended by Nolan himself in the Bonython Gallery on Jerningham Street in North Adelaide.
It seems so strange that this event was long forgotten, not deemed earth-shattering until Turley came on the case.
There is a serendipity, a co-incidental sense of destiny, perhaps, that Turley himself has come to roost in Adelaide after peripatetic years. He and Rachael now dwell in a Nolan-filled house just a stone’s throw from that North Adelaide gallery.
Turley leaves no stone unturned reaching into Nolan’s philosophic and literary influences, particularly the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, as well as his personal relationships and the insatiable curiosity that drove him to seek out and befriend as many thinkers as he could.
Turley tracked down other interesting art series and projects by Nolan, and embellished them with the critical assessments of media and arts commentators then and now. He also drew from the newly-opened Sidney Nolan Archive at the National Library of Australia, which provided access to never-before-seen diaries, photographs, and notes.
Nolan’s Africa (The Miegunyah Press / Melbourne University Publishing)
Turley’s fascination is infectious. Whether one loves or loathes the style and output of Sidney Nolan, one is drawn into this charismatic creation. Funnily enough, some arts smarts have described the book as a ‘monograph’.
There certainly are few monographs of this scale; if Nolan was prolific, this work is prodigious. Turley reveals that Nolan’s artistic process was always swift in its execution, but long in its creative gestation.
Turley is of the passionate belief that Australia’s Sidney Nolan was a genius.
Nolan’s Africa by Andrew Turley (The Miegunyah Press / Melbourne University Publishing) is out now