“The Man on the Raft” was, in 1952, as art students in Melbourne , our first dramatic introduction to the stranger side of Fairweather. We had seen few paintings at that time and the sketchy stories that abounded gave no clear sense of the person whose real magnitude we are only now starting to recognize.

He was 61 at that time, with an awesome history of hardship and endurance behind him. It was sheer chance, and Australia 's good fortune, that he chose Bribie Island and found there the ambience of survival he had sought for much of his life.

Over the next 17 years he produced his major body of work. One hesitates to call them Australian. His wandering over the face of the earth; his pruning away of worldly clutter; the single, simple oneness of his being arrived at by then, flowed out in images of quite universal grandeur.

During the last four years of Fairweather's life, I was living on Bribie Island and saw him regularly. I found him a man of innate politemess and enourmous dignity. We played chess, drank, went on picnics and drives away from the Island – and we talked. Through our conversations two recurrent themes, if one can call them that, emerged. One was an unconscious identification with those great Chinese calligraphers who usually retreated within a religious group into a contemplative, philosophical life of which their work was an extension. In one of his few references to me about his way of working, he said “… I like a mess. I like to make a mess, then make something out of it – work something out of it. When the mess is your own and you make something out of it, you end up with something totally of you.”

To me this seems like a making over of one's life at each instant. A conscious act of removing the un-necessary bits, structuring up with the meaningful. A push-pull of adding and subtracting until that point of stillness and inner completeness is reached.

The other theme that recurred was his strong, underlying sense of Family. The ‘coda' was set from childhood and reinforced when he distanced himself from his family at the age of 37. Despite a lifelong correspondence with a niece, and less frequently, with other members of the family, he never reconnected with them in a satisfactory way.

He loved children and perhaps regretted not having children of his own. On the back of a photograph taken by him of a visiting family from Brisbane he had written “Lucky them. They have 3 healthy children. Poor me.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that the all-important figures appearing throughout his work are often of children or himself.

A few months before he died, he wrote to a niece in America , “…our family was Norman – I don't know which side we were on. Presumably with William the Conqueror – so we have survived.”

Indeed he has.

Lawrence Daws – May, 1984