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I found the footpath library while queueing up for dinner at JEF's food van across the road on a wintery Tuesday night in 2007. I'd been a regular since 2004 when I was living in a shitty boarding house in Redfern with my son who'd just been released from Rozelle hospital. A little while before I was living & working as a professional artist in a cosy mud brick studio on the outskirts of Melbourne. Things were looking up ,I was starting to sell paintings, was in with a leading gallery & my health was good. I'd given up the part time teaching job that I"d done for over ten years & was determined to make my living as an artist. But that was then. In 2007 I was sneaking into my studio at night to sleep when I could.I was evicted from the studio for dossing there. In between I slept out or stayed in a shelter. Throughout this time when I couldn't paint I'd read & I'm gratefull for the footpath library for sustaining me. Reading took my mind off my troubles & gave me a respite from the constant motion that that kind of life demands.The footpath library has been a saving grace. Apart from being down & out in Sydney I've been down and out in Paris and London with George Orwell, read about the homeless in Victorian London in Peter Ackroyd's "London: A Biography"', discovered Proust in the Edward Eager Lodge, hung around seedy ports in the South Pacific with Conrad's Lord Jim & reread one of my favorite books; Joyce Cary's "The Horses Mouth" with its patron saint of destitute artists Gully Jimson. I read a book on the Lives of the Saints & felt both inspired & humbled. " The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats" gave me the background on those writers , some of whom I'd read & vowed to read again one day. I wandered through Europe in the 50's through the eyes of Lloyd Rees & his wonderfull drawings and was glad I was sober after reading a biography of Charles Bukowski. Patrick Whites "Tree Of Man" made my troubles look pretty small & I learnt a little humility from reading the life of the Australian poet John Shaw Neilson.
Things have picked up since then.I've got a cosy little room in Glebe & am painting the grounds of the old asylum my son was a patient in . I've got in with another gallery & even sold some work, there's a survey show coming up in Melbourne later in the year & I'll take a trip down for that. I've got a belly full of cabbage and ham soup & you can guess where I found the recipe for that old chestnut!
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