When I lay in bed... I mean I mean this very seriously. I actually speak to myself. I say, “Stop looking backwards. Look forward”, because there is no point in looking back and regretting all those things. So I say to myself, “Look forward”. What I really mean is that get off your backside and go into the studio tomorrow and do some work. Look forward, don’t look back. My name is Guy Warren. Guy Wilkie Warren if you want the full name. I am 101 years old and I was born in the city of Goulburn in 1921 I have extraordinary good, like most old people I think, long term memory. I can remember being in Goulburn as a child. I can remember being in a pram in the main street of Goulburn. I had one, two, three, four... four or five maiden aunts and they were maiden because they never married. And they never married because all the young men in Goulburn had been killed in the First World War. And the story I heard was that all the Goulburn boys were in the boats that first went into Gallipoli. Whether that was true or not, I don't know. But what I have seen many times later, wandering through the bush, wandering through the country, driving around. I used to at one stage often stop at the local cemetery in any country town, and if you do, you find one name and six people with that same name. And they were all boys from the local farm. And one joined up and then the next one grew up a bit and he joined up, and then six of them joined up. Appalling. My mother was born into a very large family in Goulburn and when she was born there was something like eight kids I think. I forget the number now, but I know it was a big family. And there was measles in the family. All the other kids had measles and when the new baby arrived, obviously they didn't want to have a new baby in the house if there was measles there, so they gave the baby to an elderly aunt. What would have been to me a great aunt. I think. And they reared her. They never gave the baby back. That's Aunty Fanny’s house and that's the house I was born in, in Goulburn. That’s my Mum with a violin in her hand by the look of it and that’s her playing piano. And she was a very good singer. She learned the piano, she learned the violin, and she was good at all those things. And Dad was a pianist. So obviously that's how they got together. Okay, well, that photograph is of the Empire Theater in Goulburn where my old Dad played the piano. And that's my Dad. The cinemas in those days, of course, were like extraordinary theaters. They were magnificent pieces of architecture and razzmatazz. And he was the pianist and in the days of no talkies, when all the spoken words were written on the screen in front of you, there was no sound. In order to have music and appropriate music, there was always a pianist and usually a small orchestra. And Dad was such a pianist. Mum was the violinist. And I know Dad had, when Mum could no longer could do it or had kids to look after, he had a small group with him. You don't ask questions to your parents, which is a great shame. You don't know the questions to ask, of course. But we moved. We never owned a house. We moved every two years and we moved to every suburb in Sydney and in retrospect I would guess it was because Dad had a two year contract with the cinema. I remember in primary school being very proud of the fact that I could point to the flier which said, ‘Playing at the local cinema was Leonard Warren and his...’ whatever they were called, and saying, “That's my Dad!” Big deal. Poor Dad. Talkies came in, of course, exactly in the depths of the Depression. So he got a double whammy. He lost his job because the talkies came in and it was right in the depths of the Depression. Poor devils. They really struggled after that. Yeah, we've been lucky. I've been lucky. They were tough times. One in five people were out of work. My memory of the Depression is of lines of out of work blokes on every street corner in Sydney, particularly musicians who are the first people to feel the rigors of being out of work. Nobody wants to pay a musician. My memory of Sydney is of a muso on every street corner, busking for a living. And on the rocks around the eastern suburbs of Sydney, I have a clear memory of out of work fellows who'd saved a bit of timber that had washed ashore on the rocks and had built huts. Somehow they must have made them waterproof. They certainly couldn't have made them warm. I had to leave school at 14 to earn a little bit of money to help them, I guess, although the pay was so poor that I can’t believe that it helped them very much. But I always regret having to have to leave school at 14. That was much too early. And my brother, of course, who wanted to be a doctor, never had the chance to do that. But these things happen. You know, that's part of living, part of life, part of the world. I can remember when I was 14 and that was in high school. I was just leaving high school. Mum always managed to have a Sunday roast. I don't know how she did, but I do remember that half a leg of lamb was a shilling. How do I remember that? Somebody... maybe she or maybe somebody told me that, but a shilling that's... well, what's ten cents now. I can remember breakfast that my brother and I had, having gone for a swim in the morning, and come back. And there were big sandwiches of bacon and a bacon sandwich and a sunny morning in summer after a swim. Man, that’s really living! It really is. Why don't I do it now? I'll have a sandwich tomorrow. Bacon sandwich tomorrow. Through somebody who knew somebody who my parents knew, I got a job as a proofreader’s assistant on the old Bulletin newspaper. It was a weekly newspaper, and the old Bulletin had a reputation as being a farmer's country magazine. The proofreader in those days was fairly powerful. He wasn't a journalist. He was a proofreader, and he'd checked every proof for mistakes. In a funny way, I probably got a very good education, at least in English from him, because I was his assistant and I had to read out the journalist's copy while he checked all the proofs. So I don't regret that except that I think I was there too long and I was fascinated by the journalists and I liked using words, so I wanted to be a journalist and I started writing bits and pieces for them. But I was particularly interested in the fact that the bulletin didn't have any resident artists, but its pages were full of jokes. All the jokes and all the drawings, of course, were drawn by outsiders, by freelance artists. They weren't done by artists who were on staff. There was only one guy on staff, and he was the guy who actually collected the drawings and spoke to the artists. And I saw these guys coming in every Thursday I think it was, with their jokes. They'd disappear into his room and the door would close and there'd be great roars of laughter. And then they'd come out half an hour or an hour later with a little bit of paper in their hand, and they'd go to the front desk. This was at 252 George Street, and they'd go to the front desk and swap their bit of paper for a cheque. Then they'd go out onto George Street, turn right, and go into the nearest pub, which was next door. And I thought, “Gee, you know, that's a pretty easy life”. So I thought I ought to be an artist. I'd always drawn anyway. I'd always wanted to draw. So I started bombarding the art editor with joke drawings, and they were obviously very bad. But bless his heart, he was very kind. And he didn't do anything about it. He didn't say anything until one day he'd obviously had a bad day. He said, “You don't do it like that. You do it like this!” And he grabbed my bit of paper and he took a pencil and he drew something on the paper. I can still remember his drawing. It was a damn sight better than mine. And then he grabbed me by the arm, literally grabbed me by the arm, dragged me out of his office, up the steps, into the main office, down the steps, into George Street. Up George Street to a little street on the right, the name of which I've forgotten. It was full of old colonial type buildings. He went into one about halfway up the street and took me upstairs to about the second floor of this old building and threw me through big swing doors and said to the bloke inside, “Teach this kid to draw”. And then the art editor buzzed off and left me there. And it was a little private school run by somebody called J.S. Watkins, who was a trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He was a painter and a good painter. It was a traditional school with a tradition that goes way back to Leonardo. It was about seeing and putting down what you see and the skills that you need with which to do that. It was nothing about imagination or investigation or excitement. It was straightforward drawing and painting what one sees. It was a skill. It was skill oriented. And I was grateful for it. And I had a very good basis in exactly that. And that meant that I left the Bulletin because they sacked me when I was 21. Lousy creatures. I thought I might have gone on and become a journalist. But anyway, they obviously had enough journalists and they didn't want me. So at 21 I decided... things were getting a bit hectic then, so I decided to join the army. The Japanese at the time were battering the door down in Darwin and, at a moment of patriotism, I decided I ought to do something about it, so I joined the army. But what that meant was, by the time I went into the Army, I had a lot of skill in drawing. Being in the army on the whole is awfully boring because you might be frantically busy sometimes doing all sorts of awful things, but there are times when you do absolutely nothing and blokes sit down and play cards, which always bored the hell out of me. But I could draw them playing cards and I could draw them anyway. I remember I used to draw all my mates. In fact, I think at one stage, in New Guinea, I used to charge them for drawing them, which showed a degree of acumen that I don't seem to have followed since, sadly. But it was fun. And by sheer chance, I didn't get it out for you, on my table here in front of me, is an old sketchbook which has on it ‘Bougainville Sketchbook 1940s’. And I served for a few years on the island of Bougainville, a couple of hours flying time east of New Guinea. And these are some of the things that the War Museum has. These are drawings of Japanese which, bless them, they photographed and let me have photographs of them, so I haven't lost them entirely. They’re in the museum and I have good photographs of them. And I still think they’re damn good. Well, he's obviously not a Japanese. He was a fellow soldier, a fellow sergeant. And that's one of the Japanese. They’ve all written their names on them. I asked them to do that. How I did that, I can't imagine. I guess by sign language, but I've had them translated since and they are indeed proper names, which intrigues me because in a similar in an opposite situation, an Australian prisoner of war would have written ‘Ned Kelly’. But these guys wrote their proper name. They were much more disciplined than our lot. Oh I won’t to go through it all. A lot of landscapes and a lot of a lot of local indigenous people. And I was always intrigued by the way they decorated themselves, not only their tribal decorations, but if you gave them anything, they would put it in their hair or in their lap-lap, or they would... it became somehow a part of their body. And I quote one particular time when drawing a big black guy, and the guys in Bougainville are very, very, very black, they're the blackest in the South Pacific, and I had I used to pay them with cigarettes or tobacco or something like that and I had nothing with which to pay him. So I went into my tent and found a tin of talcum powder, a pretty unlikely thing to have, but the Comforts Fund had sent up tins of talcum powder because they thought it would help skin disease. I don't think anybody ever used it. But anyway, I found a tin in my tent, so I took it out and gave it to him. He immediately opened it, poured it into his hand, and made these wonderful, great marks, white marks on his big black body. And I thought, “Wow, only an artist would do that. That's great”. Anyway, that image has stayed with me ever since. And there was another related incident which added to that which happened... 10, 15 years later. After I'd come back to Australia, I did a course at the National Art School, which was then called the Sydney Technical College, and that was an art course. And then I married and my wife and I went to London looking for a job and I got a job, and so did she, in those days and we had a little flat just out of London. And this was the early days of television and we had a little black and white television set. And I saw a documentary by some person who'd been in New Guinea, in the highlands of New Guinea at Mount Hagen, where there was an annual... there was in those days, an annual dance festival. And dancers come from all over the South Pacific, from all the islands, and they dressed themselves in the most outrageous clothes. But all local material. They used feathers, plants, anything you can think of... mud, anything at all, which become fancy dress, if you like, dance dress. And the thought suddenly occurred to me that what these guys are doing is not just dancing, but by using all this material, which is local indigenous material, what they have around them, what they are really doing is making a statement about belonging to their land, not somebody else's land, their own land. And I thought, Gee, I'd like to have some of those photographs. So I wrote to the BBC and said something like, “I'm an Australian artist living in London, drawing my memories of New Guinea, painting my memories of New Guinea”. And whoever got the letter probably thought, Well, here's an idiot, you know, who would want to paint New Guinea from London? So he may have passed the letter around for all I know. Anyway, about a week later I got a phone call from somebody and he said he was from the BBC and he thought he might be able to help me. He said he did have some photographs from the documentary that I had been looking at, but he wouldn't sell them to me as I wanted him to. He said he'd lend them to me, but he introduced himself over the phone and he said his name was David Attenborough. And would I like to come around for a drink? Well, David wasn't well known in those days. He was just a bloke from the BBC with a name as far as I was concerned. So my wife and I went around for a drink. It's odd, isn't it? The little things that one remembers. Totally, totally, utterly insignificant things. Why the devil should one remember them? Because we sat down in his lounge room and he said, “What would you like to drink?” And my wife said she'd have a gin and tonic. And I said, “I'll have a whiskey.” And so he poured me this small whiskey. And he said, “What do you like in it?” Meaning you know, water or soda or whatever. And I said, “Well, actually I prefer it neat”. And then he looked at me and said, “Oh, well, you'd better have more than that” and he went... I mean, why should I remember that? I still keep in touch in touch with David very occasionally. And he sent me a note for my 100th birthday, which was a great thrill. Bless him. Well, springing from those two connections with land. First of all, with that connection with the fellow in Bougainville. And secondly, after talking to and listening to David, not only when I met him, but subsequently all his... all his programs, and also a better understanding of our own Aboriginal attitude towards land, our own Indigenous people's attitude towards land. Maybe it's a romantic idea. I don't care. I like the idea anyway. I like the idea of us belonging to the land, belonging to the universe, not owning it, for God's sake. We don't own it. We are part of it. And what I frequently do is to inhabit my landscapes with figures which don't necessarily have to look as though they're in the painting to give it scale or to give it interest. But looking as though they're as real and as insignificant as a tree beside them, as though they're part of whatever it is they're in. If you're in a thick rainforest, you are there and that's it. It does take over you. You are part of it. And the vines, the lianas, that wind their way through it and around you and everywhere. You're captured by it. You are part of it. Anyway, it's like the lianas are like three dimensional drawings, just weaving through space. Look, I don't... I'm not dogmatic. One of the great American painters whom I respect enormously said, among other intelligent things he said, “Art can contain anything, anything at all except dogma of any kind”. So I don't want to be dogmatic, and I do do other things. I don't always follow my own rule. There are no rules to this crazy game. It's about expression. One should be able to... An artist needs to be curious. We all need to be curious. We ought to ask questions. Is there a better way of doing this? Why can't I do it this way? Who says I can't do it that way? One should be capable of doing, painting anything one wants to.