The time was the afternoon of 7 September, 1989; the place, Graeme Base's home in an inner Melbourne suburb. We sat in the dining/kitchen area, drinking our beer, and talking into a cassette recorder. Let's pick up the conversation a few minutes in . . . .
DC: You were saying how you admire the work of Mervyn Peake, and the Gormenghast books in particular.
GB: The thing which is most memorable to me was Flay and Swelter – the final conflict up in the Tower of Flints. It was an amazing sequence going over pages and pages that held me absolutely riveted. I would dearly love to illustrate Gormenghast, but I think the problem is that Peake did his own illustrations – and he did it bloody well, too, when it comes down to it!
But there's always room for new interpretations. After all, I illustrated Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, and that has been done already by very well known and respected artists. That didn't worry me. Maybe I have a thick skin or an ego or an artistic naivety. I just thought: This is something I would love to do.
I felt inspired by the words. I feel the same with The Hunting of the Snark, even though it's just recently been in the news with that musical version. I don't see there's any reason why I couldn't do that.
DC: I wasn't at all impressed by Mike Batt's musical version of The Snark.
GB: I think a lot of people would share your view. The damnable thing is that I wouldn't mind having a go at it musically myself, because I've got a tremendous interest in music. I'd be just as happy working as a musician rather than as an artist.
In fact I did for, oh, five years; I was in a band. But we never made a brass razoo. After five years, we worked out that we actually broke even, which we thought was a raging success because most bands lose money at a fabulous rate.
DC: What was the band?
GB: It was called Rikitikitavi, after the Rudyard Kipling story, but we spelt it wrong. We only put one K and had Rikitikitavi as one word. It was sort of a support band around the pubs and clubs in Melbourne. We did all right; we got some good gigs.
DC: What sort of music did you play?
GB: I suppose it was essentially funk. But not black man's funk - a sort of English technofunk. You can't categorize it really. We started off being very heavily influenced by Talking Heads; very syncopated, detailed sort of music. But when you play in pubs you cater for people that "wan-na dance".
And so it all fell apart in the end, but it was a good experience. I'd love to go back to music.
It was how I met Robyn. She was the lead singer and I played keyboards. Actually, I started off in the band playing drums; that was my great love. Rhythm is always the essence of music for me. We were trying out keyboard players and we couldn't find a keyboard player we were happy with. I was already writing stuff for keyboards, so I began playing keyboards instead of drums and we started looking for drummers.
For a while, we went through that stage of being a drum machine band, which is really soulless, but it was a way of coping, 'cos then I could do both: I could program the drum machine and play the keyboards. Then we found a superb drummer and a guitarist who came as a boxed set, so we joined forces and went on for another three years. Eventually, we all went our own ways.
I still play a heap of music for enjoyment, for relaxation - guitars or keyboards or percussive things - but most of the stuff I write now is instrumental, and tends much more towards the orchestral. I tend to write a piece and hear it in terms of cellos and french horns and oboes, rather than electric guitars and drums.
DC: Do you have any of the synthesizer instruments...?
GB: Samplers, you mean? Yes, I've had various bits and pieces of equipment over the years, but I sold most of it since Animalia and The Eleventh Hour started taking up almost all of my time.
The rate of progress, technically speaking, with electronic instruments these days means that hanging onto something for more than 18 months makes it antique. I realized that I wasn't using any of what I had, so I got rid of it. But I hope to re-invest in some stuff, and get back into music next year (1990).
DC: So is a musical Hunting of the Snark a goer?
GB: No, it's not actually, now; it's already been done, and I'd find it very hard to get back into. But I have heaps of ideas: probably seven or eight ideas for projects at the moment, four or five of which are books, and the rest are musical.
Some are theatrical, some are recording, so I don't know which way to jump. I suppose it's good to have a choice, but I've got to make sure I make the right decision. At this stage, having had two fairly remarkable successes with Animalia and The Eleventh Hour – books don't usually sell those sorts of figures in Australia – it's very tempting to rest on one's laurels, and say, Ah, it doesn't matter what I do next, it'll sell.
I can get away with that once, and, if it doesn't work, my credibility is right back where it started from. So I'm very aware of not just saying, I want to do this and hang everyone's advice. If I'm self-indulgent, I'll fall in a terrible heap. I take advice. I don't take it well, but I do take advice. Robyn's a terrific critic. Artistically, in particular, because she's an artist, an oil painter, and a tremendous colourist, much better than I ever was, or ever will be.
She criticizes me well, and so does my publisher, Bob Sessions (as in "Petty" Sessions). He's a tremendous critic, and I've worked with him ever since I've been in publishing. He has a very good business sense as well as a good artistic eye.
DC: How did you get started?
GB: Mmm. (Drinks.) The potted version? When I was twelve I went around telling people "I'm going to be a commercial artist". It sounded wonderful. This magical blend of money and art. You draw pictures and actually get paid for it. Sort of heaven on earth. All the way through high school, that was that. I'd decided I was going to be an artist.
Sure enough, when I finished HSC, I went to Swinburne – College of Technology as it was then – and did the graphic design course for three years. I wanted to do it for four years, because there was a degree string to the course. But after three years they said, "That's your lot mate, off you go."
They didn't want me for four. (Laughs.) I think they were probably very wise.
Then I went into advertising. I battled in advertising for two years, getting paid extremely well and hating the work with a vengeance. The sort of work I was doing was killing. Newspaper ads: drawing furniture for Saba ads, tyre tread patterns for Bob Jane T-Marts, golf shoes, outrageous, silly stuff.
DC: You've got good company. A lot of Australian writers started in advertising.
GB: Yeah. It's interesting you should say writers, though; I don't think of myself as a writer. Whenever I talk to somebody it's always from a visual perspective. Writing is really almost a side-line, although it's become fairly fundamental to my recent work.
Getting back to advertising. I went through three jobs in two years, and I didn't like it at all. Finally, I was fired from my third job after three months, for incompetence. I hated my work so much; and if you do hate your work, it shows. Anyway, the fellow sacked me: it was the best he could do. As it turned out, it was the best thing he could have done for me as well. He forcibly ejected me from this very comfortable, salaried position.
I'd already been working up some freelance work for book publishers in the meantime, doing book jackets and the occasional spot illustration for a story. So I just had to go and see what I could do, and began hawking my wares around the various publishers.
I went to Bob Sessions when he worked for Thomas Nelson in LaTrobe Street. I didn't have any firm plans for work, except some sort of half-baked and not very well thought out idea about dragons.
He said, "No, I don't like that. Why not do something Australian?"
So I did, I went away and came back six months later with six illustrations and a complete poem, which I'd written, called My Grandma Lives in Gooligulch.
And he said, "Yeah, great; I'll publish it."
So I had a very easy start, and then I did Animalia. That was followed by Jabberwocky and a book called Creation Stories, both of which I did for Macmillan, and Days of the Dinosaurs, for Nelson. And then back to Penguin for The Eleventh Hour. The latest thing I have out is a calendar called Dragons, Draaks and Beasties.
The calendar is the final culmination of at least a decade of a positive, constructive, almost professional, interest in dragons, going right back to when I was a kid, drawing dragons and monsters.
Now finally I have something out in press. The idea of doing something on dragons has been haunting me for years. Even though Dragons, Draaks and Beasties is not a book, I decided to put out something to get the monkey off my back.
DC: And have you?
GB: Ahh-h, for the moment. I may still do a book – there are many more dragons to be drawn – but there are a lot of other projects that are crowding in on me, musical ones especially.
DC: What gets you inspired to start a new project?
GB: Well, it's hard to know. That's the classic question, isn't it: where do ideas come from? I've got no idea. I know with The Eleventh Hour I was actually working again on a draft of a dragon book, (laughs) probably the seventh draft, when this idea hit me. Who knows? Maybe I'd seen an Agatha Christie movie the night before, I just cannot remember.
I suddenly thought: I don't think anybody has ever done a mystery story in pictures, one where all the clues would be in the pictures rather than in the text. That was the essence of the idea, and was exactly how it came out in the end. And then about fifteen minutes later, almost at the same time, the title The Eleventh Hour appeared. It sounded like a spooky, exciting, mystery-type title.
Which left me with a bit of a problem, because I had a concept and even a title, but no idea what the story was at all; I had to construct the story to reflect the title. And that's how it became all the elevens.
DC: Your travelling obviously has had an influence on The Eleventh Hour.
GB: With The Eleventh Hour, especially, yes. We've done a lot of travelling in recent years. In '87 we were overseas for ten months, and picked up lots of influences from India, and especially from Europe. And we travelled through Kenya – the game parks – and Tanzania. That was fantastic; it was an unbelievable experience for someone who's interested in wildlife.
DC: So you spent a lot of time with a camera?
GB: Oh yes. I'm not a plein air painter: I don't go out with a sketch pad and a beret, and paint and draw out in a field. Besides, if you're with a group of people you can't make them hang around for three-quarters of an hour while you finish a drawing. So I tend to use a camera, and then come back and work from the photographs.
DC: How do you paint from a photograph? I imagine that would be incredibly difficult.
GB: Well. What I do is develop the pictures as slides, and attach them with sticky tape to a magnifying doovilackey, and hold it up to my eye to draw it.
I'm not a wildlife artist, far from it, but when I draw an animal, I still want it to be believable, I want to know that I got the animal essentially right, even if the animal is dressed in an admiral's uniform or an Indian's headdress, or whatever. For Animalia, I studied pictures of lions so closely I could actually make sure that the pattern of hair on the nose was going in the right direction. I'm quite obsessed by detail. I wouldn't say I'm a nature artist or wildlife artist, because I will take those animals and do other things with them; I'll draw a goanna from reference to make sure I got the feel and the shape of it right, but then I'll sit it up in a chair with a glass of beer.
I'm anthropomorphising the animals. It's the stuff of children's literature: Wind in the Willows, and anything else you can think of. That sort of thing has been looked down on for many years; in the circles of people who "know better" it's considered to be a bit infra dig. But I do absolutely naturally what I enjoy. The books that I do are the sort of books that either I had as a child, or wished I had as a child, or imagine that I should have had as a child, if you know what I mean.
It comes very much from the kid within me, which I've steadfastly refused to let go of. I've just turned thirty-one. It's come as a huge shock, because I still think of myself as about twelve years old. Which is terrific.
People who lose that childhood, that ability to be child-like – in particular facets of their life, of course, not all of them – I think those people are really missing out. They're not complete people. Maybe they think they are complete people, 'cos they've left behind the things of childhood and moved on to something else. But they haven't; they've cut part of themselves away.
Not being scared to be a child still, I think is very, very important. And I think I've proved that there are a lot of people out there who want to hold onto their childhood. My books are still considered children's book – you can't market them as anything else – and a lot of people buy my books, thinking they're buying something for a child, a son or daughter, or grandchildren, and they'll keep it for themselves. I get a lot of letters from adults who tell me this: people who've become intrigued by one book or another.
DC: Do you spend a lot of time reading letters?
GB: (very tired) Oh, I do, yes. I've almost always got a backlog of fifty to a hundred letters that I have to reply to. It's part of the deal. Sometimes they're wonderful; you can get some terrific responses.
One guy in his sixties wrote to me, and he said that he had The Eleventh Hour and he'd spent ages and ages and ages working on it. Nobody else in his family had done the work he had, and he didn't want to spoil it for them, and he had to talk to somebody about it. So he wrote to me, and he said, I know you know all of this, but I want to tell you what I've done. And he went through every page, and what he'd found, and what he liked, and the problems he'd had. And then, at the end of the letter, I don't know why he did it, he set me four conundrums of his own. I only managed to solve three of them, so he beat me in the end. (Laughs.) But I just love to get that sort of response.
DC: By the way, the swan's name is Ingrid.
GB: Well done! (More laughter.)
The interview will continue next page, when Graeme Base will tell us about poverty, affluence, technical aspects of his work, and why someone in South Yarra is afraid to answer the telephone.
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