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Chapter 1: What is the main focus of Janet Holmes à Court's art collection?
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Hello there and welcome to Tim and Kev's Big Design Adventure. Hello, Kev.
Hi, Tim. It is an adventure, isn't it? I probably say that every time we speak. It's the fact that our episodes, they always surprise me because we go out and record them and a month or two later we're sitting... And last night I listened to today's episode, to our interview, and thought this is just magical because we record quite a bit on location.
And so it's like revisiting a – put it this way, it's not like finding an old sandwich at the bottom of your suitcase, is it? That's the thing.
I think it's interesting because maybe we don't listen as much in these situations as we think we do. So when you hear it back – You go, oh, I miss that. I've made television programs and I've watched them again and went, I was there, I did that voiceover, I was there in the edit and I miss that bit.
Quite bizarre. Yes, because if you're interviewing somebody or if you're doing voiceover, you're doing your job. You're listening to it. You're following through. You're looking at timing. You're thinking about how does this end? Hang on a minute, there's a bit of a glitch in the picture or that. That doesn't land as well. If we just change that in the edit, that might be a little better.
And I think when you're live with people, I mean, I remember when we interviewed today's collaborator, I was in Perth and you were in Perth. Yes. And I think it might have been like the day after I landed or something or two days. And I was playing catch up, you know, as you do when you first go to a country.
And listening to it, the conversation just sounds so amazing because it's sort of relaxed, but also there's a sort of intensity and a kind of fascination about it. I keep teasing here now because I don't want to announce who it is, but I think you should.
Yeah, we're talking about Janet Holmes at court.
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Chapter 2: How did Janet transition from business to arts patronage?
I think it's a curious thing because when I was listening back to you, you're really good and you're super engaged even though you were jet lagged and it's nice to have a record of these things.
I think I was trying to impress her too much. I think I used too many long words.
No, you didn't.
There was one question that was the classic. It was one question which was like 40 seconds long and I think her answer was yes. It's the worst possible interviewing technique.
Mine's always when you're chatting to someone and then you think you've just landed something amazing and they'll go, yeah, I haven't really thought about that before. I'm not sure and then it ends. The recent 100th birthday for David Attenborough had me thinking about the time that I was lucky enough to interview him. You must have met him a couple of times at least.
I have because we were both ambassadors for WWF. Yeah. In fact, I was there because a friend of mine was involved with WWF and we had this meeting. I was just reading out something and then I don't think he knew who I was. By the way, we shared the same birthday, weirdly. Oh, did I miss your birthday? Well, that's okay. Oh, shit. No, hang on a minute. That's the correct form when you're my age.
It's correct, Tim. When was your birthday? October 20th. Yeah, you see, I think I missed yours. So come on. So it doesn't matter. No, I'm just saying that only because it is a coincidence since you mentioned David Attenborough. Yeah. I had a lovely birthday. Don't worry. I didn't miss your card or anything. I'll have to send something now. No, don't.
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Chapter 3: What role does architecture play in Janet's life and work?
Please, no, don't do this. I don't. Let's not. Please, come on. Yeah. It's too much. Look, listeners, dear listeners, here's a lesson, I think. If you have great friends in your life that you love, the thing is to love them and look after them. If you feel you have to send them a birthday card or note or something on their birthday, it's because you're not being a good enough friend.
Oh, is that harsh? Yeah, it is a little harsh. You know, friendship is something that happens and one definition of it is spontaneity. One definition of it is the fact that it's 365 days a year.
Yeah, and to be fair, you're not eight. If you are eight, it's a big deal. Birthdays. It's a big deal. When you're 100, it's a big deal. It's a very big deal. So let's talk about this conversation we had with Janet Holmes at court, which I knew that it would be one that you would enjoy. And it's about her life and art and architecture.
Look, she's a very, very successful businesswoman in her own right, a one-time science teacher. Now, Robert Holmes Accord, her late husband, was like an old school, what people used to call tycoons back in the day. Such a good word.
Yeah.
What happened to the word tycoon? Nowadays, it's property developer, isn't it? Yeah. Or mogul or businessman or oligarch. For goodness sakes, what happened to tycoon?
Well, let's just call him an old school tycoon. When he died in 1990, Janet took over the reins of the family business and really steadied the ship, which impressed everyone. But it's not really what we're talking about here. We're talking about her life with art and architecture and how not only has she got this extraordinary art collection, which we'll discuss in this interview, but...
She's helped start the Black Swan Theatre Company in Perth.
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Chapter 4: How has Western Australian culture influenced Janet's perspective on art?
She's been instrumental with the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Australian Children's Television Foundation and how I met her in her time as the Commissioner of the Venice Architecture Biennale for Australia. So she loves art and she loves architecture and so those two things coming together makes her a perfect guest for the podcast. It does. Because she's such an impressive human being.
That's why it was important to have her on the podcast. I mean, for God's sake, she's one of the National Trusts of Australia's living treasures and there's only 100 of them. She's a living treasure.
So are we talking here about a legitimate, this is a list, a published list of national treasures. She's a living treasure. We have the phrase, but what a brilliant idea to institutionalize it, to say, let's not just use this as a throwaway tabloid term. Let's actually value these people, assess them and value them. That's a really good idea.
And so I suppose this conversation is about celebrating her passions and we did this in her art gallery, which is pretty basic but also not basic at the same time. It's a big old factory and she was super generous with her time, super charming. And as always, you're going to love this chat. Thanks for having us in your wonderful gallery.
Thanks for coming. It's a great privilege to meet Kevin. I've met Tim before, but it's great to meet you.
I thought you guys would like each other. I think the privilege is all ours, isn't it? Thank you. This space. And by the way, we've got this wide shot of us all sitting here.
Yes.
In silhouette, there's tiny figures in the corner of this amazing perspective of this room, which is a fabulous gallery and wasn't built as a gallery. What was it built of?
It was actually built as a factory in which Taubman's paints were made many, many years ago. I'm not exactly sure how long ago, but yeah, it was a paint factory. I then found it when I was on my way to a little
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Chapter 5: What unique challenges does Janet face in promoting Indigenous art?
private cinema down the road called Backlot to watch a movie and it was for sale and I'd been looking for a gallery and storage space particularly in fact storage because the art collection used to be stored at a farm we have 40 miles 64 k's south of Perth and that meant the staff were driving back and forth constantly
So from paint factory to... To a... Paint factory.
A paint factory, yes. A painting factory. But there's a lot of storage space out the back, which we'll have a look at later. Yeah. And then this wonderful space for a gallery.
What did you want the gallery to be?
Well, we started collecting in 1968. Wow. When we lived in the hills outside Perth in a place called Darlington. And the three paintings that we bought... in 1968 are in this exhibition. We've still got them in the collection. And we always thought of it as a public, private collection. I believe very strongly that artists paint their works for people to see.
I mean, the artists might not agree with me on that, but I think it's great if people have done all that work to make a picture. Let's share it. And so the collection is... publicly available and this was a great space in which to share art the three paintings that you still got yes yeah what are they and tell us about their journey where they've been over the years
Well, the three paintings, obviously when we were first married, we didn't have any paintings. Nobody, people usually don't come to a marriage with a lot of paintings and we didn't. But we lived in Darlington, which was a bit of an artist colony at the time. So lots of our friends up there were artists and every year they had a Darlington art show. So we had a house with walls.
We needed something to stick on the walls to display. And we bought three paintings that are here. One is the Bob Juniper on the big easel down there. One is a... Wim Boiservijn oil, it's called The Hunter. It was painted before Wim Boiservijn started painting vases of flowers, which didn't interest me.
But I have two of his pictures, that one, which was in the first three, and the other one is two gorgeous old Aboriginal people sitting at a bus stop. Mm. And the third painting we bought then, our third work, was by Guy Gray Smith. It's a lithograph. And those three, as I say, they're still in the collection and very precious.
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Chapter 6: What stories do the artworks in Janet's collection tell?
I've got a lot of batiks, say, from the community that Emily came from in Utopia. They've been exhibited all over the place. It's a compact exhibition because they fit into two big boxes. I actually took them to China once and I was presented with five Chinese people who didn't speak English and I was me with no Chinese at all.
But they were exhibited in a deconsecrated Taoist temple and I had never hung an exhibition before. I didn't know what I was doing. I couldn't communicate with them. So I just put all the purple ones in one room and all the orange ones in another room. All the yellow ones. It actually was great. But the first time they went overseas was to the opening of the new Australian embassy in Paris.
And it was opened by Paul Keating. And they hung the works from the ceiling. And there are a hundred of them. And as people walked through, because they're such fine silk, they must have been beautiful.
Yeah, the gentle wafting.
Yes, wafting.
Yeah.
Yeah. You talk so passionately about it, and quite clearly this has become, over your life, a hugely important body of work for you. I mean, an enterprise. It's like seeing a fantastic ship in sail, you know what I mean? It's like the sense of this great collection moving forward through time. Can I just ask a very basic question, which is what does art, visual art, mean to you?
That's such an interesting question. The painting over on the wall behind us by Brian McKay, the one that looks a little bit like a Francis Bacon, and there's a great story about it because he painted about 20 pictures when he was in England and then realised how influenced he'd been by Francis Bacon. Fortunately, that one had been sold, but he burnt the other.
And when the woman who bought it died, her daughter wrote to me and said, I know you've got a lot of Brian McKay's work. Would you like this one? So it was great that that one was saved. But I once said to Brian, tell me what you really think art is. And he said, art is something that moves you in a way you can't explain. And I love saying that because that's how I feel about it.
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Chapter 7: How does Janet view the relationship between art and public accessibility?
He was the husband of a friend of mine who was Czechoslovakian. And he came home when he and his wife were about 70 and said, nothing personal, but I want a divorce. So every time I look at that painting, I think, nothing personal, but I want a divorce. It's just the most bizarre thing.
This painting here, we actually gave to some people who'd come from Zimbabwe and they didn't have any paintings on their walls. We gave it to them for their walls in Perth. They went back to Zimbabwe and somehow someone, it turned up in auction and I was able to buy it back.
You bought back a painting that you'd given to someone.
There's a lesson there.
Yes.
What does it mean to you to be a Western Australian?
It is an interesting thing to be born and grow up on this side of a continent where you often meet people, you know, meet people in Sydney who've never been to Perth. They've been to Hawaii or Los Angeles or London or Europe, parts of Europe. But we actually live in a very different part of the world.
when I was involved with founding a theatre company, Black Swan, and we focused our works on the Indian Ocean rim. And twice I've had exhibitions here of craft from the Indian Ocean. not from Hawaii or Sydney or Brisbane, but from India or South Africa or Malaysia and so on. So it is a different mindset.
It's also quite funny to grow up in a place where the rest of your country think you're a cultural desert, but we produce a disproportionate number of Australia's great singers, disproportionate number of our great women writers, Music is huge here. Seriously, you can go to a concert every single night of the year in Perth.
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Chapter 8: What insights does Janet have on the future of art and architecture?
Yeah, they were.
Yeah. And so tell us about that and how that sits in you too, doesn't it?
Yeah, that's something I can't help. Do you want to help? Like an illness. No, my father was in the Second World War in Darwin in Signals, saw no action whatsoever. He and some of his friends read a lot. And they decided that the system that we had was not working. They were born in a war and then they were in a war.
And the system they thought could be improved, they'd also been through a depression. He became a communist and so did my mother. And I spent a lot of my childhood, early childhood, at the home of Catherine Susanna Pritchard, who was the leader of the communists here. Most of Dad's communist friends were actually doctors.
And we had an interesting time until my mother decided that there should be some sort of debate was communism really as good as they were being told and was marxism as good as they thought and catherine did not want any debate on that at all she wouldn't allow debate so mum said fine i'm out of here so she left the communist party and my father followed and then in about 1945 she joined the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which I think was founded about then. And she was still a member of that when she died at 89. Amazing. And she and some of her anti-war pacifist friends, every Hiroshima Day, they would have a campaign. They would picket
There was a church in Perth, Wesley Church, they'd stand outside Wesley Church with their anti-nuclear weapon signs and so on. So I have to say sometimes I'm pleased that she's not around anymore because I think she'd be absolutely horrified if she knew what was going on in the world now.
This blood runs in your veins.
I'm afraid I can't get rid of it.
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