James Vandeluer Wigley (1917–1999)

143.0000

James Vandeluer Wigley (1917–1999)

person

Wigley, James, 1918-1999.

Sheridan Palmer and Jane Eckett

21 May 1917

Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

17 July 1999

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

artist (draughtsman), artist (printmaker), artist (painter)

Born in Adelaide to Marion Dove Wigley (née Dale) and Henry (Harry) Vandeleur Wigley, James Wigley’s father died in 1927 and the family thrown into financial stress. James’s maternal grandfather, James Ernest Dale, an Anglican priest, facilitated his attendance at Poultney Street School (later Poultney Grammar School) as a fee-exempt student. There Wigley befriended fellow student and future anthropologist Ronald Berndt. Both Wigley and Berndt disliked school and left at an early age—Berndt, at fourteen, to study bookkeeping and business correspondence, and Wigley, who dreamt of joining the circus, at fifteen (James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman, 1987, NLA). Their friendship, however, would prove important. Berndt’s father, a jeweller who collected Aboriginal artefacts, awakened an interest in Indigenous cultural material in both Berndt and Wigley, who began collecting from an early age (Geoffrey Gray, ‘‘Cluttering up the department’, Ronald Berndt and the distribution of the University of Sydney ethnographic collection’, reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, vol. 2, no. 2, September 2007).

In 1937 Wigley enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Tynte Street, North Adelaide, where his Slade-trained art instructor, F. Millward Grey (1899–1957), considered drawing more important than painting, resulting in an emphasis on life classes and commercial art. While at art school, c. 1937-38, Wigley began to draw local Adelaide people as well as undertaking cartooning work under the nom de theatre of ‘Creigh’ (‘Fine work by students’, News, Adelaide, 12 December 1939, p. 11). He was invited to take part in group exhibitions in Adelaide around this time, including the Royal Society of Arts where, in June 1937, he was shown alongside such established artists as Dorrit Black, Ivor Hele and Hans Heysen (‘Student Artist Invited to Exhibition’, The Advertiser, Adelaide, 30 June 1937, p. 18).

In February 1938, with the support of Heysen, Wigley held a private exhibition of his work at the Mount Lofty home of Mrs Mellis Napier (Heysen’s role in helping arrange the exhibition is recounted in ‘Artist's studio among Aborigines’, The Australian Women's Weekly, 23 September 1964, p. 13). An Adelaide arts commentator, signing themselves ‘Palette’, reported that ‘people from every part of Australia saw the potentialities of this young South Australian, and eagerly bought up what was shown’ (Palette, ‘Young S.A. Artist in Sydney Studio. James Wigley’s Prospects’, The News, Adelaide, 17 February 1938, p. 8). The same commentator described Wigley’s work as ‘a compound of that of the late Will Dyson and the Englishman Stanley Spencer’ and the artist as a ‘sensitive shy dreamer’ ‘of whom great things are expected’. Shortly afterwards Wigley moved to Sydney and took a studio on George Street in the city.

At the end of the year, in November 1938, he joined a group of young contemporary artists exhibiting at Preece’s Gallery in Adelaide. His co-exhibitors were Mary Elizabeth Bell, Dora Cant, Nora Young, Geoffrey Francis, J. Rosemund Stokes and his future wife Molly Burden. One reviewer praised Wigley’s exhibit, Suburban Ladies, for its ‘delightful balance between irony and gentle satire, somewhat in the manner of Daumier’ (‘Students Show Courage and Promise’, The Advertiser, Adelaide, 18 November 1938, p. 9).

In 1939 he saw Keith Murdoch’s Herald exhibition of French and British modern art when it began its touring itinerary in August at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA). However, with his Slade-influenced training and its emphasis on drawing, painting remained a mystery. Moreover, the AGSA was ‘overweighed by British nineteenth-century art’ and held little to no appeal to the young student (James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman, 1987, NLA).

With Ronald Berndt—who was then still untrained in anthropology—Wigley spent time at Murray Bridge (76 km north of Adelaide) from November 1939 to February 1940. There he produced a series of sensitive portraits of Indigenous people (reproduced in Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt with John H. Stanton, A world that was: the Yaraldi of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia, Melbourne: MUP, 1993, plates 3, 4 and 10). This was Berndt’s ‘first anthropological field experience with living people’ (A world that was, 1993, p. 94) and Wigley’s first series in which Indigenous Australians took centre place.

After the outbreak of war, Wigley enlisted in the 2nd Survey Regiment R.A.A.(M) at Southwark, South Australia, in August 1940 (Canberra: National Archives of Australia, series B884, WIGLEY James, service number V110218). Barely two months later, on 8 October 1940, he married Molly Burden at St Columba’s, Hawthorn, Adelaide, and left shortly afterwards for Melbourne—then considered the place for figurative artists (‘Artists to marry’, The Mail, Adelaide, 5 October 1940, p. 10). They settled on the eastern outskirts of Melbourne at ‘the picturesque artists’ colony of Warrandyte’ (Palette, ‘Local artist moves to colony in Victoria’, The News, Adelaide, 8 February 1941, p. 2).

In Melbourne Wigley began meeting painters such as Albert Tucker, who lived in an old flat in Powlett Street, East Melbourne, with Joy Hester—a vital person who, in Wigley’s opinion, was overshadowed by Tucker. Photographs by Tucker of James Wigley and Molly Wigley from this period exist in the State Library Victoria. Through Tucker they met Yosl Bergner, Danila Vassilief, John and Sunday Reed, and the Koornong School people at Warrandyte. Molly taught at the Koornong school and James found work there as a maintenance man. Vassillief taught blacksmithing and building; he was then constructing his own home Stonygrad. The Wigleys rented a little cottage from Connie Smith who had bought Penleigh Boyd’s studio, where she held open house parties for actors and artists. When Sidney Nolan came up to Warrandyte to meet Adrian Lawlor, Wigley found Nolan aloof. Wigley’s mother, Dove, also moved from West Croydon, Adelaide, to Warrandyte and rented another small cottage from Connie Smith.

Wigley joined the newly formed Victorian branch of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS), where he met and befriended Noel Counihan, but he was never affected by the factionalism raging within the society. He met Vic O’Connor at Gino Nibbi’s Leonardo Art shop, thereby forming friendships with the Melbourne social realists. In December 1942 Wigley contributed three works to The Contemporary Art Society of Australia Anti-Fascist Exhibition at the Athenaeum Gallery. He attended the George Bell school once but didn’t fit in due, he said, to his ‘Slade school’ training in Adelaide; he also felt ‘swamped’ by the expressionists Percival, Boyd and Vassilieff (James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman, 1987, NLA). He found a studio in Brunswick and discovered the importance of books, especially Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky—‘a heady mix for the dark times’ (James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman, 1987, NLA).

In April 1941 Wigley enlisted in an army survey regiment at Noble Park racecourse, a unit that made relief maps and model planes used in training officers. Camp training was at Balcombe and Watsonia. In 1942–3 he applied unsuccessfully for the post of Official War artist. In 1943, just after his son Julian was born, Wigley was transferred to Sydney. The waiting around ‘in mobs’ to be sent here or there wore him down and he went AWOL, for which he was fined, and a warrant was issued for his arrest in October 1943. He was sent to Caufield where the records state: ‘Discharged NOT on account of Misconduct/or Discreditable Service’, but because he was ‘considered unsuitable for any further military service’. He was formally discharged 23 November 1943 with five days’ pay (National Archives of Australia, Canberra, series B884, Wigley James, service number V110218).

Back in Warrandyte the Viennese émigré architect Fritz Janeba designed for James and Molly Wigley The Stone House (1943), with Australia’s first butterfly roof (Philip Goad, ‘‘Austria in Australia’: Fritz and Kathe Janeba in Warrandyte’, in Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: transforming education through art, design and architecture, Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 2019, p. 226). Janeba also designed the Dove and Bill Wigley House, for James’s mother and brother, just down the hill, in 1948 (Wynne Scott, ‘Planned economy’, The Australian Home Beautiful, July 1949, pp. 34-5, 37). According to Wigley’s second wife, Eugenie Knox, both houses were built with Molly’s money (Eugenie Knox, Indelible Memories: Into the mouth of the tiger!, 2010, p. 75). Marion Dove Wigley would remain at Warrandyte until her death, aged 94, in 1984.

In late 1945, at the invitation of Ronald Berndt, Wigley travelled to the Northern Territory and spent several months at Daly River where A.P. Elkin had sent Ronald and Catherine Berndt to work as liaison and welfare officers for Vestey Brothers while researching labour conditions on Vestey’s cattle stations (Geoffrey Gray, ‘‘Cluttering up the department’, Ronald Berndt and the distribution of the University of Sydney ethnographic collection’, reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, vol. 2, no. 2, September 2007). Berndt thought Wigley should come and see ‘the real Australia, the real subject’, and, like ‘two outcasts’—the artist and the anthropologist—they settled amongst a group of white ‘combos’ (‘whitefellas gone native’) who had taken up land and employed Indigenous people from mixed tribes (James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman, 1987, NLA). More officially, Berndt advised E.W.P. Chinnery, director of the Northern Territory Native Affairs Branch, that Wigley would collect and document ‘examples of native art—such as drawings, basket work and other handcrafts (these of course will go to the Dept. Anthropology, together with series of his own drawings). Also he is to act as an observer, so that later his work should form a basis for our own’ (Ronald Berndt, letter to E.W.P. Chinnery, 28 October 1945, Chinnery Papers, National Library of Australia, MS 766, cited in Geoffrey Gray, ‘“He has not followed the usual sequence”: Ronald M. Berndt’s Secrets’, Journal of Historical Biography, no. 16, Autumn 2014, p. 70). While Berndt lobbied Vestey’s to improve their workers’ labour conditions, Wigley sat around the camp sketching and absorbing the vitality of the Aborigines in their own environment. He found the experience wonderful but said that the Aborigines ‘can disappear in front of your eyes if they want to, [and] you cannot see the landscape through their eyes’ (James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman, 1987). Wigley found it hard to convince the old men, who had been initiated, to talk; ‘they don’t care much for us’, he said. In Darwin, which was still occupied by the military, he found racism rife but during this period he produced hundreds of drawings of outback camp life.

On his return to Melbourne, Wigley attended the National Gallery art school for two years, funded through the Commonweath Rehabilitation Training Scheme, c. 1946-48. William Dargie, who was then head of the school, had his special students and didn’t bother about the ‘expressionists’ who had moved to the basement. He reportedly ‘tried to sack Wigley on the grounds he had been a practicing artist before the war’, but Wigley stayed on for the duration of the course (Philip Jones, ‘Painter found inspiration among the oppressed’, The Australian, Sydney, 29 July 1999, p. 9). Wanting to digest his Northern Territory experience, Wigley joined the students in the basement where he and Yosl Bergner painted the dispossessed.

In May 1947 Wigley held his first solo exhibition at the Velasquez Galleries at Tye’s (later known as Tye’s Gallery) in Melbourne. Sir John Barry QC opened it and was photographed at the opening with Wigley and Bill Onus, president of the Australian Aborigines League (‘Aboriginal Life’, The Age, Melbourne, 7 May 1947, p. 2. The work, nearly all drawn from his experiences at Daly River, and comprising both paintings and drawings, sold well and was critically acclaimed (Clive Turnbull, ‘Social value in artist’s work on Aborigines’, The Herald, Melbourne, 5 May 1947, p. 14). A few months later he exhibited Tobacco Hand-Out with the Studio of Realist Art (SORA) at the David Jones Gallery in Sydney, but the exhibited was disparaged by the Sydney critics (‘Exhibition by Studio of Realist Art’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 August 1947, p. 7).

With the proceeds of the Velasquez Galleries exhibition he accepted Yosl Bergner’s invitation to travel to Paris with himself and his sister, the dancer Ruth Bergner (1917–2021). Wigley had by then begun an affair with Ruth, which would continue sporadically throughout his two marriages and indeed for the remainder of his life (Rhonda Senbergs’ 1990 slide photograph of the pair—with only Wigley identified—are now in the State Library Victoria.

They sailed via Perth, Colombo and Aden to Marseilles (Julian Wigley interview, 2 July 2020), possibly on the Orient Line ship, The Tidewater, which departed Melbourne in late January 1948 (‘Shipping’, The Age, Melbourne, 12 January 1948, p. 6). Ruth sailed separately on the Stratheden under her married name, Blima Pilley (having married in 1942 CAS member George Pilley, who would later marry Erica McGilchrist), arriving at Tilbury Docks, London, on 30 December 1947, and giving as her intended destination an address in Paris.

Wigley found Paris magical, even after the German occupation, ‘full of bullet holes and flowers’ (James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman, 1987, NLA). The three lived frugally in the Marais, which even after the war remained the Jewish quarter. One of Wigley’s letters home was addressed from the Hotel d’Anvers, 11 Rue des Quatre-Fils (Wigley family collection), while Counihan described Yosl and Ruth Bergner living ‘in a humble hotel in the Jewish quarter’ (Noel Counihan to Pat Counihan, 24 April 1949, Canberra: National Archives of Australia: A6119, 179/REFERENCE COPY pages 153-155 of 206).

Wigley gave English lessons and attended life classes at the Académie Julian and the Atelier Fernand Léger, in the 18th Arrondissement, but found these packed with American and British students. He visited the Louvre often, as well as Delacroix’s house and Rodin’s garden, and felt he could have stayed in Paris forever. While in Paris he briefly rendezvoused with artist friends from Melbourne; Max Newton would later tell a reporter from The Argus that in Paris ‘there was a reunion between [Grahame] King and [Max] Newton from Italy, [Peter] Graham and [Doug] Green from London, [James] Wigley and [Yosl] Bergner from Marseilles, and Dot and Laurie Phillips from London’ (‘Melbourne Artist On World Tour’, The Argus, Melbourne, 24 September 1949, p. 12). This was most likely in October 1948, when King and Newton returned from Italy. Towards the end of the year Wigley exhibited with Yosl Bergner at the Galerie Gentilhommiere (67 Boulevard Raspail), where just one work sold. They drank the proceeds. However, French critics noticed the exhibition; Wigley sent the clippings home to his mother Dove on 22 December 1948 (Wigley family collection). Bergner had by then met up with former National Gallery School student Audrey Keller, with whom he travelled to New York and Montreal in 1950 before returning to Paris, where they married, and thence onto Israel, where they settled.

In early 1949 Wigley flew to London to meet Molly and Julian, who had arrived on The Straithaird on the 16th January. King, Newton, Graham and Green—the so-called ‘bush boys’—had probably told Wigley of the Abbey Art Centre, when they had met in Paris the previous year. By March 6th the Wigleys were living at the Abbey in a large room in the main house, with plans to travel to Paris then Italy the next month (letter from James Wigley to his mother, 6 March 1949, Wigley family collection). The family were in Paris in mid-April (Julian recalls seeing the shop windows decorated for Easter), but Italy never transpired—possibly owing to the difficulties of travelling with their five-year-old son. On returning to the Abbey, Wigley rented Inge King’s studio while she, in turn, spent six months in Paris from April to September 1949 (Inge King, conversation with Jane Eckett, 19 June 2012). Julian, who attended a nearby school, remembers there was a travellers’ camp in the field next to the Abbey. He also recalls the kitchen and dining room at the Abbey, with its large table and many chairs, where communal meals were had, as well as talk of poltergeists and paintings coming off the walls and down the stairs (Julian Wigley, ‘The Abbey’, 17 May 2019; and Julian Wigley interview, 2 July 2020). In the garden he played in the thatched roofed huts with Bienchen Ohly, who was two years older. However, by October 1949 Molly and Julian had left the Abbey and were living at 8 Hampstead Grove. They set sail for Melbourne on The Otranto on 20 October 1949.

Wigley was back in Paris by February 1950, which is when his French identity card was stamped (Wigley family collection), but soon returned to London with Ruth Bergner. Together they lived in a half-bombed shop in Whitechapel. Wigley took rough jobs at factories and as a dishwasher at the Lyons Corner House café on Coventry Street, Piccadilly, where the German-born artist Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) also worked. Wigley greatly admired Frankfurther’s work. They shared a common feeling for the working class and the socially marginalised, as reflected in their respective studies of the Lyons staff, who hailed from all corners of the British Commonwealth (see Sarah MacDougall, Ben Uri Gallery, catalogue of Frankfurther’s Lyons Corner House series). Wigley also painted the patrons of various Jewish teashops in Whitechapel and several scenes inside the Grey Eagle Pub at 52 Grey Eagle Street in the Spitalfields. His final known address in London was 47 Quaker Street, which was directly opposite the Grey Eagle (UK and Ireland, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890-1960, record for James Vandeleur Wigley, 1952).

He and Bergner (who travelled under her married name Ruth Blima Pilley) both returned to Melbourne in February 1952 on board the P&O Steamship Mooltan. A small collection of Frankfurther’s work, entrusted to them, was destroyed on the voyage; Wigley blamed himself for not having packed them more securely.

In Melbourne he lived for a time with Molly and Julian at Warrandyte. Wigley found Melbourne like ‘an outback town—a ramshackle culture, a sort of thinness after the deep ingrained history of Paris and London’ (James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman, 1987, NLA). He was unable to settle down and in late 1952 or early 1953 left for north Queensland, where he stopped en route at an artists’ camp outside Cairns. He wanted to look at the bush again, but only got as far as Port Douglas, where he produced the cane cutters’ series. Again, he found racism rife. He was living in Port Douglas in February 1953, when ‘Mr and Mrs James Wigley, of Port Douglas’, were reported to be holidaying in Brisbane, and still there in April, when ‘Mr James Wigley, of Port Douglas, was in Mossman’, a short distance inland from Port Douglas, for a couple of days (‘Southern Letter’, Townsville Daily Bulletin, 19 February 1953, p. 6, and ‘Mossman Notes’, Cairns Post, 4 April 1953, p. 8). Later that year he returned to Melbourne and lived with Ruth Bergner, visiting Molly and Julian at weekends.

Wigley joined with his old social realist comrades Noel Counihan and Vic O'Connor for a joint exhibition at Tye’s Gallery in October 1953, showing mainly Paris and London subjects. Despite the emergning Cold War politics, when social realism was deemed suspect in the United States, in Melbourne they were critically well received. Alan McCulloch described the work as romantic and perceived Wigley’s close identification with his subjects: the downtrodden slum dweller and tavern customer (Alan McCulloch, 'Theme of realism has variety', The Herald, Melbourne, 6 October 1953, illus. p. 14). Similarly, The Age art critic, Arthur Vollens Cook, found ‘James Wigley’s studies of the boisterous vulgarity of life in London slums … keenly observed and, on occasions, brilliantly interpreted’ and commended the absence of ‘propaganda’ (‘Painting outgrows politics’, The Age, Melbourne, 6 October 1953, p. 2). The same critic later recalled the exhibition as one of the most important shows of the year in Melbourne (‘In the world of art’, The Age, Melbourne, 26 December 1953, p. 14). Wigley’s alliance with Counihan was reflected the following year when Counihan showed his portrait of Wigley in an exhibition of drawings at the Peter Bray Gallery, alongside another of Albert Namatjira (‘Art Notes’, The Age, Melbourne, 24 March 1954, p. 2).

Aside from painting, Wigley worked as a wood machinist for a year, and as a temporary teacher at South Melbourne Technical School but resigned after a year. He also worked with Hymie Slade, making puppet heads for theatre and television (Julian Wigley, ‘Jim Wigley at work’, 16 April 2016). Molly sold the Stone House at Warrandyte and moved to Erin Street, Richmond, where Wigley stayed. Visitors during this period included Brian Fitzpatrick, Peter Miller, David Armfield, James Flett and Vancer Palmer. By 1955, however, his marriage to Molly had ended.

He was then working closely with Ruth Bergner, who, throughout the 1950s, was teaching, performing and choreographing for the Melbourne Ballet Guild. Bergner’s ballet, The Wedding, inspired by a painting of Breughel’s, premiered in 1956, with stage decor designed by Wigley ('[Melbourne Ballet Guild...]', The Argus, Melbourne, 25 August 1956, p. 13), and Wigley designed the sets and décor for the Jewish ballet, Bontche Shvaig, choreographed by Bergner and performed at the Kadimah in St Kilda in 1955 (‘”SKIF”: Concert “with a difference”’, The Australian Jewish News, Melbourne, 4 November 1955, p. 9).

In 1957 Wigley wrote to Don McLeod who, in 1946, had helped organise 800 Aborigines to walk out on strike from the pastoral stations at Port Hedland and Marble Bay regions of the Pilbara, demanding higher wages. McLeod had been arrested for inciting unrest. This struck a deep chord with Wigley, who held serious concerns about racism and oppression. By 1955 Pindan Pty Ltd, an Aboriginal-owned mining co-operative, had been established with McLeod’s help. In December 1957 Wigley travelled north-west to the Pilbara, where McLeod sent him to help mine beryl at Roebourne and work with the Pindan people on the coast, helping construct fibreglass boats for their pearling operations (Bain Attwood and Anne Scrimgeour, 'Timeline', The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike, website, Melbourne: Monash University, 2018). Wigley’s drawings of the Pindan people, made during the three months he camped with them, formed the basis of a series of oils that would be exhibited with Counihan and his social realist associates in Moscow and Prague in 1960 and 1962, and comprised his first solo exhibition with Australian Galleries, Melbourne, in July 1959.

Tam and Anne Purves of the Australian Galleries began showing Wigley’s work in 1957, in their first anniversary exhibition, and successfully promoted it particularly among their corporate clientele. One of Wigley’s Queensland paintings, Burning Cane, c. 1958, entered the ICI collection after Daryl Lindsay selected it from Australian Galleries for the chemicals industry giant; the same work had also been awarded first prize by Eric Westbrook in the May Day exhibition that Counihan had helped organise at Melbourne’s Town Hall in 1958. The 1959 exhibition was a commercial success and heralded a fruitful decade with Australian Galleries, with a further three solo shows to follow. In June 1960 Wigley’s painting Refugees was chosen for the front cover of the gallery’s gala fundraising event, an Exhibition of Australian Art by Victorian, Interstate and Expatriate Artists for World Refugee Year. Three years later, when the Purves were asked to assemble the Viscount Collection of work by seven leading Australian artists, for tobacco manufacturers Godfrey Phillips International to present to the six state galleries and nascent National Gallery, Wigley was selected alongside Arthur Boyd, Russell Drysdale, Sidney Nolan, John Olsen, Albert Tucker, and Fred Williams. His inclusion drew criticism from some quarters, but the event created considerable publicity and Godfrey Phillips presented his Government Reserve, Roebourne, 1963 to the Art Gallery of Western Australia (for a full account, see Caroline Field, Australian Galleries: The Purves Family Business, The First Four Decades 1956-1999, Collingwood, Vic.: Australian Galleries, 2019, pp. 97, 103-8).

In March 1961 Wigley married the nineteen-year-old dancer Eugenie Knox (known as Janie), protégé of Ruth Bergner and daughter of Eltham landscape architect Alistair Knox, at the Melbourne Registry Office. For the next six months they lived with Don McLeod’s mob at Port Hedland—Wigley sketching by day and Janie teaching English and reading and writing. They returned to Melbourne for the birth of their first daughter, Jasmine, living in a bungalow at the back of the Knox property (see ‘James Wigley and his wife and baby daughter’, c. 1962, Herald and Weekly Times Limited portrait collection, State Library Victoria, Melbourne, H38849/4915). Christabel was born the following year. In July 1963 the young family left Melbourne, driving north in a jeep with a custom-built caravan to Queensland via Mount Isa then on to Broome and Port Hedland, where they stayed in a broken-down station. Janie and the children flew home and by 1964 the marriage had ended.

Ruth Bergner, who had left for New York in 1964, to join her father, returned to Sydney in 1967. Wigley met her in Sydney and they lived together in Glebe from 1967-8. However, he found it hard to break into the Sydney scene and they both soon returned to Melbourne. In 1969 a letter from Don McLeod, who was ill, prompted Wigley to again return to Port Hedland. There he became closely involved with the McLeod-led Aboriginal workers' co-operative, Nomads Pty Ltd, which purchased Strelley sheep station and lobbied for federal funding to build there a school and suitable housing for teachers. His son, Julian, joined him in 1973 and designed ‘experimental homes’ for the group (Julian J. Wigley, Report to the Australian Nomads Research Foundation on the proposed experimental homes for the nomad group of Aborigines, [North Melbourne, Vic.]: Australian Nomads Research Foundation, September 1973).

The Strelley Community School opened at Port Hedland in 1976. Still in existence, it is the oldest continually operative independent Aboriginal community school in Australia. Wigley established a literature centre at the Strelley school, installing an offset press on which he printed books that he designed and illustrated. They were written in Nyangumarta with English alongside (for a sample, see Original illustrations by James Wigley for Waljamarri Marrngu, 1977, and other books [picture] / James Wigley, National Library of Australia, Canberra).

Wigley returned to Melbourne in 1979, ‘to digest, reflect and paint again’ (James Wigley: Survey 1936–1992, Richmond, Vic.: Niagara Galleries, 1992, p. [2]). His first wife Molly died that same year [check]. While in Melbourne, in January 1980, Cyclone Amy hit Port Hedland and destroyed much of the Strelley settlement (‘Settlement ‘shattered’ by cyclone’, The Canberra Times, 16 January 1980, p. 11). Wigley lost his caravan and all his belongings including sketchbooks and many paintings. He never returned.

In Melbourne he resumed painting and began pulling his own prints on an Enjay printing press he had installed in his home studio in Elwood. Rachell Howley organised his first retrospective exhibition at Acland Street Galleries in St Kilda (June 1981). He was included in two major group shows: Aspects of Australian Figurative Painting, 1942–1962: Dreams, Fears and Desires at the S.H. Erwin Gallery for the Fifth Biennale of Sydney (1984) and Art and Social Commitment: An End to the City of Dreams 1931–1948, which toured all state galleries (1984–5). Throughout the 1980s he exhibited successfully with Niagara Galleries, in Richmond, and in 1992 had a large survey exhibition there. Wigley died in Melbourne in 1999.

Sheridan Palmer and Jane Eckett
9 August 2021

Wigley mobilisation papers, 1940-43: Canberra: National Archives of Australia, B884, V110218.

John Hetherington, ‘James Wigley: City Painter Found His Destiny Outback’, The Age, Melbourne, 30 June 1962, p. 18.

‘Artist’s studio among Aborigines’, The Australian Women's Weekly, 23 September 1964, p. 13.

Original illustrations by James Wigley for Waljamarri Marrngu, 1977, and other books [picture] / James Wigley, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Christine Dixon and Terry Smith, Aspects of Australian Figurative Painting, 1942–1962: Dreams, Fears and Desires, Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney in association with the Biennale of Sydney, 1984.

Charles Merewether, Art and Social Commitment: An End to the City of Dreams 1931–1948, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1984, pp. 113, 130, 158-9, 165.

James Wigley interviewed by Barbara Blackman, 22-23 September 1987, c. 303 minutes, National Library of Australia, 1987.

James Wigley: Survey 1936–1992, Richmond, Vic.: Niagara Galleries, 1992.

Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt with John H. Stanton, A world that was: the Yaraldi of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993, plates 3, 4 and 10.

Philip Jones, ‘Painter found inspiration among the oppressed’, The Australian, Sydney, 29 July 1999, p. 9.

Geoffrey Gray, ‘‘Cluttering up the department’, Ronald Berndt and the distribution of the University of Sydney ethnographic collection’, reCollections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia, vol. 2, no. 2, September 2007.

Eugenie Knox, Indelible memories: into the mouth of the tiger!, Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris Corporation, 2010.

Geoffrey Gray, ‘“He has not followed the usual sequence”: Ronald M. Berndt’s Secrets’, Journal of Historical Biography, no. 16, Autumn 2014, pp. 61-92.

Julian Wigley, ‘Me and Danila’, 30 March 2016, (accessed 1 May 2021).

Julian Wigley, ‘Jim Wigley at work’, 16 April 2016, (accessed 1 May 2021).

Julian Wigley, ‘The Abbey’, 17 May 2019 (accessed 1 May 2021). 

Caroline Field, Australian Galleries: The Purves Family Business, The First Four Decades 1956-1999, Collingwood, Vic.: Australian Galleries, 2019, pp. 87-9, 97, 103-8.

Julian Wigley correspondence with Sheridan Palmer, June 2020.

Julian Wigley interview with Jane Eckett and Sheridan Palmer, 2 July 2020.

Passport photograph from James Wigley's 1950 Paris Carte Valable (family collection)

9 August 2021

2 May 2024