What Book to Read?

I first heard about Anne Summer’s The Lost Mother in a radio interview with her. A sort of cross between autobiography and memoir, it sounded fascinating. So I went out and bought the book.

And it is intriguing. Actually it’s made up of three, or maybe even four stories woven together. At the centre of it is a portrait of Anne’s mother, painted when she was a child in Melbourne. Part of the story is about what happened to this picture, and how it ended up back in Anne’s possession.  Part of the story is about the artist who painted the portrait – Constance Stokes, nee Parkin. And part of it concerns Lydia Mortill, the Melbourne socialite who originally bought the painting. The fourth element in the story is a house in Hawthorn, Melbourne, called Tay Creggin, which plays a part in all three of the other stories. 

The story of the painting allows Summers to talk about her mother, and her own relationship with her, which was at times stormy. Her mother’s death was what prompted her to write the book; she is the ‘lost mother’. Why don’t we think to ask our parents how things were for them before we loose them?  She is also ‘lost’ in the sense that Stokes painted two portraits of her, one of which now can’t be found.

Summers is a writer long concerned about the lost history of women – her best known book being Damned Whores and God’s Police: the colonization of women in Australia.  She is therefore very interested in finding out why so few of us have ever heard of Constance Stokes, 1906-1991, although she was once as highly regarded as artists like Russell Drysdale, who remains a household name.  Do we too easily overlook women artists? Was she stifled by becoming a wife and mother? Or did her work, radical and modernist in its day, lack something that would keep it in the forefront of critical attention? 

And what of Lydia Mortill? She is also a woman of some mystery. It seems that she was an aristocratic Russian who found herself in Cairo during the WWI. There she married a young South Australian lieutenant, who was killed only months later in France. She made her way to her unknown parents-in-laws’ home at Kadina, a small town to the north of Adelaide; it must have been a painful meeting on both sides. She soon moved to Melbourne, where she found herself a rich husband – with a somewhat dodgy past – and together they set out to win a place in Melbourne society. To this end, they bought the mock Tudor mansion Tay Creggan which was where they entertained visiting celebrities, including Russian ones like Anna Pavlova, in the 1920’s and 30’s. 

And it was here that they hung their art collection, including the portrait of Anne Summers’ mother by Constance Stokes. But why, in 1939, just before the outbreak of war, did they hastily sell up and depart for Europe, leaving most of their art collection on the walls of their mansion?

Intriguing as these stories are, it is frustrating to find that they must remain incomplete. It is in the nature of Summers’s material that in the absence of evidence, she often has to fall back on speculation. And with a story made up of such different strands, it is perhaps inevitable that organizing them into a coherent narrative would prove difficult. Summers has chosen to tie her story together based on the time line of her own exploration, and as she found various bits at different times, the pieces of the story are inevitably disjointed. Indeed it is probably unrealistic to expect the degree of coherence found in fiction, which imposes patterns and provides endings that are not available in real life. Nevertheless, I was frustrated and did feel there was a degree of muddle in the book which detracted somewhat from my enjoyment of it. I found the names of minor artists who knew Constance Stokes, of the various Mortill relations who may or may not have been done out of a fortune, and Lydia’s family connections all too distracting. And I would have been happy with a little less of Summers’ exploration, and a little more of the social context in which her mother, Constance Stokes and Lydia Mortill led their lives. 

 The book itself is beautifully produced. The portrait, which is charming, is shown on the cover, and text is illustrated with a number of photos, and reproductions of Stokes’s paintings. You can see more of her work – mostly pencil drawings – on the internet, and the Art Gallery of SA has one of her major pieces – Reverie. 

 So while overall I enjoyed the book, I don’t recommend that you rush out and buy it like I did. It is certainly worth reading, but you can afford to wait until it comes into your local library.

 Tay Creggan is now a school, but you can see a photo of what it looked like in the Mortills’ day.

 For more information about Constance Stokes, here is a pdf and her profile on the Australian Art and Print website.  a