Pandora and the Tucker Box

Victory Girls, 1943

Albert Tucker

Image courtesy NGA

War, horror and anxiety. In this setting the human figure assumed demonic form.’Albert Tucker, 1982

For Albert Tucker (1914-1999) the Second World War was an experience that violated the social and moral stability of urban Australia. He was disturbed by the live-for-the-day mentality that pervaded the city with the influx of servicemen on leave. Victory girls 1943 presents a grotesque night image of two young women accepting the advances of drunken soldiers. The ironic title refers to both their morals and the colours they are dressed in. The pig like faces of the soldiers and the snarling trap like mouths of the girls indicate the deep sense of personal revulsion Albert Tucker felt for this secondary effect of war.

Tucker was a pivotal Australian artist. A member of the Heide Circle,  a group of leading modernist artists and writers that centred on the art patrons  John and Sunday Reed,  whose home, "Heide", located in Bulleen, (outside Melbourne), was a haven for the group. Tucker's major series Images of modern evil (1943–47) depicted prostitutes and soldiers in Melbourne.

The Heide Circle have a special resonance for me personally as from 1957-1964, my parents lived in nearby rural Hurstbridge and were acquainted with several of the artists and the Reeds.  My mother enjoyed the special friendship of artist John Perceval during one her sojourns in Larundel Psychiatric Hospital where Perceval was resident in the seventies.  Mother never said much about her experiences of community within the psychiatric hospitals she frequented; it was as though those times were her sabbaticals from the responsibilities and demands of motherhood and wifedom and she guarded her stories with a tenacity that belied their actual importance.  Such is life with someone prone to grandiose delusions and an insatiable hunger to feel and be seen to be special.

Can you hear my eyes rolling?

My mother and her three sisters were Victory Girls.  Small country-town born and bred, when Australia went to War and the Yanks were overpaid, oversexed and over here, the eldest three were  blossoming young women in their late teens to early twenties who had moved to Melbourne, living in a Richmond hostel and working at Myers.  They were "where the boys were" and compared to the thick-headed Wimmera sheep shaggers back home, the smartly-dressed GIs were received as khaki-garbed knights in shining armour.

I suppose if things had gone differently my mother could have been swept off her feet, married in haste and steamed off to the US of A with all the other Aussie War Brides, and lived a completely different life.  Over the decades I think my mother questioned her choices in the small hours of the night.  Wondering how much better her life could have been if she had accepted the marriage proposal of a well-to-do American Naval Captain who hailed from the East Coast.  She turned him down because "he was fat".  Mother's vanity was her nemesis in so many ways.  Her short-sightedness would be the constant obstacle I had to hurdle as her only child and unacknowledged carer.

Fat people can lose weight and considering the tight quarters of naval warships, the good Captain cannot have been morbidly obese.  He was probably just a little on the chubby side.  My mother was well-fleshed as well and short with it.  Pot. Kettle. Black.

Karma has a wicked sense of humour.  The cocktail of psychiatric medication that did little to stabilise her manias and depressions, had the unfortunate side-effect of weight gain.  By the time mother was 55 years old she was morbidly obese and while still vain enough to dress well and adorn herself with jewellery and put on her face, she was too apathetic to bathe regularly.  Mother's slatternly habits tested everybody's tolerance levels and when I could reason with - or bribe - her to get into the bath, I literally hosed her down. 

My mother and my three aunts are now all dead and viewing Albert Tucker's painting brings back to me the echoes of their voices telling War stories which flowed around an elephant in the room.  Not my mother.  The existence of a daughter born out of wedlock and dumped in a State Home in Melbourne. 

The garish clown faces of Victory Girls reminds me of all the dark secrets that should never have been kept.  Things that my generation did not know about and which have hurt us: the baby-boomer generation. 

A Pandora's Box of inherited generational karma is now spilled out on the table and like Psyche we have the task of sorting out seeds from the peanut shells, chewing gum wrappers and used condoms.  We can do it.  We are made for these times.  We are the Pluto-in-Virgo generation.