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  Robert Hughes: a critic's lament ROBERT HUGHES: I remember absolutely nothing, it's really strange. It's like ... a slice was taken out of my life. JANA WENDT: It was May, 1999, in the remote Kimberley region of Australia's far north-west, and Robert Hughes had taken a day off from filming a new television series to indulge his other great passion, fishing. Now, with a freshly caught tuna packed in ice in the boot, Hughes was heading back to Broome. MESSAGE ON ANSWERING MACHINE: Hello, Mr Batty, this is Bob Hughes. I gather we're meant to be having dinner tonight. I'm down at Eco Beach and I'm driving back now. It's about – what is it? – about half-past five. I've got a tuna and a couple of salmon, ah, and I'll be bringing those up with me, so talk to you later. Bye. ROBERT HUGHES: What I remember is turning left on the coastal highway, driving suspended in that sunlight, and then total blank. JANA WENDT: Hughes came face to face with oblivion. Driving in the other direction, three young men saw Hughes' car heading straight for them on the wrong side of the road. They say they flashed their headlights and hit the horn, but it was too late. ROBERT HUGHES: I don't remember seeing the other car, I don't remember hitting the other car, I don't remember any of that. JANA WENDT: Hughes' fishing mate, Dan O'Sullivan, was the first to reach the scene. DAN O'SULLIVAN: I remember Rob stuck in the car. I suppose, ah, 'humble' was hard, after – the man's a little bit bigger than life but when he was trapped in the car, he was sort of all too human. And I sort remember seeing a man reduced from what he was to a man thinking he's dying. JANA WENDT: Hughes was near death – his body, as he later put it, smashed like a toad's. DAN O'SULLIVAN: I remember telling him that I thought there was a chance he could go and if there was anything he wanted to tell me or anything I could pass on or anything he wanted to be remembered by, now might be the chance to do it. JANA WENDT: Hughes' greatest fear was that the car might catch fire. He asked O'Sullivan to shoot him if it did. DAN O'SULLIVAN: He asked. Well, I don't have a gun – so I didn't have a gun – but I think the basic idea was if the car went up in flames, which was a danger he thought could realistically happen, then he certainly didn't want to be dying in flames so he just asked if we could take care of him in some way. KEVIN BULLEN: Well, I believe he virtually died twice, almost died twice there in the vehicle. JANA WENDT: When Kevin Bullen, chief of the Broome Volunteer Fire Brigade, arrived on the scene, he had no idea the man trapped in the wreckage was the world's most famous art critic or that the crash was about to catapult him into the international spotlight. KEVIN BULLEN: He was virtually trapped by his injuries and every time we went to lift him out, he started to go, so they had to stabilise him and they spent more time stabilising him than we actually did getting him out of the vehicle. In the end they said, "We have to get him out or he's going", so we just had four or five guys pick him out of the car seat and onto the trolley. ROBERT HUGHES: I was completely out of it on intensive care for five weeks. There was one doctor in Perth who felt that they should probably amputate my right leg and my right arm. Well, that would have finished things off for me. I mean if I still had my left arm, I just would have got my shotgun and finished myself off. JANA WENDT: Broome prides itself on being a frontier town. It's generally not big on art critics. And in the aftermath of the accident, the so-called Broomer-mill went into overdrive. DAN O'SULLIVAN: Broome is famous for rumours – if you haven't got a good one by 10, you start one – so the stories that got around were sort of really big and then it took on a life of its own. The big thing is that people thought he could have been asleep or drunk at the time – I can guarantee he wasn't drunk – and he only had to park his car, unlock a gate and then close the gate and get back in his car, and that was only a kilometre before he had his accident, so there was no way known he'd fallen asleep. JANA WENDT: I'm sure you have wondered how it is that you ended up on the wrong side of the road? ROBERT HUGHES: Yes, I've often wondered about that, and I have no answer to it. It might be that I'm used to driving on the other side of the road – it could have been that. What puzzles me is, you see, I hadn't had a drink, I had had a siesta. I was, in so far as a geezer like me can be, I was as fresh as a daisy. If there's one thing I know for sure is there was nothing culpable, probably on either side, certainly not on mine about the accident. JANA WENDT: That's not the way the Western Australian prosecutors saw it. They charged Hughes with dangerous driving. NINE NEWS NEWSREEL: It was a bizarre clash of cultures at the tiny outback court in Broome today, eminent expat Robert Hughes forced to defend himself on criminal charges. JANA WENDT: The trial became a media circus, more so when it was revealed that the driver of the other car and one of the passengers had been secretly recorded offering to change their evidence in return for $30,000 each from Hughes. The innocent victims of the crash had now become the accused. CRASH VICTIM: Justice at a price, mate. It's who's got the most money. JANA WENDT: The extortion plot forced the prosecutor, Lloyd Rayney, to abandon his two star witnesses, leaving only the third passenger, Darryn Bennett, who'd been asleep on the back seat. NEWSREEL: The prosecution says Bennett will give crucial evidence Hughes had been driving on the wrong side of the road, even apologising after the crash, saying he couldn't be certain whether he'd fallen asleep at the wheel. JANA WENDT: But a local magistrate threw out the charges. Hughes emerged from court throwing verbal punches in all directions, attacking the men in the other car. ROBERT HUGHES (TODAY SHOW): Those darling scummy little crooks, you know, you run into the strangest people on the highways of north-western Australia, you really do. JANA WENDT: Hughes jokingly told reporters that his rescuers had abducted the tuna from the back of the car, but the humour got lost in translation, as it sometimes does with Hughes, and the Broome locals were told he'd accused them of stealing his fish. KEVIN BULLEN, VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTER: We take our role as volunteer firefighters very seriously and we thought, me in particular, because I was the captain of the brigade at the time, I was insulted by his remarks. ROBERT HUGHES: You know, these popinjays of the West Australian press invented that whole cloth, the story that I'd said a whole lot of insulting things about the Broome emergency amateur ... volunteer fire brigade – totally untrue. I've never been anything but grateful to them and glad of their ministrations and, you know, they saved my life and I never said a word against them. JANA WENDT: Well, you are very angry about the Australian press, the Australian media. What do you see as their agenda here? ROBERT HUGHES: A lot of Australian journalism is fuelled by this, it's fuelled by schadenfreude, which is that expressive German term, as you know, for taking delight in the misfortune of others. The Australian editors, now more than they used to, feel they have to see blood in the water. JANA WENDT: But your blood, in particular – it's not only some of the members of the press, even some of your friends said you'd lost it, you went overboard. Do you not regret anything that you said at that time? ROBERT HUGHES: Of course, I do. I should have shut my big mouth and not said anything that was offensive to anybody, but it's not in my nature to do so. JANA WENDT: Hughes' nature has cost him dearly. The Western Australian prosecutors sued him for defamation and he was forced to settle out of court. They also pushed to re-try Hughes on the dangerous driving charges and earlier this year he pleaded guilty to one count, wearing a $2500 fine. He was banned from driving in Western Australia for three years, not that that worried Hughes. He wasn't raring to return, and the feeling is mutual. CLANCY McDOWELL, BROOME LOCAL: I do think he has lost touch and his attitude he displayed when he came here after the court case was absolutely shameless and if he doesn't want to be an Australian citizen, I don't think we are going to miss that kind of character. JANA WENDT: So how did it all end so badly? For nearly 40 years, Robert Hughes was a star among Australia's cast of talented expats. A man who'd been born into privilege, the Hughes clan educated at St Ignatius, Riverview, in Sydney, and gone on to cut a swathe through Europe and the US, ending up in New York as the feared art critic for Time magazine. Here was a man who'd made it to the top of the international pile. And if he had a toffy accent, most Australians didn't care because in the sometimes genteel art world, Hughes would always call it as he saw it and to hell with the niceties. ROBERT HUGHES: He didn't make his own stuff of course. No doubt Koons couldn't carve his name on a tree. JANA WENDT: Here he is on one of his television programs, talking about the American artist Jeff Koons. ROBERT HUGHES: If cheap cookie jars could become treasures in the 1980s, then how much more the work of the very egregious Jeff Koons, a former bond trader whose ambitions took him right through kitsch and out the other side into a vulgarity so syrupy, gross and numbing that collectors felt challenged by it. JANA WENDT: And when Sotheby's held an auction of former First Lady Jackie Kennedy's personal belongings, Hughes shocked many Americans with this caustic aside during a live television interview. ROBERT HUGHES: I was waiting to see what price her diaphragm would make because it's about the only damn thing they didn't sell. This was a really grotesque piece of Americana. JANA WENDT: During his visits back to Australia, he could be withering in his contempt for Australia's lack of sophistication, here opening a modernism exhibition in Sydney. ROBERT HUGHES: I have to confess that I am the prey of mixed feelings tonight. As I was going around the show that you were about to see, indeed that many of you have already seen, I realised that it has arrived in Sydney about 25 years too late. JANA WENDT: 'Arrogant' is a word that is often used to describe you. ROBERT HUGHES: To describe me? No, I'm not arrogant but I have fairly strongly held opinions about some things. I am a complete elitist, but the elitism that I speak of is not anything to do with social class, it's nothing to do with money, nothing to do with any of that stuff. It is to do with ability. I mean, I think what Australia needs more of is an elitism which is based on real ability and real talent and not on snobbism, social climbing, arrogance or any of that. JANA WENDT: You've just pleaded not guilty in passing to being a snob. Is that a description that ... ROBERT HUGHES: I'm not a snob. JANA WENDT: Because that, too, is a description that sometimes comes your way. ROBERT HUGHES: Yes, it does, but from people who don't know me. JANA WENDT: Silvertail is another ... ROBERT HUGHES: Oh, I don't know what Silvertail means – I mean it suggests to me some sort of rare beaver. You know, you can't help where you were born or how you were born. I've never had the slightest interest in being a member of or promoted to the gentry and nobility – far from it, I'm republican. ROBERT HUGHES (SPEAKING AT RALLY): Our Prime Minister has done absolutely zilch about this issue. NEWSREEL: In a scathing attack, ranging from monarchy to racism, eminent historian Robert Hughes referred to Sarah Ferguson as "that coarse, ginger twit", questioned the sanity of the former princess Diana and condemned the Government's handling of the Pauline Hanson affair. ROBERT HUGHES (ADDRESSING RALLY IN SYDNEY TOWN HALL): Ignorant racist mouthings of Pauline Hanson and her sympathisers are not going to change the evolving Australia of which I am proud to be a citizen. (APPLAUSE) Hughes thundered into Australia's Republican debate, alongside merchant banker Malcolm Turnbull, who's married to Hughes' niece, Sydney Lord Mayor, Lucy Turnbull. MALCOLM TURNBULL (ADDRESSING RALLY IN SYDNEY TOWN HALL): Australians aren't going to be fobbed off by delays and obfuscation from a monarchist Prime Minister. JANA WENDT: Malcolm Turnbull may now be regretting those words as he bids for Liberal pre-selection in the blue-ribbon seat of Wentworth. Certainly the PM was not amused. JOHN HOWARD, PRIME MINISTER (SPEAKING IN PARLIAMENT): It is not a debate that belongs to a group of self-appointed cultural dieticians, domestic or expatriate. JANA WENDT: But 'Uncle Bob', as Turnbull refers to Hughes, isn't about to turn down the volume. ROBERT HUGHES: Look, I don't like Howard, I don't like his complete lack of political imagination. I don't like his opportunism and I don't like his – above all, I dislike his notions about history and how Australian history should be written. JANA WENDT: And what do you think another Howard victory means for Australia? ROBERT HUGHES: More confirmation of mediocrity as a way of life. JANA WENDT: Many Australians first took notice of Hughes when he wrote The Fatal Shore, a bestseller that highlighted the country's convict origins and made Hughes a load of money. ROBERT HUGHES: Fatal Shore really paid for the house the convict built. JANA WENDT: For the last 15 years, Hughes has lived here, in a large rambling home on Shelter Island, a three-hour drive from Manhattan, where he also has a loft apartment in the Soho district. ROBERT HUGHES: This is what writers do, you see – we beaver away, we write books, sometimes one of them rather unexpectedly makes some money and you blow it on real estate, which I guess is better than blowing it on cocaine or something. JANA WENDT: After a long convalescence here, Hughes returned to Australia to finish Beyond the Fatal Shore, the television series he'd just begun filming when disaster struck. ROBERT HUGHES (IN TV SERIES BEYOND THE FATAL SHORE): On this very road, I found out that Australia still had the power to surprise me, nastily. JANA WENDT: The nasty surprise Hughes didn't expect was the hostile reaction of Australian critics, many of whom agreed with his own facetious prediction. ROBERT HUGHES: Instead of a thoughtful and nicely constructed essay on Australia, you're just as likely to get the codeine-fuelled rantings of an outpatient. JANA WENDT: Critically acclaimed around the world, Beyond the Fatal Shore was harshly criticised by some Australian reviewers as an outdated and stereotyped view of Australia, the product of someone who'd been away too long. ROBERT HUGHES: I haven't seen this car since I crashed it. DAN O'SULLIVAN: Me neither, Bob, but... ROBERT HUGHES: Shit. Is that it? DAN O'SULLIVAN: There she is, matey. ROBERT HUGHES: Bloody hell. JANA WENDT: What the program did reveal, however, undeniably, was the impact the accident had had on Hughes' life. ROBERT HUGHES: You wouldn't walk away from that, would you? JANA WENDT: The art critic's crash on a lonely stretch of road produced terror and pain, but in another sense it would free him. As he lay in his hospital bed in a coma for five weeks, Hughes experienced powerfully real dreams in which he was taunted by the Spanish painter, Goya. Hughes had struggled for years with the idea of writing a book on Goya, his disturbing violent images and his visions of tortured souls. Now, hallucinating, Hughes found himself face to face with the artist. ROBERT HUGHES: And what a wimp he thought I was and what a fool he thought I was to try to take him on and how his companions, who were Madrid street toughs, mocked me and, you know, stuck my foot in a fetter and prevented me from getting, you know – it was all weird stuff. It had a certain basis in reality because my foot actually was in a fetter. They had this fiendish thing called an Isikoff brace, and there were these spikes that go in through it and they bore them through the flesh and into the bone to hold the fragments of bone anatomically correctly in relation to one another. JANA WENDT: Analysts would have a field day with that – that the painter Goya played such a part in your life that he then invaded your subconscious? ROBERT HUGHES: Oh, absolutely, analysts would have a field day with it and, as a matter of fact, they did afterwards had a field day with it. I mean I talked to a shrink at some length about this because it was a very clear playing-out of my fears about failing to write a book on Goya – my fears, in effect, of turning out to be hopelessly inadequate for the task which I had set myself. JANA WENDT: So after 12 operations, Hughes came back to Shelter Island to finally write a book on Goya. It's clear that the man who once hunted ducks along this shoreline has been changed by the accident that so nearly claimed his life. ROBERT HUGHES: I remember very vividly looking down at my leg, and it was all over the place like that, and I was vividly reminded of the legs of a duck that I'd shot. And the minute I think about possibly shooting a bird again, I think of my leg and I go, "I wouldn't do it [laughs].” JANA WENDT: It stops you? ROBERT HUGHES: Stopped me. It hasn't stopped me eating duck, of course. JANA WENDT: Did you think at a time that you wouldn't be able to walk down here ever again really? ROBERT HUGHES: Yes, I thought I was never going to walk again. Like many other people, I've had suicidal impulses, but, as you see, I've never followed them through. I've, honestly, you know, wished I was not alive but that's because you wish that some kind of pain would cease. But beyond that there's always some other possibility, you know. In the end, I'm so glad I didn't blow myself away. JANA WENDT: The black dog of depression also haunted Hughes' son, Danton, an aspiring artist who lived in Sydney's Blue Mountains and who'd found unwanted fame of his own because of his relationship with a woman 21 years his senior, fashion designer Jenny Kee. Kee was an old friend of Hughes, but no longer. Two years after his accident, Hughes received a phone call. His only child had committed suicide. JANA WENDT: In the very sad case of your son, you struggled so hard to hang on to your life. Can you make sense of the fact that he let go of his? ROBERT HUGHES: I can't make sense of it for him posthumously. He was very sad, he was very alienated, a condition for which I partly blame myself – as parents always do, and must, I suppose – but bad things happened to him that he genuinely wasn't able to handle, and, uh, that's all I can say about it. I don't know what was going through his head when he ran the pipe from the car exhaust. I just don't know, and if I did I probably couldn't have helped him anyway. JANA WENDT: Were the two of you close? ROBERT HUGHES: No, we were very alienated. I mean we had a couple of things in common, I mean we both loved carpentry [laughs] and he wanted to be an artist. He very much wanted to be an artist but he died too young. JANA WENDT: Do you wonder about why he did? ROBERT HUGHES: Yes. Of course, you know, if you have a child who suicides, of course you wonder about the motives. You wonder, you blame yourself, you acquit yourself then you rescind the acquittal later. It's a mess. I'll always wonder about Danton, I'll always be sorry about him, but the thing is that life just has to go on. You know, I can live without Danton, I've had to. I'm sorry I didn't see more of him but you know, there it is. JANA WENDT: And this too has been played out publicly to some extent with his ... ROBERT HUGHES: His lover, who immediately went out to the Australian Women's Weekly and proceeded to sell her rather illiterate memoirs. I don't want to speak about Danton's lover, she's not one of my favourite characters [laughs]. ROBERT HUGHES: That room above the workshop is where I do my writing. Oh, sacred territory. JANA WENDT: Robert Hughes has always been a man of big ideas and big passions, big loves and big hatreds. His great loves are fishing, now temporarily abandoned, and carpentry, the passion he shared with his son. ROBERT HUGHES: So this is sort of the cave of making, the little hobbyist's dream house. JANA WENDT: It's not so little really. ROBERT HUGHES: No, but you see, every true Australian male has to have a shed, n'est-ce pas? JANA WENDT: And you're nothing if not a true Australian male. ROBERT HUGHES: Oh, absolutely not. JANA WENDT: Hughes makes his own furniture in a large workshop attached to the house on Shelter Island. ROBERT HUGHES: And eventually, you stain it, and varnish it and then your wife says, "Take it back, it's the wrong size". JANA WENDT: The woman he's talking about is Doris Downes, an artist, and the other great love of his life. Hughes says he only survived because of her and after the accident they were married. As for those pet hates, well, Australian journalists still rate very highly. ROBERT HUGHES: Somebody wrote this extraordinary piece in the Herald the other day, published in the Herald, saying, "Now it can be revealed that Robert Hughes is no longer a citizen of Australia. He has turned in his passport, he has returned his Order of Australia, he has done this, that". This was total and complete fabrication. JANA WENDT: You have not turned in your passport? ROBERT HUGHES: I have not turned in my passport, I still travel on it. I have not abandoned my Australian citizenship and, certainly, although I don't normally wear that little gold button that goes with the AO, mainly because everybody in America thinks it's just a lost earring. I mean, I don't know where they get this. JANA WENDT: All right, so you haven't done it – how do you now feel about Australia? ROBERT HUGHES: I feel nothing but love for Australia and 90 per cent of Australians. I feel nothing but contempt for the people who went after me as they did. JANA WENDT: When it was published falsely, you now tell me, that you had thrown away your Australian passport, there were actually letters to the editor saying "good riddance". ROBERT HUGHES: Oh yes, of course, yes, yes, good riddance, "That fellow doesn't deserve to be an Australian". MAX GILLIES (IMITATING ROBERT HUGHES): Did anybody own a white Volvo parked near the stage door? See me after. JANA WENDT: Robert Hughes' rambunctious style has provided satirists like Max Gillies with much inspiration. MAX GILLIES: But the convict stain's no excuse to act like a bunch of hoons. You lot wouldn't recognise a world-standard intellectual if he was coming towards you at a closing speed of 180 miles per hour! JANA WENDT: Despite the lampooning, Hughes at 65 resolutely refuses to be anyone else, but Hughes. He no longer thinks Australia should be towed out to sea and sunk but that's as big a concession as he's prepared to make. JANA WENDT: In the preface to your new book, you say West Australian justice is to justice what West Australian culture is to culture? ROBERT HUGHES: Exactly! JANA WENDT: Well, you've worked hard on that, I mean you could have said it in a moderate way, but that's guaranteed to make the blood of any West Australian boil, isn't it? ROBERT HUGHES: You can't imagine the immense admiration I have for West Australian culture. JANA WENDT: But take my point – you could have said that another way? ROBERT HUGHES: I could have. JANA WENDT: You could have been mild-mannered about being disappointed with West Australian justice if you like but you put it that way – why? ROBERT HUGHES: Well, I guess, ah... well, I don't know really, I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time. Click here for a printer-friendly version. |
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