My Misspent Youth:

An exhibition of Oil Paintings by Bob Dixon

Precinct Galleries - January 2000 (ends 2nd February)

My Misspent Youth: Ten - Ivy Maree
Oil on Canvas 1996 - 70cm x 65cm

As was the custom of teenagers of the time, my friend Jeff and I took off from Queensland in 1966 aged 17 to Melbourne where we lived a precarious life taking whatever work we could get to survive. This series documents the years 66/67 and focusses on the people who influenced our lives at the time, positive and negative. Most of the works concern the period of time that we worked as deckhands on the Ivy Maree, a rundown scallop boat, plying the scallop beds in south western Port Phillip Bay. Based in Mornington, we lived on board the boat five days a week and shared times of great adventure and danger amongst the denizens of the docklands. These paintings are drawn from my memories of the Sixties; the colours, the music, the people.

AUS $800.00 plus shipping & handling costs

My Misspent Youth: One - Skipper Steve
Oil on Canvas 1996 - 82cm x 90cm

Skipper Steve was a salty dog. In the time honoured fashion, as skipper, he was obsessed with the inclusion of greens in our diet. “Boys, you gotta have your greens!” Jeff and I took to calling him the Jolly Green Giant. He was a good man at sea, in a storm. We rode out some big seas on the Ivy Maree. A howling southerly pushed up the bay and the little boat plunged through huge swells. I could see water and bubbles through the portholes. The dark water crashed in through the hatch. Kneeling like an altarboy, I prepare to drown in the wild black bay. No life jackets, no radio; just the hungry waves. Steve surfed it out and we limped back to Mornington with the angels wiping their brows in heaven. Steve moved in heavy circles. We couldn’t go to sea once because he’d had his jaw smashed in a fight over a woman. Not long after, the heavies shot him dead. By then the scallops were fished out anyway.

AUS $950.00 plus shipping & handling costs

My Misspent Youth: One - Johnnie
Oil on Canvas 1996 - 92cm x 91cm

Johnnie looked like an angel but he was as tough as a bird. The older boatsmen consigned to him the job of looking out for the country bumpkin in the hellhole pubs of Port. He was only a kid like me, seventeen and wary in a sparrowlike way in the jungle of the waterfront. Stepping into the pub was like falling through the doors of Dantes Inferno. Dockers, spivs, fishwives, painted ladies, and pre-teen whores; cops, seamen, sharpies, white men, black men, brown men all engaged in the chaotic rituals of Friday night in Port.

AUS $1200.00 plus shipping & handling costs

My Misspent Youth: Three - Maisies
Oil on Canvas 1996 - 92cm x 91cm

Maisies was a pub in South Yarra frequented by the theatre and arts crowd, always alive with colourful people. Jeff and I would scam drinks from the queens all night then do a runner around closing time. We’d make our escape from the toilet and the little bloke in hat and glasses followed us in there one night. “ I’ve been buying you boys scotch all night, you don’t get away from me that easily.” We had to put him in the picture in no uncertain terms.

You’d often see the big rock stars and their satellites at Maisies, often in drag, hairy legs sticking out of stockings and high heels. The graffiti in the pub proclaimed: “ Be modern; be camp.” Seems old fashioned thirty years.

AUS $950.00 plus shipping & handling costs

My Misspent Youth: Four - Lesley
Oil on Canvas 1996 - 93cm x 63cm

In the ‘brambled gullies of the Dandenongs, we cut the survey lines, scrambling on mossy logs over seas of blackberries, juggling the valuable theodolites like babies. And, God, the snakes! The place was alive with them; tigers, copperheads, blacks. The tigers were aggressive little buggers, too. Les had bright black eyes that peeped out of slits and a built-in snake radar. One day he killed seven snakes. It was war out there. We were invading their territory and soon brick bungalows would swallow up their wild hillsides.

Les was a surrogate father. I respected his quiet way, his fierce eye and his hunterhood. Somewhere in his past was a great sadness that stuck out of his back like a knife.

AUS $800.00 plus shipping & handling costs

My Misspent Youth: Five - Yank Smith
Oil on Canvas 1996 - 87cm x 84cm

Yank at the wheel of his loud, farting Blitz truck, tearing down a building. He’d wrap a great steel rope around it, hitch it to the Blitz and plant his foot. The old beast roared and reared its front wheels off the ground with Yank hanging out the window like a cowboy.

He’d stowed away from home in Canada, aged thirteen, on a ship bound for the other side of the world. His family never heard from him again. He told me he was expelled from school for “draw’n a dick on a buff’lo.” Jeff and I worked as labourers in his demolition business, clearing up the debris after the Blitz had been through. One of his handful of beautiful daughters was Jeffs girlfriend.

It was Yank who got us the jobs on the Ivy. His home was one of warmth and laughing voices. Heaven was in Kathicen’s kitchen, around the stove with the family, cold winter nights.

AUS $800.00 plus shipping & handling costs

My Misspent Youth: Six - Bob’s Vision
Oil on Canvas 1996 - 100cm x 89cm

The skipper piloted the Ivy up into the mouth of the Yarra; the desolate industrial aspect surreal to the eye of a Queensland boy. Freighters and punts, barges, launches, spidery cranes; the clay coloured river was a world I’d never known. The muse stirred as I drew in the stark poetry of smokestacks and factories; tangles of rusted machinery; grey workers awaiting ferries in the ebbtide of the afternoon.

AUS $950.00 plus shipping & handling costs

My Mis-spent Youth: Seven - The Unholy Trinity
Oil on Canvas 1996 - 90cm x 46cm

The phantom was the first junkie I’d met.
He was downright BAD.

Tassie George was on the run from the law.
He was downright MAD.

Karl looked like a Nazi U-Boat captain.
He was a KILLER.

They hung out in the waterfront pubs and lived on the water. One night at the Royal they threatened to murder us. I watched George’s eyes change to psycho blue. It’s a long story, lost in the wind.

AUS $665.00 plus shipping & handling costs

My Misspent Youth: Eight Carol
Oil on Canvas 1996 - 85cm x 87cm

Carol was a bright, feisty schoolgirl who, I must admit, I was in love with. Ohh, the pain of teenage love! She’d often be waiting on the weathered boards as the Ivy drew up to the wharf on a Friday afternoon. I stood in the prow and leapt onto the dock showing off my skill with a double hitch over the bollard. Her father was a BIG man and drove very fast.

AUS $950.00 plus shipping & handling costs

My Misspent Youth: Nine The Poet
Oil on Canvas 1996 - 70cm x 91cm

Jeff and I dubbed this bloke The Poet. He could be seen, striding dramatically along the Esplanade, long grey hair tormented by winter winds: a solitary figure with the gravity of a Robert Lowell. We imagined him back in his hungry garret, searching for the perfect words to describe the wintry sea. He fitted a romantic ideal of our Sixties vision.

Imagine our surprise later when we met him in the Dickensian factory we were obliged to take jobs in when the scallops fished out. He had worked at the same press for forty years. So much for romance!

AUS $665.00 plus shipping & handling costs