Dunningham, Roy Interview

This is Caroline Lowry interviewing Roy Dunningham on Thursday 26th November 2020. Good morning, Roy; looking forward to hearing your story.

Good morning, Caroline. Okay. Well, I was born in Hastings in 1936; my parents were Wilfred and Tui Dunningham. I was an only child. I went to Parkvale School which I enjoyed because I had an oddball teacher there, Mr Harris. Mr Harris loved Wagnerian opera, art, music; so his spelling tests would be things like, ‘Last night the pianist Alfred Corteau held a concert of Schubert’s music in the Auckland Town [Hall]’ – that would be our spelling test, so I loved Mr Harris; nobody else did but never mind. [Chuckles] And I actually became dux of Parkvale School.

My mother encouraged me in art as well. My family wasn’t an educated family, but they encouraged education. I can remember once when I was a kid, my father, who ran a service station, said, you know, “Well, what are you going to do when you grow up?” And so out of loyalty I said, “Oh, well I’ll come into the service station with you, Dad.” “No, you won’t”, he said. [Chuckles] You know, so although he wasn’t educated himself he had a higher sight for me, and I do appreciate that; I do value that. That was something with that generation, I think.

The things that … it’s funny the little things that affect your life; the polio epidemic for example, of 1948-’49 … the summer of ‘48-’49. [Chuckle] We had marvellous … they were marvellous actually, I enjoyed them … correspondence lessons sent out to us; no online in those days, of course. And I was a bit pipped at the time because I was the only kid in the street who actually did all the exercises – mainly because my mother wouldn’t let me go out to play until I’d finished my tasks for the day. But I can also remember the musical appreciation programmes on the radio – Owen Jensen – I can still remember the music of Smetana’s ‘Moldau’ … the River Moldau … I can still play it in my head from those days. These things make a deep impression at that age.

I suppose … sometimes, your life hinges on a single event. Well mine hinged on probably less than a minute, a thirty-second chance conversation with a teacher. In 1950 I arrived at Hastings High School – the third form – and they put us into options, and I went into art for two weeks; schools were slow at getting themselves organised in those days. And after two weeks they finalised our “options” [chuckle] in inverted comma, and I found myself doing woodwork. Well you didn’t sort of complain about those things in those days; but anyway, a couple of days later I was walking across the school quadrangle, and I bumped into Miss Guppy, the art teacher. And she must’ve remembered me from the two weeks that I was in her class, and must’ve recognised some talent; and she said, “Dunningham, why aren’t you in art?” And I said, “Please Miss Guppy, they made me do woodwork.” “Did they?” she said; and next woodwork period Miss Guppy comes sailing into the woodwork room, sails up to Bert Garretly, the woodwork teacher, points to me and says, “I want that boy in art!” And Bert, with indecent haste perhaps, said, “Take him, he’s yours.” [Chuckles] And everything in my life hinged on that thirty-second chance conversation – I mean my career; my marriage; my family; my friends; the whole shape of my life hinged literally on that thirty seconds. Goodness knows what would’ve happened otherwise, but that’s what shaped … there were other teachers who influenced [me] … Miss Guppy, you know, thank you Miss Guppy, wherever you are. It sounds a bit mean of me to say this – she wasn’t actually a very good art teacher, [chuckles] but never mind.

Fortunately she left, and the teacher who replaced her was a lady called Yvonne Rust. And Yvonne Rust was an inspirational art teacher – one of the great art teachers; and I suppose as a teacher eventually myself, to some extent you model yourself on the teachers that you admired, and I guess in lots of ways I always modelled myself on Yvonne’s teaching. She was also, incidentally, I know a huge role model for a lot of the female students … a number of female students, who realised that, you know, a female could be a strong, independent, creative person; that you didn’t just have to be an adjunct to a male. [Chuckle] And so that was wonderful.

The other one who influenced me was a Mr Eade, a wonderful English teacher. He gave me a great love of poetry … T S Eliot, Shakespeare, Wilfred Owen. Whenever I did any reading to a class I modelled myself on Mr Eade. He had a particular technique; he was very intelligent, and he understood the words … what they meant; understood them thoroughly, and then understated them. Let the words do the work, and gee it was effective. Now I also played in the First XV, First XI there, so I enjoyed my school years, I thought they were great.

In the mid-1950s I duly arrived at Canterbury Art School; some great tutors there – Russell Clarke, Bill Sutton – again, teachers that you modelled yourself on in future years. Also experienced how tough a business art could be; another one of the tutors was Rudolph Gopas. Rudi was a Lithuanian refugee; a very good artist, and a very outspoken character. And anyway, we used to have monthly sketch club meetings, where we’d have a guest speaker; we’d exhibit our paintings; the guest speaker would criticise the paintings; then we’d all go away and have a party afterwards. [Chuckle] And Rudi was the guest this night, and he spent about five minutes verbally demolishing one of my paintings; and in broken English which made it even more devastating. [Chuckle] And what made it even worse was the fact I was the president; I had to thank him afterwards. [Chuckles] I didn’t touch a paintbrush for a couple of weeks afterwards …

Oh!

… I was so shattered. And then I thought, well if I was that wimpy I shouldn’t be muckin’ around with it. So that was – oh yeah – he finished by adding, “Ah, there is one thing that I like about this painting – the signature is nice.” Ohhh! [Growl] [Chuckles] Anyway, so that was one of life’s toughening experiences. Rudi was also … he was a misogynist. He hated female students, and he was infamous for the incident where one female student took a painting to him and he said, “Ah, this painting is too big – take away, make it smaller.” And she did that, and he repeated that: “No, it’s still too big, make it smaller.” And then the third time, “Ah! Now it is small enough to throw in the rubbish bin.” So he was pretty destructive; I didn’t like Rudi. But anyway …

The really great thing I guess, at art school, was the student flat. My memory of that is so colourful. There’s a painting by Phil Clairmont in the Hawke’s Bay Museum of a flat; and a seedy flat just like that. And it’s all Phil Clairmont, brilliantly coloured. And of course our flat was faded furniture, torn, stained and so on, but – I remember the flat the way that Phil Clairmont painted this picture, because … the people that went through; the debates and discussions we had; the art, the music, the poetry and so on. It was vividly coloured; it was exciting and wonderful.

And the great thing was of course, I met the love of my life, Marie; and that was the beginning of a sixty-year love affair, which was wonderful. [Sighs] We married, and I began teaching; my first teaching job at Te Kuiti. Our four children were born there. Te Kuiti was actually a great experience, because this was in the days before drugs and gangs, and country towns still had an innocence about them. There was a social life there too, because this was the days when the banks and the stock agents still had agencies there, so you had young people on their way up through the ranks; country service in schools; so there was really quite a vibrant young social circle in those towns. And being an intellectual in a small town I was able to … I did stage sets, I had art shows, I took lead roles in stage productions, I sang. I was part of the … I’ve actually sung on stage with Kiri Te Kanawa.

Wow! [Chuckles]

It was a fundraising tour that she did, and we put on an event for her. And so [chuckle] … I was on stage with her singing, so I’ll claim it. [Chuckles] And I also played in the local rugby and cricket teams, so you could be everything; I mean it was the big frog in the small pond, but it was fun. I played rugby against the great Colin Meads …

Wow! [Chuckle]

I actually tackled him once, but I think in actual fact I fell over and he tripped over me, [chuckles] but never mind. [Laughter]

So however, you need to change, and Te Kuiti was a small school; friends move on, and I wanted to move to a larger centre that had more of an art community. And a job came up at Hastings Boys’ High School which I took, and it was a good move because I had some exciting classes and exciting students there – people like Phil Judd, for example, of Split Enz, who also has a painting in Te Papa; Mark Hough, who founded the Suburban Reptiles, and foundation member of The Swingers, ‘Counting the Beat’. That was actually fun; and again stage sets – I loved stage design. And we had two very good drama producers at Hastings Boys’, Peter McMechan and Bert McConnell; and plays like ‘Royal Hunt of the Sun’, ‘Ross’, ‘MacBeth’, ‘Merchant of Venice’; and a number of students who actually ended up – people like Stuart Devenie and so on – who became professional actors themselves. That was actually pretty exciting.

I also did a number of sets for group theatre at that time, for plays like ‘Man for All Seasons’, ‘Under Milk Wood’ and so on. Theatre design … it was sort of total art; you had everything there. You had sound, you had movement, you had gesture, you had shapes and design and form; it was the whole thing, and I loved designing for a purpose. If I had my time over again knowing what I know now, I’d be tempted to be a graphic designer, because I love the idea of having a set problem and having to solve that problem. On the other hand I loved teaching anyway, so … teaching [is] the most rewarding occupation, and it means so much to me that I’m still friends with people that I taught so long ago. It’s pretty wonderful. Anyway …

Okay. At Hastings Boys’ High School I also got interested in tramping, and I ended up taking the school Tramping Club. And I can remember an incident there that defines how narrow the gap is between life and death; one of my friends, an Intermediate school teacher, asked me to take his class for a tramp. So we went to climb […] in the Kawekas, and we came down the shingle slide – lovely shingle slide, you glissade your way down. And right at the very bottom one of the girls took a little tumble. She didn’t go more than two or three metres; she could’ve tumbled playing netball at school. But anyway, she was quite dazed, she was pale, the pupils of her eyes were dilated, and she complained about a sore tummy; and you don’t like to go prodding round the tummy of a teenage girl, of course. Anyway, she said she really couldn’t walk, and so I took it at face value and we made up a – we had plenty of adults – we made up a stretcher; carried her out all the way to the road, got her to hospital, just in time to save her from a ruptured spleen. So all these little bits of drama that come in.

I suppose a hunting interest also introduces what you might call a dark incident or a period in my life. Somebody introduced me to a man called Terry Clark. Now Terry apparently had a pine tree pruning contract at Willow Flat up at Mohaka, and he wanted somebody to go pig hunting with him. I should’ve had warning bells that none of the Maori boys who worked for him would go out with him; that should have been a warning, but never mind; somebody told him, “I know somebody who’s brave enough … silly enough … Roy Dunningham.” [Chuckle] Anyway, Terry was great company; charming man. I started to realise he was a bit dodgy – he admitted that he’d been a crook … a burglar … in Auckland and had come down here to go straight. And in those days – it was the late sixties – and you know, you sort of had these romantic ideas that baddies really had good people inside …

Right. [Chuckle]

… waiting to get out. [Laughter] Terry was interesting – his marriage had broken up but he had custody of the children. God knows the story behind that. And actually, the children and Terry have sat at this same table having meal[s]; we became quite good friends. Anyway, I realised that he was still a bit dodgy when on the way home from Willow Flat he said he was running short of petrol, and so we stopped; and [he] said, “Tell me if somebody comes.” And there were some cars parked, and he comes out with a [chuckle] rubber tube. And [chuckles] I’m just about dying of fright there. Anyway, I realised; the friendship started to cool. He also had a partner at the time who looked after his children; Norma Fleet was her name. Norma – actually, she was a good lady – somebody who only hurt herself. And she really looked after the kids well, but she was a heroin addict, and a couple of times when Terry was up at Willow Flat I had to rescue her; she’d ring me up and she was having withdrawal symptoms, and so I’d have to go out to Haumoana where she lived, and take her and the kids up to the Esk Valley to where her sister lived, to look after her. Anyway, the friendship ended; but the final incident was when Terry must’ve decided there wasn’t enough money in pine tree pruning, and he burgled the Manchester Unity safe in Hastings. But the really bad thing was that he used an oxy-acetylene he’d stolen from the metalwork room in Hastings Boys’ High School. And the cops found out that I’d been friendly with him, and so I got grilled by the cops.

Oh!

I got the bad cop/good cop treatment …

Right! [Chuckles]

… and you know, the sergeant got a phone call, and the other cop said, “Look Roy, we don’t want to nail you, you know, we just want to …” “I know nothing! I know nothing.” [Laughter] Anyway, that was the end of the friendship with Terry Clark. And of course Terry in jail realised that you could make more money from drugs than you could from burglary, and he ended up of course in the Mr Asia gang; murdered four people in Australia at least; probably murdered Norma Fleet when she’d outlived her usefulness – she died of a heroin overdose in a motel in Marton, and it’s almost certain that Terry did that. Murdered Marty Johnstone, the leader of the Mr Asia gang, ‘cause he was unreliable; and then got murdered himself probably, in jail. He was probably an informant to the prison authorities on the IRA, [Irish Republican Army] and they …

It was in England, wasn’t it?

He was in England, yeah. Well he got away with it; and things in Australia. And Australian cops of course, at that time – and even now they’re pretty dodgy – were notoriously corrupt. But in England they nailed him, and he officially died of a heart attack, but probably the IRA sat on his chest so he couldn’t breathe. But anyway, that was my [chuckles] … the dark episode in my … [Chuckle] Terry was a charming psychopath.

Anyway, and round about that time … I guess you also have great tragedy in your life. First tragedy in our life … stillborn baby … our baby, Tom, died. But we fought our way through that. And it was a time of … I was showing in art groups at the time, and I went to a wonderful four-day school with Colin McCahon. He was actually the greatest teacher I’ve ever met – you know, they say those who teach … you know, but in actual fact McCahon was the best; the four days I spent with him was the most intense learning experience of my life. It’s been with me ever since. And [it] was after that that I shifted to Havelock North High School. Again, I’d enjoyed my time at Boys’ High but Havelock North was a new school; I wanted to teach in a co-ed school; it had more scope for the arts, and it was highly motivated staff, a new school. It was pretty exciting. I ended up with the biggest art department in Hawke’s Bay, and it was tremendously satisfying, actually; the number of students who I still keep in touch with today, the students who went on to become professional artists in some way themselves. The school had a great music department and very strong drama so again the stage sets were important – ‘West Side Story’, ‘Camelot’. ‘West Side Story’ was interesting. The sets for that, I decided I’d … it was written in the fifties; abstract expressionism, you know, Jackson Pollock … so I thought, ‘Well I’ll do some huge Jackson Pollocks and scaff’ [scaffolding] – ‘I won’t try to recreate New York City – I’ll put up scaffolding round the stage, and I’ll put up these huge Jackson Pollock-type paintings.’ And so it was a long weekend; I got a couple of senior students to help me, and I thought, ‘This is going to be easy – we’ll just chuck paint everywhere.’ And it didn’t work, and I found that I had to think, ‘We need a wash of green there; we need an arc of black there.’ And so what Jackson Pollock would’ve done just intuitively, I had to nut it out to get something that actually looked cogent, that actually worked. And so I should’ve known that of course, but it was [a] good learning experience for me, and for the students.

It was a time of changes to art assessment, where instead of setting an exam you sent in folios by this stage; and I was appointed to national marking panels, and School C, [Certificate] UE [University Entrance] and bursaries.

So this was in the ‘seventies?

By this time we were in the seventies … late seventies, early eighties. Yep. [Chuckle] And that was quite exciting too, because I was working with some of the leading artists in the country. And of course this was the time when students were encouraged to latch onto the style of leading artists, and to learn from them and incorporate that artist in their own work. And so I was marking with artists who were represented amongst the students’ work, and I can recall [chuckle] … it was bursary art I think … and the sculptor Greer Twiss – there were Elam lecturers there – and he found a student who’d based his work on Don Binney, and he calls out to Don Binney across the marking room, “Hey, Don! This kid does your stuff better than you do.” [Laughter]

Some interesting things happened. I reckon I scored something that would’ve been a New Zealand record for results in bursary; I had a student in bursary who the year before in my Sixth Form class I’d failed him, because he was very bright but very lazy, and he’d missed so many deadlines that I failed him. He said, “Look, I know I bombed last year – can I do bursary, Sir?” “Yeah … yeah, all right” – I had faith in him. And he was superb, absolutely superb. He ended up getting ninety-six percent for bursary, so actually his bursary mark was twice the mark, [chuckle] … double the mark from the year before. That’s got to be a national record. He became a very successful architect later.

In the 1980s I became involved with what was then the Hawke’s Bay Art Gallery and Museum, now MTG [Museum, Theatre, Gallery] of course. I was appointed a board member, and I was also appointed on an acquisitions committee, and that was interesting because the museum had missed out on that period of the sixties and seventies when all these vibrant new artists, Clairmont, Fomison and so on, Maddox and so on; they didn’t purchase anything of their work in that time, so by the 1980s we were in catch-up mode, still trying to get enough money together to get some of those artists while we still could. And I can remember that we had a chance to buy Tony Fomison’s painting of Omai. Omai was the young Tahitian who joined Cook’s expedition, went back to [the] UK. [United Kingdom] It’s a wonderful painting. Anyway, we had this huge argument on the acquisitions committee; we fought World War 3 over it, and finally managed to convince them that it was – we bought it for $9,500; it’s one of the greatest Fomisons ever. Art & Object four or five years ago valued it at $450,000. [Chuckle] So that sort of thing was fun, and at least we made up some ground on that.

I started doing curating work at this stage. I curated shows for the Hawke’s Bay Art Gallery on Bryan Dew; Bryan Dew was an interesting artist. In the 1960s he did a series of bitingly satirical paintings of Hawke’s Bay social life – the Blossom Queens; you know, the parade of flesh and the leering old men putting award medals around their necks, you know – that sort of thing; the awkwardness of twenty-first birthday parties; [chuckle] all the social mores of the time. And sadly Bryan left – went and worked in America, became a graphic designer; but these paintings are a terrific record of Hawke’s Bay social life at that time. So I curated a show of that in the late 1980s for the Hawke’s Bay Museum; one on Phyll Simmonds, pioneer modernist; another one on Bryan Dew for Hawke’s Bay Exhibition Centre; one on Geoff Fuller. Geoff Fuller was really a tremendously important art teacher at Karamu High School, and then an artist – one of the most … probably the major figure in Hawke’s Bay art over much of the latter part of the twentieth century, and so it was really great to be able to do a retrospective exhibition of his work. The Collectors’ Room – that was paintings from local collection[s]. I borrowed a painting from your name, Lowry …

Jamie and Pru?

That’s right – I borrowed a painting from them; Bronwyn Thorpe and I did that.

Okay, I’m into modern times now, and by this time I’d given up painting myself. I had too many interests; I didn’t have the discipline to dedicate myself, I wasn’t doing it well enough, and I thought rather than do it badly I’d rather concentrate effort on mentoring others; so I curated; I advised things; I became an art advisor for the Hastings City Art Gallery, planning their future exhibitions. I did a lot of writing on art; I wrote for many years when the Hawke’s Bay Herald Tribune … used to have serious articles on art in those days; I wrote for Bay Buzz magazine; I wrote several articles for Art News New Zealand. I set up a business as a consultant, fitting [some] individual clients with an art work I did a number of mural and glass window designs for National Mutual in Napier, and a couple of finance companies in Hastings; I did a glass window for Sacred Heart. They were commissions for architects, so it was going quite nicely.

I’d retired from teaching in 1996, incidentally. Yeah – I decided that I was still teaching well at that stage, and it was a matter of pride. I’d seen it – at Hastings Boys’ High School I can remember the old chalkies who were sad men, you know, their careers dissolving around them, and no, I didn’t want to be like that, [chuckle] so I retired while I was still alive and kicking. [Chuckle]

I did consultancy work for Opus on the local district plan, and as an art advisor for the Hastings District Council; so all the sculptures that we have in the CBD [central business district] in Hastings and in Havelock North came from that so that was pretty exciting. Yeah, and we actually got a national award for that. Hastings City Council were great – we sold them on the idea that Hastings was never going to be a ‘river city’, ‘city of the seven hills’, ‘Venice of the south’; so we had to make it interesting and give it a vibrancy in some other way. And so that was one way of doing that – we had to concentrate on what we did in the town, seeing that it didn’t have the natural attributes. I curated a number of shows for Russell Street Art Centre as well.

And then in the year 2000 I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and so I decided that it was time to enjoy life then. And so my wife and I had already travelled a bit, but we embarked on serious travel. I was successfully treated with radiotherapy and so that gave me a bonus lease on life; so there was a lot of travelling there to Australia, Europe, Asia and the wonderful exhibitions, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Monet, Picasso, Max Beckmann; just so exciting. And even Australian art … Marie had relatives and family in Australia. I love the Australian colonial art – the Heidelberg School in Victoria – beautiful paintings; but I also love the contemporary indigenous art there. Boy! Is it angry! And with very, very good reason of course, but [chuckle] the intensity of the anger! [Chuckle] I’d never seen in anything like that before.

That was in the colour, or the ..?

Everything – the messages. The messages, the content. I mean, we see powerful work by Maori activist artists in New Zealand, and you know – fine, it’s vibrant. But it’s tame compared with … These art works just vibrated; they exuded anger, which was not a relaxing, pleasant experience, but my goodness, it was exciting. And revealing. It probably told more than anything just where things are at at present, and things are not at a good stage yet … yeah.

Okay. In 1999 my wife and I bought a block of bush land in the Ruahines, and we own the headwaters of the Manawatu River, actually.

Wow! [Chuckle]

So that was pretty exciting. [Chuckle] So that was a lot of work improving … building a hut and improving a hut, cutting tracks, pest control, possums and mustelids, dope growers. We had a dope grower using our land; and somebody broke into our hut, so I took a couple of big mates around to the dope grower’s house, you know, accusing him of breaking into our hut, and he was very indignant of that. He admitted growing dope on our land, but said he didn’t break into huts. He said, “That’s kids’ stuff – I’m a professional.” [Laughter] Anyhow, you couldn’t argue with that. [Chuckles] It’s an exciting block of land; we have a stand of … there’s regenerating bush there, a lot of it was milled … but there is a stand of rimu trees which are at least five hundred years old. You know, they were when the [Spanish] Armada sailed – they were already reasonable sized trees. We’ve covenanted that land, so that’s great to know that when we’re long gone it’s still going to be there.

Still active in art activities; for the best part of the last twenty years I’ve taken U3A groups … University of the Third Age … and they’ve been a marvellous, marvellous group; they’re a lovely group of people. They’re never daunted by any[thing]; we do gallery visit[s] – I didn’t want to stand in a room and show slides, so we go to a gallery every month. And that was really good for me because it means that I have to adjust to new work … challenging work … and even if I don’t like it I have to be able to say something cogent about it at least. And so that kept me awake. [Chuckles] I was also in an advisory group for the Hastings City Art Gallery for a number of years, planning the exhibitions that were upcoming. I’ve been a guest speaker for a number of MTG functions.

Oh. I did neglect to [mention], I’ve had three tragedies in my life. My daughter, Helen, died way back in the late 1980s; that was the second tragedy, our youngest daughter; and then 2018 my wife died after a short illness. Then 2019 my own health declined quite seriously. Fortunately I responded well to chemotherapy, and back into action.

I’ve compiled a book of my wife’s poetry. My wife was a remarkable lady; our relationship could be stormy at times. Neither of us was backward in coming forward if something pissed us off, but at the same time we were never bored with each other. And she was quite an activist – she was head of Grey Power locally; she was an activist in social political matters; environmental matters – Cape Kidnappers protection, that sort [of thing]. She was a fluent speaker of Te Reo, and she was a very good poet and a leading light in the local Live Poets. And so anyway, I compiled and printed a book of her poetry so that was my big tribute to her.

I returned to my U3A group, and I selected a major show this year for Community Arts Napier. I made a film for MTG on their permanent collection. So right now I’m thinking about what the next thing I’ll do will be.

Oh, exciting! Tell me, Covid – how have you found that?

Not too bad. I was an only child, and so one of the few advantages of being an only child was that you’re self-reliant. I mean in war years when I was a kid, we didn’t have many toys available for sale, and so I can remember I used to make my own toys. I’d make my own aeroplanes, trucks, guns … whatever. That was fun.

That ability to improvise has actually been really useful. I got a commission in the army when I did compulsory military service because they set you up where they want you to take a model lesson – this is on the Officers’ Training Course. They say, you know, “We’ll give you these resources to take a lesson.” And anyway, the lesson comes along and suddenly you’re told, “Sorry, we can’t give you the resources, we can’t find the key”, and so on. And so I was able to improvise a brilliant lesson out of nothing, and [chuckle] I ended up First Lieutenant Dunningham. [Laughter] So that was the improvisation of those [war years] … so Covid … I was compiling my wife’s poetry book at that time, which was a terrific experience because it was like hearing her speaking to me so it’s a great memento.

Fantastic.

Yeah. You renew contacts with friends that maybe you’ve drifted away from … yeah, Covid was okay for me; it was okay. Yeah.

Oh, good. Well, that was fascinating … thank you so much. Can’t wait to listen to it; thanks so much, Roy.