Book Review: Dark Night: Walking with McCahon, Martin Edmond

Colin McCahon pictured with some of his work in 1971. Photo / Supplied

Martin Edmond, New Zealand-born, but resident in Australia since 1981, makes the history and culture of both countries the focus of his writing.

A master of the genre that is sometimes called "creative non-fiction", Edmond in his latest book has chosen a subject that is genuinely transtasman: the temporary disappearance in Sydney of the great New Zealand artist, Colin McCahon.

In 1984 McCahon was in Sydney to attend the opening of the first major exhibition of his work held outside New Zealand - a collection of his word and number paintings, curated by Wystan Curnow, under the title I Will Need Words, which was shown as a satellite exhibition to the Sydney Biennale.

But on the day his show opened, McCahon - who had by this time ceased painting because of the onset of what his biographer, Gordon Brown, calls "cerebral atrophy" - disappeared in the Domain after going to a public toilet, leaving his wife waiting outside (it seems that he exited by a different door).

He was eventually found the following morning in Centennial Park, several kilometres away, with no memory of what had happened to him in the preceding day and night.

Edmond, living in Sydney at the time, has a strong interest in the visual arts, having, for instance, written books about Philip Clairmont and Ludvig Becker, the German artist who accompanied Burke and Wills on their ill-fated journey across the heart of Australia in the 19th century.

Long fascinated by McCahon's work, in which the Catholic motif of the Stations of the Cross figures prominently (especially after 1965), Edmond conceived an audacious project: "The idea of replicating that lost journey ... I wondered if I could arbitrarily choose a route [between where McCahon went missing and where he was found] and along it find equivalents for the 14 Stations of the Cross?"

A long chapter called "Psychogeography", divided into 14 parts, one for each station, forms the core of the book. The first station, "Jesus is Condemned to Death", logically enough, is the toilet near the Palm Grove in the Botanical Gardens where McCahon went missing.

Each of the 14 parts describes the author's various visits at different times of day and night to the sites he has chosen to represent the stations; he often digresses on to related topics, many to do with McCahon's work, sometimes with his own life.

Visiting the toilet near the Palm Grove, for instance, he discourses on the history of the botanical gardens and writes at length about the flying foxes (fruit bats) which inhabit the palm trees. The toilet itself reminds him of trips as a boy to the grim urinals at Athletic Park, Wellington, during rugby tests, or toilets at various primary schools he attended.

"All of these confronting, disreputable or sinister associations seem to gather in that dim, malodorous interior into which McCahon stepped through one door and, thoroughly and permanently changed, out the other. It makes perfect sense to call this the first station, the one at which he was condemned to death."

This example will give some sense of the book's manner and method. It is a courageous and risky venture, with unlimited opportunities for giving offence or coming a cropper. I consider Edmond courts disaster and triumphantly transcends it, because of his honesty, deep appreciation of McCahon as man and artist, the depth of his research, and the excellence of his prose.

The book is a brilliant and intimate portrait of inner-city Sydney - its parks, and pubs, its churches and jails, its monuments and public art works, its streets and parks, its derelicts and street people, its prostitutes and transvestites.

In the chapter "Dark Night" Edmond recounts his decision to spend a night in Centennial Park, where McCahon was found, using the poems of Spanish mystic St John of the Cross concerning the "dark night of the soul" as his text for reflection.

Again, it is a perilous exercise, with potential for provoking scorn or ridicule from an unsympathetic reader, but highly effective. I found the book utterly absorbing, and read it again from start to finish.

Dark Night: Walking With McCahon by Martin Edmond
Auckland University Press $37.99

* Peter Simpson is an Auckland reviewer.