STEVE CULLEY is a well known Fremantle artist from the famous Culley’s pie family. In the late 1970s and ‘80s he taught art at Fremantle Prison, later setting up Desert Designs with fellow artist David Wroth  where they ‘pioneered’ the transfer of WA Indigenous designs to fabric. Steve and his family now live in Sydney. 

I GOT the call from his daughter Vassiliki that I didn’t want to hear. 

My friend, the artist Arthur Kalamaras, had passed away from an aneurysm. I couldn’t hear a thing after that. I just cried like a baby. It was one of those moments where you realise getting old sucks. 

That as you get older, you lose the people in your life who mean so much. 

It’s a double blow. Just a week before, I found out Trevor Woodward had passed away. 

Another wonderful artist. Trevor was a Vietnam veteran, a forward scout who lived with the trauma of isolation and fear of the Vietnam experience, he channelled all that post-traumatic stress into his art. He used art as therapy.  

Arthur, in some ways, failed to do that. I put it down to his incredible depth of feeling, his incredible sensitivity.  

We met at art school. I was a year or two younger, and I turned up to find this rock – I don’t know, it seemed nine feet high – and he was carving a male and female Greek sentinel into it. 

It took forever. 

I watched him chipping away at it throughout our years together, and those moments of just sitting by him, watching him work, were a revelation. 

I was drawn to the immediacy of action painting, the chaos swirling in an adolescent mind. 

Arthur brought me stability. He carved because things lasted.  

He arrived in Australia when he was one year old, already carrying stories of tragedy. 

His mother was a famous playwright and poet. His father was a sculptor. His father’s brother was a professor of sculpture in Thessaloniki. 

His mother’s father was a finance minister in the Greek government. 

She had grown up living under the shadow of the Acropolis. 

Then they arrived here and found their way to Manjimup, growing tobacco, eking out a living on the land like so many new Australians. They were from the land, even with that rich cultural past.  

We went our own ways. 

I got involved with Desert Designs and meeting Jimmy Pike, which changed my life. 

Arthur taught and produced powerful works that are still visible at Kings Park as well as many other locations. 

But we met again when my offices were in Fremantle and he was based at Arthur Head in J Shed Art Studios on South Mole. 

Arthur was the one who put the proposal to Fremantle council to turn the Shed, relocated from Victoria Quay to the area behind the Round House, into a precinct of art studios. This would have been the early 1990s. 

He’s the guy that put the glass up in the old shed. 

He’s the guy that sat there and lived out his own Greek dramas, while reflecting on the energy of that place and its Indigenous component.  

We were drawn together by a shared empathy: for the abundance that comes from being gifted citizenship of Australia, and for understanding the power of Indigenous culture.

I think of all the long-distance calls, the hours and hours of talk, the wisdom he shared with me. 

He taught my grandchildren about the Greek gods, and when I’d see a modern Greek play in Sydney and called him to tell him about it, he’d gently remind me that it all went back to the Iliad. 

He never tore me down; he always wanted to build me up. 

Saying goodbye is full of so much love. And it’s full of sadness. 

I think of the fight he was having when the monument he built at Arthur Head – a tribute to all settlers – was smashed by a bobcat. 

Fremantle council wanted to move it for the Biennale festival light show, as if his stonework was just an obstacle. 

It was destined for court, and he died with it unresolved. 

I feel ashamed I couldn’t help him reach past the tragedy of that loss. We spent hours talking about the power of that work, how it related to ancient works in England, Europe and Asia, and how it was his way of channelling something deeper. 

Not claiming any right, but an empathy, a spiritual knowledge. 

Arthur believed that if you stop and think about the ground we walk on, you can experience that too. He taught me that.

His wisdom was so great. 

He left Australia, studied medicine, then came back to enrol in art school, became a lecturer at Claremont School of Art, and somehow attracted the ire of modernists who thought his work was locked in a time warp of irrelevance. They were so wrong. 

Their signposts were trivial. His was profound.

His memory will always be healing for me. He was a blessing. His family is a blessing. 

He imagined a museum for his parents, to show how their art, poetry and engagement with Australian culture could demonstrate how wonderful this country can be as it embraces migrants, while also  understanding its past. 

He wanted to honour those who suffered for our abundance, and to see the cycle completed by recognising the Indigenous abundance of knowledge and energy that surrounds us: The thing we’ve ignored for 200 years; The thing that is everywhere, washing us with healing.  

Thank you, Arthur.

Arthur Kalamaris’s funeral is Tuesday March 17 at Karrakatta Cemetery, 12-1.30pm.

by STEVE CULLEY