Murray Bail (b. 1941), writer, was born in Adelaide and spent several years in India and England in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In London, he wrote for the Transatlantic Review and the Times Literary Supplement. His first book of short stories, Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories, was published in England in 1975. His first novel Homesickness (1980) won the National Book Council Award and shared the Age Book of the Year Award; Holden's Performance (1987) won the 1988 Victorian Premier's Award for fiction. Bail wrote a lyrical monograph on the artist Ian Fairweather in 1981, which was republished in 2009. Described as 'one of our most remarkable fabulists', Bail has won critical acclaim and a number of major Australian literary honours, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Miles Franklin Award for the beguiling Eucalyptus (1998). His subsequent novels include The Pages (2008) and The Voyage (2012). In 2021 he published his collection of autobiographical writings, He.
Although much of his best-known landscape work is severe and sparing, Fred Williams himself was a genial and well-loved man, and produced a number of striking representations of his friends. His portrait of Bail was painted while both men were Council members of the National Gallery of Australia. Represented as slight, rumpled and ordinary, Bail looks diffident, even a little sheepish, but at the same time a man who may conceivably be cogitating a low-key story strangely irresistible to the listener.
Gift of an anonymous donor 1999. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.
© Fred Williams
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
1 May 2014
In Persuasion (1818), a long walk on a fine autumn day affords Anne Elliot an opportunity to ruminate wistfully and at great length upon declining happiness, youth and hope.
Michael Desmond discusses Fred Williams' portraits of friends, artist Clifton Pugh, David Aspden and writer Stephen Murray-Smith, and the stylistic connections between his portraits and landscapes.
