The Guardian 5 April, 2006
Art Review by Peter Mac
Sydney’s Disappearing Industrial Treasures
When Jane Bennett began painting Sydney’s industrial sites 20 years ago, she encountered considerable opposition from the art establishment.
Ms Bennett was fascinated by the character of industrial settings. There were notable precedents for her work, such as Margaret Preston’s vivid depiction of the Harbour Bridge. However, Sydney’s galleries showed her the door.
On the other hand, workers at the sites where she painted were wonderfully supportive. Many insisted on carrying her equipment. The wharfies sighed at her knots, and gave her expert tuition in tying down her heavy easel.
Ms Bennett’s choice of particular subjects was often dictated by the imminent loss of industrial sites, many of extraordinary technological and aesthetic significance. She says she often had the uncomfortable feeling that her depiction of these places was their undoing, as many were immediately demolished when her work was complete.
Because the majority of her paintings depict sites at or near the end of their working life, they rarely show people at work, yet they evoke the ghosts of long years of hard labour, companionship and industrial struggle.
Her beautiful work covers a range of settings in a variety of moods. Her paintings of the half-demolished Mortlake gas works are astonishingly powerful, poignant and eerie. Her depiction of Sydney’s wharves captures the experience of wharfies arriving for their shifts over God knows how many decades.
The Woolloomooloo wharf, that place of momentous transition for hundreds of thousands of impoverished migrants, is captured by Ms Bennett in brooding, spellbinding images, at the moment of its own transition to a new life as an apartment complex.
When Jack Mundey saw the Mortlake paintings he exclaimed that he had worked there decades ago. Sadly, Ms Bennett had to advise him that this complex is now completely gone.
The loss of so many sites is a tragic theme of the exhibition. However, some of the paintings also show parts of Sydney’s historic Rocks district. Its salvation in the 1970s by the Builders’ Labourers Federation and local residents showed that the most greedy and philistine corporations can actually be beaten, and significant sites saved.
Ms Bennett’s remarkable exhibition, which is part of the National Trusts’ Heritage Week program, Industrial Heritage Festival: Our Working Lives, is well worth a visit. But hurry, it closes April 13.
Jane Bennett, Sydney’s Disappearing Industrial Treasures, National Trust Centre, Observatory Hill, Sydney.
Open Weekdays 9-5, Weekends 11.30-5.