Snowy Mountains Construction Site
1960. Ink drawing with chalk, dated, initialled and titled in pencil lower right, 56.8 x 44cm. Pinholes to corners, handling crinkles and slight stains to edges. This is a detailed drawing showing the construction and concrete works for one of the sixteen dams built for the Snowy Mountains scheme (hydroelectric complex) between 1949 and 1974. Born in Melbourne, Clem Millward grew up in Western Australia. From the mid to late 1940s, he studied art at East Sydney Technical School and Julian Ashton Art School. He won a scholarship to study at an art school in Bucharest, Romania. On his return during the mid-1950s Millward worked as waterside worker and became a member of wharfie work gang “364”, known as the “Brains Trust”, which included musicians, intellectuals and party activists “who played chess during smokos.” He was a member of an artists’ collective, which worked under the direction of artist Rod Shaw on a wharfies’ mural, a “mammoth work now in the Australian National Maritime Museum that has been compared to that of the internationally recognised Mexican artist Diego Rivera.” During this time, Millward along with fellow artists Ralph Sawyer and Sonny Glynn, produced hundreds of May Day posters and screen-prints promoting peace, socialism, workers’ rights, Aboriginal land rights and liberation struggles. In 1961 he began teaching at TAFE, and from 1977 to 1985 he was senior head teacher at its Hornsby college. Millward was a finalist in the 1958 Archibald and 1966 Sulman competitions and won the 1973 Wynne Award. His work is held by major Australian galleries, overseas institutions and private collections. Ref: SMH, 14.5.2007; New Theatre, Sydney; Wiki.
Item #CL202-47
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