David Bailey: Bailey's Matilda

BaileyÆs Matilda is David BaileyÆs love letter to Australia, but in typical Bailey fashion itÆs not what youÆd expect. This is no rosy portrait of ôthe lucky country,ö but a gritty yet affectionate vision of rural and small-town Australia in the early 1980s: black-and-white images of a dead cockatoo, kangaroo and sheep, of painted advertising for QueenslandÆs beloved XXXX beer, of a gravestone and dead tree trunks against a lead sky. His human subjects are the Indigenous people of Australia, not the descendants of its white colonists.

Bailey embraces all the flaws and accidents of his printsùtheir blurrings, smudges and stainsùand enhances them with his own scribbles and crops, creating painterly results. In his own words itÆs all about chance: ôThis book should have been washed up in a bottle on the sea shore. All damp with the pages almost stuck together. Just coming apart in the hands of our beachcomber. After a brief look, he takes it to a man he sort of knows at the library. The library ma