Friends of the Armchair Traveller

 On Sunday 9th November my little sister Chris   (known to so many of her friends as Chrissie)  celebrated a huge day in her life. Chris has been fighting cancer since the shock of her diagnosis in early 2018. At the time her partner Matt was also fighting cancer and Chris looked after Matt until he succumbed to his illness in 2019. That was a tremendously difficult period which Chris negotiated with great love and affection despite being in the horror of wondering what was going on in her own body. Chris continued receiving many different sorts of treatment for her cancer at the Peter Mac up to and throughout the horrible period of COVID which brought our entire society to a grinding halt! Then in 2021 because she was having trouble with her voice which had always been so important to her as a musician and creator of music, she started to take lessons in artwork such as sketching and watercolours. I posted the first blog about this transition in her life in September 202...

                     My friend,  Paulus Henrique Benedictus Cox (16 April 1940 – 18 June 2016) How can I say "my" friend?  Paul had hundreds of friends, thousands, everywhere. He did not "belong" to just one single person. Our friendship came about because we happened to live next door to each other for a couple of years and it grew from there. I find it extremely difficult to make this post, just as I find it extremely challenging to see any photographs of Paul, either from the time we met, or later in life, especially when he became devastated by his liver failure and transplant, his partial recovery, then another close call with an agonising abscess on the liver which tore him apart, and his last years following that. Has it really been 9 years? I don't want to "summarise" his life. I don't want to give you more information because there's heaps of information out there...  This is just to display some of my f...

Athol Shmith in his South Yarra apartment .  Paul Cox (c. 1979) Gelatin silver photograph 24.6 × 24.0 cm. Department Australian Photography, National Gallery of Victoria.  Presented through The Art Foundation of Victoria by the Shmith family, Governor, 1996 F ollowing the two recent posts by Peter Leiss on Robert Rosen and Jill Gocher.     These posts triggered my memories of the good old days when I lived next door to  Paul Cox in Punt Road, South Yarra... Paul and I became great friends. Although Paul passed away about 9 years ago,  I have not created a written tribute to him. I did make a film about those days with Paul,  "The Nude In The Window". Despite his initial nervousness about the film, Paul was very pleased with it. https://youtu.be/047V_T9OYU8 In those 1970s days Paul introduced me to many people including Athol Shmith, whom  I met only on a few occasions. I was aware of Athol's exceptional portraits. I found him  incredibly ap...