THE tide of the 21st Century may be closing in, with suburbia colonising vast tracts of land just over the hill, while drivers tear helter-skelter along the nearby M1 Pacific Motorway, but somehow Minmi still feels far removed in distance and time.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The old mining town on Newcastle’s western fringe squats in a valley, as though it is trying to hide from the pace and excesses of modern living.
While new buildings are sprouting in the community, and there’s even a set of traffic lights, touchstones of history are scattered around Minmi. From the Minmi Hotel to small, dignified cottages and the old coal wagon in the school grounds, there are reminders of the town’s past.
Yet to have a clear view of how Minmi used to be, all you need do is look at Bill Freeman’s paintings. For the well-known Hunter artist, who died in May, Minmi was both his home and muse.
William Freeman was born in Minmi, and he lived and painted here for just about all of his 88 years, on a large block of land that had been in his family for generations.
“He was very home conscious,” says Dawn Freeman, Bill’s wife of almost 68 years.
“This block of land meant everything to him. His father was born on this block of land, and his grandfather had bought it.”
When Samuel Freeman, a sail maker and artist, bought the land in the mid-1800s and created a home, Minmi was effectively owned by the coal-mining family company, J & A Brown.
Through the later years of the 19th Century, the town flourished, and fine buildings rose on the fortunes of coal mined in the Browns’ collieries. Minmi boasted a cluster of hotels, a courthouse, a large school, and a string of stores, serving the hundreds of miners and their families living locally.
The boom times faded, and so did Minmi. Many of the buildings rusted and mouldered, crumbled, or were demolished. But what remained, and even those that lay in ruins, would provide the foundations, and the inspiration, for an artist in town.
Time and economic downturns may have been stripping the buildings from Minmi, but Bill Freeman would restore them on canvas with his paints and brushes in a career that spanned more than 70 years. The churches, the pubs, the mill and the cottages, even the hay sheds, they were all recorded by Bill Freeman.
As Dawn Freeman explains, her husband was attracted to the character of Minmi’s old places, and he felt connected to many of those who had lived and worked in them.
“I think he knew the people personally,” she says. “Minmi was a very close community; everybody knew everybody. Those days have gone, I’m afraid.”
Born in 1929, Bill Freeman was a mostly self-taught artist. As a kid, Freeman sketched and painted around his hometown. Dawn Freeman has a sketch of Bill’s that he did when was about 12, which shows a bridge on the edge of Minmi.
In his teens, he had his first exhibition - in a Wallsend funeral parlour. The funeral director had admired young Bill’s work, so he offered to display the teenager’s paintings in the business’ front windows and even had had his cabinet-makers construct picture frames.
“They all sold, 30 shillings each,” Bill Freeman told me in 2006.
“I thought it was wonderful that people wanted my paintings.”
Bill’s father wasn’t keen on his boy being a painter. So for a time, Bill followed his Dad into the bush as a timber-getter. But Bill Freeman was keener on depicting trees than felling them. After Bill met Dawn and they married in 1950, the young couple decided he should pursue painting full-time.
Art put food on the Freemans’ dining table, and it transported Bill and Dawn to other places. And wherever they travelled, often along the coast as they pursued another of Bill’s passions, fishing, he kept an eye out for painting subjects.
“There were always a sketchbook and pencils on the back seat,” Dawn recalls.
As a result, he painted land- and seascapes, particularly the scenes of his favourite fishing spots, country towns dwelling in long shadows and dusty memories, and lonely shacks dozing in paddocks.
But mostly, Bill Freeman found what he was looking for just outside his front door.
AS he ambles past a collection of Freeman paintings, through mist-shrouded gums and time-battered bush houses, in Morpeth Gallery, Trevor Richards smiles at his old mate’s vision.
“He painted places that meant something to him,” Richards, the gallery owner and Bill Freeman’s long-time art dealer, says.
Since Freeman’s death, Richards has scoured his stockroom and contacted collectors to assemble a tribute exhibition, which is on display for four days from Thursday.
The collection comprises more than 40 works, dating from the 1960s to some of his later works, which bears the signature “William Freeman O.A.M.”, acknowledging the Order of Australia Medal he was awarded in 2006 for service to the visual arts.
“He was reticent to do that,” Richards says of the signature. “He said, ‘I don’t want to big note myself’. But I told him, ‘You need to put it on your paintings, you’ve earned it’.”
Richards shows an image of the historic gold town of Sofala and notes how this early Freeman work displays the influence of the painter’s unofficial mentor, William Dobell, who lived at Wangi Wangi.
Bill Freeman once told me how his friendship with the acclaimed artist began: “I took out some landscapes [to Dobell’s home], and he said, ‘You’ve got potential, mate’.”
“Old Bill” advised the younger artist to include what would become a hallmark of a Freeman painting: an odd number of chooks.
“He said, ‘If you make them even, the composition doesn’t look right’,” Freeman recounted. “He said nature was not even.”
Sure enough, in a few of the paintings in Morpeth Gallery, odd numbers of chickens roam and peck across the paddocks and around the sheds.
But time and again in the paintings, the artist takes the viewer “home”, back to Minmi, including in a large street scene, depicting the town in the early 20th Century.
Minmi, as painted by Bill Freeman, helped put Morpeth Gallery on the map.
Richards recounts how Freeman’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, “Minmi As It Was”, in 1995 featured 23 paintings of local buildings. One bloke walked in and bought the lot.
A second exhibition of Minmi building paintings two years later also sold out. And Freeman’s depictions of those rustic reminders of another age are what art buyers still seek.
“I think that’s what Bill is best known for, the old houses, and he captured them in such a lovely way,” explains Trevor Richards. “And that’s what Bill loved. As he’d say, ‘They’ve got so much character’.”
BILL Freeman’s views of the past continue to guide the next generation.
Minmi Public School has a mural that Freeman painted to celebrate its sesquicentenary in 2011. The mural features a miner and coal wagon, a colliery, the Minmi Hotel, a distant Mount Sugarloaf, and gymea lilies, representing the Indigenous meaning of Minmi: “Place of the giant lily”.
The school also has a couple of paintings donated by the artist, and when the students do a history walking tour of their town, Freeman’s depictions of old and departed buildings are used as references.
Relieving principal Ingrid Bellamy says those excursions usually begin in front of the mural, to show the students elements of the town’s history, and to remind them of one of the school’s best-known former pupils.
“It’s a romantic notion, but it’s wonderful to have these snapshots of Minmi’s past, because Bill experienced it, he lived here and he knew what it was like here,” Bellamy says.
“As time marches on, we’re going to have less and less of the historical aspects, particularly with so much [residential] development underway.”
FOR Dawn Freeman, her husband and life partner may be gone, but she has his paintings and his sketchbooks. And she can still see Minmi through Bill’s eyes.
“When I see an old building, I think, ‘What would he like to do with that?’,” Dawn Freeman says. “How would he paint that?”