The Bonkers now get more news space, because we’ve had two decades of dependable year-on-year growth of Perpetual Outrage. It’s a profession which provides good career opportunities for the obsessed.
Fortunately, all that’s bonkers is not bad. The Arts, for example, are lushly populated with mad geniuses.
The craziest artist I’ve dealt with was also, by some distance, the most commercially successful Australasia has seen. Kevin "Pro" Hart achieved this, despite the art establishment dismissing him as a bumpkin arriviste, who (this galled most) spat out best-selling art at the rate of an ATM.
Pro Hart achieved his success because Australians love to hang an Outback painting on their living room wall — and near the beginning of his career, Hart found a fresh, distinctive way of painting The Bush.
Above these hung a sky painted in piercing blues which somehow achieved the trick of being both intimate and infinite. He peopled these landscapes with rudimentary figures who seemed like outback ghosts.
By the time he died in 2006, tens of thousands of Australians owned a Pro Hart. (You can buy a larger one for $10,000, or something minor for as little as $500).
I met a young Pro Hart 40 years ago when I got stuck in the outback town where he lived — Broken Hill. An assignment had drifted into a temporary legal limbo, and because I couldn’t get out of the place, the best option was to write a few "outback character" profiles while waiting for the lawyers. I found a tough old girl who’d excavated a huge mica mine with her hammer-tip drill. (Tess Alfonsi slept on-site, surrounded by her lovingly dressed dolls). I spent a day with a loner who patrolled the Dingo Fence, which stretched from Queensland to Victoria. He was still reeling from the impact of visiting Melbourne a decade earlier.
Then I visited Hart at home. He met me in stubbies, paunch, and T-shirt, and it was immediately clear why Kevin Hart had been nick-named "Pro."
Balding, with an innocent moon face, he wore serious spectacles, and had eccentric enthusiasms. No matter which outback town he lived in, he’d be their Mad Professor.
"Come see the new organ," he said, leading me into his sprawling house. Pro Hart sat down and began with Bach, or perhaps it was Chopsticks. It doesn’t matter — the point was the Professor’s new toy was a full-blown pipe organ, big enough for a minor cathedral. His fame was quite recent, and the dollars were flowing. He’d finished an illustrated collection of Henry Lawson bush ballads which was sprinting off the shelves, and Banjo Patterson was next in line. He had "serious" European paintings on his wall. Trail bikes were scattered round his dusty backyard, and he was about to put the first of a pair of Rolls Royces in the garage. (He painted up the Roller as a Pro Hart).
His next project was to out-Jackson Pollock.
"My mate’s got an aeroplane," he enthused.
The Professor would spread out a rather large canvas, the mate would fly in low as in The Dambusters, and Pro would lean out the window and paint bomb the canvas. Artistically.
I’m not certain how the bomber project went, but he made a heap from carpet cleaning commercials, where he action-painted the Feltex, and they mopped up after him.
When I met Pro Hart, the critics were beginning to question how he could be so prolific. I sat for an hour in his studio perched on what seemed to be a box adorned with a cloth. Then, as we finished I stood, and the "box" collapsed under me.
The cloth had covered a very large stack of plywood squares. There were at least 40, all painted out with identical Pro Hart orange and blue backgrounds. I’d accidentally knocked over the Pro Hart factory. I rather liked the man, and give a bemused "hooray" to an Olympian it’s claimed could bang out eight "originals" a day. But as a journo’s "gotcha" moment? Well, you don’t get better.
• John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
