The largest single artwork ever in the whole entire history of human civilisation

Sydneysider: A personal journey

In 1969, in my second year at the University of Sydney, I enrolled in the inaugural year of Fine Arts. That’s the Power Institute of Fine Arts to you. Everything in the world was exciting and glamorous, what with flower power, campus Marxism, the Vietnam War and living away from home.

A totally new course was a leap in dark, but both of my parents drew and painted and they’d assiduously pushed me in the direction of the arts. I thought that the history of painting, sculpture and architecture would be much more exciting than stuff like Political Science, History and Archaeology, which I’d started with.

Fine Arts was different. Fine Arts was a bit of an intellectual commando course. I wasn’t at all sure where it might lead, but I couldn’t have cared less. Back in the 1960s, we were confident that the future would take care of itself.

In my first year in Fine Arts, a rich Australian art collector, John Kaldor, invited an up-and-coming avant guard artist, Christo, to Australia. Christo did “installations” – the latest breakthrough in modern art. He’d only recently started what became a long career in wrapping things for artistic effect. Big things. Things like the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf in Paris.

But in 1969, all that was in the future. At the time, Christo’s claim to fame was the “Air Package”, a lighter-than-air tethered sausage-like thingy with a volume of 5,600 cubic metres, that could be seen from 24 kilometres away, erected at Documenta 4 – a sort of art expo in Kassel in 1968.

Somehow, Kaldor, a textile company owner and founder of the Alcorso-Sekers Travelling Scholarship in art, had got permission for Christo to wrap two and a half kilometres of sandstone coast and cliff line at Little Bay and he paid the “spectacular” cost of the job.

Thus it was that, towards end of 1969, my Fine Arts tutor, Terry Smith (who went on to become a really big man in art academia), recruited some of his students to work at Little Bay. According to Wikipedia (which can’t be wrong) a hundred paid workers and just 11 volunteers devoted 17,000 work hours to the project.

At the time, it was billed as the largest single artwork ever in the whole entire history of human civilisation. How do you calculate these things? Was it really bigger than, say, Ankor Wat, the Great Pyramid of Cheops, or St Peter’s in Rome? Whatever. Briefly, it put poor backward Australia on the world art map.

We wrapped two and a half kilometres of coast with cliffs up to 26 metres high using, they say, 95,600 metres of beige plastic polyweave and around 56 kilometres of nylon rope. I’m not sure if my wife Ruth and I were paid or if we were volunteers but I remember working at least a couple of days on the project, mainly rolling out polyweave and playing out rope. Other workers used Ramset guns to secure the rope to the rocks.

At one point – alas, I can’t say I was there – a group of yobs arrived to jeer. There was an outbreak of physical dialectics and the police had to be called.

The press divided, with The Daily Telegraph being predictably agin, and The Sydney Morning Herald cautiously in favour (how little things change). Modernist architect Harry Seidler was in favour and naturalist Vincent Serventy against – on the grounds that fairy penguins would lose their habitat. Vincent, an early hero of the environmental movement, was drawing a very long bow. There’s no evidence that fairy penguins roosted or bred at Little Bay.

On the 40th anniversary of the wrapping there was a small exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW. Watching the old movies I was struck by how hideously unsafe it all seemed. Workers were swarming all over the billowing polyweave which obscured the edges of the rugged and treacherous cliff line and the deep crevices in rock shelf below. One false move could have plunged a distracted worker to their death. It was a miracle that the project was completed without a disaster. Christo didn’t speak much English and directed with much waving of hands. It’s said he became increasingly dictatorial and eventually a former army major, Ninian Melville, was put in as project manager to smooth his path.

The final effect was both curious and monumental in scale. The public paid a whopping 20 cents each to view the work, with the proceeds going to Prince Henry Hospital. But the great work didn’t last long. Within a week of its completion, a southerly buster had stripped it away.