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About the author

BAD ART MOTHER

Edwina Preston is a Melbourne-based writer and musician. Preston is the author of a biography of Australian artist Howard Arkley, Not Just a Suburban Boy (Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002), and the novel The Inheritance of Ivorie Hammer (University of Queensland Press, 2012). Her writing and reviews have appeared in The Age, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, Heat, Island and Griffith Review.

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‘I adore Edwina Preston’s Bad Art Mother. This is a magnificent panorama of a novel, written with an assured verve, that encompasses art and feminism, love and marriage, and makes us believe we are right there, at the very heart of a transformative moment in culture when everything is about to change. There is anger here, as there must be when telling the story of how women have been silenced in the world—but there is also a scrupulous empathy for every character: this is a humane and tender work. The conception is daring, yet Preston has the confidence and talent and assuredness as a writer to never stumble in the storytelling. I was never less than enthralled.’

—CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS

‘With commanding prose, imaginative energy and fierce wit, Preston tells the lives of women artists. The focus is Veda Gray whose confronting presence, desperate stratagems and passionate engagement with her creativity offers an intense and memorable portrait.’

—JANINE BURKE

Title page

Dedications

Dedicated to the feminists of my mother’s generation, the mothers of my friends, for paving the way, getting the laws changed, and making possible the conversations we are having today.

Helen Myles, for her work in women-centric healthcare and childbirth education in Melbourne in the 1980s, and for first alerting me to the word ‘feminism’;

Carolyn Lloyd, one of the original pram-pushing front-bar-stormers of the Graham Hotel public bar in Melbourne CBD and the Manhattan Hotel in Ringwood, 1972;

Liz Preston, upon whose bookshelf I first discovered A Room of One’s Own.

BOOK LAUNCH

I don’t remember much of Mother’s book launch, just the flash of the newspaperman’s camera. Flash! it went, fixing us in time. Flash! Flash!

I’ve still got the photograph the Age used. I keep it in my Cartridges box. Mother’s got a big glass of wine in her hand and she’s blinking and talking at the same time. Her eyes are closed and her mouth is open and the combination isn’t flattering. The Australian found a worse picture, in which she looks like a crazy Picasso woman, with bits of her face in the wrong places. No one, looking at her in those photos, would like her or feel sympathy for her.

I don’t remember Mr Parish’s speech. My subconscious must’ve deliberately erased the words he used to put Mother’s book to death. There was the picked-over head of a pig in front of him, I remember that. A lump of dead pork on the cover of someone’s Veda Gray.