Merioola Group

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The Merioola Group was a Sydney-based group of Australian artists active during the 1940s and early 1950s. The group was named after Merioola, a mansion where many of the group lived.

Merioola house

"Merioola" house as it appeared in 1916

The group took its name from Merioola, a Victorian Georgian mansion converted into a boarding house in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra, New South Wales, managed from 1941 by Chica Edgeworth Lowe. Lowe consciously encouraged artists, dancers, writers and theatre people to take up residence, forming the bohemian artistic centre of Sydney in the immediate post-war years.

Tenants included the European-born and trained artists Arthur Fleischmann (sculptor), Roland Strasser, Peter Kaiser, Michael Kmit and George de Olszanski. Others, such as Donald Friend, Edgar Ritchard (artist and costume designer), Loudon Sainthill (later to become one of the most prominent theatre designers of the 20th century) and his life partner Harry Tatlock Miller (writer, critic and curator and subsequently the director of the Redfern Galleries, London), had lived and worked overseas.^[1] Others connected with the visual arts included photographer Alec Murray, painters Justin O'Brien, Mary Edwards, artist and later noted costume designer Jocelyn Rickards. Other tenants included dancers Alison Lee, Darya Collin, Beatrice Vitringer and Edmee Monod, author and historian Hector Bolitho, architect George Beirs, mathematician and astronomer John Sidgewick, musicians John and Norma Bannenberg, and many others.^[2]

When in Sydney, Ballet Rambert dancers often spent time at Merioola, where many theatrical and literary collaborations took place.^[3]

Bohemian life at Merioola

There was no 'movement' to Merioola, no manifesto, simply a post-war desire to celebrate life. Critic Robert Hughes describes their output as "charm at its simon-purest", but notes that their 1947 joint exhibition under the Merioola Group label, "threw into relief the already substantial friction between the Sydney and Melbourne art worlds", the former poetic, light-hearted, tending towards the frivolous and decorative, the second socially conscious and self-consciously avant-garde. (The group considered to exhibit in later years, with changing membership, under the label of 'Sydney Group').

Ballet Rambert dancer Walter Gore at ‘Merioola’, 1948

By its ad hoc nature the Merioola Group were destined not to last, and by the mid-1950s its original members had left or were on the point of leaving, most overseas. But while it lasted Merioola provided an invigorating bohemian atmosphere, described by its chronicler Christine France:

In post-war Sydney, Merioola was probably the most exciting place to live. Justin O’Brien said, "I've never laughed so much, not at people but with people". Merioola was always full of visitors; both local and overseas artists would call in [and] the mix of creative people at Merioola often led to interdisciplinary activities. The dancers would pose for [Arthur] Fleischmann or Alec Murray. The artists would make sets for theatrical activities. And Harry [Tatlock Miller] and Loudon [Sainthill] and Alec [Murray] would combine their talents as editor, designer and photographer for Ballet Rambert and Old Vic programs.^[4]

Footnotes

↑ Friend, D. and Gray, A. and National Library of Australia (2001). The Diaries of Donald Friend. National Library of Australia. pp. xxvii–xxviii. ISBN 9780642107381.
↑ Christine France (February 2001). "Donald Friend: Merioola and Friends". In National Library of Australia. An Inventive Magic: Donald Friend and his Diaries. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
↑ "Dance people dance". National Library of Australia. Retrieved 4 September 2013.
↑ Australia Dancing — Sainthill, Loudon (1919–1969)

External links

Bibliography

Merioola and After (Christine France, 1986)

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