David Bailey: Bailey’s Matilda

Bailey’s Matilda is David Bailey’s love letter to Australia, but in typical Bailey fashion it’s not what you’d expect. This is no rosy portrait of “the lucky country,” but a gritty yet affectionate vision of rural and small-town Australia in the early 1980s: black-and-white images of a dead cockatoo, kangaroo and sheep, of painted advertising for Queensland’s beloved XXXX beer, of a gravestone and dead tree trunks against a lead sky. His human subjects are the Indigenous people of Australia, not the descendants of its white colonists. Bailey embraces all the flaws and accidents of his prints―their blurrings, smudges and stains―and enhances them with his own scribbles and crops, creating painterly results. In his own words it’s all about chance: “This book should have been washed up in a bottle on the sea shore. All damp with the pages almost stuck together. Just coming apart in the hands of our beachcomber. After a brief look, he takes it to a man he sort of knows at the library. The library man realizes the pages are mostly taken on a Polaroid camera. He dries the pages on a radiator and passes them on to another man that has a small printing press. Now the pages have a sort of accidental history. So after their long journey, the pages end up being printed for anyone to see. That’s the story I would like this book to be.”