You’ll Find Me There, Always
‘We took a different path that night’, 2022.
Patrick Oates paints family portraits of strangers he’s getting to know.
Words: Jessica Howard, Portrait Photography: Laura Kate Delv
It’s perhaps no coincidence artist Patrick Oates has settled in a tiny New South Wales hamlet where he can see swaying emerald canefields from his studio window.
“Sugar cane is just the most romantic thing to me, and it features a lot in my work,” he says from Harwood in the Clarence Valley, where he lives with his partner Leigh and dog Bernie.
Pat spent his early childhood in cane country on a bush block near Mackay on Queensland’s northern coast, and it’s where so many of his core memories formed. “It was a tropical oasis,” he recalls of a home that was always bustling with animals. “We looked after my uncle’s horses, had a couple of Brahman cows, chickens, peacocks. Mum and Dad were a bit eccentric.”
When the family moved south to live by the beach, only Pat’s dogs could join them (those that hadn’t been picked off by ticks or taipans). Life was different, but still felt sweet to the then 10-year-old. Little did Pat know, there was a sorrowful undercurrent tugging at his family that he wouldn’t understand, or even recognise, until he was much older.
“I thought starting [this project] would be really fun, and positive—and it has been—but there’s also been so much sadness,” Pat says of his most recent work that melds family folklore and surreal colour to depict characters from his past.
Most works begin as conversations with his Mum and Dad in their Cooee Bay home, sifting through old photos, unearthing morsels of stories and drawing them out. “We sit up for hours with a wine and I go through [the photos], asking them questions like—’where was this? Who was this? What are they doing? How do you know them?’”
His mother’s people were drovers in western Queensland, while his father’s family was tied up in the military. Figures from those narratives are central to Pat’s work: a saffron digger in a slouch hat; a turquoise stockman pushing cattle through a paddock; a tiny child atop an lumbering horse. All toil in a rural setting under a starry night lit gently as if by a full moon.
“I don’t know if it’s actually the bush in my work, or where my pieces are necessarily,” Pat says. “I think of them as dreams, almost like a limbo place. Because I haven’t met my Uncle or Great Grandad, it’s kind of like meeting them them in the middle and discovering more about them.”
Read the rest of this story in Bush Journal 07.
‘You’ll Find Me There, Always,” 2023.
This is an excerpt from Issue 07,
Bush Journal’s new keepsake
magazine, available now.