‘I’ve privately held my father accountable’: Bertie Blackman’s bohemian childhood

By Nigel Featherstone

Bertie Blackman with her parents, Charles Blackman and Genevieve de Couvreur.

Bertie Blackman is sitting in the corner of a cafe in Elizabeth Bay, a black leather jacket folded beside her open laptop, the remains of breakfast on a plate.

On the other side of the window is a crowd of folk who are waiting for their takeaway coffees. Many have brought their dogs, and most of the men are wearing tight black shorts and sleeveless tops, their biceps bulging. Glimpses of the harbour between the plane trees. Just around the corner is the Opera House, and the great industrial bulk of the Bridge. When a rubbish truck is not straining up the hill, BMWs and Audis impatient in its wake, there is the hyper-chat of rainbow lorikeets darting from tree to tree.

Blackman is in the heart of her country, her own neighbourhood, the place of her childhood, which she has never really left – in more ways than one.

When I step up to introduce myself, she smiles, dabs her lips with her napkin, and then stands. For the briefest of moments, I think she is about to open her arms and embrace me. Not wanting to appear overly familiar, I extend my hand, which she shakes.

When seated, I ask Blackman how her morning has been. “Busy,” she says. She had to get Rumi, her two-year-old son, to childcare. She is looking forward to meeting with a friend about a film project. And at some point, she hopes to visit the gym.

Bertie Blackman has written a memoir about growing up the daughter of famous Australian artist Charles Blackman.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

Without my asking, she tells me about a new album she is working on, which is a collection of “last songs”, as in songs that have been purposely written to close a hypothetical album. Clearly, Blackman is brimming with ideas, and it appears as though she would quite happily keep talking. Only minutes into our conversation, she admits that she can come across as “cool, as in aloof”. My experience of her is the opposite – she is warm, engaging, and uncomplicated company.

Which, to be frank, is a surprise.

Bertie – Beatrice Octavia – Blackman is from one of Australia’s most prominent art families. The family’s patriarch, Charles Blackman, was a visual artist and part of the famous “Antipodeans”, a group of Melbourne painters who also included Arthur Boyd and Clifton Pugh. As was the way for artists of the era, Blackman, who was able to call Barry Humphries “a good mate”, lived a wild life.

“A polite way to put it is he lacked boundaries,” says Blackman, smiling as she does so, potentially out of love for her father but also embarrassment, if not discomfort.

A young Bertie with her father Charles Blackman.

After a period of alcohol-induced dementia, Charles died in 2018. He had married three times and Bertie is from his second marriage – to Genevieve de Couvreur, also an artist.

Despite the weight of her father’s reputation, and, perhaps, notoriety, Blackman has forged her own singular career as an artist, primarily as a singer-songwriter. She has five acclaimed albums to her name. In 2009, Secrets and Lies received the Best Industry Release gong in the 2009 Australian Recording Industry Association Music Awards. In no way could it be said that Blackman’s music has remained the same. Her earlier work was inspired by PJ Harvey and Patti Smith, while her later music is built on gorgeous synth-pop melodies. What holds Blackman’s oeuvre together is a sense of playfulness, of exploring worlds within worlds, and working through the stuff of her childhood.

And it is the stuff of childhood that we are here to discuss.

Blackman has written a memoir, which focuses on her formative years. It is not her first prose project. In 2020, she published Mica the Star Sailor, a children’s picture book about a little girl who dreams of being an astronaut, just like her father. “But waiting for him to come home can feel endless” goes the publisher’s blurb, more than a little poignantly.

In Bohemian Negligence, there is the sense that Blackman is clearing the domestic air, especially now that she has been able to gain some perspective.

Bertie Blackman says it took her some time to realise she had a different childhood experience to others.

“For my whole life I’ve been telling stories about my childhood,” she says. “Sometimes it would become the funny part of the conversation and people would say, ‘Oh that’s so unbelievable.’ I realised that I had such a different childhood.”

For how long has she been working on the book?

“I started writing the first chapter in my head about six months before I put it down – just before the pandemic hit and when I was trying to get pregnant. I wanted to write this book before my son was born because I knew my whole perception would shift. And because I knew it would have been difficult writing the memoir while looking at my own child.”

Blackman describes being aware, even at a very young age, that her father was an artist, which was something about him that she adored, but it was not lost on her that he liked to live his own life in his own way.

In one of the memoir’s especially memorable passages, she describes coming down the stairs to go to school only to find that her father was wearing a dress and pointing at a fruit bowl. He asked Bertie and her brother to choose something from the bowl; that would indicate the size of the bra he would wear. Once the bra was chosen and worn, Charles Blackman drove his children to school. Bertie, however, was not mortified. She was excited. Surely, her friends would see how absolutely beautiful he was.

But it was not all fun and games.

Bertie Blackman says she was always proud her father was an artist.

Another time Bertie came down the stairs to find her father lying naked and unconscious on the kitchen floor. He had also soiled himself. She helped her mother to clean him up.

There would be more of this shifting between light and dark.

Her mother took Bertie to her first Mardi Gras at age 10, which she thought was fabulous. “All that colour! All that celebration of individuality!” However, throughout her childhood, and up on the North Shore, she was sexually abused by a family friend.

Blackman writes – and talks – about the abuse with frankness.

“That man made a mistake with me because he underestimated me. He didn’t frighten me enough. I’m proud of myself. I spoke up quickly.”

Importantly, her mother believed her.

“She wasn’t trained to do that, it was her natural instinct and I’m very grateful. Still, all these years later, when I drive past the highway exit to his house, I feel sick. I can still smell his old-man smell, the smell of skin.”

Bertie Blackman’s memoir includes her account of being sexually abused as a child by one of her parents’ friends.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

What does Blackman think it will be like to talk about her childhood with the public, including at writers’ festivals?

“I think it’s going to be…”

A long pause.

Restarting her answer, she says, “I’m really excited about sharing my story because I went through a lot of pain to have the strength I have now. And that came from talking to other people. Being able to talk and not feel alone, or not feeling like a freak, or not feeling like it’s all your fault. It’s very easy to think that something is wrong with yourself.”

As for her father, Blackman is pragmatic and deeply forgiving.

In the memoir, the man appears playfully eccentric – he loved to make and wear paper vampire teeth and then teach his daughter how to cook pasta (the teeth stayed in while eating) – as well as devoted to the making of art, to the expression of complex and dark emotions, the evocation of nightmares.

And then, of course, there was the alcoholism.

“Just because someone was drunk doesn’t excuse their behaviour. Just because someone was famous, or a genius doesn’t mean they can’t be held accountable for the things they do. Despite all my love for him, I’ve privately held my father accountable for the things that happened between us. Forgiveness comes from accepting the dark and the light.”

There are two elements of Bohemian Negligence that are particularly distinctive.

Bertie Blackman at her Sydney home.Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

One is that the memoir is written with precision but also a sense of weightlessness. “I wanted the book to be approachable,” Blackman says, “to have doors open.”

The other is that between most of the chapters is one of her own pen-and-ink drawings. They are whimsical – they depict rabbits in suits with feathers, cats coming out of sardine cans, a girl with a cardboard box over her head – but at times they appear to suggest pauses, as though the writer wants to take a moment before diving into the next memory, as if she wants her readers to do the same.

A minute later, Blackman says, “I would have been proud to show my dad this book.”

She knows that one day her son will be old enough to read his mother’s memoir. “Honesty and bravery are very important aptitudes that I have,” she says. “I know it will be hard for him to read some of these things, but I would like to give him as much information about my childhood as he wants – when he’s ready.”

After all that she has achieved, and having recently passed her 40th birthday, what keeps driving her work as an artist?

“Storytelling. It’s about what’s real and what’s not real – I love that dance. The nuance of imagination. That’s when I feel most alive.”

With that, Blackman waves at a woman who is standing outside the café. “That’s my best friend,” she says. “She knew I was doing this interview.” Taking that as my cue to bring our conversation to an end, I get to my feet. A minute later, we are standing together in the doorway. I thank Blackman for her time and say that I hope that the world will open its arms to Bohemian Negligence. She smiles. Her eyes light up. “I’m excited!” She offers a quick, almost childlike wave, and then disappears into the crowd of her neighbourhood.

Bertie Blackman’s Bohemian Negligence is published on October 18 (Allen & Unwin). Nigel Featherstone’s latest novel My Heart is a Little Wild Thing is out now.

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