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.