By Jed Lanyon
Yarra Glen RSL received a welcomed gift recently as a local artist donated a painting of a late World War I veteran.
Coldstream artist and former Yarra Valley Arts president, Joy Brown, donated her portrait of the last surviving Gallipoli digger Alec Campbell, who passed away in 2002.
Ms Brown had held the painting for many years and said she was inspired to paint Alec’s portrait after finding a newspaper clipping featuring his image after he had completed an Anzac Day march around the age of 100.
“I had been inspired by the look of the gentleman at the time of the march and I think I had a father who was very elderly at that stage and I just saw the wonderful look on this man’s face,” she said.
Alec Campbell was born in Launceston in 1899. He arrived at Gallipoli in October 1915 with the 15th Battalion and remained there through to the evacuation but sustained a lifelong injury, which he recounted to Jonathan King, author of Gallipoli: Our Last Man Standing: The Extraordinary Life of Alec Campbell.
“The fellow in front of me got shot and fell backwards into the trench, knocking me over, which could have saved my life. He did not hit me, but he fell back and the rifle clouted me in the head.” (Alec Campbell to Jonathan King)
The injury destroyed a facial nerve in Alec Campbell’s cheek in front of his ear.
“In time, this would paralyse the muscles in the right side of his face and lead to …Bell’s Palsy, which eventually prevented him from closing his right eye, smiling properly or showing his teeth. The attacks of paralysis came and went during his younger years, but as he got older the condition produced an increasingly unsightly facial disfigurement. As an old man he lost his right eye.” (King)
Despite his disfigurement, there was something about the returned serviceman that inspired Ms Brown to paint him.
“He just had a beautiful, beautiful face that told us lots of things. He was just a true blue Aussie,” she said.
Many years passed until Ms Brown found the portrait again and wanted to do something special with it.
“I had put the picture away in the bottom drawer of my art studio and forgot about it. Just this Anzac Day I was cleaning it out and found it and refurbished it all.
I had a friend involved in the Yarra Glen RSL and I showed it to him and he said ‘you’ve got to show that to the other RSL members’.
“He just was a beautiful old man that I think was worthy of having his portrait painted. Things have to appeal to me and I have to have a feeling and I really thoroughly enjoyed painting this man’s picture despite not knowing him and never will.”
The painting of Alec Campbell is now on display in the RSL rooms of the Yarra Glen Memorial Hall.
