Ralph Sawyer

Ralph "Bunk" Sawyer was an artist, wharfie, barber, musician and communist. But his enduring work centred on his art and his politics, which were inseparable for most of his life.

The son of the Gallipoli veteran and peace activist Leonard Lynn Sawyer, Ralph was born in Matraville and grew up tough during the Depression around the tips and Chinese market gardens of Mascot, before moving to Ashfield. He sold newspapers after school to help support his family, fetching food from the local grocer "on tick" for his mother, Mabel, when there was no money in the house.

Sawyer's first job was as a copy boy for The Daily Telegraph, where he launched his career as an artist. It was wartime and women's silk stockings were unobtainable. The women at the Telegraph would use "stocking paint" and get Ralph to draw "seams" down the back of their legs with an eyebrow pencil.

The Sawyer family helped him study draughting at technical college, but war cut short his studies and he joined the army at 18. Discharged in 1947, he applied to study art at East Sydney Technical College under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, but couldn't get a place. So when his older brother, Peter, offered him an apprenticeship at his barber shop in East Sydney, Ralph Sawyer became a barber.

The 1950s saw the birth of the bodgies and widgies, an early form of teenage counter-culture in which the male bodgies and female widgies wore flash clothes, dramatic hairstyles and boasted about sexual promiscuity. Peter's shop was the place for flash young men to have their haircuts. Artists, entertainers, jitterbug dancers, jazz musicians, petty criminals, car salesmen and boxers made it their haunt.

Ralph Sawyer had been taught the cornet as a youth and played the trumpet in the army. After the war he hung out with trombone-playing Vic Worsley at the penny arcade jukebox near the corner of Pitt and Park streets, where they befriended Australian big band legend Ralph Mallen. The musicians would go to Pete's for a haircut and gather around the gramophone in the shop window.

Patrons often stayed to listen to jazz and debate music, art or politics, a beer in hand from the pub across the road. Sawyer, known as Bunk after New Orleans cornet player Bunk Johnson, was already a forceful left-wing debater. Before long he was working "under the hook" on the Sydney wharves and was a member of the Communist Party of Australia.

It was 1955 and a cultural revolution was under way on the waterfront. Under the union leadership of Tom Nelson, the Sydney branch of the Waterside Workers' Federation was the Sussex Street centre for the arts, communism and cabaret. It drew left-wing intellectuals to the wharves, housed the New Theatre and set up a union film unit and an artists' studio, which Sawyer made his second home.

With Clem Millward and Sonny Glynn, he produced hundreds of May Day posters and screen-prints promoting peace, socialism, workers' rights, Aboriginal land rights and liberation struggles. He won an international award for one of his silk-screens.

Under the direction of the artist Rod Shaw, Sawyer worked in an artists' collective on the wharfies' mural, a mammoth work now in the Australian National Maritime Museum that has been compared to that of the internationally recognised Mexican artist Diego Rivera. Sawyer finished the mural after the other artists moved on.

On the wharves he was a member of a work gang known as the Brain's Trust, which included musicians, intellectuals and party activists. Later he joined Gang 505, which refused to load arms to Vietnam and led rolling bans on South African ships during the apartheid years.

He liked to pass on his skills to others, especially the young. He taught art at the National Maritime Museum and screen-printing to Aboriginal youths at Tranby College in Glebe.

A selection of his posters and banners is held at the Powerhouse Museum, the Maritime Museum and the Centre for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles. A reproduction of his 1985 May Day banner was included in the exhibition Working Art: a survey of Art in the Australian Labour Movement at the Art Gallery of NSW. A documentary on his life and works aired on ABC Television.

In his early 20s Sawyer married Elaine Stollery, and they had a son, Tony. They separated before long and Ralph later embarked on a 40-year partnership with Sheila Walsh. He is survived by his son, two grandchildren, his brother, Peter, and sister, Joyce."

Jim Donovan and Tony Barker

[https://www.geni.com/people/Ralph-Sawyer-Artist/6000000022746886859]