Patricia Coe – Lifelong Rebel

8 March 2017

An enquiring mind has been Pat’s hallmark

Patricia Coe lives at Vasey RSL Care’s Hawthorn Independent Living Units in Manningtree Road. She and resident, Norma Copeland recently exhibited their art at the Hawthorn Town Hall Gallery. Norma prefers mixed media while Patricia uses water colours, often with Indian ink, charcoal or gouache. Both are self-taught and have come to it only recently.

Bob Evans met with Pat to hear about her life.

Pat Coe & Patrick White Some years after she moved into her unit at Manningtree Road, Pat discovered that the local U3A was conducting painting classes.

She enrolled in the watercolour class because she knew nothing about it and she likes to learn things. But if she was unfamiliar with the medium of watercolour, she was no stranger to sketching. Her father, she remembers, was a particularly talented sketcher – and an inventor.

“Everyone in my family sketched,” she says. “We used to sit around on Saturday afternoons and do sketches of each other.”

Pat extended her U3A enrolment to include Feldenkrais exercise and French conversation. In her academic career, Pat had taught French literature at Monash University and Linguistics at Deakin University. Pat says she was “a complete work freak” who thrived on the challenges of education. After eight years’ study she’d earned three degrees: she was awarded a BA Hons., an MA, and on her 70th birthday, a PhD. Her doctoral thesis compared the works by the French writer, Émile Zola, and the English novelist, Thomas Hardy.

Pat’s three older sisters had each in their turn been dux of their school and their father, Henry, had insisted that they matriculate. He ignored the many letters from the Headmaster of Launceston High School suggesting that “Pat would be happier if she left school”. Whatever her level of unhappiness at school, in her final year Pat managed to win the State Prize for French.

The prize was a scholarship to study in Paris!

Sadly, World War II had just been declared and Pat’s plans to tour Paris were blitzed. “So, I went into the army instead,” says Pat. “It must have been the stupidest thing for a lifelong rebel like me to do. I did it to make my father happy – which it didn’t – and from day one, I loathed every minute of it.”

For his part, Henry seems to have had conflicting views of the military and would likely not have been surprised by Pat’s lack of enthusiasm for the army. He served in both World Wars: he landed on Gallipoli at the age of 19, was wounded and evacuated. When recovered, he was sent to fight on the Western Front where he was gassed. By war’s end he’d been promoted to lieutenant.

In World War II, Henry attained the rank of colonel as Commander of the 4^th Field Regiment and oversaw the training of troops for battle in New Guinea. Pat says he was “broken-hearted when he couldn’t go with them” and yet from the day he returned from the Great War, Henry had refused to march on ANZAC Day. Only once did he agree to lead his battalion at the ANZAC Day march. He died the following year and Pat later found a poem written in his hand on a scrap of paper among his personal effects.

Who died for the right to live

Or were maimed for freedom’s sake

Who lived the hell to return

With hearts athirst for better,

These be men.

“Where other returned service men became alcoholics or beat their wives, our father became a religious fanatic,” says Pat. “The house was full of Bibles and he was frantically learning Aramaic so he could read the Dead Sea scrolls. He made me very uneasy.”

Patricia Coe - series of paintings Unlike her father, Pat is emphatically not religious, but she does have a strong social conscience. She volunteered to teach intellectually challenged teenagers at Croydon and later applied for and won a position as a librarian at Winlaton, a juvenile justice institution for girls aged up to 18. After four years at Winlaton and setting up a library for them, Pat moved on to Fairlea Women’s Prison.

“I can’t bear for people to be locked up,” she says. “At Winlaton, many of the girls were running away from incest – it was an angry place. Fairlea was a sad place.”

In her experience, prisons only employ primary school teachers, but in Fairlea there were women studying degrees by correspondence with no one to help them. She knew how hard that was having studied French and English by correspondence – “not online” – at the University of New England. So, she was fully qualified to assist the Fairlea inmates with their studies and share the benefits of her experience.

Since moving into Vasey RSL Care’s units in 2000, Pat busied herself for three and a half years volunteering at the Maribyrnong Detention Centre which incarcerates refugees and asylum seekers.

“Wanting to volunteer so I could see the situation for myself, I rang and spoke to a manager there and he said: ‘Oh no’. So, I rang Canberra and spoke to somebody in the Department of Immigration. In the end, I made such a nuisance of myself that they said I could go out and meet the manager. It has more security there than any prison I’ve ever seen. They had one teacher there and – yes – she was a primary teacher,” Pat says.

She met with the teacher who suggested she work with the more advanced English speakers.

“The nicest men I found, able to talk about literature, came from Iran. They were lovely men and serious men. One I did a lot of work with, had managed the book shop at the University of Tehran. He was ordered by the Ministry of Culture to stop selling western literature but he refused to comply. Then he got a message from a friend or colleague warning him that agents of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security were coming for him and he should get out quickly. So, he fled Iran and sought asylum.

“I didn’t meet one man out there who had ever been in prison and suddenly here they are experiencing lack of respect and xenophobia.

“I have to do things for the under-dogs.

“I have been a member of Dying with Dignity for some years. They appointed a number of us as writers on behalf of the organisation. We receive emails about issues that might appear in the press. And we will write in. The Age must be sick of getting letters from me.”

But her letters do get published and she has had a one-on-one meeting with Victoria’s Shadow Attorney General, the State Member for Hawthorn, John Pesutto, to argue the case for Dying with Dignity.

“I’ve lost my three sisters to cancer so I know what that is like. I’m the youngest and the only one left. I’m the baddest,” she laughs. “My dearest sister – and to this day I have not met a woman as nice as she was, never – died of bowel cancer, aged 54. She was at Cabrini Hospital while I stormed around trying to do something.

“At the end there was nothing of her. She was about the size of an 8-year-old child. She couldn’t eat. All she did was emit this awful groaning. And I remember one of the Cabrini nuns coming in and telling me I should be glad that God had chosen my sister to share the agony of Christ.”

Pat sharply contrasts such a sanctimonious and pitiless attitude with the care and tenderness exhibited by some of the nurses in the ward, who saw it as an honour to bathe her sister in extremis.

As part of her activism on behalf of Dying with Dignity, Pat is content to allow decision-makers such as John Pesutto to exercise a conscience vote when the euthanasia bill comes before Parliament. “But your conscience should also should also extend to those people who are dying because at that stage, they cannot speak for themselves and they need people like us to speak for them.”

Pat is finding another voice in her sketches and watercolours. On her wall is a painting of Patrick White and she is working on another, an instantly recognisable portrait of footballer, Gary Ablett Junior. “He has the most amazing eyes, and mouth!” says Pat.

The Assistant Curator at the Hawthorn Town Hall Gallery has been helpful and supportive, and four of Pat’s paintings were sold at the recent exhibition. He even suggested that Pat swap watercolours for oils and start painting portraits. In the past, Pat has been happy to take up the opportunity offered by the National Gallery of Victoria’s “Drop-by-Drawing” sessions on Sunday afternoons in January, where she has the “great and free” opportunity to mix and compare sketches with up to 80 people sitting, drawing alongside some of the gallery’s most inspiring artworks.

Pat has also started on a personal project, featuring a character she has created named Sebastian and his bicycle adventures in quirky landscapes.

“I like working in black and white … and it gets a little surreal at times.”

Maybe it’s the black and white, maybe it’s the slightly surreal touches, maybe it’s the French that reminds me of the France’s most famous mime artist, Marcel Marceau, and his character, Bip. Whatever, or whoever, the best thing about Pat’s Sebastian is that she is pursuing a fresh artistic adventure at the age of 91.