The Stranger Artist is a finely structured and beautifully written account of gallerist Tony Oliver’s immersion into the world of the Kimberley art movement at the end of the twentieth century; the close relationships he developed over the following years with painters such as Paddy Bedford, Freddie Timms, and Rusty Peters; and the creation of Jirrawun Arts as a collective to both promote and protect the artists and their work. How these artists, under Oliver’s practical guidance, came to assume the mantle of the legendary Rover Thomas and took Kimberley art to the world provides a compelling narrative: from fascination to enthralment to disillusion. Dreams are born, bear fruit, and die. Like many a fine work of art, The Stranger Artist attracts with a brilliant surface while fascinating with its deeper layers. Behind the thrill and wisdom of the painting – so new and old, so luminous and dark – lurk the tragedies of history and dysfunctional politics. This book – how could it be otherwise? – is peopled with spectacular characters, art, and landscapes. Appropriate to this remote corner of Australia, it is full of intense colour and eccentricity, while also permeated with great sadness.

In 1919 a major outbreak of pneumonic influenza threatened the livelihoods of actors and musicians throughout Australia, and forced a tense confrontation between artists and government officials in Melbourne.

In contrast with the current pandemic, Australians had plenty of time to prepare. Prompted by reports from abroad of a deadly disease that was killing thousands, authorities in November 1918 ratified a plan for responding to the threat. Strict travel restrictions, however, only delayed the arrival of the virus. On 29 January 1919, Victoria joined New South Wales in implementing a federal order that ‘all theatres, picture theatres, music or concert halls, and all public buildings where persons assemble for the purposes of entertainment or instruction, shall be closed forthwith, and not again used until permission is given’.

You are looking at a book. On its cover is a painting of a person of colour. But you can only see a portion of the piece. The face is obscured. One dark eye takes up the middle third of the page, while one nostril fills the bottom right-hand corner. The painting is covered in a layer of fine cracks – presumably due to its age. These lines show that myriad individual pieces make up the image before you, but this is still only one part of the picture. Frustratingly, you cannot see the face as a whole.

The cover belongs to art historian Alice Procter’s first book, The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums and why we need to talk about it. Contrary to the common adage, this is a book that you can judge by its cover. Procter wants us to see the cracks in the narratives we are told by museums about the objects they house. She wants us to see the deep fissures that are papered over when museums claim to be neutral spaces; the histories of violence, genocide, cultural appropriation, and European élitism that are obscured behind museums’ claims to objectivity. This book aims to make us aware not of only institutional power but of our personal biases and that colonial history has a contemporary legacy. It confronts us with the fact that in museums the whole picture is always missing from view.

It is a truth, maybe not universally acknowledged but a truth nonetheless, that epiphanies tend to happen earlier rather than later in one’s life. Soul-shattering, life-changing experiences occur more regularly when the soul is tender enough to be shattered and the life malleable enough to be changed.

I am an excited seven-year-old. Today I am going to what I have been informed is London’s grandest theatre to witness the World’s Greatest Dancer in the ballet Cinderella. I am no theatre-going virgin. I have seen Peter Pan and clapped furiously to bring Tinker Bell back to life and have been to a children’s matinee at Doris Fitton’s Independent Theatre on a return to Australia, but it has been made clear to me that today’s experience will be of a different standard altogether.

Lunch is at the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus, long since turned into a sort of pinball parlour but then a bastion of rather faded Edwardian grandeur. We walk to the theatre. I am a little surprised that it is right next to a vegetable market, but the building itself lives up to expectations. The uniformed doormen loom majestically over the entrance, the lobby is imposing with its grand staircase, and then there is the auditorium. Rudolf Nureyev, fresh from the grandeur of the Mariinsky and the Paris Opéra was apparently unimpressed by Covent Garden’s décor, but for this seven-year-old, the tiers stretching up into the heavens, the royal box, and the vast red curtain make it the epitome of glamour.

I am given the aisle seat so that I can lean out and not have a view impeded by the adult in front of me. The lights dim, the music starts, the curtain rises, the ballet begins – but the earth does not move. I am not bored or disappointed. The scene changes are magic. I enjoy the Ugly Sisters, they’re funny and I’m pleased that one of them is an Australian like me. I like the World’s Greatest Dancer. She has a nice smile and makes it clear that she is sad to be bullied by her family, excited to be going to the ball and, finally, happy to be with her prince. But she is so old. I do find it rather annoying that just as the story is heating up everything stops and somebody I’ve never seen before and who has no connection to what has been happening dances and then disappears, never to be seen again.

The ballet finishes, the curtain descends, there is a pause, and then it rises to reveal the corps de ballet in formation advancing to the front. The applause begins. This is when I realise that there is a difference between clapping for Tinker Bell and really clapping. This is exciting. The curtain descends again and I’m outraged. Aren’t we going to see the soloists? But a gap in the curtain opens and out they come, some solo, some in pairs. Here come the Ugly Sisters. The audience really like them. The prince arrives, regally acknowledging his reception. Now there is another pause and I am getting worried. Has the World’s Greatest Dancer had an accident? Has she gone home already? At last she appears and now I really hear applause. The house explodes. Adults are standing and shouting. Through the commotion she smiles and curtsies, coolly accepting the adulation. So this is what performers can reduce their audience to. I am vaguely beginning to understand the power of live performance.

As we leave, I am wondering if perhaps next time we could have less ballet and more applause.

I am twelve and going to my second opera. The first was not a success. If you are trying to encourage an eleven-year-old to appreciate opera, perhaps a static, poorly acted, if well-sung, performance of The Flying Dutchman is not the best choice. The second will be Rigoletto, and my dauntless mother is determined not to make the same mistake. For my birthday I am given a recording, the Callas, Gobbi, di Stefano version with the La Scala façade on the cover. My older brother has the score and cajoles me into singing one of the heroine Gilda’s arias, ‘Tutte le Feste’, to his accompaniment. Many years later he tells me it was chosen because the piano reduction was easy, but at the time it didn’t occur to us or our parents that an aria in which the heroine describes her abduction and rape to her father was not perhaps the most suitable vehicle for my boy soprano voice.

This performance is at the much less grand Sadler’s Wells theatre, but the cast is first grade. Rigoletto and his daughter, Gilda, are sung by two young performers who will go on to distinguished international careers: Peter Glossop and Elizabeth Harwood. Because I know the opera, I enjoy the first two acts, but something special happens in the third.

Rigoletto has come to the duke’s palace in search of his daughter. The courtiers try to fob him off, but suddenly the distraught Gilda appears from the duke’s chambers. Rounding on them in fury, Rigoletto drives them off and turns to comfort his daughter. Harwood begins ‘Tutte le Feste’ and I realise the oceans of distance between my amateur warblings and the emotional anguish this wonderful singer can put into the aria without breaking the line. The two singers launch into the passionate ‘vendetta’ duet that ends the act, and I am beginning to understand the combination of technical control and emotional abandon that makes the best opera so powerful. I have become an opera addict for life.