Alice Springs has always had a few interesting characters, Dave Fish and Dave Simpson were two that were my friends. A description of them may give some idea of what life in Alice Springs was like.
Dave Simpson, I first met after work one day in 1971 while walking to the Stuart Arms with my employees for an after work drink.
While talking to Dave Simpson on Todd Street the day I met him a tall young aboriginal woman broke off from a group of her friends on the opposite side of the road and calling out “Dave, Dave, I want to talk to you and she joined our group.
I was introduced to her as Maria.
She had very long arms and she started to hit Dave each side of his head while shouting “you have been fucking Gloria, look your prick is still wet.
I said “Excuse me, I have to keep going, see you in the bar”.
Another day Dave Simpson came into my office with a tape recorder and said “I recorded a corroboree last night, do you want to hear it? And he started the machine.
It started with a soft rhythmic sound and Dave said “they are beating out that rhythm by hitting the sand with their thongs” then a didgeridoo started then another, it was sounding good.
Then Maria’s voice said “Dave!, (silence from Dave) Dave (More silence) DAVE, LISTEN TO ME,FUCK YOU!, “yeees?” said Dave,
Maria’s voice said “You know Phyllis, well Phyllis said to me, ‘you know your husband Dave’ Yes I said, ‘well he fucked me’, that’s what she said”.
Dave’s voice said in a very proper English way “good heavens”.
And the sounds of the corroboree continued.
David Fish, alias, Bardius Goldberg, walked into my office in Todd Street one day, without an appointment, and introduced himself. He commissioned me to design an ‘outback restaurant’ which he called ‘The Steak house’, he never had money of his own but on this project he was backed by two or three of the local politicians.
These two men both lived on the extreme edge of society but at opposite poles.
Dave Simpson was from England, very much an Englishman, good looking, average build and small time but practical entrepreneur and he liked aboriginal women. He claimed to be a descendant of the Boleyn family as in Ann Boleyn, beheaded wife of King Henry the Eighth.
He was an excellent mechanic and when I met him was working on aeroplanes at Connellan Airways but previously had set himself up at Ayres Rock fixing tourist’s cars.
At Ayres Rock he married, by tribal law, an aboriginal girl with whom he had two children, a boy, Simon and a girl, Emmy. When he came to Alice he left his wife and children in the care of the elders of her tribe.
When he went back after about a year he found his wife had become an alcoholic and the children were badly neglected so he brought them back to Alice where he brought them up and they were beautiful children. He then lived with an aboriginal woman called Trixy who had two full blood aboriginal daughters and he also brought them up. One became a chef, the other to be a teachers’ aid.
He was keenly interested in renovating old vehicles and he had a 1922 T model Ford truck which he drove around town.
Coming into Alice through the gap one day the old truck was not running well so he pulled off the road, folded back the bonnet and was blowing through the fuel pipe to remove obstructions in the pipe when a road scraper came along, lost control and crashed into Dave and his truck.
The wheels on these road making machines are about two metres in diameter and one of them crushed Dave into his truck.
I went to see him in hospital.
His pelvis was broken in numerous places and one of his thighs was broken, they had him slung in a sling hanging from a scaffold over his bed.
He was on regular doses of morphine which kept him virtually unconscious most of the time but every time he started to become conscious he tried to tell them not to give him more morphine yet, but not being totally conscious he was unable to communicate this clearly and tried to prevent them from giving the morphine injections.
The hospital staff in Alice Springs interpreted his behaviour as being ‘mad’ and they sent him to a psychiatric hospital in Darwin.
By this time he was in a wheel chair and after a while in the psychiatric hospital he decided he shouldn’t be there. The patient in the bed next to him, every night, threatened to kill him while he slept.
He tried to escape twice but failed.
On his third attempt he succeeded and had Trixy waiting to take him to the airport.
The first I heard about his being sent to Darwin was when he phoned me on his successful escape to Alice and asked for help, he needed somewhere to hide out.
I said “come to my place”.
After we sorted out his medical attention and got a promise from the registrar at the hospital that he would not be sent back to Darwin he moved back to a house he had bought in the Gap area of Alice Springs.
Because he was restricted to a wheel chair he started to rebuild old cars from pieces that he had gathered over the years.
The first was a 1913 T model Ford.
He was meticulous about authenticity and searched the world, by telephone, for genuine parts including genuine screws, nuts and bolts.
The first car took a long time but when finished it was like it just came from the original factory.
By then he was walking with difficulty but he rebuilt a number of cars in a relatively short time.
He would search the desert around central Australia and bring back wrecks of old cars that had lain there for forty or fifty years. From these tangled masses he would rebuild the cars so they were as good as new. In the desert rust was very slow to grow.
The 1920 Silver-Ghost Rolls Royce displayed at the Alice Springs Airport, that belonged to Eddie Connellan, is a car that he rebuilt. Note that this Roller had been converted to a ute.
David bought an old house on acreage outside the gap that was the farmer’s house of an old orange grove.
He received $90,000 compensation from the accidence and with that money built a museum to house his rebuilt cars. In the museum he included a restaurant with a 1920’s theme and during the evening showed films, like Bonnie and Clyde, which featured cars of that time.
This was the first motor Vehicle Transport Museum in the Northern Territory and was opened by senator Burnie Kilgarriff on April first 1977.
I designed the building for his museum so that he could build it himself with two labourers.
Some years later the Northern Territory government purchased his museum collection for a sum which I hope gave him a good profit. They are now displayed at the Central Australian Aviation Museum
Dave Simpson didn’t like Dave Fish, he thought that he was a wastrel who has had so many good opportunities to make good but blew them every time just by irresponsible behaviour.
Dave Fish (Bardius Goldberg) was also a small time entrepreneur but with big and usually impractical ideas, he really wanted to be a ‘high flyer’.
He was huge, extremely macho in physic and attitude and he liked well educated and classy women.
He was a bit autistic could not write well and could not read hand writing but was an avid reader of print and had educated himself through reading.
An excellent artist in whatever medium took his fancy, he produced quite a bit of work but he never persevered for long in any one field.
Although he was extremely macho he was far from being an occa. He was well informed through reading, knew more than most about international affairs and although he could be excessively aggressive he was also kind, considerate and affectionate to all his friends. He could read people like no one else I ever knew.
He told me how he went to Canada and sneaked into America without a visa but while there he got gonarea. . Because he had to keep away from women while he was being cured he thought up a scheme to help a local charity. He was to live on the top of a nine metre high pole for two weeks.
This stunt got a lot of publicity and when he came down he was arrested and deported.
While he was in America he met an American girl who came to Alice and they married.
They opened and ran the Steak House for a couple of years. She made excellent American salads and he had fun playing mine host wearing a big striped butchers’ apron and brandishing a big butcher’s knife. The restaurant was a big success until he got the head waitress pregnant.
His wife was upset at first but eventually he persuaded her that they could adopt the baby which they did.
His philandering did not decrease so Lois eventually left him.
When Bardius and his wife were running the Steak House he also started a Mini Moke Hire business. The Mokes were leased.
Bardius sometimes disappeared from Alice Springs and one such time, I later discovered, was because
after his marriage break up he sold the Moke hire business but did not understand that he should have had the new owners take over the lease agreement on the vehicles.
When the leasing company started putting pressure on him for their monthly payments for cars he no longer owned, he disappeared.
He was living in a small hills town near Adelaide and while at the local pub a man with a cut-throat razor went berserk and started to threaten people.
Bardius (David Fish) took him on
The madman slashed at Bardius’s throat.
Luckily Bardius was smiling at the time and the razor cut across his teeth giving him only a small cut to one side of his mouth.
The madman had only that one chance after which Bardius had him.
Someone there had a camera and took photos of the action which they sold with the story to the Adelaide Advertiser
The owner of the leasing company saw the story and had Bardius brought to his office, congratulated Bardius on his bravery and cancelled the debt.
He moved back to Alice Springs.
He redecorated one of the bars at the Stuart Arms hotel to look like it was the inside of a pioneering hotel which were built using rusty corrigated iron and bags. They called it ‘The Bag Bar’ and it was a big success.
The Tennant Creek Hotel therefore wanted a Bag Bar so he went there to build it.
While there he met Mandy Web, an English girl who was a science teacher at the high school.
He brought Mandy back to Alice Springs to live and she bought a few acres of land outside the Gap which used to be an orange grove and the back boundary adjoined the back boundary of Dave Simpson’s property.
They had Mandy’s demountable house brought down from Tennant Creek and installed on this property. While waiting for this to happen they both lived at my place.
Eventually Mandy bought an old timber framed weather board house in Alice and had it moved to her property.
Dave Fish (Bardius) hated Dave Simpson with a passion so bad that he often threatened to kill him. He was envious that Dave Simpson, with his steady and persistent work, was being more successful when he, Bardius, worked hard and had grander ideas but never seemed to get ahead.
Mandy then purchased a sandstone quarry complete with machinery that she hoped would give David (Bardius) a career.
The quarry was making some money but because of Dave’s macho character he frequently broke the machinery, even the D9 which he thought should be able to do anything. He pestered me a lot to use his sandstone in more buildings but most clients can’t afford to use stone walls and it was not suitable for many buildings.
I too would like to use more sandstone but the cost of laying it was $30.00 a square metre when concrete blocks cost only $10.00, stone was three times the cost. So I said to a stone mason “if we had the sandstone cut into flat slabs and you laid it ‘book leaf’ style it would be as easy as laying bricks, how much would you charge for laying that”. He said “It is still stone and laying stone costs $30.00 a square metre”.
So I had David Fish cut some sandstone in 90 mm thick slabs leaving the edges natural and asked a brick layer how much he would charge to lay it. His price was $12.00 a square metre, an extra two dollars for having to keep it clean.
So, as a test run, we built the end (street) wall of a new office and reception building for the Oasis Motel , (which I had designed), by this method and it was a great success.
Later I used it in 190 thick slabs on the new Housing Commission office Building and also in the new council chambers. { 190 thick because with a 10 mm mortar joint makes a module of 200 mm}.
When the supreme Court Circuit Judge came to Alice springs Bardius and Mandy would usually have a Sunday barbecue and invite the judge and his wife so they could meet some locals. We all know that judges, lawyers and jury members are not allowed to discuss court cases outside the court room. At one of these barbecues where Judge Jim Muierhead, trial judge of the Lindy Chamberlain case, was the guest, I heard a young man say to him “well what do you think about Lindy Chamberlain, is she guilty or not?”. I thought “how rude, to put Jim in such an awkward position” and took a breath to intervene but before I could Jim said “let me put it this way, if the jury had consisted of lawyers, they would not have found her guilty”. I thought “well handled Jim”.
Bardius (Dave Fish) with Haggis, my little dog that he gave to me.
Sometime after I moved to Queensland Bardius moved back to live in the Adelaide hills town of Harndorf.
When the bodies were found in barrels in an abandoned bank vault in Snowtown Bardius, because he reasoned that many tourists would now visit Snowtown, saw this as a business opportunity and opened a café there.
His advertising campaign consisted of selling T shirts printed with :
YOU CAN BANK ON A BARREL OF FUN AT SNOWTOWN.
I expect his café was a success but the next I knew of Bardius was from some news paper clippings sent to me by George and Shirley Brown, friends in Alice Springs, dated July 24, 2002 announcing the death of Bardius.
Quoted from the article in the Alice Springs News by Chris Marshall:-
“A man much to be admired; his own man, often too big for the social constraints and conventions that surrounded and frustrated him (the idea of needing a licence to drive seemed ridiculous to him), with little patience for fools and the small minded, he was nevertheless utterly impressive.
In the best sense a big man. An Andonis, his physique was imposing and he carried himself with the bearing of a champion. But he was also a man of huge creative ideas and impulses, with each grand vision replaced by another before anything was fully completed.”
He was a Michael Angelo who needed his own Medicis (though he did enjoy the loyal support of such benefactors as Reg Harris). His money and he were soon parted, though, and his struggle to survive in a largely unappreciative world was constant.
Biggest of all was his heart. To those he loved he was over-whelmingly generous. He gave his time and labour with reckless generosity and could be deeply hurt when it was spurned or unappreciated, which was sometimes the case.
After I had moved to North Queensland Bardius phoned me in about 1995 and said “I want to draw, in the desert, a picture of an aboriginal man five kilometres long, so it can be seen from space and passing jet planes. I have been talking to Reg Harris about funding it but had a disagreement with him and punched him on the nose. Reg will not talk to me any more. Would you phone him and apologise for me and ask him to talk to me again”. I phoned Reg Harris but although he had funded a number of Bardius’s projects and they often had arguments, this time Reg was not going to forgive and forget. That was the last I heard of it until in about mid 1998 it was on the news and they called it ‘The Marree Man’
Insert July 13, 2008.
The Weekend Australian Magazine dated July 12 – 13 had an article by Mark Whittaker called ‘TIME CAPSULE July 16 1998. DISCOVERY OF “MARREE MAN” SPARKS ARTISTIC WHODUNIT’
This article gives a great more detail of Bardius and how he achieved his ambition. And how he died.
To quote from the article by Mark Whitacker:
Alas, the wild artist, who made and lost two fortunes in his 61 years, got into a fight with a younger man in a pub in 2002. One of his teeth got dislodged. “he was scared of the dentist and would do nothing about it,” says Adamus. “From that injury he got septicaemia and died. End of Bardius.”
(Adamus is the person Mark Whitaker interviewed in Alice Springs.)
Dave Simpson has now moved to Burra in South Australia where he has bought a great old stone building on a few acres that used to be the abattoirs and converted it into a house (well, almost a castle).
He now lives there happily with his wife, Belinda.
Dave Simpson, I first met after work one day in 1971 while walking to the Stuart Arms with my employees for an after work drink.
While talking to Dave Simpson on Todd Street the day I met him a tall young aboriginal woman broke off from a group of her friends on the opposite side of the road and calling out “Dave, Dave, I want to talk to you and she joined our group.
I was introduced to her as Maria.
She had very long arms and she started to hit Dave each side of his head while shouting “you have been fucking Gloria, look your prick is still wet.
I said “Excuse me, I have to keep going, see you in the bar”.
Another day Dave Simpson came into my office with a tape recorder and said “I recorded a corroboree last night, do you want to hear it? And he started the machine.
It started with a soft rhythmic sound and Dave said “they are beating out that rhythm by hitting the sand with their thongs” then a didgeridoo started then another, it was sounding good.
Then Maria’s voice said “Dave!, (silence from Dave) Dave (More silence) DAVE, LISTEN TO ME,FUCK YOU!, “yeees?” said Dave,
Maria’s voice said “You know Phyllis, well Phyllis said to me, ‘you know your husband Dave’ Yes I said, ‘well he fucked me’, that’s what she said”.
Dave’s voice said in a very proper English way “good heavens”.
And the sounds of the corroboree continued.
David Fish, alias, Bardius Goldberg, walked into my office in Todd Street one day, without an appointment, and introduced himself. He commissioned me to design an ‘outback restaurant’ which he called ‘The Steak house’, he never had money of his own but on this project he was backed by two or three of the local politicians.
These two men both lived on the extreme edge of society but at opposite poles.
Dave Simpson was from England, very much an Englishman, good looking, average build and small time but practical entrepreneur and he liked aboriginal women. He claimed to be a descendant of the Boleyn family as in Ann Boleyn, beheaded wife of King Henry the Eighth.
He was an excellent mechanic and when I met him was working on aeroplanes at Connellan Airways but previously had set himself up at Ayres Rock fixing tourist’s cars.
At Ayres Rock he married, by tribal law, an aboriginal girl with whom he had two children, a boy, Simon and a girl, Emmy. When he came to Alice he left his wife and children in the care of the elders of her tribe.
When he went back after about a year he found his wife had become an alcoholic and the children were badly neglected so he brought them back to Alice where he brought them up and they were beautiful children. He then lived with an aboriginal woman called Trixy who had two full blood aboriginal daughters and he also brought them up. One became a chef, the other to be a teachers’ aid.
He was keenly interested in renovating old vehicles and he had a 1922 T model Ford truck which he drove around town.
Coming into Alice through the gap one day the old truck was not running well so he pulled off the road, folded back the bonnet and was blowing through the fuel pipe to remove obstructions in the pipe when a road scraper came along, lost control and crashed into Dave and his truck.
The wheels on these road making machines are about two metres in diameter and one of them crushed Dave into his truck.
I went to see him in hospital.
His pelvis was broken in numerous places and one of his thighs was broken, they had him slung in a sling hanging from a scaffold over his bed.
He was on regular doses of morphine which kept him virtually unconscious most of the time but every time he started to become conscious he tried to tell them not to give him more morphine yet, but not being totally conscious he was unable to communicate this clearly and tried to prevent them from giving the morphine injections.
The hospital staff in Alice Springs interpreted his behaviour as being ‘mad’ and they sent him to a psychiatric hospital in Darwin.
By this time he was in a wheel chair and after a while in the psychiatric hospital he decided he shouldn’t be there. The patient in the bed next to him, every night, threatened to kill him while he slept.
He tried to escape twice but failed.
On his third attempt he succeeded and had Trixy waiting to take him to the airport.
The first I heard about his being sent to Darwin was when he phoned me on his successful escape to Alice and asked for help, he needed somewhere to hide out.
I said “come to my place”.
After we sorted out his medical attention and got a promise from the registrar at the hospital that he would not be sent back to Darwin he moved back to a house he had bought in the Gap area of Alice Springs.
Because he was restricted to a wheel chair he started to rebuild old cars from pieces that he had gathered over the years.
The first was a 1913 T model Ford.
He was meticulous about authenticity and searched the world, by telephone, for genuine parts including genuine screws, nuts and bolts.
The first car took a long time but when finished it was like it just came from the original factory.
By then he was walking with difficulty but he rebuilt a number of cars in a relatively short time.
He would search the desert around central Australia and bring back wrecks of old cars that had lain there for forty or fifty years. From these tangled masses he would rebuild the cars so they were as good as new. In the desert rust was very slow to grow.
The 1920 Silver-Ghost Rolls Royce displayed at the Alice Springs Airport, that belonged to Eddie Connellan, is a car that he rebuilt. Note that this Roller had been converted to a ute.
David bought an old house on acreage outside the gap that was the farmer’s house of an old orange grove.
He received $90,000 compensation from the accidence and with that money built a museum to house his rebuilt cars. In the museum he included a restaurant with a 1920’s theme and during the evening showed films, like Bonnie and Clyde, which featured cars of that time.
This was the first motor Vehicle Transport Museum in the Northern Territory and was opened by senator Burnie Kilgarriff on April first 1977.
I designed the building for his museum so that he could build it himself with two labourers.
Some years later the Northern Territory government purchased his museum collection for a sum which I hope gave him a good profit. They are now displayed at the Central Australian Aviation Museum
Dave Simpson didn’t like Dave Fish, he thought that he was a wastrel who has had so many good opportunities to make good but blew them every time just by irresponsible behaviour.
Dave Fish (Bardius Goldberg) was also a small time entrepreneur but with big and usually impractical ideas, he really wanted to be a ‘high flyer’.
He was huge, extremely macho in physic and attitude and he liked well educated and classy women.
He was a bit autistic could not write well and could not read hand writing but was an avid reader of print and had educated himself through reading.
An excellent artist in whatever medium took his fancy, he produced quite a bit of work but he never persevered for long in any one field.
Although he was extremely macho he was far from being an occa. He was well informed through reading, knew more than most about international affairs and although he could be excessively aggressive he was also kind, considerate and affectionate to all his friends. He could read people like no one else I ever knew.
He told me how he went to Canada and sneaked into America without a visa but while there he got gonarea. . Because he had to keep away from women while he was being cured he thought up a scheme to help a local charity. He was to live on the top of a nine metre high pole for two weeks.
This stunt got a lot of publicity and when he came down he was arrested and deported.
While he was in America he met an American girl who came to Alice and they married.
They opened and ran the Steak House for a couple of years. She made excellent American salads and he had fun playing mine host wearing a big striped butchers’ apron and brandishing a big butcher’s knife. The restaurant was a big success until he got the head waitress pregnant.
His wife was upset at first but eventually he persuaded her that they could adopt the baby which they did.
His philandering did not decrease so Lois eventually left him.
When Bardius and his wife were running the Steak House he also started a Mini Moke Hire business. The Mokes were leased.
Bardius sometimes disappeared from Alice Springs and one such time, I later discovered, was because
after his marriage break up he sold the Moke hire business but did not understand that he should have had the new owners take over the lease agreement on the vehicles.
When the leasing company started putting pressure on him for their monthly payments for cars he no longer owned, he disappeared.
He was living in a small hills town near Adelaide and while at the local pub a man with a cut-throat razor went berserk and started to threaten people.
Bardius (David Fish) took him on
The madman slashed at Bardius’s throat.
Luckily Bardius was smiling at the time and the razor cut across his teeth giving him only a small cut to one side of his mouth.
The madman had only that one chance after which Bardius had him.
Someone there had a camera and took photos of the action which they sold with the story to the Adelaide Advertiser
The owner of the leasing company saw the story and had Bardius brought to his office, congratulated Bardius on his bravery and cancelled the debt.
He moved back to Alice Springs.
He redecorated one of the bars at the Stuart Arms hotel to look like it was the inside of a pioneering hotel which were built using rusty corrigated iron and bags. They called it ‘The Bag Bar’ and it was a big success.
The Tennant Creek Hotel therefore wanted a Bag Bar so he went there to build it.
While there he met Mandy Web, an English girl who was a science teacher at the high school.
He brought Mandy back to Alice Springs to live and she bought a few acres of land outside the Gap which used to be an orange grove and the back boundary adjoined the back boundary of Dave Simpson’s property.
They had Mandy’s demountable house brought down from Tennant Creek and installed on this property. While waiting for this to happen they both lived at my place.
Eventually Mandy bought an old timber framed weather board house in Alice and had it moved to her property.
Dave Fish (Bardius) hated Dave Simpson with a passion so bad that he often threatened to kill him. He was envious that Dave Simpson, with his steady and persistent work, was being more successful when he, Bardius, worked hard and had grander ideas but never seemed to get ahead.
Mandy then purchased a sandstone quarry complete with machinery that she hoped would give David (Bardius) a career.
The quarry was making some money but because of Dave’s macho character he frequently broke the machinery, even the D9 which he thought should be able to do anything. He pestered me a lot to use his sandstone in more buildings but most clients can’t afford to use stone walls and it was not suitable for many buildings.
I too would like to use more sandstone but the cost of laying it was $30.00 a square metre when concrete blocks cost only $10.00, stone was three times the cost. So I said to a stone mason “if we had the sandstone cut into flat slabs and you laid it ‘book leaf’ style it would be as easy as laying bricks, how much would you charge for laying that”. He said “It is still stone and laying stone costs $30.00 a square metre”.
So I had David Fish cut some sandstone in 90 mm thick slabs leaving the edges natural and asked a brick layer how much he would charge to lay it. His price was $12.00 a square metre, an extra two dollars for having to keep it clean.
So, as a test run, we built the end (street) wall of a new office and reception building for the Oasis Motel , (which I had designed), by this method and it was a great success.
Later I used it in 190 thick slabs on the new Housing Commission office Building and also in the new council chambers. { 190 thick because with a 10 mm mortar joint makes a module of 200 mm}.
When the supreme Court Circuit Judge came to Alice springs Bardius and Mandy would usually have a Sunday barbecue and invite the judge and his wife so they could meet some locals. We all know that judges, lawyers and jury members are not allowed to discuss court cases outside the court room. At one of these barbecues where Judge Jim Muierhead, trial judge of the Lindy Chamberlain case, was the guest, I heard a young man say to him “well what do you think about Lindy Chamberlain, is she guilty or not?”. I thought “how rude, to put Jim in such an awkward position” and took a breath to intervene but before I could Jim said “let me put it this way, if the jury had consisted of lawyers, they would not have found her guilty”. I thought “well handled Jim”.
Sometime after I moved to Queensland Bardius moved back to live in the Adelaide hills town of Harndorf.
When the bodies were found in barrels in an abandoned bank vault in Snowtown Bardius, because he reasoned that many tourists would now visit Snowtown, saw this as a business opportunity and opened a café there.
His advertising campaign consisted of selling T shirts printed with :
YOU CAN BANK ON A BARREL OF FUN AT SNOWTOWN.
I expect his café was a success but the next I knew of Bardius was from some news paper clippings sent to me by George and Shirley Brown, friends in Alice Springs, dated July 24, 2002 announcing the death of Bardius.
Quoted from the article in the Alice Springs News by Chris Marshall:-
“A man much to be admired; his own man, often too big for the social constraints and conventions that surrounded and frustrated him (the idea of needing a licence to drive seemed ridiculous to him), with little patience for fools and the small minded, he was nevertheless utterly impressive.
In the best sense a big man. An Andonis, his physique was imposing and he carried himself with the bearing of a champion. But he was also a man of huge creative ideas and impulses, with each grand vision replaced by another before anything was fully completed.”
He was a Michael Angelo who needed his own Medicis (though he did enjoy the loyal support of such benefactors as Reg Harris). His money and he were soon parted, though, and his struggle to survive in a largely unappreciative world was constant.
Biggest of all was his heart. To those he loved he was over-whelmingly generous. He gave his time and labour with reckless generosity and could be deeply hurt when it was spurned or unappreciated, which was sometimes the case.
After I had moved to North Queensland Bardius phoned me in about 1995 and said “I want to draw, in the desert, a picture of an aboriginal man five kilometres long, so it can be seen from space and passing jet planes. I have been talking to Reg Harris about funding it but had a disagreement with him and punched him on the nose. Reg will not talk to me any more. Would you phone him and apologise for me and ask him to talk to me again”. I phoned Reg Harris but although he had funded a number of Bardius’s projects and they often had arguments, this time Reg was not going to forgive and forget. That was the last I heard of it until in about mid 1998 it was on the news and they called it ‘The Marree Man’
Insert July 13, 2008.
The Weekend Australian Magazine dated July 12 – 13 had an article by Mark Whittaker called ‘TIME CAPSULE July 16 1998. DISCOVERY OF “MARREE MAN” SPARKS ARTISTIC WHODUNIT’
This article gives a great more detail of Bardius and how he achieved his ambition. And how he died.
To quote from the article by Mark Whitacker:
Alas, the wild artist, who made and lost two fortunes in his 61 years, got into a fight with a younger man in a pub in 2002. One of his teeth got dislodged. “he was scared of the dentist and would do nothing about it,” says Adamus. “From that injury he got septicaemia and died. End of Bardius.”
(Adamus is the person Mark Whitaker interviewed in Alice Springs.)
David Fish (Bardius Goldberg)
***
Dave Simpson has now moved to Burra in South Australia where he has bought a great old stone building on a few acres that used to be the abattoirs and converted it into a house (well, almost a castle).
He now lives there happily with his wife, Belinda.
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