CLARA BRACK The Secret Landscapes: On not pleasing your mother. Reviewed by Sandra Hogan

Clara Brack finds her own voice in exploring the differences between her parents’ lives as artists and their lives as parents.

The artists John Brack and Helen Maudsley both defied their mothers – he when he chose to be an artist and she when she chose to marry one. Now their first daughter, Clara Brack, has defied them both in writing a book about their private lives.

The subtitle On not pleasing your mother comes from Janet Malcolm, who wrote, ‘Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.’ It might sound like the defiant slogan of a young writer, but this is a book written, with intense inner struggle, over 20 years. Brack is 77 at the time of publication. Her father is dead, her mother is nearly 100 years old. In publishing this book, Clara Brack has finally found her own distinctive voice.

Brack introduces her parents with simple directness:

My parents are John Brack and Helen Maudsley. They met at art school and exhibited their work in Melbourne from the 1950s for fifty years … My father’s work was well known. School students wrote essays on his painting Collins St 5pm. When asked if my father was John Brack I would sometimes say, ‘My mother’s an artist too. Helen Maudsley.’ ‘Oh, is she? I don’t know her work, never heard of her.’

She wanted to tell the story of two artists in a formative time of Australian art, but she wanted to tell it from the perspective of their daughter, showing the ‘disjunction between the artist as a parent and the artist in their work’.

Both John Brack and Helen Maudsley believed, and taught their four daughters, Clara, Vicky, Freda and Charlotte, that the artist’s work should speak for itself.

Dad would repeat: ‘Everything to know about me is in the paintings.’ Mum would repeat: ‘Private is private, public is public.’ For both of them, the private life of an artist is out of bounds.

For a long time, Brack was mystified by her parents’ insistence on privacy. They lived ordered, disciplined lives, both of them in their painting rooms working for long hours. Family dinner was at the same time each night. John and Helen rejected the idea of artists as bohemians and they knew that art was simply ‘hours and hours in the studio working alone’.

It was, from an external view, a boring life, but Brack sensed that there were secret inner landscapes.

It felt to me that a sense of dark precariousness hung over the family, exuding an ominousness that could never be referred to.

It was a lonely life for the four girls. There were no visible grandparents and their parents’ real lives were very clearly in their painting rooms. Brack found the only way she could be with her father was to pose for his portraits. And there was his drinking. The public story was that he had stopped painting having said all that he wanted to say. His daughters knew that he had stopped painting because the paintbrush periodically slipped from his hand. Near the end of his life, John Brack had dementia from alcoholism.

Brack’s deep inhibitions about writing came from her father’s voice saying ‘you dill’ and her mother’s saying ‘private is private’. After years of experiment, Brack found a technique that allowed her to write truthfully. She imagines her father speaking to a therapist and her mother (who would certainly never speak to a therapist) talking to an old and very trusted friend. It is a fictional device, but Brack is always clear about what is fact and what is fiction.

What this does is to give her parents a kind of agency in the process. Brack enters imaginatively into the minds of her parents as they are guided through their own inner work. She is not sitting outside them, judging or complaining or accusing. She, and the reader, participate in a transformative process that brings sympathy and understanding for this gifted and troubled couple. It is a surprising and deeply moving approach.

Brack finds and names the painful legacy of being the child of artists but she also names the gifts.

The gift of being brought up in a home with original paintings on the walls, of seeing the inner life of my parents in their paintings, of the encouragement to make things, to invent, to break from convention. The gift of seeing the illusoriness of fame and what it takes to resist it. The gift of knowing the tenacity and the discipline required to continue working despite negative reviews and little interest in the work.

She writes evocatively about the paintings and the inner lives of her parents that she finds in them. It would be very satisfying to have coloured prints of the paintings in the book but that would put it out of the budget of most readers and it is fascinating even without. Only one picture is included, which highlights its significance and poignancy.

Brack writes with great restraint and simplicity. She is only interested in telling deep truths and doesn’t offer artistic gossip or chitchat. It is a serious, moving, original work – worthy of her artistic inheritance.

And, in the end, it is a hopeful book. Brack writes that there are

‘the gaps left within us’ by the secrets of others, the opportunity to repair something, to make amends, to make sense and give meaning to what is passed on to us like a baton.

Clara Brack The Secret Landscapes: On not pleasing your mother Upswell Publishing 2026 204pp $32.99

Sandra Hogan is the author of bestselling non-fiction spy story With My Little Eye. Her memoir My Mother’s Secret will be published by Allen & Unwin in 2027.

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You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.