Mr McKay

Some years ago I started drawing my earliest memories in a notebook. I often experience very early memories as if I am looking at a scene. Here is a page from the notebook with a drawing of me looking over Mr McKay's shoulder as he quickly sketched a landscape in pastels. The way his drawing appeared on the paper was pure magic.

(By the way, my drawing is rough because it was drawn very quickly and left unchanged as I wanted to interfere with the depicted memory as little as possible.)

Mr McKay and me back in 1948

Mont Park was an old style mental hospital near Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. In the nineteen forties such hospitals were huge and often had thousands of patients. Some patients were locked up, while others worked on a farm or in other hospital industries.

It was quite unusual for a patient with a chronic illness to return to live in the community.