Crossing the Great Divide: Memoir of an Artist
The memoirs and paintings that Rod Moss has produced during the last 35 years are unique in their dramatisation of the lives of his trusting Aboriginal family and have been critically acclaimed nationally and internationally. In his third memoir we follow the nurturing of the curiosity and openness that has fastened him to the luminous power of Central Australia and its First Peoples. From the foothills of Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges and his city-based art education, we are taken to arid-zone Victoria where he first embraces the climate most conducive to his well-being. He returns to the city and is invited to participate in Melbourne’s dynamic experimental small school movement. Then there’s a year in the USA studying the ‘spiritual’ teachings of Gurdjieff in a Shenandoah farm setting. Travel necessarily widens perceptions and continues to pique his curiosity. A trip to a Pilbra Indigenous community opens the door on the Aboriginal world that he will spend the rest of his life coming to terms with.
Crossing the Great Divide is deeply insightful without pretension; compelling reading for those who relish exquisite writing combined with the artist-philosopher’s apprehension of our world. The reader is swept along through an historical arc of great moments. At times it reads like some exotic travelogue where familiar places are freshly painted in details only remembered as you read––like a 3-dimensional re-experiencing of that place. Throughout, it creates a strong sense of the unique, essential Australianness with which we apprehend our world
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2019 | 9780648349860 | 336 pages | Paperback | 234 x 154 mm | Memoir
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Rod Moss, art, paintings, First Peoples, indigenous, aboriginal culture, artist, memoir
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Praise for Crossing the Great Divide
‘When I read Rod Moss’s masterpiece The Hard Light of Day, I marvelled at the wonderful goodness and profound humanism of the man who wrote it. Ditto when I read One Thousand Cuts. Where could such a man come from, I wondered. Many readers who felt as I did will look eagerly for answers in Crossing the Great Divide. They won’t be surprised that Moss’ rich life confirms the ancient insight that wisdom comes only to people who were neither wise nor prudent when they were young. In his early and middle years, Moss’ ferocious hunger for experience––physical, intellectual, artistic and spiritual, in their many forms––was tempered by a sense of humanity as it existed in himself and others that went deep even then. The idiosyncratic, gritty but sensuous, realism of Moss’ paintings shows also in his prose, enlivening while disciplining its attention to the details of events, persons and places he describes. I know of no one like him.‘
— Raimond Gaita, philosopher, author
‘The writing of Rod Moss has already opened a unique gate into Central Australia: his The Hard Light of Day and One Thousand Cuts were revelatory of the landscape and those dwelling in its tissues of tragedy and love. What made this writing possible? How did Moss’s goodness of heart and his intelligent eye so come together as to produce these unique contributions to Australian art-making? This gritty memoir, both prosaic and textured, is a good place to tackle the mystery. It is vivid with detail, open-hearted, redolent with drollery and authenticity as the author draws himself back into his originations.‘
— Barry Hill, author
In Crossing the Great Divide, Rod Moss shows the reader through his formative years in 1950s and 1960s Victoria, and through young adulthood in the 1970s. He weaves his experiences together with sensitivity and a painterly eye.
“Crossing the Great Divide is a monumental achievement. Epic in scope, it encompasses a life journey recorded in luminous detail, driven by an unwavering intellectual curiosity, and graced by unsparing self-reflection and humanity. It is both a portrait of a young man as aspiring artist, working his way towards his calling, and the reflections of the mature artist, who has truly crossed the divide between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and found a way to express his findings, and his vision, as a painter, craftsman, lateral thinker and writer. ”
Rod Moss is an award-winning artist and writer. His first memoir, The Hard Light of Day, received the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the Northern Territory Book of the Year. His second, A Thousand Cuts, won the 2014 Chief Minister’s Northern Territory Book of the Year Award. Moss exhibits in Alice Springs, Brisbane, Melbourne and the USA. Read more.