Obituaries Australia

I saw Mac [Herbert McClintock] a couple of times in hospital — the last time I took with me his early Melbourne painting friend Roy Dalgarno who was over from New Zealand. Mac responded to us with short bursts of animation about the past.

His enigmatic laugh was still there. Dalgarno said he might see him in September on his next visit. Mac's rueful smile will be hard to forget.

In his work since the great depression of the '30s, McClintock always identified with ordinary people. Born in Perth (1906), he moved with his family to Melbourne (1912), then to Adelaide, and back to Heidelberg where he went to the technical school.

He left at 13 and worked as a messenger boy. Later, he was apprenticed to a process engraver and then a signwriter. As a cartoonist/journalist he contributed to progressive journals like Tribune, Overland, The Building Worker, The Waterside Worker and Common Cause.

During the second great war he was appointed an official artist, with Dobell, for the Allied Works Council. Earlier, in 1933, McClintock and his first wife, Pat, went to Perth where he worked for The Daily News.

At that time he painted under the pseudonym of Max Ebert surrealist. Later, during the Great Depression, he was intensely concerned at the plight of the working man and woman and he reflected this in his development as a social realist painter.

McClintock was a member of the Contemporary Art Society for many years, and the Studio of Realist Art (SORA) with which he exhibited, along with such members as Kant, Dalgarno, Missingham, Margaret Preston, Counihan, Wigley and Weaver-Hawkins.

Mac loved singing and he sometimes sang duets at local concerts with his second wife, Marie, who was a member of the Australian Opera company. Mac was the salt of the earth, you can't have too much of that.