Barbara Blackman AO, born Brisbane, December 22, 1928 – died Canberra, October 4, 2024.

One of Canberra’s leading philanthropists, writers and public intellectuals, Barbara Blackman, died at Clare Holland House on Friday afternoon. She was 95.

Blackman, already famous as a writer when she came to Canberra in the early 2000s, dispensed more than $600,000 of her personal money to the Canberra International Music Festival, $10,000 to the ANU and $250,000 to the Australian Chamber Orchestra. She also supported individual artists.

In 2006, she was awarded the Australian Contemporary Music Award for Patronage and in 2012, she was appointed Officer of the Order of Australia.

Born Barbara Patterson, she attended Brisbane State High School, but was beset with optic atrophy and became legally blind in her 20s. She never let this stand in the way of her love of art and music.

She was famously married from 1952 to 1978 to her first husband, the artist Charles Blackman, by whom she had three children. As an artist’s model, she is seen in many of  Blackman’s  Alice In Wonderland paintings.

With her second husband, Frenchman Marcel Veldhoven, she  lived at the south coast until in March 2002. After the end of the relationship, she was drawn to the ACT by the many friends she had here, including the music teacher Adrian Keenan, who had boarded with the Blackmans in the 1970s while he was a student at the Sydney Con. Keenan was to become her life-long carer.

Once in Canberra, Blackman became the centre of a coterie of artist-intellectuals, was constantly seen at concerts, and would throw extraordinary birthday parties at her Yarralumla home, conducted with laughter, singing and poetry-reading.

On her request, I drove her to the Murray Art Museum Albury several years ago after she had the sudden idea to gift the Murray River-related artworks from her private collection to the museum.

Blackman was an adherent of Jungian philosophy and took a keen interest in cultures and religions from around the world, an interest which continued through the many years of her confinement to bed. She was moved from her Yarralumla home to Clare Holland House on Monday.

She is survived by her children Auguste and Christabel; her youngest son Barnaby having died in 2021.

Details of any memorial service will be posted when available.

Musician CHRIS LATHAM, artist-in-residence at the Australian War Memorial, writes:

Canberra was a good place for Barbara to finish her long-distance race. This city is like Barbara in so many ways, its magic hidden in plain sight.

She loved the fact that Walter’s and Marion’s sacred geometry was carved into the Limestone plain, there for anyone with eyes to see. In the same way, she wove her magic overtly, her unusual gifts hidden by the obvious trappings of her physical frailty. Blind, almost deaf and bedridden for the last 12 years, she became a Helen Keller-like figure, passing out transcendent wisdom dressed up as simple conversation.

Those artists lucky enough to make their work around her, knew that somehow she unblocked us, straightening out our celestial chimney, so that the idea would come down like Santa at Christmas, without getting stuck half way. She would then edit our words, suggest changes to our thinking, our doing, and before long our idea would be there on a plate – shiny, new and perfectly shaped, Barbara’s fairy dust making it shine with a light not our own.

Artists came to her in a long procession, bearing poems, novels, symphonies – even festival programs. Before she’d gone blind, she had also inspired painters like her husband Charles Blackman, whose paintings she examined forensically with a large magnifying glass. We all somehow knew that when we were around her, we made our best work.

She’d endlessly say: “Let it be done through me, not by me” and embodied her mantra that “one of the highest forms that love can take is encouragement” by telling artists to keep going. When you make a large work from nothing other than ideas and imagination, there is nothing more assuring than to be told, “keep going” – that your instincts are correct. All you must do is fill in what’s missing, until it is finished.

Barbara’s generosity transformed the Canberra International Music Festival but mainly her philanthropy was personal, given to artists hanging on by their fingernails. She made them feel that they could survive and thrive, that what they made had meaning, and that God or the angels, or simply Light itself, would ensure they were supported to create in the world a more perfect form of beauty.

May her memorial be that we who she encouraged, in turn give our love to others, so they have the courage to complete their creations.