The Bill Ainslie Handbook

MO: Yes, morning Jasper, trust you are well. What I am realising now is that in opening and in getting to know Mike Gardiner’s fascinating Bill Ainslie Handbook, subtitled ‘from Artist and Ancestor’, is how careless my living without much connection to Art has been – including that rugby and slogans attracted more of my attention; and hence , more careless care. You should know about such issues too, when you moved sideways to shovel coal into the mouths of steam railway locomotives, and their instant coffee barrels. The remarkable thing is that the handbook is freely available on the internet, as a downloadable PDF and as an e-book. (excluding, for the moment some millions of our countryfolk still cowering behind a digital iron curtain because of jobs and costs). All these are long stories, but what say you, today?

JC: Good morning, Maeder. Bill Ainslie, and his then girlfriend, Cathy (now Brubeck) Shallis came to our Burger St house in Pietermaritzburg in 1958, invited by my brother Al. Michael Gardiner followed not long after, in our Scotsville home. It was the beginning of many heady years of stimulus for me, because Bill, of a slightly earlier generation of UNP luminaries than Michael Gardiner, and Michael himself, spoke in words I battled to understand in my pre-teen year. I was the little brother who made coffee and listened. Both cohorts became, for me, the Big People, in the same way Noni Jabavu used the term in Drawn in Colour; The Ochre People. They were liberal, and they opened my young mind.

MO: Without further fuss, for the moment, on artistry and ancestry, here in opengates is our initial link to the full Mike Gardiner handbook on Bill Ainslie, and its challenging closing chapter: for openers. See you next cares?