His family had brought his ashes back to Australia, which he always considered home. I was pleased to attend and impressed with a short extract from the back of the service sheet, where in an extract from A jerk on one end (1999), Hughes wrote of learning to look in his days as a boy fisherman in Sydney Harbour:

I rarely got out of the harbour and was confined to its foreshores, rock and piers. No matter; though I didn't really know it at the time, I was getting an education in seeing and discrimination. To fish at all, even at a humble level, you must notice things: the movement of the water and its patterns, the rocks, the seaweed, the quiver of tiny scattering fish that betrays a bigger predator under them. Time on the pier taught me to concentrate on the visual, for fishing is intensely visual even - perhaps especially - when nothing is happening. It is easy to look, but learning to see is a more gradual business and it sneaks up on you subconsciously, by stealth.

Reading this, it struck me how there are often simple beginnings to what we value most.

A well-produced video of clips from his life of looking and critiquing was played and, of course, tributes flowed. The Art Gallery of New South Wales was presented with a watercolour of Uluru by Hughes.

I realised also that there was a lot of Robert Hughes's writing which I hadn't yet read so that weekend I bought a copy of The Fatal Shore, which I'm enjoying now.

The Shock of the Newt

We were recently given a most unusual copy of Hughes' The Shock of the New for the library by the ever-generous Jim Barr and Mary Barr. Some years ago, they spent a day with Hughes while he was in Wellington and, spotting The Shock on their bookshelf, he spontaneously signed it. Over the following years they invited visiting artists and curators [also named Robert or Bob] to make their own addition, with some intriguing results...