Many around Freo may not have known Garry Gillard by name or personally, but they are very likely to have come across one or other or all of his wondrous websites, likely in their order of prominence: Freotopia/formerly FreoStuff; Australasian Cinema; and GarryGillard.net.
Garry’s Freotopia/formerly FreoStuff is simply a tremendous trove of everything you ever wanted to know about Fremantle, past or present. An amazing work in its own right. Little of what happened around Fremantle missed Garry’s gaze and much of it found its way into Freotopia.
But many folk who love Fremantle and delight in celebrating the wonderful congregation of people to be found around Freo, came to know Garry both by name and personally and to admire and treasure him and his work.
Now, while Garry might not mind me eulogising him here, I’m sure he would immediately take me to task for using the word ‘congregation’ in this context, as well as for the use of the adjacent adjective ‘wonderful’, but after a good half hour’s discussion, or perhaps 45 minutes, on each, he may, just may, arrive at the point of agreeing to disagree with me.
To Garry’s family and old friends none of this is news but simply recognition of Garry and who he was, and a reflection of his deep love of and curiosity about both language, its forms and its meanings, and literature, and place. Along his life’s journey Garry had been both a language teacher – French – and a scholar of psychoanalysis, having written a Ph D on Sigmund Freud. No surprise, he was also familiar with German.
It is perhaps to Freud, though, that Garry’s dedication to cinema in general and Australasian cinema in particular, should be attributed. After finishing his dissertation and acquiring his doctorate at Murdoch University (of which he was one of the first students and where he worked, taught and researched till his retirement), Garry vowed never to read a line of Freud ever again and turned to cinema instead. Garry’s passion for cinema was later recognised by one film critic who hailed him as the “unsung hero of Australian cinema”.
Garry watched a film virtually everyday (although he also had a fondness for Brit detective, old-fashioned series such as Father Brown or Death in Paradise). He wrote a note about each new film he saw, most of those finding their place on his Australasian cinema website, augmented with snippets of other critics’ reviews and, when he felt inspired, with a full review of his own. But his knowledge of cinema extended well beyond Australia and one of his favorite directors, for instance, was the Japanese Ozu. As a result, his website has become an invaluable tool. He kept us on our toes too with occasional devilish quizzes…
Then he would scour all the latest on Freo, to update or add to his Freotopia trove. On Freotopia he even took on the mantle of a psephologist bravely predicting who would succeed in the latest City of Fremantle Council elections – and was usually right!
Garry also had an extraordinary memory. His old friend Anne-Marie has explained how she became accustomed to Garry arriving for a morning coffee having memorised a whole poem by Wordsworth or the like, and reciting it for her with just the right amount of feeling. Towards the end of his illness Garry decided to tackle Proust’s monumental A la recherche du temps perdu, perhaps a testimony, says Anne-Marie, to his belief in his own survival and his love of life.
Garry loved nothing more than a discussion, be it about Fremantle, cinema or any other topic that took his fancy. He delighted in discussion. He remained focussed in a discussion. Rarely did he allow discussion to slide into mere passionate debate or noisy talk. He always remained focussed and demanded the same commitment from his conversant. And he never let you make a slip, or at least never let your slip remain unnoticed.
Grammar and factual errors Garry abhorred. Garry was, for Fremantle Shipping News, a regular, self-appointed, additional, volunteer proofreader. Rarely was it that just after an edition of The Weekly Edition had been emailed out to Shipees on a Friday afternoon an email would land in my Editor’s inbox pointing out a relevant error or two, some apparently egregious. Often I was obliged to plead guilty. Although, after a while, my usual response to Garry was that I was pleased to see he had discovered the error I had so carefully planted just to check he was still watching.
Garry had his 80th birthday late last year. It was an honour to be invited and to mingle with his treasured family and friends. This photograph of the 80 year old Garry is spot on. The intensity of the eyes, the alertness of the face, the clear readiness for discussion evident in it all.
As Garry recently wrote, on his personal website, of the other two: ‘Both of my websites … have been selected for preservation by the National Library of Australia.’ This was and is a fitting honour and testament to Garry’s tireless work over many years in creating them, and their significance. His work will live on.
If you go to Garry’s personal website site you will learn more about Garry including his education at Perth Modern School in the late 1950s, his contribution to teaching and education, his career at Murdoch University, and his family and his writings.
Garry Gillard was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago. He fought it stoically with both eyes open. On Bastille Day, 14 July 2024, a coincidence Garry would have smiled at, he passed. Garry is survived by his two loved daughters and his treasured circle of friends – and his treasured websites, Freotopia and Australasian Cinema.
Vale Garry Gillard.
A funeral service will be held at Fremantle Cemetery on Tuesday 30 July at 12.15 pm.
* By Michael Barker, Editor, Fremantle Shipping News, in collaboration with Anne-Marie Medcalf
