David Frazer. Rooftops in the Wimmera.

The most consequential thing to ever happen in David Frazer’s art career occurred at Melbourne Concert Hall, which has now since been demolished, and it had nothing to do with art.

In October 1981, High School Teacher, Oliver Hopkins, loaded up two fifteen-year old boys, Frazer and his mate Garry Richards, and drove them to the Dallas Brooks Hall to see Tom Waits. The experience left Frazer inspired, and a want to become a songwriter. For the next fifteen years of his life, he spent it coming to the realisation that he couldn’t.

“I wanted to do music and performing… as well as become an international rock star”, he said, sitting in his studio at the edge of Castlemaine where the houses give way to the bush. What he got instead was a city of bands that went nowhere, and a decade of becoming the hardest working karaoke act in Central Victoria. In this period also gave way to one of his lowest points in his career, one in which involved “monkey suits and a café in Sale”.

“I was nearing thirty and realised I didn’t want to have a career as a complete loser,” he said. “So, I decided maybe art was a better fit after all.”

This decision produced one of the more unlikely careers in Australian art. Frazer, born in Foster in 1966, has since held more than fifty solo exhibitions across Australia, London, and China. His work sits in the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW, the National Gallery of Victoria, the British Library, and the National Museum of China. The ABX made a half-hour documentary about him. Critics have taken to calling him the Tim Winton of the printing press. 

And, the whole thing runs on story.

The kid on the roof

Growing up as a teacher’s son, Frazer’s life revolved around moving. Foster first, then Ararat for kindergarten in which he attended for a total of 3 days before refusing to go back. Next stop was Murtoa, in the Wimmera, where his father took on a principal position at the local high school.

Murtoa’s landscape is one that caught Frazer’s eye, and one that never left his memory. It was flat, wide, quiet. On Saturday afternoons, the entire town went to the footy, and the main street emptied out. “I’d be on the roof, or up a tree,” he said, “That whole narrative of me wanting to fly away and go somewhere more exciting was a big thing. That became the landscape to my narratives later on. That sort of melancholic beauty, nothing’s happening, and it’s quiet.”

The kid on the roof is still there in his work. Look through Frazer’s prints and you will find lone caravans parked in the back blocks, ladders leaning against weatherboard houses, gum trees standing on sentinel in empty midnight paddocks, and a bloke perched high on a gable who has clearly been there a while, considering his options.

Not long after, his father announced that he got the top job at Rosebud High, which at the time was the biggest school in the state. “It was terrifying,” Frazer said. “Going from a little town to Rosebud, which is like the big city. And my dad was the principal. I had no friends. I just remember crying every night in terror.”

Like many childhood fears, the reality of the situation turned out fine. Rosebud was filled with young teachers who played in bands and took their students fishing. Hopkins was one of them. Frazer grew his hair, wore clothes with holes in them (imagine Principal Frazer grimacing), did well at art, and was in Melbourne by the age of seventeen to attend art school.

He lasted a year at Caufield Tech before transferring to Philip Institute in Preston, which he had heard was the “it” school. By the time he arrived, this rumour was very much false and happened to be dead as a doornail. To this day is one of his biggest regrets.

“I was the big fish in a small pond at high school, and then I came to art school and realised there were all these other dudes as good as me, if not better,” he said. “I thought I was already a genius and didn’t need to learn how to draw until I got to art school”.

Finding the medium

The way back into the workforce came sideways. In the late eighties, he took a job as a part-time studio technician at Methodist Ladies College, sharing it with a printmaker named Jeff Faulkner. There was an etching press in the room. Frazer pulled a few linocuts off it, and something clicked.

At thirty, ten years after his degree, he went back to art school to complete an honour in Printmaking at Monash University, Caufield. He landed there just before the course turned contemporary and academic, while it was still full of working printmakers doing sessional teaching. Some of them he already knew. Ultimately, he was the bloke who had wasted his first year at art school and came back a decade later to find his old classmates running the place, Geoffrey Ricardo and Rosalind Atkins among them. One of the printmakers, the wood engraver Tim Jones, showed him end-grain boxwood.

“That was the lightbulb,” Frazer said. A medium that brought instant joy. He found something “that is exactly what excites me”.

Wood engraving is worth understanding, because the technique explains the artist. You cut into the end-grain of a very hard block rather than along the plank, which lets you hold detail fine enough to read like a pencil drawing. The blocks are small, because boxwood is small. They are cut to the same height as letterpress type, meaning images and text can be locked into the same form and printed together into a single press. Originally, it was invented to illustrate books.

“It’s the closest thing to writing a song,” Frazer said. “The history is in illustrating books, narratives, and poems. It sits so well with little stories and text.” The subject with the medium. All those wasted years turned out to be the material that informed his work.

“My years of hopeless showbiz gave me a narrative,” he said. “That failed ambition. That melancholic yearning to be successful and famous and loved and being a failure. Wishing to escape, wanting to stay.”

Getting the songwriters to say yes

He started by writing his own words but quickly got sick of telling the same story. So, he went looking for collaborators. Novelists first, including an attempt at Tim Winton that never came off. “Writers are very precious about their words, which is understandable,” he said. “Songwriters are fine with it.” A song has a cadence and duration that suited Frazer’s endeavour.

A break finally came through when Frazer got in touch with Cameron Bruce, a keyboard player in Paul Kelly’s band. Frazer asked whether Kelly would let a stranger illustrate one of his songs as a handmade book, a wood engraving for every line, something like a music video yet stays on paper. Kelly, to his surprise said yes, and even more surprisingly said he didn’t need to see any of it first.

The result of this was Little Aches and Pains in 2014. Kelly turned up to the launch with his guitar and sang it. This was Frazer’s biggest opening in his life. After this opportunity, work was consistent. In the music industry, everyone knows everyone. So, it wasn’t unusual when Don Walker of Cold Chisel offered him to illustrate Pool, and later the words to Flame Trees for a broadsheet. Kelly’s manager then put him on to Nick Cave, who agreed via email, and Love Letter was illustrated in 2021. Each book was handprinted on Frazer’s own Columbian platen press, and 1950s machine of which around four hundred survive worldwide, then handbound in editions of ten to thirty.

Eventually it was time to go international, which took a cold email to Paul Charles, and Irish agent whose roster runs through Van Morrison, Elvis Costello, Donovan, and Nick Lowe. Lowe agreed. Frazer chose Lately I’ve Let Things Slide a song about a man responding to lost love by letting his standards collapse. He illustrated one verse with a bloke eating cat food while sitting on the dunny.

“That book was completely up my alley,” he said. “It’s a celebration, a homage to complete and utter male hopelessness.” Frazer launched the piece in London with gallerist Rebecca Hossack, and Lowe came along and sang.

Charles also represented Tom Waits. Frazer had been trying to reach him for years, entirely without success, and had a specific reason for his want. He intended to dedicate the book to Hopkins, the teacher who took him to Dallas Brooks Hall in 1981. Weeks after reaching out, one morning an email arrived. Waits and his wife, also his co-writer, Kathleen Brennan, like wood engravings, as well as handmade books and gave the go ahead.

More Than Flesh and Bone mixed three of their songs into a single narrative, and it broke Frazer’s pattern. This book celebrated a couple who stay together to the end. He nervously printed thirty instead of his usual fifteen, in which he sold only five. This left Frazer quietly disappointed. However, this disappointment only lasted a short 24 hours. Brennan offered to post about it on Waits’ social media creating an influx of orders from his obsessives all over the world. He started raising the prices as the edition shrank. Within a couple of days, the lot was gone. When he asked about licensing the lyrics, expecting a bill that would sink the project, they told him to use the originals for nothing.

What comes next

More recently, Frazer has supplied the artwork for Marianne Faithfull’s final release, the posthumous EP Burning Moonlight on Decca. Marianne died in January 2025, before he could meet her and before she could sign the work, which he still regrets.

Then, the jazz guitarist, Robbie Melville, turned up with The Village Square, a set of original fairy tales scored for live performance with cellist, Zoe Knighton, and actor, Richard Piper narrating. Frazer read the stories, and to be frank, was not certain about them. Needing a second opinion, he handed them to his wife and decided to take the job when she said they were strange yet good. Out of it came a recurring image of people hugging, animals included, that he has been mining ever since.

That image is feeding the big one, a show for Australian Galleries he describes, cheerfully, as his post-apocalyptic gardening show. The premise: The world has been wrecked by alpha males, and the gentlemen are left to revegetate it. Blokes digging holes in desolate country but planting anyway. He credits Winston’s Juice for the mood.

Small engravings will carry the desolation. Larger pieces will carry the gardens, so the show reads as what has been lost against what might be grown back. “Once I’ve got the idea, the story, the title, the narrative, I’m home,” he said. “Then, I’ve just got to produce the work and hope my body doesn’t fall apart.”

And Frazer’s never stopped pitching. Lucinda Williams has been a polite maybe for a couple of years. Bruce Springsteen is the near impossible one, though he notes Springsteen has sung on William’s recent records which means a door exists somewhere.

He has also floated running it backwards. Here are the pictures, he tells them. You write the song.