Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

75
He was far more interested in being good and kind and doing good works for people
[…], so we never said the Rosary at home like a lot of good Catholic families did then”.
She adds: “My father only went to Communion once a year, which was bordering on
mortal sin for the Catholic Church. And we never saw him go to confession. He
always took us to Mass, but he didn’t believe in prayers at home”. Interestingly, she
claims that it was her mother who taught the children childhood prayers and they all
“went through the practice at that time of making the first Communion”. 252
Despite the family not being “overly religious”, Judy and Vincent’s two sisters later
became ‘born-again’ Christians through the Charismatic movement. Marianne believes
although Vincent “never really had a conversion experience through his Catholicism
[…], it became part of his art”. She points to the ethos and cultural side of Catholicism
as being “very much in his films”, and uses What Dreams May Come to illustrate the
point that the film is a depiction of “heaven without the central figure”. She also sees
the “huge influences of his Catholic upbringing” as being the background to The
Navigator. 253 Trevor Lamb, a childhood friend of Vincent’s, concurs with Marianne in
seeing the religious undertones and sense of humour in his work “as reflecting the
person” that Vincent is. 254
Although Ward also asserts that he was not particularly religious, he was “drawn to the
apocalyptic engravings” in his grandfather’s leather-bound Bible, a scene that is
recreated by Toss in Vigil. Ward talks about imagining “demons rising up out of the
flaming fields to peals of thunder as my father burned back the barley stubble” and
about his attraction to fire. 255 Watching his father burn the piles of stillborn lambs is an
incident recalled in Vigil, as the memorable image of Toss’s father burning the sheep
carcasses. Marianne says of Vigil, that the character of Toss was not a reflection of
either of his sisters’ personalities, it was more like his own. She does however claim
that the idea of the ballet tutu probably originated from her and Ingrid having learnt
ballet as kids. 256
252 Lynette Read, interview with Ingrid Ward, 15 April 1999.
253 Lynette Read, interview with Marianne Chandler, 1 October 1999.
254 Lynette Read, interview with Trevor Lamb, 15 April 1999.
255 Ward, Edge of the Earth: Stories and Images from the Antipodes 66.
256 Lynette Read, interview with Marianne Chandler, 1 October 1999.