Walkthrough Michael's Sydney studio (one and a half minutes)

Paul McGillick: I'm Paul McGillick. It's Thursday, the 23rd of February 2023, and I'm at the home and studio of painter and sculptor Michael Snape.

Paul McGillick: Now the best way to introduce Michael Snape, I think might be to quote from a recent article that I wrote for the magazine Artist Profile in which I said this 'Michael Snape is probably best known as a sculptor, but he is in fact an artistic polymath, sculptor, painter, writer, assiduous blogger. And one could also add perhaps occasional poet and musician'. So, Michael, this suggests to me an urgent need for expression which no single outlet can seem to satisfy. Is this right?

Michael Snape: I think that's a fair call. I give myself a lot of license. I think probably sometimes undeserved, but where I feel an urge to speak, I will find whatever means I can to ... to speak. Obviously, the ... the media through which I have more experience, are more reliable as ways of expressing and containing what I have to say. But I ... I can't explain.

Michael Snape: For example, my playing music is ... is without license. However ... I ... I seem to be able to access parts of me that through these other processes which are illuminating and I think inform the other ways I have ... they actually bring bring more language to the sculpture ... ultimately. I don't know how, but it seems to feel right.

Paul McGillick: Well, I do want to come back to this in a little while ... about what seems to me a certain complementarity, say, between the painting and the sculpture. But just to sum up then, it's just sort of ... you're talking about a language and you just in a way looking for a different language to say the same thing. Is that what's happening.

Michael Snape: Probably it is ... from a very early age, I had a sense that ... it almost ... almost like a preordained or a sense that I had something in me that I was compelled to express.

Michael Snape: I spoke to somebody recently about the idea of being ... ready formed one ... as an artist, either ready formed or emerges through a process of finding oneself. I've always felt, even from the age of, you know, 17, 18, that I was, I pressed a button that said Go and I was off. And I'm more or less still on that trajectory, even ... even when it hasn't necessarily been supported. It's ... it continues to be ... to find drive.

Paul McGillick: So is there anything in your family background which you think might have ... created this polymathic as ... artistic personality?

Michael Snape: I had ... my father was a psychiatrist. My mother was a designer. My mother gave me permission very early on to believe in myself. My father ... always insisted that I question that and be very suspicious of any any sense that I should believe in anything. And ... and ... the ... the the fact that my daughter is now an artist makes me believe in a kind of continuum. And that I am willing or otherwise a ... a necessary part of that process. Yeah. So, yes, ... it does concern me that that that it my belief in myself is un-soundly based, but I'm going with it.

Paul McGillick: When you say aren't soundly based, I'm not quite sure what you're saying. I mean, you do believe in yourself very strongly or are you suggesting that you have doubts?

Michael Snape: I have ... I have ... I have ... that was the other thing my ... my ... my father warned me against ... unsustainable sense of omnipotence, you know, of letting oneself to be all powerful. And if ... if you feel that ... if you allow yourself to feel that, then unfortunately, you ... you accept the opposite of that, which is, you know, a total lack of confidence or belief in yourself.

Paul McGillick: Well, can I just briefly then return to what I've suggested is a complementarity between the two? Now, you seem to agree with that. Can you elaborate a little bit on how, say, the painting and the sculpture complement one another?

Michael Snape: I think. I think ... What I'm interested in is the way that ... things complement each other in an entirely unpredictable ... unpredictable ways and what one needs to be reminded of in all these various departures and deviations is the way in which ... future work is informed. And ... ultimately one cannot anticipate.

Michael Snape: I suppose my the way I you know, how is my painting, how does my painting inform my sculpture? By showing that it ... nothing can be anticipated. I am reminded in everything I do that everything is only ever the beginning. You know, I'm not ... I don't build. I don't build on anything. I ... I it's almost like I'm taking stuff away in order to keep the foundation clear.

Michael Snape: And I always imagined that my life would ultimately lead to ... you know, a ... a something accruing. But ... it seems to be as much, you know, like levelling off continual levelling off. So the question is, how does my painting inform my sculpture ... through ... through shedding darkness?

Paul McGillick: Well, I've got some comments I'll make a bit later. I might sort of burrow into this issue a bit more. But what I want to ask you now is that ... if I go to your website, you have a category of work you refer to as 'text sculpture', which is sculpture incorporating words and texts. So how did this evolve and what's its function as distinct from the other sculptures?

Michael Snape: I have appetites for various ways of working. I love working with the figure and I ... worked with a figure for a period until my memory, my language, my access to my imagination in relation to the figure is exhausted and I just cannot do any more. And so I go to another area. With text, I ... I ... my mother was a typographer, endlessly watched her doing letterforms over her shoulder as I was growing up. So I kind of had ... had that love of ... of the letterforms and the way that the letterforms could be ... could produce in their combinations, meanings.

Paul McGillick: And of course, you're old enough to remember hot metal press, wouldn't you? And because that's a kind of sculpture really, isn't it?

Michael Snape: It is. And I'm interested in ... in ... in ... in publication, so that so that the actual making of text based sculpture is a kind of publication. Unlicensed ... it's an unlicensed publication. I have no you know ... there's no machinery that normally supports publication, such as editors, and you know ... Again, the license ... the license to publish ... provided by being supported by support ... by ... those who invite you to publish.

Paul McGillick: So, well, just maybe we can get a bit more concrete because the recent work you did with Agatha at the University of Sydney, I mean. Perhaps you could say a little bit about how that evolved and how you work together.

Michael Snape: Well, in relation to ... in relation to that particular piece, the ... the text and the choice of words and the way in which ... we arrived at those words and the scale and the way that you moved around the words, was ... produced out of a joint sensibility, out of a common sensibility, interest in language and words in space ... I think I had only recently embraced the idea that I was not of myself, necessarily ... important, but that I was only ever at best ... a part of something.

Michael Snape: I've only recently realised that ... at best I am a part of a tradition of sculpture. My own voice ... is ... functions as being a part of a tradition. And I love that idea. And so ... that sculpture happened to parallel the recognition of that to become the part was to acknowledge that you know ... you know the ... the ... the ... the. That is a positive kind of position, which is very different to ... to one that I felt before ... obv ... you know, obvious to many. But, you know, a moment of ... you know, recognition on my part, which was,

Paul McGillick: well, you've just said that you've become increasingly conscious of being part of a tradition. Maybe you could elaborate upon that a bit. I mean, I've said I've never asked you, but I've just ... I've said previously that The Trail, for example, to me is ... an homage, as it were, to Henry Moore. In part. I know a lot more than that. So can you elaborate a little bit on that. But I mean, who in the tradition, for example, is become ... is important to you?

Michael Snape: Well, for all of my, you know, dispersed practice ... ultimately, you have to keep open other ways in which you might be ... read at the time. The fact is that I am trained as a sculptor and ... and I have reasonable, you know, ability to speak sculpturally. I understand sculptural language ... because of my training at the National Art School. Ian Mackay, Ron Robertson-Swann, Peter Powditch ... in relation to what they had all been taught, Linden Dads...

Paul McGillick: They were all teaching at the National Arts School?

Michael Snape: They were all teaching the National Arts School. They'd all been taught by, you know, the Lyndon Dadswell generation. So there was a real, a significant generation of thinking, sculptural thinking, which I was a beneficiary of. And ... and that probably is a rare thing. It's a rare ... it's rare to be part of a continual ... continuum ... within any culture of 50 years, really ...

Paul McGillick: because the National Art School itself has a ... an amazing tradition, sculptural tradition, because before Dadswell you had the Rayner Hoff period, which was fantastic.

Michael Snape: Yeah, yeah. And really ... to be noted, ultimately, as ... as a rare global ... condition for any continuum of that duration which was ... which ... which was had very specific, you know, formal language to be understood and ... and not to be ... not to be chucked away, you know. To ... to find a practice which... which acknowledged the richness of that, but ... and to find one's own voice. You know, that's. That's the challenge. Yeah.

Michael Snape: But yes, the ... I have had in my background, in my thinking, you know, my blog is called the Sydney School of Sculpture. What what constitutes the Sydney School of Sculpture? You know, if on the one hand, I'm talking about being part of a kind of a noble tradition, on the other hand, I'm scattering at, you know, in my own practice all over the shop. You know, how can I ... how can I bring the two together? Is ... is ...

Paul McGillick: And what about earlier people ... do you relate to people like Bertram Mackennal and Harold Parker. I mean, they ...

Michael Snape: Only ... only in that. My God, there were some serious people, you know, you could look at them, Bertrand Mackennal and Rayner Hoff. And, you know, like ... it's ... it's no small thing to be that accomplished, you know, to ... to ... to ... to have a ... a ... a ... a ... lang ... a formal language that has an ability to be physically realised is amazing.

Paul McGillick: All right. Well, let's take a slight ... different tack. For the time being. We're sitting in your house and studio and you have lived in this house and studio for over 50 years. So how significant has it been for you to be able to combine house and studio?

Michael Snape: I, I had a great studio when I left art school and I lost it after three years. And I was devastated. And I thought, I can't do that again. I have to find a studio where I won't ever have to leave. I think I was probably oversensitive, you know, I should have got a life and like not have any expectation that you're going to have somewhere. But we found this place and it was affordable and ...

Paul McGillick: See, because a lot of artists like the idea of being having them separate and leave home and go to the studio, but you ... you've got them together.

Michael Snape: Look ... I think ... I think you... To ... to be able to have ... to be able to practice as an artist is a miracle. Like ... like if you can figure out some way of surviving as an artist, it's amazing. You ... very few artists can afford a studio and a house. You know, there's ... there's ... there's set ... setbacks. There's ... there's disadvantages to obviously. Well ... after 50 years, I can't work here anymore because of noise complaints from neighbours. But to be able to live and work is just been an extraordinary luxury ...

Michael Snape: Yesterday ... my daughter was talking about having grown up with the sounds of a grinder and being somewhat traumatised by that. She's realising only recently that that's ... it's been an issue. I was unaware of that or so self-possessed that I didn't care.

Michael Snape: I've had periods of having a studio away and that's been great and brings other positives and negatives. You know, driving somewhere, you know, takes an hour out of the day. I prefer ... sometimes I ... well, again, pros and cons. You wake up in 3 o'clock in the morning and go and check to see what you're doing. It's great and good. Problematic sometimes, but ... but great. Yeah. So both ways.

Paul McGillick: You've sort of recently acquired a second home and studio in rural New South Wales. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how it came about and how it now functions in your overall life and practice.

Michael Snape: I have a ... a ... a larger production than a market, so I have had to store works over that period of time, which were ... never going to find a home. And I was paying too much money for storage. And so we found somewhere to store the work, which was the same price as the cost of paying for it to be stored.

Michael Snape: That ... was five years ago, and I guess it was three years ago that COVID first presented itself. And so we left for health reasons to go there and live there. And we spent two winters at living in the shed at Wamboin. And recently I've been able to start to ... put the sculptures up at Wamboin and to make a real ...

Paul McGillick: Like a sculpture park.

Michael Snape: This is kind of a sculpture ... it's not a park because it's a wilderness there ... it's a sculpture wilderness. And ... and I'm taking some perverse pleasure from finding an environment in which those things ... can be at home, where the world had not really been that ...

Michael Snape: Look the world has not been completely ambivalent. I've ... I've survived, but I suppose ... It's it's almost feel like I don't want to ever sell anything again because I want to just keep on building this ... and the work ... that it's when you ... when the works go up side by side in the country, in the landscape, even though they're at risk from being damaged in the weather, there are links between the works. They speak together over time, as if all of my kind of ... belief was ... justified. You know ... they ... they connect over time, beautifully.

Paul McGillick: ... Your sculpture is both abstract and figurative and quite often those two things are combined in the one sculpture. So does this suggest a divided artistic personality or a kind of artistic program?

Michael Snape: Yeah, I think you never know how things come together. That's my main kind of philosophy. How ... you know ... you keep an open ... menu. You keep ... you keep ... you keep the language open so that connections can be made between things. When the book is closed, you don't have ... as much scope to draw things together. So I'm always ... I suppose that's .... that's why I believe in keeping ... keeping an open mind is because the best connections get made across the big gaps.

Michael Snape: And, and if you have an expectation of how things come together, then nothing comes together properly. So on the one hand, it's ill disciplined. On the other hand, it's the only way I can make profound connections. So within in one work, for example, you know, I don't know whether it's going to ... well, it means no difference ... it makes no difference to me whether there's subject connections or formal abstract connections or literary connections in any ... any kind of scope for things being connected is valid. And ...

Paul McGillick: So ... so ... assuming for the moment there is a body of work of yours which we can call abstract sculpture. So how abstract is your abstract sculpture? Is it ever completely divorced from some kind of representation or figuration?

Michael Snape: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If ... if ... if the language of a work is purely, you know, bar, dot, straight lines against the curve, it's ... it's ... it's only abstract. There's no other ... there's no other thing that needs to be brought to it. I was looking at the work at ... in the country the other day and there's quite a lot of abstract work which is ... which is almost insolently ... defiant of reference. And that has to be ... that has to be ... Well, it's when ... when ... when ... when it's appropriate. It's appropriate given given what you're well responding to.

Paul McGillick: So, at this point, let's just turn to the more overtly figurative pieces. For example, the cut metal plate, chains of apparently dancing figures a la Matisse's La Danse. Can you describe for me the origins and development of these pieces?

Michael Snape: Yeah, well, we are ... we are a product of our relationship with all of our history. Whether it's our interest in other art, our art education. You know, we like to think we are our own invention, but we're still a product of, you know, many things.

Michael Snape: I started doing those cut-outs when I was 18. I couldn't ... I was doing I was doing drawings, figure drawings. And I would need ... physically need to cut them out. Why am I cutting this out? It makes no sense. I needed to make a ... make the drawing physical and ... and ... and you can't just have to go with it. Like if you and ... and if you respond to what you felt like doing and have a bigger response, you get affirmed. It gets affirmed.

Michael Snape: And I loved the the way that I could not only, you know, use the figure that I loved in others, but I could also with the figure, embody my own physical experience, you know, And I think ... I think I got this from my father because my father used to play. We used to do like he would, you know, hold my arm out and, you know, force me to, you know, do something ... may ... have an appreciation of the weight of my arm or the you know, I don't know ...

Paul McGillick: Because I'm personally very fond of these works, because I love the energy and there's this kind of sense of humour or good humour of, sense of fun in them as well. The energy, the rhythms of it. I mean, so I'm just curious. I'm just trying to burrow into this a bit.

Michael Snape: I totally am too. And I love it when I ... when ... when ... it takes off. But sometimes I can ... I can spend all day drawing and just like ... there's not speaking to me and and you just have to find something that's like ... There's things, there's a, there's cues, there's a cues. Q not 'que' ... not 'cue'. But queues ... there's queues of things waiting to be dealt with, you deal with something and then you exhaust that. And there's another thing waiting and, and sometimes you can block that thing out, finally go, okay, I'll deal with you now.

Michael Snape: The figure work ... it's been ... It's been several years since I've done any figure work since I've had ... an appetite. It is like an appetite to find the pleasure in the line ... to find the pleasure in actually accessing the ... the the mental ... act of dredging that memory out. You know, it was hugely like, amazing. You know, I didn't even know I thought that or could remember that. Like it's ... it's ...

Paul McGillick: So it's sounds to me like the very strong intuitive element.

Michael Snape: Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, it's all a bit intuitively and a bit ... a bit recklessly intuitive. I sort of trust ...I trust I ... there will be some deliverance from a disciplined response to intuitive and that ... that ... you know, it's a bit, a bit irresponsible but it's kind of ... it's the way I elected to go, really, and I'm committed to it.

Paul McGillick: Well, I think going back to the the 2022 show at Australian Galleries ... we just discussed the role of intuition. And I think in my catalogue, as I referred to ... the ... Louis Kahn, the American architect who talked about how a building or a space had to find out or discover what it wanted to be. So, and I applied that to you, to those paintings. Was I right in doing that? It was a process of the painting, trying to discover what it wanted to be.

Michael Snape: Absolutely. Yeah. And ... and ... and it was in that instance of the paintings, me trying to find out where I had found myself in the country and finding some way of ... describing that what you don't actually know where you are until you've made some sort of account of it. And ...

Paul McGillick: Well, yeah, because my next question actually is probably a good moment to ask this because the landscape seems very important to you personally and as an artist. So can we assume that the Wamboin option which you now have is an opportunity to engage with the landscape in a different way and that just because it's very different, because it's just very different from, say, this context, which is a fairly dense urban context in Balmain.

Michael Snape: I can't believe how much being in the country is a kind of physical ... kind of rebirth. You know, you actually ... to be in a space ... that ... that ... that extends, you know, to the horizon that ... that is ... not only benign, but, you know, like ... giving in every way. There's. Uh ... Great. I love it. It's love. We're probably going to be there more. Even though this has been fantastic here, and it's spacious and ...

Paul McGillick: Well, one thing seems to be in common between the sculpture and the painting, especially as it applies to the landscape ... seems to be that both seem to me about inhabiting the landscape rather than simply representing it. For example, in your exhibition Fold ... Fol ... Forest, was it ...

Michael Snape: Folded Forest

Paul McGillick: at Australian Galleries or The Trail, for example, at Sydney Park, where it is an object in the landscape, but you can see through this object, so the object is a part of the landscape. Can you comment on that ... inhabiting the landscape?

Michael Snape: Yeah, I suppose ... the ... the ... Well in relation to the sculpture. I've always felt that in ... in Australia, in Sydney ... today ... the light does not lend itself to ... looking at objects. We seem to need to look through things as much as at them and that objects provide an interruption ... to everything else that we're looking at. And that has to be recognised in order to for you to start in order for you to ... proceed. Is ... I don't know that I've probably haven't thought about that specifically that ... that ...

Paul McGillick: well, for example, a trail, it is an object in the landscape, but it's an object which in a sense disintegrates because you can see through it. So it becomes a part of the landscape, not just an object in the landscape.

Michael Snape: I do ... I do ... I do like the way that, you know, for all of its mass and weight and, you know, physical assertiveness, steel can ... can dissipate itself so well, as well. You know, the sculpture at St Andrew's, you can hardly see you know, you look at the buildings and you know ... I love ... I love that aspect.

Michael Snape: And I think ... I think maybe temperamentally I do like the idea of something that is simultaneously absent and present ... is ... probably attractive. Yeah. But I also think I mean, that's the history of ... history of modernism, too, was that the positive and the negative were in dialogue in a way that they hadn't been previously in the history of Western art. And that ...

Paul McGillick: yes, it's that tension between the surface and depth isn't something. Yeah. Plain.

Michael Snape: Yeah. But again, I think the ... the ... the cutting ... I have ... Michael Buzacott, sculptor, mentioned ... mentioned to me 20 years ago, 'You seem to need to cut everything'. So it's not from shaping. I'm not shaping like as in carving or modelling. I'm cutting, I'm always cutting.

Michael Snape: And ... in a ... that may be something that that can be drawn out along the ... you know ... all of the threads that there's the cut text and the cut figures and the cut abstract forms which may be a debt to drawing as opposed to there's always been a discussion with my work that it has a larger debt to drawing than to sculpture. There may be something in that.

Paul McGillick: Well, maybe we can just ... hone in a little bit on some general principles. Again, in that catalogue essay I referred to, I rather cheekily referred to the epistemology of art. That is to say, what does art do? What's its function in the world? So I quoted your catalogue from the Forest exhibition. You said this 'to me, art, whichever art it might be is a research project'. So to me that sounds like you're saying that art can never be taken for granted, that in a sense, every time you work on a new piece, it has to ask itself, This is why? What's its function?

Michael Snape: That, that I just I just don't understand how any serious artist can present their work as if there's something to behold, as if there's something finished that is momentous. It's ... it all has ... Unless it's a research project, it doesn't exist. There can be no certainty. You cannot approach anything with certainty.

Michael Snape: So that more or less puts the whole of the art world production in the bin. It's all predicated on the idea that the thing has inherently some value or worth which I discount completely. You have to start ... it has to be ... everything has to start from nothing in order to have any chance of being anything.

Michael Snape: And where ... where does where does this come from? And this is and this is something that I'm just recently thinking about is ... I have this ... idea of constant revolution ... of constant reinvention and ... the ... the person that we haven't discussed today, which is not my father nor my mother, nor my teachers, but my mother's brother, who ... was a communist. And I've somewhat of a father replacement and a big influence on me as a teenager.

Michael Snape: And he was just endlessly on about constant revolution and constant ... And he was talking about it in relation to ... he loved .... he kept going to Russia and you know, he had a big history of ... he was a scholar. He was an architect ...

Michael Snape: But as I was growing up, there was the talk of the revolution. You know, there was the there was the original Paris revolution. There was the ... there was the French Revolution and then there was the Paris Revolution. There was the Soviet Revolution. There's been and ... then there was the ... there was the hippie revolution. You know, there's been all sorts of ideas of the revolution. And when I start to talk about it, people talk about, well, what do you actually revolting against? You know, from what ... from which context? From which revolutionary?

Michael Snape: And like, I'm not a historian, I don't really know. Except that it is deeply embedded in me somehow the principle of revolution. And I kind of ... I believe ... I believe in it ... profoundly the way ... the way in which we ... find life ... is only out of, when I mentioned it before. Unless it emerges from darkness. It doesn't ... exist. And it doesn't ... it doesn't ... it has no life.

Paul McGillick: So these are ideas of yours. So that brings me to think about your blog, where you put ... put out lots of ideas. I mean, so what sort of need is that fulfilling with these opinion pieces and history pieces and so on?

Michael Snape: Well, for me, the blog, I mean, it's ... it's not ironic, the title of the blog is Sydney School of Sculpture, because everything in it is ... almost everything in it is not about it. But I'm ... I'm just wanting to ... I guess, find a forum for the different ways that I respond to the world and ... the way in which they, you know, just feeds ... feeds my thinking.

Michael Snape: I was down at the park this morning walking the dog. I looked into the drain and the drain had attracted from the storm, 50 bottles and the 50 plastic empty bottles were floating ... carried ... they were held in by the stormwater, but they were being turbulated by the water still coming from the storm, which was causing the bottles to rotate and to tumble in a confined space.

Michael Snape: And it was utterly worthy of ... a kind of recognition and... I mean, one could not have expected to look down and see that there. But having found it there, it was worthy of my attention. And ... I'm really interested in the way that things can can come to you. And ... and and they they always come to you out of nowhere and ... they're more satisfying as they come to you out of nowhere. And ...

Paul McGillick: Well, that kind of leads us, I think, into another topic, which is the topic of commissions, because there's on the one hand, this work, which is a direct expression of of yourself, but then you have commissions. I mean, how does that work in practice and how does that affect how the work emerges? For example, having a commission, how does the process work?

Michael Snape: Well, I get commissions from ... from generally people who understand that I am impossible to work with and don't ... don't ... don't take a brief seriously. I'm very good at responding to a site and ... to the physical nature of a site. And I'm also ... quite easygoing and amenable to discussion and, you know, taking on board... certain things that they might talk about, in fact.

Paul McGillick: What kind of things would the brief say?

Michael Snape: I might be enlivened, for example, by their expectations of what a work should have in it. And I will find a way that that ... that ... that overlaps my need to ... access something that I need to talk about. And I actually needed that, I actually needed that in order to bring something out in me that was dormant. I actually can use. I actually find the brief.

Paul McGillick: So the constraint of the brief ...

Michael Snape: I find the constraint of a brief, often liberating ... often it obviously doesn't take me away from myself, it actually takes me to myself, as much as all of the other ways of working do and ... and ... sometimes, I suppose people approach me three times as often as actually I get the commission because it doesn't quite take off, you know, thing ...

Michael Snape: When you get a commission, it has to like ... it has to find its life, It has to like everything has to find its life. And ... sometimes like the ... the ... the ... probably my best work was a commission which was ... well, possibly my two best works, the Graduate House Commission at the ANU, 100 metre long cut out just brought just ... I just found so much that I could say there. And I satisfied all of the brief requirements.

Paul McGillick: And the other one, the other example ...

Michael Snape: The other one was Apollo and Daphne, which was commissioned by Sandra McGrath in 1990. And she said at the first meeting ... she said, 'Bernini's ... I want you to make a sculpture that responds to Bernini's, Apollo and Daphne'. And I said, 'see you later. You know you can't tell me what to do'.

Michael Snape: And ... I came home and somehow I made a Bernini's Apollo and Daphne. And it's the most you couldn't like. It is the most subtle interpretation of that sculpture. And ... you know, achieved through ... achieved through kind of on my part, resistance and repulsion, you know, like you just never know how things are going to go. It's always like ... that's why you have to stay open. You can't close off.

Paul McGillick: Well, we've established that your practice is, I would say, fundamentally experimental and highly intuitive. So does that mean ... can I ask as a final question, if you like, do you ... do you actually know where you're going or is that have to be discovered in the process? Where to next, in other words?

Michael Snape: Well, I'm ... I'm a ... a wood carver, and I will never do anything else apart from wood carving, from now on. And I can't think why I was so obsessed with all of these other options, because ... because ...because there's very important work that needs to be done with regard to helping the indigenous people of Australia find their voice. And so I've been trying to carve the voice and I'm hoping that my small part will ... will play a part in ... helping us all find our way here in Australia.

Paul McGillick: Well, that's a good note on which to end. Thank you, Michael, for your time.

Michael Snape: It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Credits.

Interviewer: Dr. Paul McGillick

Producer & Videographer: Dr. Bob Jansen

Technical & Assembly Dr. Bob Jansen