Rod Moss
Rod Moss grew up in Melbourne, completing his schooling in Boronia and gaining Secondary Art Teaching qualifications. Moss was invited to teach in the avant garde, experimental Brinsley Road school that emerged in Melbourne during the early 1970s. After a year’s interlude in West Virginia, teaching at John G Bennett’s school following the principles of Armenian thaumaturge and philosopher George Gurdjieff, Moss relocated to central Australia, where he has lived since 1984. Moss lectured, painted and drew at the southern campus of Charles Darwin University until his returement in 2008.
He is an award-winning artist and writer. His first memoir, The Hard Light of Day, received the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and the Norther Territory Book of the Year. His second, A Thousand Cuts, won the 2014 Chief Minister’s Northern Territory Book of the Year Award. Moss exhibits in Alice Springs, Brisbane, Melbourne and the USA.
Rod Moss
The memoirs and paintings that Rod Moss has produced during the last 35 years are unique in their dramatisation of the lives of his trusting Aboriginal family and have been critically acclaimed nationally and internationally. In his third memoir we follow the nurturing of the curiosity and openness that has fastened him to the luminous power of Central Australia and its First Peoples. From the foothills of Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges and his city-based art education, we are taken to arid-zone Victoria where he first embraces the climate most conducive to his well-being. He returns to the city and is invited to participate in Melbourne’s dynamic experimental small school movement. Then there’s a year in the USA studying the ‘spiritual’ teachings of Gurdjieff in a Shenandoah farm setting. Travel necessarily widens perceptions and continues to pique his curiosity. A trip to a Pilbra Indigenous community opens the door on the Aboriginal world that he will spend the rest of his life coming to terms with.
Crossing the Great Divide is deeply insightful without pretension; compelling reading for those who relish exquisite writing combined with the artist-philosopher’s apprehension of our world. The reader is swept along through an historical arc of great moments. At times it reads like some exotic travelogue where familiar places are freshly painted in details only remembered as you read––like a 3-dimensional re-experiencing of that place. Throughout, it creates a strong sense of the unique, essential Australianness with which we apprehend our world