Figure 1

Ralph Miller, 1918 – 1956(Figure 1) , was a highly talented and successful commercial art designer and artist in the years leading up to the war. As a young man, he worked for the established Dunedin family design and sign-writing firm O.G. Miller, later to be renamed Miller Studios. Thanks to recent research conducted by his son Brian and the comprehensive book Brian published in 2013 as a result (Figure 2), we know a great deal about the life and wartime experiences of Ralph Miller.

Figure 2

https://lifelogs.co.nz/product/moments-in-time-ralph-miller-artist/

One difficulty we have when researching Miller’s work and history is that many of his drawings and paintings are undated. However, because his work is contained in many drawing books, we know they can be generally grouped into Pre-War, Fiji, Solomon Islands and Post War.

While he excelled as a graphic designer and sign-writer in the family firm, Miller was always more interested in developing his talents as an artist/painter. He was also a competent musician: he was a member of the St Kilda Band which won several national championships. Miller studied with two highly respected painters in Dunedin in the pre-war years: Alfred Henry O’Keeffe and later one of O’Keefe’s students, Katherine Salmond. O’Keeffe taught Miller oil painting, but he felt it was not suited to him and later on was to benefit more from Salmond’s training in water-colour painting. He quickly acquired exceptional skill in this medium even if, as in this example (Figure 3), the resulting imagery often owed more to that of the”Old Country” than to the New Zealand landscape.

Figure 3

The more fluid, yet arguably more demanding, technique of water-colour painting was better suited to Miller’s meticulous style and approach than oils, enabling him to capture people in motion and landscapes with distinctive spontaneity.

Miller began his basic training with the New Zealand Army at Burnham Military Camp south of Christchurch in March 1940. His musical talents were soon recognised and he was given a place in the Burnham Camp Band.

In November 1940 Miller left for Fiji, now a member of the 8^th Brigade Group Band. Miller was to remain as a member of the band for the duration of his time in the army. It was while in Fiji that his loose, impressionistic style of pencil and pen and ink drawings style began to evolve, as he recorded his fellow-soldiers and band members going about training activities and relaxing in their barracks. He also depicted local street scenes, tropical creatures and vegetation.

Several months after returning to New Zealand in 1942, he was to follow the same path my father Harry Stone would later do. Now part of the newly formed 3^rd Division of 2NZEF-IP (Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force In the Pacific), he visited New Caledonia, Guadalcanal, and then the Treasury Islands. He was to spend the next two years touring the Pacific with the Third Divisional Army Band playing wind instruments, before returning to New Zealand in August 1944, two months later than Harry Stone.

Before leaving for New Caledonia on 27 December 1942, Miller produced a Christmas card featuring the “Onward New Zealand” motif for the Army Band shown in Figure 4. Many copies of this card were printed for use by his fellow band-members.

Figure 4

As he toured with the band, he continued to hone his drawing skills, at one point noting in his diary: “Getting hold of muscles”. His ability to record people in motion was put to good use: he developed a confident yet loose, impressionistic style initially using Indian ink and later making the switch to predominantly conte wash. Like Russell Clark and Alan Barns Graham, he continued to use this ability to show his comrades relaxing and engaged in their everyday activities: building and maintaining living quarters, preparing food and cooking, eating, reading, writing home, playing cards and chess (Figures 4 – 6).

Or, as in this outstandingly rendered water-colour painting entitled “Bell Tents”, simply resting in the tropical heat (Figure 8). This painting is a match to the finest of Russell Clark’s water-colour work.

Figure 8

Men reading books, magazines and newspapers from home feature often in these images. Above the heads of the two men in Figure 4, Miller has included the bottom section of a poster for Milford Sound, the South Island tourist attraction and a New Zealand icon: for the men, a poignant visual reminder of home. The drawing, dated November 1941, shows the ‘Fiji Times’ on the left’. This wash drawing predates Miller’s time in New Caledonia and the Solomons.

Not surprisingly, many of his works feature the band at practice or rehearsal (Figures 9 and 10), or going from place to place with their instruments in the back of an army truck to perform (Figure 11). “In one period of just over two months, the band travelled more than 3000km and gave 70 concerts, one of them with an audience of 7000.” (Gillian Vine: Otago Daily Times review of “Artists in Uniform” exhibition of three NZ war artists, August 2017.)

Although, like my father, Miller was fortunate to have been “spared the horror of jungle fighting” (Harry Stone Diary 2, November 5 1943), he toured in New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands with the Army Band, playing in “mud, mud, more mud and more hurricanes” for five months before returning to New Caledonia and then New Zealand.

The band were on Mono Island on the night of February 4 1944 (Figure 12) when Japanese bombers attacked. James Perkins of the 29th Battalion wrote: “I believe the band hadn’t experienced any air raids till they came up here, and tonight when the raid was on they were sprawled in muddy ditches and culverts.”

Figure 12

It is interesting to compare this quote with what Harry wrote in his diary the day after from his gun emplacement on neighbouring Stirling Island:

“Saturday 5^thFebruary: A fair show in the way of an air-raid last night, 8 bombs were dropped on and near this island, but no-one was hurt though I think a generator near the fighter strip was wrecked. About eight or nine bombers flew over the ack-ack. Search lights held one plane in their beams for about five minutes, but the gunfire got nowhere near the plane. We are not at all pleased with the accuracy of their fire – in fact we’re disgusted, there is no definite proof of the ack-ack having brought a plane down yet!” Harry Stone Dairy No. 2

While drawing and painting in the Islands, Miller’s design training and instincts came through in much of his more formal work. Sometimes these take the form of curiously stylised, moderately abstracted images such as this painting of a soldier invading a tropical island with his bayoneted rifle at the ready (Figure 13). The stylised approach in this image and others like it are possibly a reflection of Miller’s interest in the American Regionalist movement, which was  popular in the 1930s. This style of painting, with its flattening of the picture plane, distortion of figures, patterning of the landscape and mild abstraction can also be seen in works by official war artist Russell Clark.

In Miller’s painting, support planes and ships are depicted in the background, with a stylised Japanese “Rising Sun” flag and Japanese soldier, ambiguously integrated into the jungle foliage to suggest the stealthy, camouflaged qualities of the Japanese forces, on the right. Miller has represented the head of the Japanese soldier in such a way that it can also be read as a skull, suggesting the imminent defeat/death of the enemy, or perhaps the death-dealing nature of jungle war-fare itself.

Miller appears to have enjoyed making postcard-like paintings, whether for the Army Band, as in Figure 4, for friends, to promote the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force In the Pacific (2nd NZEF-IP), or as a kind of tribute to the places he visited (Figure 14). He would make bespoke greeting cards for his mates to send home to family, and at Xmas 1943, painted a full-colour card which he sent to his future wife Nan in New Zealand (Figure 15).

The movie poster-like imagery he employed in these works generally depicted the Pacific as a tropical paradise. While they were admittedly made for private consumption, it is possible that with some of his images Miller unwittingly contributed to the general New Zealand public’s erroneous impression of the War in the Pacific at the time: of being little more than a thinly disguised South Pacific holiday excursion for soldiers in the tropics. The common, if inaccurate, perception of soldiers lolling about on sandy beaches in the company of dusky South Sea beauties gave rise to the pejorative term “Coconut Bombers” amongst the New Zealand public.

Perhaps Miller was channelling this irony with his painting of submachine-gun wielding soldiers and soldier-labourers holding pick-axes flanking what appears to be a tourism poster, complete with hula-dancer and the exhortation to “Visit the South Seas” (Figure 16).

Miller also painted what may perhaps have been intended as a postcard design promoting war-time New Caledonia (Figure 17). Symbolism features strongly in these postcard-like designs, the imagery intended to reinforce the presence of the 3rd Division in the Pacific: personal symbols such as New Zealand’s kiwi bird, musical notations and instruments, Pacific symbols such as beaches, hibiscus flowers and other tropical flora, land-crabs, lizards and mosquitos, the local Kanak people, French gendarmes, the Free French cross, army trucks and tents, the New Zealand “lemon squeezer” army hat, and frequently the “Onward New Zealand” motif.

After returning to New Zealand and being discharged from the army, Miller returned to his former position with the family firm. He took a keen interest in photo screen-print reproduction and ensured that Miller Studios was at the forefront of the introduction of this medium in Dunedin (Figure 18).

In 1946 he married Annie (Nan) Smith Buchanan, whom he had known and played tennis with before the war.

Also in 1946 he became a partner in the family business, renamed O G Miller and Sons. While working for the firm Ralph continued to attend life drawing classes to improve his figure drawing (Figures 19 and 20), and during lunchtimes often took a drawing pad, pencil and conte crayon out into the city streets to capture people going about their business. The fluid, impressionistic water-colour skills Miller had honed while away at war were put to great use in these works: they convey a sense of the busy-ness of the city environment, the public relief at war’s end and hope in the future that was pervasive in the post-war population (Figures 21 – 23). The family group in Figure 23 striding confidently forward into an idyllic future is of Miller and his family. Nan is on the left, with two of his children, Lindsay and Brian, on the right.

Ralph Miller has only in recent times been given the recognition he deserves as an artist and designer, being accorded a Memorial Exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1969, a retrospective exhibition at the Hocken Collections gallery in 2006, and a “Ralph Miller 100” exhibition at the Otago Art Society in 2019. Still, in the words of his son Brian, his work “remains largely unknown. His works are mainly seen on family walls.”

This is doubly ironic, because hanging on family walls or standing on family sideboards is exactly what most of the soldier-art produced in the Pacific was intended for.

In 1956 Miller died suddenly of unknown causes, (probably related to an earlier bout of rheumatic fever) aged only 37.

Figure 24