I didn’t know Merv had died until a letter arrived from his wife Joyce. The pottery worlds of Adelaide and Brisbane are far apart and news doesn’t always travel with the speed of a phone call or an email, but late or not, it was still a sad shock. I immediately rang Joyce and she gave me the details.

Over the years there had been other long distance conversations with Joyce, especially when Merv had yelled for her to come to the phone to take part in a lively three-way exchange. His deafness had got much worse over the years and in fact I can’t recall a time when Merv didn’t have a clay-covered hearing device hanging around his neck to either ‘tune in’ or ‘tune out’ conversations, depending on whether he wanted them or not. But he has gone now and sadly I can’t think of many others with whom to share a bank of early memories which date back over half a century. His brothers Gordon and Eric who were also part of my early pottery life are gone, as has Harry Memmott. But at least with Harry, I was able to spend some time with him shortly before he died. There are of course many others who owe their own debts to Merv and Harry, but they came later.

It was through Harry Memmott I came to meet Mervin, about fifty three years ago. Harry had completed a post-war ‘repat’ art course at the renowned East Sydney Technical College and with newly born twins Carl and Paul and wife ‘Cooch,’ had returned to Brisbane to live in the old family house a few doors from the Sandison Pottery at Annerley. For Harry this was familiar territory as he had virtually grown up in the shadow of the pottery kiln stack and as a child had wandered in and out of his grandfather’s workshop. I recall an early drawing Harry did of his grandfather throwing at the wheel, which even then showed his uncanny facility with pens, pencils, sharpened bamboo, or anything else for that matter that could scratch a line. It was at the old Annerley pottery that Harry too was to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, and it was also there that I received my early pottery tuition. But first, a little history to explain the Feeney link.

J.T. Sandison, or ‘Grandpa’ Sandison, as everyone referred to him during my time there, had come to Brisbane from Bendigo around the turn of the century and so could rightly be regarded as a Queensland pioneer potter. The pottery he established at Annerley - in what was then an outer Brisbane suburb - was erected long before building codes. It was fashioned from giant hardwood timbers, rough cut, and the original building was still standing some fifty years later despite constant onslaughts from termites. In the early days the building probably didn’t have walls; the corrugated roof which covered the working area, with its throwing wheels and mounds of dry clay, as well as the prepared clay kept plastic under wet sacks, was no doubt still the original one. When I first went there with Harry, old Grandpa Sandison had retired and the business was being run by Harry’s uncle, George Sandison, or ‘Uncle’ George, as everyone called him.

The pottery was by then struggling to exist because in those post-war years there was no longer any demand for the marvellous old ‘pioneer’ pots that had kept the business in production for half a century, and the main output was flower-pots. Uncle George could still demonstrate his skill, when urged to do it, by throwing three or four flower pots a minute, but by then it was obvious the business needed an infusion of new and younger blood before it too went out of business following the fate of other potteries. And so it was fortunate that in 1946, Mervin Feeney came on the scene: Merv had recently returned to a postwar Queensland and was looking for new opportunities.

The old Sandison pottery is still impressed on my memory; the sight of pots drying on stillages, changing colour from dark to light grey, much as they would have looked fifty years earlier. The roof was marvellously rusted, having lost most of its galvanised protection because of the acid action of the firings. The kiln still regularly sent ash and smoke over the neighbourhood, but in the earlier days it is unlikely there would have been many to complain. When neighbours did come later they would have become used to the rhythms of the pottery, and avoided nuisance by not hanging out wet washing on firing days.

Behind the pottery was a large gully where the first clay would have been dug and around the yard were smaller kilns, built long before, but during my time were unused, except as storage or as a home for spiders and snakes. The floor of the pottery was compacted earth with rough steps cut up the slight slope. Outside there was still the clay pit into which the youngest and silliest worker would have had to climb to tread the clay until it oozed between toes; perhaps all right in summer but not in winter. There was still the place where a horse walked in circles providing equine power for the crusher or pug-mill. It was a place of memories.

Neither Harry nor I were potters when I first met Merv sometime around the end of 1949. Harry at that time ran a business using his art skills doing silk-screen posters for the ‘radical Left.’ He also made picture frames and this is when we met and became friends. Both of us had wasted years in the Services and were finding our way in a newer uncertain world. I had a job in broadcasting but as a part-time student attended painting and drawing classes at the Brisbane Central Technical College and it was Harry who framed some of the doubtful art I did at the time. My wife Bette and I lived in the next suburb to Annerley and one day, when his car was ‘off the road’ Harry asked me would I drive him to Merv Feeney’s home. Merv’s house was what is today called a ‘Queenslander’, built high on wooden stumps, and underneath was a small pottery where he taught some students. Merv invited me to ‘have a go’ on the wheel, and of course I did, and that was where, for me, it all began.

Mervin Feeney was born in 1914, at Marburg, about 19km from Ipswich. He grew up in Ipswich and after his schooling was completed he first did some itinerant farm work in the country, but then, at seventeen years of age, he began to work at Ramsey’s Pottery at Bundamba, in the Ipswich area. He probably started out doing odd jobs around the works, but recalls taking every opportunity to jump on a vacant wheel to try and become a ‘thrower.’ When the boss, old Johnny Ramsey ‘went to the dunny for a nature call,’ Merv would jump on his wheel. He said he had to keep an eye on the dunny door to allow himself enough time to clean the wheel-head before being caught, thus avoiding a kicked backside. But that stolen practice stood him in good stead and eventually old Johnny Ramsey took Merv on permanently and so began the best informal apprenticeship one could have, learning by watching what the others did and then perfecting it through the rigours of enforced five-finger exercises Eventually there wasn’t much he couldn’t do: not only could he throw teapots, flower pots, water coolers and butter coolers but also stoneware demijohns for wines, spirits and acids. Throwing one-piece items out of 60 pounds of clay was routine and Merv could exceed even those limits. He also mastered mold-making, slip-casting and everything else that was part of potteries of the day. Somehow he also found time to attend night classes to study for a Diploma in Industrial Chemistry, because even as a young bloke he was no mental slouch.

Ramseys Pottery closed in 1938 and Merv then worked at Stone’s Pottery in Coorparoo in Brisbane, and then for a couple of years at Rylance Refractories at Dinmore where he also tested and researched local clay bodies. (it should be pointed out that this whole area is part of the Ipswich Coal Measures, with good clay in abundance, the oldest of which is in excess of ninety million years).

It was wartime and because he was qualified as an industrial chemist he was seconded into the war effort, and after training in explosives and munitions at Ballarat in Victoria he was sent to work at Salisbury in South Australia. By then, in 1941, Merv had married his Queensland ‘sweetheart’ Joyce, and she and newly born son John joined him at Salisbury in 1942. Shortly after, another facet was added to Merv’s skills when the paper mill at Millicent in South Australia required a chemist and Merv was appointed there to the position of Mill Chemist.

It was there that their second child, Beverley, was born in 1944. When the family returned to Queensland, their third child, daughter Elwyn, was born in 1949. But it was in 1946, on his return to Queensland, that Merv took up a partnership with ‘Uncle’ George Sandison at the old Sandison Pottery at Annerley.

In those early post-war days, ‘throwers’ were not common. At Sandisons most of the output was flower-pots, breadcrocks, poultry-feeders, butter-coolers, and as I recall, the occasional chimney pots. It was then that Merv’s engineering skills were utilized and he began to mass-produce pots on machines, some acquired second-hand but others he designed and made himself. Most of the basic pot shapes were produced on the machines but with the ‘specials,’ the finishing, or reshaping, was done on the wheel. The pottery not only survived, it became healthy, even dynamic.

By this time production was increasing to the point where larger premises were required and it was a full turn of the circle when, in 1951, Merv bought out Ramsey’s Pottery, the one at which his career had started twenty years earlier. In 1957, it was decided that the pottery at Annerley would be kept for sales and distribution, with all production centred at Bundamba. But such was the demand for their pots, even Ramsey’s became too small and a new pottery was built on a 2.3 hectare site at Wulkuraka, 10 kilometres from Ipswich. This was a major expansion with warehouse, offices, loading bay complex and new machinery, and a projected work force of over fifty employees, a situation far different to Annerley.
Merv was much more than a potter; he was a chemist, and what was equally important, he was also an engineer. An oft-quoted example of his engineering ingenuity is a pot machine he made, that produced eleven 150 mm pots a minute, whereas the best machine he could have purchased from overseas would have cost a half-million dollars but offering a production rate of only five pots a minute. Kilns, driers, clay preparation machinery as well as the pot machines were all made on the premises. And Merv also made clay bodies.

Potters from all over Australia know of the Feeney clays; there are about ten varieties including porcelain bodies. In fact, in a day and age when local potteries were being sent to the wall through imports, Mervin Feeney was exporting pots and sending clay all over Australia.

Merv’s life wasn’t all pottery: He was a keen singer and sang in church choirs. Also, he was a Rotarian and acknowledgement of his twenty years service to Rotary earned him the Paul Harris Fellowship Medal. The previous year, in 1986, he was also the recipient of an Advance Australia Award, one of eleven Queenslanders to be so honoured. He was Vice Patron to the Queensland Potters Association, and also was patron to many provincial pottery groups. He was also a teacher and was in demand for workshops and anyone who was lucky enough to see the Feeney magic at work can know they’ve seen the best, although, in our last conversation he admitted he tried to show someone how a pot was thrown, and laughing heartily said “I made an old fool of myself.” I once brought him down to Adelaide so my own students at the time could trace where their potting roots had received sustenance. It was a warm and remarkable visit and the students loved him.

Mervin Feeney once told me that he was a ‘potter by apprenticeship, a chemist by profession, but was an engineer by choice.’
It is true that he was all those things but he was much much more. He was one of the most intelligent people I have known and in another age, perhaps even in another country, if the ‘time and tide of life‘ had flowed a little differently, he could have been a world-famous researcher in any number of fields. Joyce tells the story that he often went to bed with an enclyclopaedia for general reading; I cannot think of many topics we discussed to which he couldn’t make an insightful and knowledgeable contribution. But there were some areas he hadn’t had the time to really understand, such as art theory, or philosophy, but even with these more abstract topics he didn’t have a closed mind.

Harry Memmott was always intellectually challenging and I think Merv enjoyed the different sort of interests that came when Harry finally shifted his workshop there. I was able to observe all this first-hand because I too spent countless hours there with Harry, when in shared effort, we produced thousands of the decorations on his pots, often even signing his name on the bottom as well: this led Harry to remark that ‘he was glad he didn’t have any money in the bank.’ For me it was an important period in that it gave me the chance to develop the sort of fluency in using an artists’ brush that can only come through constant application.
It was a rich time in many ways. We would sit for hours upon hours, on fruit boxes upturned on the dirt floor, ware boards between us covered in pots. Often as we worked we were silent. At other times conversations would range from art philosophy to existentialism to Marxism and Merv would often stop and listen because for him it was another world of thought entirely.
But if we added anything to the richness of Merv’s life it was poor return for what he did for us. He was mentor, in-house genius, and special friend. In fact, in every way he was a remarkable human being. But the most remarkable thing about Mervin Feeney was that he didn’t know how remarkable he was and that is one of the most difficult of all attainments. I’m sure many of us cherish his memory.

With love and respect, Milton Moon.

PS. A special ‘thank-you’ must go to Joyce Feeney and daughter Beverley for scouring through a mound of Merv’s memories to supply me with accurate information for this inadequate tribute to a very special ‘bloke.’