From farm sheds to art galleries, from shipwrecks and sketchbooks to the pages of the daily news, Garrick Tremain has lived a life as colourful as his watercolour paintings.

In This Is It Then, the celebrated New Zealand artist and political cartoonist reflects on a lifetime of adventure — from horseback escapades and extensive world travels, to a distinguished career
in art and an enduring love story with his wife Jill.

Told with Tremain’s trademark wit, sharp eye and irreverent humour, this is an honest, richly detailed journey through decades of creativity, controversy, laughter and loss — the full canvas of a life well lived.

Foreword by Sir Grahame Sydney

On the back road from Arrowtown to Queenstown, at a sharp bend approaching Arthur’s Point there was a gateway with a large signpost pointing to a classy newly built home perched high on a ledge, far from traffic, hidden amongst trees:

Beggar’s Roost
Garrick Tremain
Gallery

We used to pass it often back then. Everyone knew who Garrick Tremain was – the political cartoonist for the Otago Daily Tomes and a number of other syndicated newspapers. His brilliant hand and acerbic wit were a treasured ingredient of breakfast table habits for thousands of morning readers across the South, and God knows how many kitchen fridges and office walls had favourite Tremain cartoon snipped from the paper and sellotaped or pinned to them. The daily Tremain was as compulsory as Weetbix or Sugar Puffs.

I didn’t know him personally, but thought it interesting the sign did not read ‘cartoonist’. And I knew this was the same man who had poked some public fun at a nearby new tourist attraction called “The Cattledrome” - built to entice foreign tourists to enjoy a close encounter with real live farm animals. The Prime Minister was to open the venue with all the fanfare and fuss typical of these occasions. Under cover of night, on the peeling , blistered side of a dilapidated shed beside the main road not 200m away, imitating exactly the font emblazoned on the facade of the big new building, Tremain carefully painted a rival attraction: “FLEADROME.”

Next morning the PM’s official party was driven the long way around to avoid any embarrassment - a result which not only gave Garry lasting delight, but also those carloads of us who passed by the little tumbledown maroon shed for many years following.Over the following years in the 70’s and 80’s I got to know Garrick little by little: that he was indeed an Artist – a successful landscape painter in oils and watercolour, a self-taught and committed musician playing in bands around the region, a public speaker in demand for his insightful, often lacerating verbal dexterity, with a seemingly effortless ability to produce pithy limericks, and of course his wizardry as, I believed then – still do – the best political cartoonist in the country, the rightful heir to the legacy of Dunedin’s own David Low.

Supporting these myriad talents was Garry’s sparkling wife Jill, a smiling, irrepressibly charming background presence, his devoted anchor through many storms; their enviable love story and mutual dependence lasted to within a whisker of sixty years.

One Tremain story has never left me, a typical throw-away comment so telling of this man’s extraordinary perception. We had been discussing the recent General Election – it must have been late in 1975, and the first-term Labour Member for Otago Central, Ian Quigley, had just been beaten for the seat by National’s Warren Cooper, a controversial figure even then. Garry, in his usual caustic manner, admitted that he was devastated by the result – “The first time an IQ had been beaten by a WC...”

Who else but Tremain?

So, here’s the memoir, providing many pieces of the jigsaw picture of his life. He had to wrestle with his natural reticence to write these storyboard glimpses into what lay behind the distinctive hand we knew so well: for so long he stubbornly defended the fortress of his private world. The immense grief of Jill’s sudden passing fueled his urge to get it all down and be grateful for it all.

He has so much to be grateful for, and I am too, for the privilege of knowing him and calling Tremain my friend.

GCS.