The paradox of Nathan Thambu Paramanathan

This article is a short biographical treatment of the life of Nathan Thambu Paramanathan, the inaugural president of Art Education Australia (AEA). It offers the reader an insight into his formative experiences in pre-war Kuala Lumpur, including his early exposure to the work of Dutch artist Meindert Hobbema, and then through the Japanese occupation, war time deprivation, and a post-war confrontation with the White Australia policy that made international headlines. Paramanathan now lives in retirement in Melbourne after a long and decorated career as an arts educator and a practicing artist. Though biography is often denigrated as something akin to fiction, it is nevertheless a means by which a reader can discern something of the “rainbow like intangibility” of a person’s inner life amidst the “granite like solidity of the facts”