Photo by Birgit Freybe Bateman

My first year at the University of Toronto was in the last generation of "Pass Arts". Geography was one of my subjects and I was honoured to be one of the masses of students that attended lectures by Griffith Taylor during the 1950-51 school year. My early life was spent on the old Belt Line ravine. We lived on Chaplin Crescent and at the foot of our backyard was a delightful, relatively unpolluted creek with frogs and painted turtles. The valley, being part of the Don watershed, meant that we were on a bird migration route. It was a native ecosystem complete with carpets of trilliums and giant willows and oaks. After attending the Forest Hill Village school system, I made my way down Avenue Road on the strength of my thumb to U of T and back again.

I selected honours geography from a short list of my first year subjects because it interested me, obviously. But beyond that, it was the closest thing to an “out-doorsy” science course without the requirement of math. I have almost no genes for mathematics or even arithmetic. Most of my friends were taking biology with the promise of adventurous summer field jobs. One might have thought that I would take art (and archeology), but although I knew I would always be an artist, I never thought that one needed to “take” art. I still feel that way even though I taught art in high school for 20 years. In those years I was a Group of Seven “groupie”. I wanted to paint in the wilderness and I thought that I might get summer work in the wilds if I took geography and geology. This turned out to be true. I had one summer in Algonquin Park at the fish research station at Lake Opeongo. Then I landed a job with the Geological Survey of Canada doing the original mapping of the geology of Central Newfoundland. This in turn was my reference for employment with Fenimore Iron Mines, mapping potential iron ore deposits in Ungava (Arctic Quebec), south of Leif Bay. This was an astonishing experience¼ four “white” men and two “Inuit” living together for four months and exploring ground that the Inuit said their people had never walked on. We knew that no “white” men had ever been there. It was big, rolling country, resembling Scotland with harebells and heather. The wildlife was at its peak with gyrfalcons, golden eagles, plus abundant fishing. We named the lakes (not after ourselves, of course) that are now on the maps. During all of my summer field work, I painted up a storm – mostly 12 x 16 oils finished directly on the spot.

I had other reasons for wanting to take geography in that I have always been interested in patterns (visual and otherwise) and relationships between things. There were only seven in our class and we were almost like a family. I enjoyed all of our professors and teachers immensely¼Kerr, Putnam, Tatham, Tayyeb and Spelt were some of the illustrious names of that era. I especially found meaningful the course in the Philosophy of Geography and map interpretations by Professor Tatham. A couple of vivid memories of Dr. Putnam involved him falling asleep at the wheel when we were on a Pennsylvania field trip, and me getting him stuck in the mud in his car when he came to help me with my B.A. thesis in Central Haliburton country.

My choices upon graduation were to be an academic, a planner, or a teacher. I picked teaching because I've always loved it. I had been teaching at the Toronto Junior Naturalists since I was 16. Plus, I planned to use my holidays to pursue my painting. Although I was paid as a top category geography teacher, I evolved eventually into full-time art teaching until my retirement in 1976. From 1963 to 1965, I taught A level and O level geography in Eastern Nigeria under the External Aid Program. My students, being Ebos, were very demanding. When I arrived to replace an excellent Nigerian geography teacher who had been promoted, they quizzed me about my qualifications and were very disappointed that I had no post-graduate degrees. They then asked me where I stood in my class. They were somewhat mollified when I said that although I stood second when I graduated, I was first in my class in third year. I did not tell them that we were only seven.

I never expected to have a career in art. I painted in all of my spare time and gave the pictures away if people liked them. During my stint in Nigeria I visited Kenya and entered a calendar competition of East African Esso with a couple of wildlife paintings. An American woman who had the best art gallery in Nairobi saw them and asked me for more and began selling my work to wealthy Americans, British and Europeans. Then in 1967 I did my own centennial project of painting Halton County, where I lived on the Niagara Escarpment, as it had been in 1867 and still was (in 1967). I had a show at the Alice Peck Gallery in Burlington so my friends and public could see them and to my surprise, it sold out on opening night. My art career grew from there by word of mouth with shows in Hamilton, Toronto, New York and London¼ all sell outs. By 1976 I was paying more income tax on my art than my teaching so reluctantly, I left teaching in order to have more time to paint.

After that, things accelerated. I have no genes for salesmanship, either, and I never had an agent, but a number of dealers and publishers picked up various pieces of the Bateman art ball and ran with it. Now, when I am introduced before I give a lecture, there is a long litany including four best-selling coffee table books, numerous films, many museum shows (the most important being the Smithsonian Institute), honorary doctorates, Officer of the Order of Canada, plus two schools named after me. Other people have turned me into a celebrity on a modest Canadian scale. Since the '60's and increasingly every year, I have used this “soap box” to promote environmental caring and causes. In our Fulford Harbour home, studio and office, my wife Birgit spearheads conservation efforts form the domestic to the global. Furthermore, I now have a staff of two plus Birgit, who handle an almost overwhelming number of requests for my art or my money or my presence. It takes a lot of concentration on my part to “keep a life” and hold on to enough time for family, for adventures in nature and for painting.

Since I was 12 years old, my only goal was to have adventures in nature and put them down in paint. When I was taking geography at U of T, I had no idea that the world would become my oyster as it has. I went around it in a Landrover with Bristol Foster (5T5 Biology) in 1957-58. We traveled across Tropical Africa, Northern India, Burma, Thailand, Malaya and Australia, sleeping in the Landrover and cooking our own food¼ 14 months for $2,000 each. The world was safe in those days. It was when the going was good. In the last two decades I keep getting invited as a resource person on adventure tours to such places as Antarctica, Africa, the Amazon and Asia—Birgit always goes with me. It is like a magic carpet for us.

I have been blessed by geography in more ways than I can count.

GEOPLAN Editor's note: Robert Bateman originally submitted this article as a letter to UTAGA's History of the Department Committee. This Committee, chaired by Professor Emeritus Dick Baine, M.A. 5T2 and Professor Emeritus Donald Kerr, M.A. 4T3, Ph.D. 5T0, has been gathering biographies from alumni of the 1950s and early 60s in anticipation of the preparation of the Department's history for this period. Alumni from this era who wish to have their biographies included in the collection should submit them to the UTAGA Office. All alumni are invited to submit their recollections to UTAGA. Periodically selected biographies and recollections may be published, with the author's permission, in GEOPLAN.

Originally published in GEOPLAN--A newsletter for alumni and friends of the University of Toronto Department of Geography and Program in Planning, Spring 1999. Published with the approval of the author and the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto.

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