Lunch with Bryan Dawe: John's sudden passing really made me think that you've just got to live for the moment

Thing is, Dawe turned 70 in March.

Many people of that age are contentedly settling into the plans they had made for their retirement long before.

But Dawe – satirist, author, actor, self-described troublemaker and much else besides – is busily consumed by yet another of his many virtuosities: that of visual artist.

He is packing away the stage persona that has cracked up audiences and travelled the boards with him for many years, Sir Murray Rivers, QC, a shambolic "former Supreme Court judge" given to holding forth over a glass of whiskey from his Melbourne club.

He is considering – sometime – writing a new series of one of Australia's most-loved characters of radio and the stage, Roly Parks, co-created by Dawes with actress Jody Seidel many years ago. Roly (and former wife Sonya) hails from the South Australian country town of Kalangadoo, and Roly tells of his life through tender letters to his son, Gene, who lives overseas with his ballet-dancer partner Ahmed.

And, of course, Dawe's career as one half of the famous Clarke and Dawe satirical TV partnership – unmatched for more than a quarter of a century in impaling the pompous and the powerful – vanished last year when Clarke died while walking Mount Abrupt in Victoria's Grampians.

Grieving, unsure quite what to do, but determined to avoid the public gaze, Dawe took himself off to Tangier, Morocco, late last year.

"John's sudden passing really made me think that you've just got to live for the moment," he says. "All you can do is the work, and the career takes care of itself, hopefully."

And in Tangier, he found himself willed to work, immersing himself in capturing the exotic city and its people in a form of visual art he describes as montage and collage.

He is back in Australia now, having brought with him what he created in Tangier – an exhibition of the most extraordinary works.

The collection – curated, like all of his previous exhibitions, by long-time friend and curator Krista McClelland – is about to open in Bendigo, at the Arnold Street Gallery.

It is entitled Improvisé, which in French means, roughly, using anything that comes to hand.

It is as accurate a description of the work as you might get. Dawe used whatever was around him: photographic images he had captured of the ancient city, its open squares, cinemas, cafes and an abandoned theatre; paintings and drawings of the men and women of the city; cut-outs of colour and the occasional old film poster.

The photographs, paintings, drawings and cut-outs have been merged digitally on an iPad in a technique that has created variously gorgeous dreamscapes, witty portraits and celebratory pastiche.

The new collection is what has brought us to lunch.

We're at Donovans, the St Kilda beachside restaurant that Dawe declares has long been his favourite eating establishment.

We are ushered to a table by the window, wind-driven white caps skipping across the cold bay outside. Mercifully, there is a log fire warming the restaurant, and a bottle of Jim Barry Single Vineyard Shiraz from the Clare Valley at hand.

But it is the view of the sea across the sand-blown beach that dominates everything, granting, it seems, Dawe's restive soul a sense of calm, or something approaching it.

"I need to be close to the water," says Dawe. "Always have needed it."

He was born and raised seaside, he tells me, among the docks and the shipping of working-class Port Adelaide. His home these days, when he is in Australia, sits mere steps from the water at Phillip Island.

And what is becoming his other home, Tangier, teeters on the edge of another body of water, the Strait of Gibraltar.

Despite eschewing the idea of having a firm plan, he muses about returning there more permanently, or maybe to a seaside area of Spain or Portugal, and returning to Australia with yet more exhibitions of his work.

"That'd be great if it happens, if not …"

He leaves the future unexplored and turns his attention to food.

"I really want a steak," he says. "A T-bone."

And why not?

Whatever else it may offer in earthly delights, Tangier is short on T-bone steaks. When it arrives, with salad and Donovans' golden, crunchy chips, Dawe devours it with serious pleasure.

First, though, he chooses half-a-dozen oysters – three of the Pacific variety from South Australia, three Sydney rock – and I tag along with just three Sydney rock. They arrive perfectly fresh and dressed lightly with Spanish onion and dill vinaigrette.

Disregarding stuffy conventions about white wine with seafood, we stick with Jim Barry's splendid shiraz, which is giving the afternoon a rosy lift, and I choose fish (beer-battered rock flathead) and chips. Fish 'n' chips at Donovans, I would discover, is an experience close to unmatched.

Meanwhile, as us two old boys enjoy our determinedly unadventurous meal, the conversation veers to what might be called a portrait of the artist as a young man.

Dawe may have achieved fame for his broad range of artistic accomplishments, but he is almost entirely self-taught.

Having left school early to help support his mother after his father died at 46, he began work as a delivery boy for an Adelaide record shop.

The record business eventually took young Bryan Dawe to Melbourne where he sweet-talked himself a position as promotions manager for Astor Records. His big gig was turning Neil Diamond's record Hot August Night, into the number one charting album in Australia for 1973 and 1974, and keeping it near the top until 1976.

"I stayed at lunch and dinner for four years," recalls Dawe.

He then figured he could be a songwriter himself and teamed up with Steve Groves, a former member of the band Tin Tin.

Despite writing a song for pop star Marty Rhone that won the 1976 Australian Popular Song Festival and came third in the World Song Contest in Tokyo, songwriting "kept me poor for the next 10 years", Dawe concedes.

It was later, bored and a bit lost after returning to Australia from London, he discovered his aptitude for writing and performing comedy and satire.

"John [Clarke] once said all creativity is driven by boredom," he says. "And I think that's right."

And the rest, you might say in the shortest of shorthand, is history.

But what of photography, the basis for Dawe's more recent exploration of the arts?

Dawe, it turns out, has been a photographer for years and wanted from his early youth to master the craft, though he never learned its formal techniques.

"When I came over from Adelaide [aged in his 20s] I went along to the RMIT and I tried to join a course to do photography. But they knocked me back because I'd left school too early in Adelaide and didn't have my intermediate certificate. Not educated enough."

It clearly galls him still.

"But I got them back," he says. "Many years later, I found myself doing my talk called 'A Satirist's Journey' to the entire upper echelon of the RMIT.

"And part of that talk was to explain that I was told at school at Woodville High [in Adelaide] that I couldn't do what I am now doing. I was told I couldn't be a writer, couldn't be an actor, couldn't become a barrister.

"'You're from the wrong background', they said."

Dawe hated Woodville High when he was there.

"You've got all these working-class boys like me, and these aspirational middle-class kids who've all got books and a library at home and want to become doctors … and then you've got my friends and me. I mean, there wasn't a book in the house, because we couldn't afford it. This is not a hard-luck, working-class, chip-on-the-shoulder story. It's just reality."

In a wonderful irony, Dawe was invited back to Woodville High as the honoured guest for the school's 100th anniversary a few years ago.

"There was a big sign outside the school that said 'Welcome Back Old Scholar, Bryan Dawe'. Old scholar!"

The afternoon has worn on, a second bottle of Jim Barry's shiraz has somehow disappeared and we share desserts: a chocolate and peanut-butter gateau, and hand-rolled chocolate truffles.

We are, clearly, a very long way from Dawe's poverty-struck childhood.

We toast to a future with no plans and the ragged sea outside with a luscious sherry by Romate Cardenal. From Spain. Across the water from Tangier.

Improvisé, by Bryan Dawe is at Arnold Street Gallery, Bendigo, August 11-26, 11am-5pm Tuesdays-Sundays. Bryan Dawe reads Letters From Kalangadoo (with a guest appearance by Jody Seidel) at the Bendigo Writers Festival at 2.30pm on Saturday, August 11.

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