In all the discussion of the latest census data, there is a statistic you may have missed.
The 2021 Census 2021 showed there were more than 5,500 centenarians living in Australia, up from 3,500 in 2016.
Archibald and Doug Moran prize-winning artist Peter Wegner has made it his mission for the past eight years to track them down and draw their portraits.
He has looked into more than a hundred 100-year-old faces, taking just a couple of hours to capture them in what he has called a kind of "time capsule".
"You're really trying to draw out those hundred years of their life; it's a crazy thing," he said.
Mr Wegner won the 2021 Archibald Prize with a painting of artist Guy Warren at 100 years of age but had to pause his centenarian portraits during the COVID lockdowns.
He said he was now aiming to tour his drawings around regional Victoria and New South Wales and planned to document local centenarians wherever he went.
A race against time
Mr Wegner said the series was about connecting with his subjects for those short hours, bearing witness to their lives, and recording them in his growing archive.
The project has always been a race against time — several of his subjects have since passed away.
"It is sad, I'm drawing people at the end of their life and documenting it, too."
Twenty of his portraits — half of which were drawn in the past year — are currently on show in Benalla.
He said the series was intended to both mourn loss and honour life. One local subject passed away the day after the exhibition opened; another is celebrating her 101st birthday.
Benalla Art Gallery director Eric Nash said Mr Wegner's technique of dipping the finished drawings in beeswax helped freeze them in time.
Archiving memories
As Wegner draws, he speaks to his subjects about their lives, and footnotes anecdotes and quotes at the bottom of each portrait.
Some have had extraordinary stories to tell, such as 101-year-old Alex Bartos, a Jewish-Hungarian who survived Nazi labour and concentration camps before emigrating to Sydney in 1948.
He and thousands of others worked in a copper mine in what is now Serbia and were marched back to Hungarian territory as the Russians approached.
"In a place called Crvenka we were surrounded by local Germans who were very unhappy that they had to leave and I was told that I was going to be shot at first light," he recalled.
That did not happen but Mr Bartos said as many as a thousand were not so lucky.
He is quite possibly the last to hold these memories, but said having his portrait taken for Mr Wegner's archive meant more to the artist than to him.
Searching for answers
Part of Mr Wegner's mission is to investigate what makes a "good life", and he said most of his sitters spoke about relationships with friends and family.
Alex Bartos went straight to his family.
"Generally speaking a good life is to have a good wife, have children," he said.
"We have a good family, we are close and we now have grandchildren.
"Well, I suppose I am above the average that I don't have problems."
Time and human connection are preoccupations for Mr Wegner, who has also painted a series of chairs in stages of dilapidation and sculpted figures embracing in his Black Saturday series.
He is also working on a series of the unbreakable World War II Allied garrison in Libya the Rats of Tobruk, including his uncle. Some of those portraits overlap with his centenarians archive.
He said it was a poignant way to grapple with his own mortality.
The 68-year-old said would like to finish his centenarians series with a self-portrait, when he hopefully reaches 100 years of age.
