by Rod Mengham
What this exhibition also provides is a microcosm of the world of art, in its drawing together the designs of painters, cartoonists, sculptors, installation artists and filmmakers. There can be no other medium in which the limitations placed on size, shape, volume and colour have been so consistent throughout the history of its use. It is the great paradox of the discipline imposed by those limitations that it should have liberated so many artists of radically different traditions, practices and outlooks to be so outspoken in their engagement with issues of general public concern and with a sense of historical urgency, and all within the compass of something that can be held in the palm of the hand. The division of the history of medals into the parallel traditions of rewarding honour and berating dishonour has maintained the tension between dignified restraint and iconoclastic verve that has guaranteed the vitality of a medal-making culture that shows no signs of abating.
2009
Asymmetries in the Bush
There are two paintings in the Art Gallery of Western Australia – one from settler culture, the other aboriginal – that capture something of the significance of walking in the different conceptual worlds that co-exist in Australia. The one that translates very easily into European forms of experience is Frederick McCubbin’s 1889 painting ‘Down on his luck’, which shows a single bushman, physically and psychologically isolated in the landscape. The human figure is relegated to one side of the canvas, allowing the wilderness to take centre stage. The bushman’s pose, with head resting on one hand, recalls the classic European emblems of melancholy. Like the figure in Durer’s ‘Melencolia’, he is very clearly abstracted from his environment, brooding on past and future rather than on present circumstance. His connection with the landscape seems minimal, and his campfire provides a diversion from it. The bush in this painting is simply a tract of land that has to be got through, that separates starting point and destination, hopes and disappointments, fears and desires whose setting and performance is always elsewhere. It is a medium for obstruction and delay, a catalyst for introspection, an objective correlative for ‘bad luck’, a scenography of absence. It is a landscape that does not communicate.
The other painting is a typical example of Nyoongar art in which footprints dominate in representations of the walkabout tradition that reasserts the continuity of the indigenous relationship to the land. This continuity is the most long-standing in cultural history, and its expression is the most deep-rooted in the history of art, with conventions that relate directly to the iconography of the rock art of the Dampier Archipelago, dating back thirty thousand years. The particular painting I have in mind is a contemporary work that includes icons of 13 human figures, 91 trees and 173 footprints.16 The preponderance of footprints is appropriate to a culture in which everyone moved backwards and forwards between the coast and the highland scarp of what is now known as the Darling Range, occupying a variety of different sites according to the seasons of the year. There were six seasons:
Birak (December and January) – summer, hot and dry
Bunuru (February and March) – early autumn
Djeran (April and May) – late autumn, cooler
Makuru (June and July) – early winter, cold and wet
Djilba (August and September) – late winter / early spring, warmer
Kambarang (October and November) – late spring, decreasing rain
Moves would be dictated by the availability of different foodstuffs in given places at specific times of year. Further moves would be required for attendance at ceremonial gatherings. To Western eyes, the picture plane resembles a kind of map, and in many artworks by the Nyoongar, footprints are arranged in series to indicate customary tracks. These tracks are more than convenient, they are definitive of the people’s relationship with the land and with the Waugals (the water snake spirits) that created it. Even when attempts were made to erase these ancestral trails, the Nyoongars always remembered where they were. After 1829, when the port city of Fremantle was established, many Nyoongar tracks were bisected by settlers’ walls and fences. The Nyoongar ignored these, even walking through houses from the back door to the front in order to follow traditional routes.
There is pathos in both representations: in the experience of the itinerant worker whose contact with the bush only deepens the alienation that has been transplanted to Australia along with European living and working conditions; and in the experience of an indigenous people dispossessed of its sacred sites but renewing in its art (as in its song) its claim to identification with the land. Both involve a measure of projection, and an elision of ‘bad’ history, which in the settler tradition is dealt with through marginalisation, by imposing a condition of mobility on those who do not qualify for civic status. The bushman belongs in Australian settler mythology, but does not belong in any local community. That exclusion is camouflaged through romanticisation, especially in the works of the Heidelberg school, of which McCubbin was a member, although none of these works escapes the ambivalence that is close to the surface in ‘Down on his luck’. In the Nyoongar canvas, the details of settler life do not figure at all, as if they existed in another dimension, a false reality, a gaudy backcloth that the indigenous artist folds up and puts away.
It is, of course, impossible to walk though the bush as if stepping into the world of McCubbin or of Nyoongar art. Yet people do walk; they walk thousands of kilometres along carefully prepared trails such as the Bibbulmun Track, which stretches from the outskirts of Perth down to the south coast at Albany. The motivation to walk is partly to hunt, not for anything in fur or feathers, but for a ghost, the merest notion even, of an authenticity we are reluctant to let slip, to vanish altogether before we have gone to the trouble of looking for it. Part of the difficulty is knowing where to look. The Bibbulmun Track itself is a false reality, although it crosses places where the Bibbulmun people deepened their imprint on the landscape through habits acquired over thousands of years; it was marked out for the first time in 1974 by employees of the Forests Department, but had to be revised almost constantly in the face of pressure over bauxite mining, commercial forestry and water catchment issues. The track is a post-industrial construct, patched together from what was available, and it came into being the moment that walking became recreational, when the simplest activity that characterises the human made more sense in a culture of leisure than in a culture of necessity. The paradox of free time is the imperative it brings to explore space; not the space of our daily lives, but any space that lies beyond our daily habitus, for beyond is where authenticity seems to dwell, down pathways we need to follow to escape the staleness of modern life. The danger this brings is of over-investment in luxury, in what enriches our time too easily, so that we lose all respect for the value of what impoverishes us; rather than finding ways to slow that impoverishment down, and planning to make it stop. The modern desire to walk is really to stand still, to make the self a gauge for the frequencies and timescales of all those orders of being we are out of touch with; but as things are, being in touch with these different orders is to be out of our own measure, and the only real choice we can make is to hesitate, between frequencies, between measures, between acceptance and denial.
It is hard enough to do this in the landscape of our upbringing, the very setting of our orientation in the world, of the way we learned to take our bearings in it unreflectingly. But to hesitate over the way we fit into a strange landscape, as if choosing between different frames, or different sets of pictorial conventions, is close to impossible, given the strong compulsion we are under to translate the strange into familiar terms, an act of translation we perform before reflecting on it. For the present writer, the memory of walking ancient tracks in Britain is the default position, the almost mechanically applied template for orientation in, interpretation of, and cultural projection onto, other landscapes. Their ancientness is both authentic and inauthentic, even in the case of the oldest paths across the southern uplands, since their precise route is subject to chan
ge, and has changed often within living memory, although their proximity to the chalk ridges guarantees proximity to ancient settlements and field systems, to the funerary monuments of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, and to Iron Age hill forts. Walking in chalk downland, over bare turf with scatterings of flint, is a rare encounter with emptiness and space in an overcrowded island, although it is simultaneously an immersion in human prehistory; Britain often seems like an island inundated by stories told and untold, and our ignorance of many of them is a reminder of those languages once used to evoke the landscape but now beyond reach. The lavishness with which the land has been described over the last two thousand years is in part a compensation for this loss.
Equipped with the cultural phenomenology of the British walker and enough food for four days (sliced cheese, dried fruit, peanuts, pitta bread, tea, powdered soup and rice) I started out on the Bibbulmun one day in early spring. The precise route had been mapped for me by the western Australian poet Glen Phillips. Glen had primed me, liberally and humorously, for a few days in Perth, and then sent me off to Bunbury, where a friend and spirit-guide had been persuaded to drive me into the hills.
The local psychopomp dropped me by the side of the Harvey-Quindanning Road, just north of the Murray River, with only three hours to go before dark. The track wound up through scrub and then forest. According to the map, the elevation rose from six hundred to nine hundred feet within the first kilometre. There were twelve kilometres to cover before reaching the Dookanelly campsite. I did not relish spending my first night by the side of the track, and reluctantly started to jog. I had made my pack as light as possible but it did not feel like it.
By the time I arrived at Dookanelly I was in a muck sweat. Stress and irritation must have been written all over me as I trudged out of the dark and into the glow of the campfire, but if the two fire-tenders, Roy and Janet, recognised this, they did not show it. I found a spot to unroll my sleeping bag, decanted some water from the rainwater butt, and paid a visit to the earth closet. An enormous Huntsman spider, as big as a toilet lid, was spanning the entrance to Avernus. I decided not to disturb it and paid my visit further off where the night life was invisible and ignorance was bliss. Roy and Janet turned out to be from Hampshire. I had flown eleven thousand miles, caught the train from Perth, had bussed and begged lifts to get to the drop-off point, had marched like a Roman legionary into the blackest night I had ever seen, and was able to spend the evening talking about chalk streams that rose less than thirty miles from the place where I had grown up. Roy reminisced about tickling trout in the River Meon. My surname, Mengham, is taken from the name of a village on Hayling Island, a few miles east of the point where the Meon falls into the Solent. The map of that area is full of Men- and Meon- prefixes. I remembered sitting by the Meon at dusk one summer when the air was full of swallows catching the flies the trout were also jumping for. This had been in the village of Meonstoke, where the Saxon church contained eleventh-century mural paintings commemorating St Swithin’s conversion of the Meonwaras, the last British tribe to succumb to Christianity. Earlier in the year I had found the long barrow which had been the collective burial place of their Neolithic predecessors. It was further up the same valley. I had looked for it on an earlier occasion, but that had been in June when the grass was at its highest. Although the earthwork was marked on the map there was nothing to be seen. When I came back in December, an hour before sunset, the shadows began slowly to fill the slightest impressions in the turf, as if the landscape was remembering everything that had happened to it, and as I watched, the long barrow limned itself, the dark outline swelling. The long bar of light came to rest on the ground, and the true proportions of the monument were restored, as if it were projecting a dream of itself, of its lost volume, of its reserves of power, as a place in which the most important ideas of an entire culture once dwelled.
I had plenty of time to mull this over during the night, which was much colder than I was prepared for. I had no tent, only a sleeping bag. Most walkers I met during the next five days carried a roll of thin mattress material, but I had nothing to cushion my joints and spent most of each night aching and restless. I realised I would not discover any physical features that could locate the past for me, despite the depth of time the landscape had been inhabited. The Nyoongars had not led a settled existence before the arrival of the Dutch and the English, so there would be no evidence of permanent structures. But neither would there be any material remains of a nomadic culture. A European archaeologist would bank on finding tool-making debris or butchered animal bones to establish the presence of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, but on the Bibbulmun these would remain as invisible as the Nyoongars’ traditional paths, obliterated by countless cycles of burn-back and forest regrowth. The Aboriginal connection with the land could now only be traced through the incidence of certain plants and animals. Most of these remained unknown to me, or if I saw them I did not recognise them. But mostly I did not see them, and I seldom regretted this. I kept noticing holes in the banks to right and left of the path, where I knew the poisonous dugite snake must live, only two feet away from my legs. My vigilance was wonderful, but it was not rewarded until the third day, when I watched the last six inches of a dugite – pale underbelly, dark back – disappear into an old log.
I walked slowly, with long pauses to look and listen, and was irked not to encounter any decent-sized animals. The trail ran more or less parallel to the Murray, often quite close to the river, which must have been the main water supply for anything with a serious metabolism. On the higher slopes, there were many signs of where the wild pigs had been rooting, and on one occasion I made certain of identifying an emu print. It did not comfort me to read that emu parenting was conducted by aggressive males, or that in 1932 Western Australian farmers had had to use Lewis machine guns to stop a series of emu attacks.17
The only company I had during the second day was that of birds, and clouds of mosquitoes drifting by in the sunlight. There was a small, grey-coloured, long-tailed bird with a relaxed, see-sawing call that I thought was a white-breasted robin. I was amazed by the hovering flight pattern that sent it backwards and forwards over the same short distance as if entangled in a net. Often the birds were as inquisitive about me as I was about them, especially the large, white sulfur-crested cockatoos, swooping in relays from tree to tree, keen to escort me off the premises. The flora was easier to identify, but not that easy; except in the case of ferns, the only plants that looked exactly the same as in the northern hemisphere, and the ubiquitous balga, or grass tree, which had a profusion of uses for indigenous people. Its flowering grass-like stems produced edible gum and could be used for lighting fires. The leaves were used as roofing and bedding. The trunk was a larder full of witchetty grubs, a good source of protein, and the resin served as a powerful cement for constructing tools. When a grass tree eventually dies, its top disappears, as if carried off like a trophy. The denuded, black, hollow trunks are everywhere, resembling vacated termite mounds.
After a full day’s walking from Dookanelly, I forded one last stream before reaching the Murray campsite, using red laterite stones the exact same colour as the doleritic earth. Standing in mid-stream, I could hardly hear the river, lapping faintly around half-submerged trees but otherwise without a murmur. Suddenly I noticed an old bicycle bell nailed to a tree on the far bank. In its small way, a warning of the traffic to come, it made the only mechanical sound in eighty miles. It came to me that I had not looked up all day, there had been no passing aircraft, but here was a gap in the forest canopy, and something was moving into it: a small cloud, looking like the crab nebula, not very far above.
As night fell on the Murray campsite, a posse of redtailed black cockatoos passed overhead. Every five minutes for the last half hour of daylight a different species had flown up river, but already my attention had been diverted towards three human specimens, carefully bedding down around separate campfires. There was Lara, who had completed the day’s wal
k two hours before the others, waiting impatiently for the dark to come so she could go and swim naked in the river; there was Bob, a long musician with white hair and an English accent, who called across to me with reminiscences about drinking in Cambridge pubs; and there was Kim, whose small pebbly glasses, Edwardian pointed beard and hunched shoulders made him look like a Poirot of the outback. Like Poirot, Kim was always sifting evidence, but he did not look for it beyond the pile of thick hardback books he had pulled out of his backpack. It turned out he was slowly working his way through all of Gore Vidal’s sagas of American history. His days were spent rushing between camps to get on to the next chapter, pounding through the bush with the aid of two walking poles. He spoke few words and inscribed even fewer (just his first name and surname in the visitors’ book that Roy and Janet had embellished with a cartoon and the legend ‘Leave me here. I want to die’). Kim’s obsessive progress was fuelled by narratives of engrossment, annexation, takeover; of territory, stock, manpower, and investment opportunities. The American myth of expansion, extracting and exhausting natural resources, followed an arc from east to west and from a finite, physical reality to the plumbless reservoir of the imagination, where it just kept going, further and deeper, and faster than anywhere else. It seemed absurd to correlate Vidal’s fantasies of authentic imperialism with a walk in the bush, but the conversion of leisure time into an allegory of work, with the quickening of pace qualifying as productivity, enterprise, capital accumulation, had transformed Kim’s walking tour into a parody of the game with high stakes in which he had never been able to compete. He barged about among the trees, unstable embodiment of a force that impels walkers of the city streets, caught up in a rhythm of mechanical indifference to the detaining pleasures of slow time, the stirrings of obscure creatures, the dehiscing undergrowth. But the text he continued to read, or write, in his head all day was no less fictitious than the maps used by all those passing through the narrow green corridors of the Bibbulmun, which was after all the dream of a bureaucrat with itchy feet, forest wallpaper lining a passageway in the conservation department, virtual heritage. The vast majority of names given to rivers, peaks, gorges and other natural features, not to mention roads, farms, mines and settlements, were either English or taken from other European languages.