Lewis wrote that the “Pintupi’s route-finding by these unremarkable landmarks was uncannily accurate. They alway knew just where they were, they knew the direction of spiritually important places for hundreds of kilometres around, and were oriented in compass terms.” One night Jeffrey drew the cardinal directions in the sand. “North, south, east and west are like this in my head,” he told Lewis. Then he pointed out the directions of all the significant Dreaming sites between their camp and his home near Lake Disappointment 250 miles away. It was then that Lewis realized that the spiritual world, the sacred sites and Dreaming tracks, were Jeffrey’s primary references for orienting, and he experienced awe, fear, love, and extreme attachment to this spiritual geography. Lewis wondered whether he would ever be able to look at a hill or a rock hole with the same eyes as before. “All my preconceived ideas about ‘land navigation’ turned out to be wrong,” he wrote. “In place of the stars, sun, winds and waves that guide Pacific Island canoemen, the main references of the Aborigines proved to be the meandering tracks of the ancestral Dreamtime beings that form a network over the whole Western Desert.”
* * *
In the desert, Aboriginal people needing to communicate directions might make a drawing in the mud or sand. It begins with a circle that could represent water, a rock hole, a sacred site, a fire, or where the person was conceived, born, or initiated to his Dreaming. From this starting point, the cartographer draws a line representing a day’s journey on foot, somewhere from three to ten miles, perhaps more. Then another circle—water, a landmark, another place of Dreaming, the next event in a creator-hero’s story. Thus the map would appear in the very earth it represented, a network of circles and lines depicting an abstracted topography of history, cosmology, lived experience, and geography. Confronted with this symbolic representation that seems to collapse cartography, myth, and art, the outsider might be forgiven for disputing its wayfinding utility. “Often it is difficult for a Western European to enter their world,” wrote the anthropologist Norman Tindale. “We are trained on cartographic plans with a compass as aid and relatively accurate determinations as to angle and distance, and by writing in place names and using symbols we share and use a relatively uniform series of conventions.”
Tindale is credited as one of the first white Australians to understand that Aboriginal people were not starving wanderers in an endless search for food and water, when both the academic establishment and the Australian government were invested in the notion that indigenous people had no established territories and therefore no ownership of the land. In 1921, Tindale, a shaggy-haired young man barely into his twenties, spent a year on the island of Groote Eylandt in northeastern Australia. At the time, it was the longest period a scientist had ever spent with an Aboriginal community. One of the people he often worked with was Maroadunei, a Ngandi man who described to Tindale the features of his land and the borders between different language groups, how when one community’s Dreaming stories ended, another’s picked up. Tindale realized that Aboriginal people inhabited distinct territories from one another. He went home and drew a map of the boundaries between different groups. But when he went to publish the map and his research, his boss at the Australian National University told him to remove all the borders. It was almost two decades before Tindale’s map, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia, was published in 1940. It was, in the words of one colleague, “radical in its fundamental implication that Australia was not terra nullius.”
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Australian government moved Aboriginal communities onto reserves, cattle stations, missions, or into towns and cities in order to convert land for ranching and mining. The process of moving from what Aboriginal people knew as “Country” and the whites deemed to be wilderness was known as “coming in.” Some of David Lewis’s traveling companions—mainly those from the Pintupi language group—had been born and initiated in the desert and were considered among the last Aboriginal people to come in from the bush. Their departure from the desert began in the 1950s when the British started testing rockets and cleared the Pintupi from the flight path.
In 1962 Freddy West Tjakamarra, one of Lewis’s traveling companions, left the desert for the town of Papunya, 155 miles west of Alice Springs, bringing his family and a group of trackers, including Nosepeg Tjupurrula. To get to Papunya, they walked several hundred miles from a rock hole site known as Mantati. “A lot of kids run up to meet us,” remembered Bobby West Tjupurrula, Freddy’s young son at the time, about their arrival in the settlement. “I was a bit excited and I felt ashamed coming to the big community, so I got my little spear and my little woomera [spear thrower]!… I wanted to go to school and learn. It is good, so I keep coming to school every day. We used to go hunting—walkabout—look for kangaroos, goanna, everything, every Friday afternoon, Saturday, Sunday and come back to school. We loved going hunting, camping.”
It was at school that Bobby West witnessed a revolutionary movement in Aboriginal history. In June 1971, a group of Pintupi men painted a Dreaming story on the wall of the school. “I was a boy, teenage,” described West. “Everyone come together and start telling a story, and what we’re going to paint. One old man got up, said, ‘We’re going to draw this one—Honey Ants.’ They come together and start helping him paint. It was very important, the mural, because they’re proud to tell the story.”
The honey ant mural depicted the Dreaming story of ants who later became men and the convergence of songlines at Papunya. Though painted over a few years later, the act of creating the mural is now considered a spark that led to an explosion of creativity known as the Western Desert Art Movement, in which Aboriginal men—and soon after, women—formed cooperatives and began painting contemporary art depicting the Dreaming. Many of the paintings were modified to protect sacred secrets, but the act of painting itself was an expression of profound resiliency and Aboriginal defiance after decades of colonial subjugation that severed their connection to Country. The paintings were proof of their relationship to the land, their intimate knowledge of its creation; in some later land claim cases, the paintings were used as legal documents to prove generational use and ownership in the courts. The act of creating the paintings struck me as similar to the act of singing or traveling along the Dreaming tracks, an act of devotion that kept their relationship to the land alive.
* * *
David Lewis unknowingly walked into the epicenter of this nascent movement when he arrived in Papunya in 1972. And many of the men who traveled with him into the desert to demonstrate their wayfinding practices—Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, Yapa Yapa Tjangala, Freddy West Tjakamarra, and Anatjari Tjampitjinpa—were part of the now-legendary group that gave birth to the Western Desert Art Movement. Of the eleven original shareholders of the Papunya Tula Artists Pty. Ltd., the first artist collective, seven traveled with Lewis over three years so he could understand how they navigated. One of them, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, a petite man with a broad brow and deep-set eyes who painted exuberant works that would be compared to Jasper Johns and Joan Miró, accompanied Lewis in the Western Desert in 1973. Uta Uta Tjangala and Nosepeg Tjupurrula, considered masters of Aboriginal contemporary art, took Lewis to the Canning Stock Route in 1974. All had participated in the honey ant mural, and in the early 1970s they were teaching children at the Papunya school about painting and stories while depicting and interpreting their own Tjukurrpa stories with paint on flat, two-dimensional canvases for the first time.
For Westerners, these paintings are reminiscent of Wassily Kandinsky, Salvador Dalí, or Pablo Picasso. They have a mesmerizing, surreal geometry that the viewer is compelled to try and decipher. In one of Uta Uta Tjangala’s earliest works, Medicine Story 1971, he depicts the story of a sorcerer in rich plum and mustard acrylics. Two phallic ovals are surrounded by circles and lines showing the journey from Ngurrapalangu, the same place in the Gibson Desert where Uta Uta was conceived around 1926, to Yumari, where the sorcerer has illicit sex wit
h his mother-in-law. The painting shows the Old Man’s testicles connecting to the ovals with mustard lines. These are life-giving waterholes and the paths between them. In 1974, Uta Uta revisited the Dreaming stories of Ngurrapalangu in a painting of the same name, depicting the story of two women and Short Legs, who fled from Old Man toward Wilkinkarra. The women created a claypan, where food grows after the rainfall, from their dancing, while Short Legs crawled into a cave and displaced the sacred objects that then became hills.
When I began to read about David Lewis’s journeys into the Simpson Desert in the 1970s, I recognized several of the names of his companions as the same artists whose works I’d seen on the walls of museums—which sometimes sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. I didn’t think that this connection between Lewis’s navigation research and the art movement was coincidence. Lewis sought out men who were expert trackers and hunters, who had been born and initiated in the desert and knew its topography by heart. The same reverence and insatiable interest that made them master navigators—their intimate relationship to the Dreaming and their encyclopedic knowledge of bushcraft—also seemed to make them creative sages.
Whenever Lewis went into the desert with the men from Papunya, he was surprised by their passion for traveling. “I failed fully to understand the deep satisfaction elicited in my Aboriginal friends by monotonous driving from dawn to dusk day after day across a landscape that was vivified in sacred myth,” he wrote. “Every terrestrial feature, plant or track of an animal was meticulously noted and aroused very lively discussion. Highly coloured subsequent accounts of the features of the country traversed, such as the height of the sandhills, the colour of the rocks, the profusion of honey flowers, were given to envious friends back at the settlement.”
“Maps” is arguably too limited a term for the complex layering of metaphor and history in modern Aboriginal art. But no one can deny the paintings’ direct connection to the terrestrial geography of place. The paintings are of the topography of the Dreaming, and the Dreaming is the sacred geography of the land. “Aboriginal roads and tracks are maps; they are connections to country, they are about human movement, metaphor journeys, and the link between the spirituality of the self with the landscape,” writes Dale Kerwin. The art historian Vivien Johnson has argued that these paintings have enough likeness to European cartography that they should be considered legal documents. “Like western topographic maps, these paintings are large-scale maps of land areas, based on ground surveys, with great attention to accuracy in terms of the positional relationships among the items mapped,” she argues. “They can be used for site location, and because of their precision have the validity of legal documents—they are Western Desert graphic equivalents of European deeds of title.”
Some people disagree. Australian anthropologist Peter Sutton has argued that the paintings can’t be used for site location because someone unfamiliar with the country wouldn’t be able to find their way using them. But the same might be said of a Google map: if you don’t know what a car is and have never been on a road or been educated in the various symbols of modern cartography, a Google map is equally useless for site location. Both types of maps are dependent on a body of knowledge brought to them by the traveler; what is esoteric depends on the viewer. “European maps are not autonomous,” writes the academic David Turnbull in his book Maps Are Territories. “They can only be read through the myths that Europeans tell about their relationship to the land.” Turnbull has argued that maps themselves are metaphors for the cultures that created them—unless they are drawn on a foot-to-foot scale, their accuracy and reality has to be considered to be a point of view rather than a neutral or empirical depiction.
On October 19, 1972, David Lewis put his navigation research aside to undertake the first solo circumnavigation of Antarctica in a sailboat. It was a grueling trip that Lewis barely survived; he capsized three times and ultimately abandoned his boat, the Ice Bird, at Cape Town on March 20, 1974. When he arrived back in Australia, Lewis visited the desert again to undertake another trip with Jeffrey Tjangala and Yapa Yapa Tjangala. Their journey would start in Yayayi, a newly created Aboriginal community, and end in Jupiter Well some 370 miles to the west. Along for the ride would be Fred Myers, an American PhD student who had been living at Yayayi since June 1973, conducting field research for his doctorate in anthropology. In documentary footage from that time taken at the settlement, Myers, with brown hair and glasses, a cigarette in one hand and a reporter’s notebook in the other, can often be seen in the background, quietly observing the gatherings and daily life of the Pintupi. He was particularly interested in documenting the creation of paintings at Yayayi, which were being purchased and then sold in Alice Springs. Myers’s connection to the Pintupi and the politics, culture, and art of the Western Desert has lasted over four decades. In his 1985 book Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines, Myers describes the scenery of Australia with deep affection:
It is a stark country, known to Europeans as an arid and dangerous place, but its red sand, flat scrubby plains covered with a sparse pale greenery, and craggy, long-eroded hills lie in muted beauty beneath an awesomely blue sky. One cannot escape its immensity and its calm. The paleness of its colors seems always to be a kind of ghostly habitation of color, barely corporeal.… In the enduringness of this landscape, Aborigines see a model of the continuity they aim to attain in social life, a structure more abiding and real than their transitory movements on its surface.
* * *
On a dismally cold February morning I walked to Washington Square Park in lower Manhattan and took an elevator up a gray high-rise to Myers’s office at New York University. Inside, my spirits were lifted by the clutter of objects and books Myers has collected over more than forty years of fieldwork in Australia. He began opening file drawers and pulling out topographic maps of the area surrounding Papunya, showing me the route he had taken while traveling with Lewis and the Tjangalas. When the trip started, Myers was already aware of the Aboriginal capacity for uncanny navigation skills; even young children seemed incapable of losing their bearings. “Friends of mine have prodigious memories,” he told me. Often they were bewildered by the fact that Myers could get lost so easily. “I can tell you kids have it by the time they are seven or eight,” he said. Sometimes when he needed directions while driving, his companions would say in disbelief, “You’ve been there, you saw it before! The road goes this way. Follow the one to the north.” Myers laughed. “I would be driving in this mulga scrub and worried I’m going to get a flat tire or rip the transmission out and they’re saying, ‘North! North!’ What the fuck? I don’t know which way north is.”
Myers scrolled through files on his computer, looking for digital reproductions of photographs he had taken on the trip with Lewis in 1974. In one, a twentysomething Jeffrey Tjangala stands in front of the extinguished ashes of the previous night’s fire holding a white enamel cup in one hand; it is morning and the camp is being broken down before they move out for the day. Jeffrey wears a peach plaid shirt, his dark jeans held up by a worn brown leather belt and silver buckle; he’s wrapped a piece of cloth as a headband around his black hair. Behind him, Yapa Yapa Tjangala stands at a slight angle from the camera, wearing a denim jacket and broad felt hat that casts a shadow over his eyes. They could have been members of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. “Jeffrey James and Yapa Yapa were two of my closest friends,” Myers told me. “Jeffrey died a few years ago, an incredible person who more or less single-handedly got his people back to their country on the Canning.”
Myers told me that he believes that Aboriginal contemporary art pieces are more like conceptual maps than geographical ones. “The placement of landscape features and their arrangement is rarely if ever replicated with actual geographical orientations,” he said. “They are more like mnemonics of places. Some paintings have more obvious useful information than others.” For individuals, he said, “I would say that
most of their knowledge is very specific, of having walked it before. They can do other things but mainly they are remembering walking with their parents.” Dreaming stories themselves have multidimensional purposes, Myers continued. “It’s one form in which knowledge and direction and ecology are encoded. People also get rights through these stories, it links people, and it does provide them with an understanding of the landscape in these faraway places. It’s a skeleton on which a lot of geographical knowledge can be placed. How do you remember this stuff? Well, my father grew up in this place, that’s where these ants were. It’s a way of condensing knowledge.” The intricacy of this knowledge is remarkable. Even today, after all the decades he has spent in Australia and despite his fluency in several Aboriginal dialects, Myers said he still struggles to understand the language through which Aboriginal people give directions to one another.
After Lewis arrived in Yayayi, the party headed west for their seven-day trip. For Myers, one of the trip’s most memorable moments was when something truly unusual happened: the Tjangalas lost their bearings. Lewis was also surprised by the episode and would write about it in several journal articles as well as his memoir Shapes on the Wind. The group had decided to go to a place called Tjulyurnya, a Dreaming site where dingos had driven two lizard men underground and left behind a pattern of triangular yellow stones. The Tjangalas wanted to get some mulyarti wood for spears and bring some of the sacred stones back to Yayayi. Tjulyurnya was twenty-six miles from their camp. Lewis carefully recorded their route to the Dreaming site across a terrain covered in spinifex, low sandhills, and “undulations hardly deserving the name of hills.”
1. Seven kilometres a little south of west to Namurunya Soak, a tiny hollow that seemed, to my eyes, to have no identifying marks at all.
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