UTOPIA
The Petyarre family comes from a place called Utopia. Perhaps it was the name or perhaps it was the art from that Central Desert settlement—with its bold control of color contrasts—which intrigued me. But I was determined to go there, and was fortunate enough to get an invitation from Simon Turner, the arts administrator who works as a go-between connecting dealers and artists. The settlement is about 100 kilometers north-east of Alice Springs. To get there from the Darwin Highway you turn east onto a dusty track and north onto an even dustier one. For kilometer after kilometer the land stays flat, a dry plain of gum trees. Then there is a tiny rise. Just 10 meters elevation or less, but suddenly you are in another world. The Aboriginals describe it, when they do, as the Mountain Lizard Dreaming or the Bush Plum Dreaming, and they tell its stories in layers and paint them in dots. With my stranger’s eye, I knew only that the country was suddenly greener and lusher. The land had lumped itself into rocky formations like stone citadels, or entrance gates to another country. In a strange way it felt as if I had really arrived somewhere.
And then, a few kilometers later, I did indeed arrive somewhere. Utopia was named a long time ago before there was a settled community here, and so the name was not as ironic as it may have appeared. It was certainly a strange, dislocated place. It was a scattered series of seemingly unplanned houses or “camps” separated by trees and tracks and “humpies,” which were blocks of corrugated iron surrounded by mattresses and bits of dirty clothing, where many people stayed outside on the warmer nights. There was a convenience store—containing the strangest mixture of highly priced items such as televisions combined with cheap ones like white bread and fried food. And there was a playground with broken equipment. One swing had curled up on top of the frame and begun to rust up there. Helped by two half-naked children, I prodded it with a stick until it swung down again. They grinned and jumped on it. The job had taken only ten minutes, but nobody had bothered to do it.
Utopia is what is called a decentralized community, consisting of sixteen outstations. I had been invited to the main one, called Yuendumu. It was the first dry Aboriginal community I had visited (which made it safer, especially for children and women who lived there), although the place had other problems, largely due to boredom and lethargy. It is a terrible thing to lose your land, but when (as in traditional Aboriginal culture) that land is not only physical but also an embodiment of the spiritual, it is hard to find anything to take its place. The nomadic life has its own purpose to it: without the need to walk, what do you do? On my first morning I went for a walk and some women beckoned me over to their “camp.” From the outside it looked like a house with a verandah but inside it was like some of the air-raid bunkers I used to break into in my childhood: bleak and dank, covered in graffiti and radiating a sense of unkemptness. One woman had a black eye. The others had invited me over because they wanted to see whether I had any clout with the arts administrator and, more importantly, whether I could use it to get them new canvases. “Finished this one,” one said, pointing to a painting that showed her “country” in tiny dot patterns of bright greens and whites. “Without a canvas, nothing to do.”
Later I went down with Simon to the arts center—a tumble-down place, although recently built. So many things in these communities age too quickly. The Formica cupboard doors were hanging off their hinges and rubbish threatened to take over; there was a sign stating (on behalf of Arapuntja Artists Inc.) that no dogs were allowed in the studio. This one-room building was not intended to be a retail point—few individual art-buyers reach Utopia—but a place where art was made, although now it is more like a place where canvases are doled out and cash transactions arranged.
Utopia was the country of the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, dubbed “the old lady,” a former horseback rider in the stock camps who became one of Australia’s most famous female artists (whose paintings of her country were used as evidence in land rights hearings). Many of the artists of Utopia are women, and it seemed that most of them were at the arts center that morning handing in their latest works, and lobbying for new canvases, while their toddlers and babies played on the dirty floor of the center. The paintings were made up of pointillist dots, and the effect was rather similar to looking at spring meadows full of flowers—but with blurred eyes and from a vantage point high above them. “What do you want to say here?” Simon asked each of them as she handed in her completed painting. “White is flowers,” Polly Ngalr said. What kind of flower? “Yam flower. And yellow is seeds.” What kind? “Yam seed,” she said, being patient. Some of the titles of the paintings shifted during the morning from Emu Tucker to Bush Plum Dreaming , and back again. Nobody seemed too bothered once the price had been set and the negotiations started for another fresh canvas.
Amy Nelson Napangardi hadn’t been given a canvas last time, so this time she was desperate. She has custodianship for the Witchdoctor Dreaming, which describes how bush medicine can be found. “Like that one,” she said, pointing to the Bush Plum Dreaming someone else had painted—interlapping dot patches in pinks and yellows. “But my colors are not pink, ” she added emphatically, and explained that the Witchdoctor Dreaming used just four colors—yellow, red, white and brown. That morning I had found myself desperate to somehow understand the paintings better—to understand what made them represent “country” or a Dreaming story, to appreciate them for more than their (often spectacular) color contrasts. I had hoped that perhaps by knowing what was not allowed, or at least not appropriate I could understand the paintings better. “Why not pink?” I asked her. “ ’Cos whitefella buyers don’t like it, ” she said.
And this is one of the curiosities of this extraordinary art movement. The buyers seem to want a sense of “authenticity” and yet nobody is quite sure what that means, nor indeed what it should mean. The fact that the painting is done by Aboriginal people seems to be vital—when, in 1977, it was revealed that the “Aboriginal” artist Eddie Burrup was in fact an eighty-two-year-old white woman called Elizabeth Durack, there was national outrage —and that it is made by Aboriginal people who somehow have some insight into nature seems to make it even more “valuable.” The fact that many “whitefella buyers” demand paintings in the natural colors of the land (ochre colors, although in acrylic versions of the original earth) also suggests they are searching for that ever elusive authenticity—a country and a history embodied in the canvas of a painting available in an art gallery or auction house. In Alice Springs I had visited one gallery advertising the work of an artist “who had come in from the desert.” Somehow his work was seen to have more integrity because he was a nomad—by buying it, or having it, there was a sense of being part of a world that has now disappeared. Yet in truth, as I would learn later from the man who helped start it, the painting styles of the Central Desert Art Movement are actually combinations of Aboriginal patterns and colors and the visions of white art administrators. And the two influences can scarcely be separated anymore.
Gloria and Ada Petyarre were away from Utopia—invited by art galleries to tour with their own paintings. But their sister, Margaret Turner Petyarre, was there at the arts center. So I sat down next to her on the floor and—struggling to understand what it was to paint a “Dreaming” rather than a mere representation of a story—asked her several questions about what the paintings meant. Suddenly she looked at me kindly: “You gotta garden, right? You must have nice flowers in your garden; lovely flowers? ” I nodded, not wanting to go into the issues of space limitations in Hong Kong. “Well then, you know; that’s what this is,” she said. “Flowers.” I felt rather foolish, almost as if I had pointed to a landscape painting in a European art gallery and asked for its meaning, only to be told that it was trees and water and hills. Couldn’t I see?
My question hadn’t been entirely misguided, of course. This art, like the shine of the ochre it was originally painted in, is elusive. Yes, it is about texture and tone and contrast and technique, but it is also about someth
ing else, something I couldn’t quite grasp. Sometimes, in my travels through the Outback meeting artists, dealers and dyers, I had the fleeting impression that we were not talking about art at all, but about the universality of the human spirit. And then that feeling would disappear again and the talk would be of dollars and four-wheel-drives.
On the way out of Utopia I went to see Greenie and Kathleen Purvis at Boundary Bore, about ten kilometers away, past a shallow lake that stretched through the middle of this parched land. Greenie had the famous name but it was his wife, Kathleen, who was doing the painting, sitting in the sunshine on the ground, surrounded by slobbering dogs, while her husband dozed in the shade of his “humpy” or corrugated-iron windbreaker. These two old people have a house—quite a big one—but as Kathleen explained they don’t use it much “because it’s full of dogs.” Unless it’s too cold they like to sleep outside, on swag mattresses under the moonlight: given the choice, I thought, I would do the same. There are few things as spectacular as the night sky in the Outback. They looked poor, but their work was selling well. They were planning to get a satellite television and a Toyota was being delivered the next day. Four-wheel-drives have been a popular means of payment for Aboriginal desert art—in the early days it was secondhand Holdens from a car dealership in Alice, now it is new Toyotas—and in many ways this is appropriate. In the past, the act of painting (as body art or on sand) was one way of passing on the wisdom and the maps, so other people could know both the land and what lies beneath it. It seems right that today the act of painting should still help Aboriginals reclaim the land. Even if it is from behind a steering wheel.
I had seen how the Central Desert painting movement had not only transformed people’s lives but also how it had provided a language through which outsiders could try to understand something of Aboriginal culture, as well as helping to keep some of the traditional stories and Dreamings alive in people’s memories. And I was intrigued by a tale I had heard again and again about how the movement had started in the early 1970s, with the gift of paint.
WHEN THE COLORS WERE TAKEN AWAY
Geoffrey Bardon was a young man full of ideas and ideals when he went to the Aboriginal settlement of Papunya in 1971 as an art teacher turned social studies teacher. “A dreamer in a blue VW Kombi van,” he once described himself. When he left that place eighteen months later he was in some ways a broken man, as his story would tell. But in that short time he had helped start up perhaps one of the most astonishing art movements of the twentieth century.
I contacted him, and flew up to the small town north of Sydney where he now lives with his wife and two sons. He picked me up from the airport in a VW Kombi van—the kind of van you can just get into and travel wherever you want to go, with your swag mattress in the back. I commented on how he was still driving the same type of vehicle he had been using so many years before. It was a cherished possession, he told me: a reminder of the days before things went wrong.
When we got to his home, we sat on the porch overlooking a garden full of gum trees and flowers, and talked for hours—although he sometimes found it hard, and we would stop and talk about something else. I wanted to learn about the paint, of course. But first he told me about Papunya. It was a hell on earth, he said. A shameful place that in just one year lost half of its population to disease, a so-called “community” where there were five tribal groups speaking at least five languages, trying to coexist and find a new purpose in life when everything they knew had been forbidden to them. It was as if the colors in their lives had been taken away along with their land, and all that was left was lethargy and depression. They were being administrated by arrogant white officials “in white socks”—most of whom, according to Bardon, did not care anything for their charges. “Some of them hadn’t talked to a blackfellow in ten years,” he said. And as for the 1,400 or so Aboriginal residents of Papunya, “they were retiring, withdrawn, and outnumbered,” he remembered. “And they didn’t have the kind of leaders anyone else understood, so they weren’t properly represented.” But as a teacher he was full of ideals and a desire to challenge the system. And although he knew that many of the children went to school only to get hot meals, he tried to teach them as well as he could.
At first the children’s paintings were crude drawings of cowboys and Indians—mimicking the exciting films that were shown on a big screen at Papunya. But Bardon noticed that when they were out of school, talking and playing in the playground, they would draw designs—dots and semicircles and curvilinear lines—in the sand with their fingers and with sticks. So one day he asked them to draw their own designs, and with a little bit of persuasion they began to do so.
The old Pintupi tribesmen were watching, interested, as Bardon’s lessons progressed. The children started calling him “Mr. Patterns” because of his insistence on neatness and careful presentation—and, as he says, it is hard to know just how much this kind of early guidance (from him and from the art coordinators who followed) influenced the work we see today. The elders had their own rich painting traditions that had in the distant past been concentrated on body and sand painting, with some more lasting ochre designs on the walls of caves and the sides of rocks. They had tried a few times to revive the practice. But they had almost no modern paints and no encouragement, and Bardon gave them both. And he did something extraordinary. He asked them what they wanted. “This was an amazing inquiry: I saw that in their faces. Nobody ever asked them what they wanted, they were always being told what to do. The slogan was that if you help one fellow you help them all . . . so nobody helped anybody at all.” When Bardon asked them there was something the Pintupi elders wanted desperately: paint. And what they offered in exchange—what a delegation of men came over to Bardon’s apartment and offered one evening—was to paint one of their sacred Dreamings on the gray concrete outside wall of the school. It was to be a work of art that was significant to the black people themselves, in contrast to much of what is painted today which as I had seen in Utopia is designed for white buyers.
The Honey Ant Dreaming (describing a story, or songline, that runs through Papunya from west to east and was felt to represent all the people of that troubled settlement) had three incarnations on the school wall. All the versions were in ochre colors, red, yellow and black, and all of them showed a long straight line with patterns of concentric circles posted along it at irregular distances, making it seem like string with enormous knots. The first version included little semicircular lines like double bananas, placed around the “knots,” and representing the honey ant Ancestors. When it was finished, some elders were horrified that it revealed too many of their tribal secrets, and they held an emergency meeting. The next day the controversial curved lines were scrubbed off and replaced by very realistic little line drawings of ants. But this time it was Bardon who objected, saying he didn’t like them: they were too much like “whitefella” painting. So on the third attempt, the “honey ants” were replaced by symbols that all parties agreed on. In retrospect they looked like little fast-food hamburgers, a yellow filling between red burger buns, but it was an important moment in the development of this new art movement. It was probably the first time that symbols had been deliberately swapped in order to show the “blanket” and yet keep the secrets that lay beneath it. In a way it marked the beginning of these dispossessed people finding a way of representing what was esoteric by something that was exoteric—something that was hidden by something that could be shown.
It was an amazing act of generosity for these men to paint their Dreaming—the representation of their layered system of knowledge—on the walls of a whitefellow building, Bardon said. “But few people really appreciated it. Nobody cared what they were doing.” In those days he used to joke that with the industrial-strength glue he had provided to bind the colored poster paint, the Honey Ant Dreaming would last a thousand years. But it didn’t, it lasted only until 1974, when a maintenance man, on someone’s orders, painted over it with acrylics. If it exis
ted today it would be one of Australia’s greatest pieces of art.
The honey ant was just the beginning of the journey. A few men— like Old Mick Tjakamarra, or Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri or Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, whose names are now huge in the Aboriginal art world—started painting a few canvases in a converted storage area that they had fixed up like a cave. Bardon took the works into Alice Springs (about 250 kilometers to the east of Papunya), and to everyone’s surprise came back with substantial amounts of money. Suddenly everyone went wild for materials. The crates that held the oranges for school break would be dismantled as soon as they had been emptied, and used as canvases; “people were painting on matchboxes and bits of board; anything,” said Bardon, who remembered one day even using toothpaste as a primer to prepare the wooden planking, because he had run out of everything else. He used up the substantial poster paint supplies in the school and then ordered more. “They particularly liked the bright orange paint,” he said. “They said it was from the land—it was the color of the ochre pits.”
His first thought was to continue the tradition of painting in ochre or ochre-like colors, and one day he was taken by some of the Anmatjirra artists to a mine in the McDonnell Ranges to the north of Papunya. It is called Glen Helen and has river cliffs of yellow and white paint running through it, representing 700 million years of geological history. “I thought we could have truckloads of this stuff and big cauldrons of glue and we could paint the town red ochre.” But the artists, despite being aware of this great natural paintbox, preferred to use non-traditional paints. Perhaps because they were brighter on the canvas, or smoother to use, or easier to find. But perhaps also because it made it less complicated for them to represent their Dreaming stories for outsiders if the materials themselves were not sacred but only represented sacred colors— like images in a mirror. It was almost as if by changing the paint, the designs had begun to lose the things that made them dangerous and powerful. It was also an immensely practical choice: as I had seen with Katherine and Greenie Purvis at Boundary Bore, much of the work is done outside. The advantage of acrylic-based paints is that they dry fast. Ochre mixed with linseed oil would be corrupted by red sand long before it dried.
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