Both these stories diverge from the versions usually told. Their partisan and lateral perspectives surprised me and made me laugh out loud when I encountered them, as they boldly shifted around the stories I knew and demonstrated a few of the many possible ways of seeing and interpreting events. Not two ways but multiple ways, perhaps as many as there are stars in the sky.
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I bought the dog for one hundred dollars over the phone as a gift for my son on his thirteenth birthday. He was the runt of the litter and looked very small and shy next to his boisterous sisters. My son named him Skeeter after a character in a cartoon. Skeeter is mostly a Staffordshire terrier but his mother had blue heeler in her so he has a lot of hybrid vigour and a rich ancestry. Staffordshire terriers were bred in the UK from bulldogs, bull mastiffs and bull terriers to be hunting pig dogs sent in to pull the pig down at the last minute by grabbing it by the throat and not letting go. They were also used in dog fights. Contradictorily, as they are extra good with children they are also known as The Nanny Dog. Blue heelers were bred by Australians from cattle dogs and dingoes. They are known for stamina and intelligence. When we walk Skeeter and I are always linked by the lead as he is too unpredictable to be let off. He reads the ground fiercely and closely as if it is an old newspaper in a holiday house on a rainy day.
AUGUST
a new language
Really, a new language needs to be developed, an energetic and tellingly descriptive way of explaining this new art scenario… a visual-emotional response; to engage the senses and the imagination and to counter the commonplace approach to art of this type with its overkill of didactic wall text.
Djon Mundine
In 1986 I hid two books from the National Gallery of Victoria bookshop under my coat and left the gallery with them. This was not something I usually did and my heart beat hard as I walked away but, though I had no money to buy them, I needed to have those books and I treasure them still. They are Mr Sandman Bring Me a Dream edited by Andrew Crocker and The Face of the Centre: Papunya Tula Paintings 1971–1984 edited by Annemarie Brody. The first was published in 1981, the second in 1985. Curiously each book has the same image on its cover, a painting called Tilpakan (1980) by Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula – the entire image is on The Face of the Centre and the central detail of it on Mr Sandman. The painting is about the Dreaming journey of a poisonous brown snake who painted his body when he arrived at Tilpakan, the waterhole where he lives. Both books are full of the energy, freshness, wonder and sense of discovery and possibility that attended the initial blossoming of contemporary Aboriginal art in Australia in the late twentieth century when it was a new story. It is a story that has since been told many times and will continue to be told and retold. It is a story that is historical yet personal to each person who tells it. It is a story with multiple perspectives and starting points. I don’t want to retell the story but to describe how it affected me, what it made me think and what a revelation it was. Though it is an overwhelming genre now, in the early 1980s contemporary Aboriginal art was just a glimmer on the horizon.
There is tremendous affection towards Aboriginal art and culture on the part of the countless people who think about it, talk about it or work with it. The artists are often charismatic characters, intense and powerful, with complex lives. The individual scholars, historians, anthropologists, curators, writers, art advisers and artists who are or have been involved with them are dedicated to them in a special way. Like anything involving love, Aboriginal art arouses great passion. There are many word-of-mouth apocryphal stories about the artists that circulate or that appear once and rarely again. Two examples took place at the National Gallery of Australia, one when Emily Kame Kngwarreye stopped in front of Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock, frowned, and on being asked what she thought, her response was that she was thinking about her favourite dog back at her camp who was unwell when she left. And upon seeing Mark Rothko’s Black, brown on maroon, Rover Thomas said: ‘Who’s that bugger who paints like me?’
Many Western Desert paintings and artworks from other remote Aboriginal communities emanate great graphic energy and brilliance. Where does it come from, this vivid and dynamic power? Is the energy from the intensity of feeling that the painters have for their country? Is it ancestral power? Is it authenticity, or sincerity? Does it emanate from the country itself and the art translates those emanations into graphic signs? How do the works communicate the emotion that charges the best of them with such intensity?
These questions go to the heart of how any art communicates. Do we simply imagine the emotions of an artist or can they be conveyed through their work? How can we read an artist’s sincerity and does it matter? Can it cross cultures and languages? How, in any case, do intangible qualities take on tangibility? In some way this is like asking how art works at all.
There has frequently been a defensive level around the discussion of Aboriginal art in Australia. People feel strongly about it and the depth of their feelings means that they sometimes wish to protect it and own the interpretation of it through their expertise in it. Or protect its makers. The issue of possession – possession of the truth and possession of permission to speak – are vital components in the debate. While some gatekeepers and experts are open to not caging the work behind their expertise and experience, there are others who want to cordon off Aboriginal art and culture. There are also Aboriginal people who want to place strong protocols around the work as if it differs from all other art. Can anyone talk about it? Is a new language required? Is exhaustive insider knowledge required? Can it be treated critically as art or, if authentically Aboriginal, is it all good? How do we define it, is it anything made by an Aboriginal person? Is Aboriginal culture the same as any other culture? Do ‘they’ have something that ‘we’ have lost, as many people have said? Did we ever have ‘it’? Does Aboriginal culture join all cultures as an equal or must it be seen on different terms and treated differently? How do we communicate across cultures? Is it possible to assert or celebrate difference without creating hierarchies? When we look at Aboriginal art can we look directly at it or are we always looking at our idea of it? How much of culture is about rights, how much about responsibilities? Who decides? How are the valuable ideas of indigenous peoples from all over the world incorporated into other knowledge systems? Does incorporation mean assimilation? Do other knowledge systems need to change radically in order to be able to encompass indigenous thought? Can indigenous thought be encompassed by anyone who is not indigenous? Is indigenous thought owned by indigenous people? Is Western thought owned by Western people? Is ownership of thought possible?
All of these questions have swirled around inside my head for the last twenty or so years. It seems to me that indigenous cultures are not ‘other’ cultures to be studied, consumed and assimilated but are each an example of yet ‘another’ culture that contains messages about human connection to the earth as a necessary and primary basis to all culture. Aboriginal art demonstrates that the intellectual structures conceived by people are reflections of structures within the world and thus amount to a discourse of belonging and recognition, a discourse of love. All too often art is considered to be functionless and purposeless. The purpose of art, the function of art, is demonstrated by Aboriginal art, to be able to be about connection and location.
My experience of Aboriginal art began on Groote Eylandt in 1974 when I was shown rock art. This made me start looking for Aboriginal art when I started art school in Canberra eight years later. On looking up Aboriginal art in the art school library catalogue I found only two books, Modern Australian Aboriginal Art by Rex Battarbee and Modern Aboriginal Paintings by Rex and his wife Bernice, published respectively in 1951 and 1971. Battarbee was a farmer who was injured in World War I and later studied commercial art but, as his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography says, ‘developed a preference for the outdoor life of a landscape painter’. In 1932 he went to Central Australia to paint with a friend, John Gardner, in a T
-Model Ford converted to a caravan. That year they showed their paintings at the Hermannsburg Lutheran mission, and again in 1934, the second time specifically to the Aboriginal people at the mission. They also painted portraits of Aboriginal people. At the 1934 exhibition Albert Namatjira asked how much money the artists would receive for their paintings. On learning how much they would fetch, possibly as much for one painting as he was getting for a year’s work, he said ‘I can do the same’. Returning in 1936 Battarbee taught watercolour techniques to Namatjira on a two-month painting trip on camels to Palm Valley and the MacDonnell Ranges. Namatjira went on to start a school of watercolour landscape painting among his countrymen, sell lots of his work and eventually meet Queen Elizabeth II. He became an Australian citizen, ironically the first Aboriginal person to receive this somewhat tainted honour, but was tragically not treated as one and was not allowed to lease grazing land, buy land or build a house in Alice Springs and, legally, had to treat members of his extended family as non-citizens. He died in 1959 but lives on in his work and as a pioneer of Aboriginal art.
In 2009 I visited Hermannsburg to see the place where Namatjira first saw Battarbee’s paintings and to see the landscape for myself. Although it is a tourist destination the mission at Hermannsburg is not at all flash, but rather humble as if the past was just around the corner. The nineteenth century is still closely present in the blackboards simply painted on the walls of the schoolroom, the ancient trees, the red earth, the old whitewashed buildings with their thick stone walls in one of which original paintings by Namatjira and his relatives hang. These days it is said that the gifted Namatjira painted his country as authentically as any contemporary Aboriginal painter using traditional iconography, and a huge number of Aboriginal artists paint in his style, continuing to use Battarbee’s very conventional method of watercolour painting as an Aboriginal art tradition.
After studying the paintings in Battarbee’s two books my education in Aboriginal art continued in 1982 when I saw the extraordinary work made by the Wik people of Cape York, a series of ceremonial sculptures collected by Frederick McCarthy at Aurukun in 1962 that were on permanent show at the time at the Institute of Anatomy in Canberra. This wonderful collection was displayed inside a number of glass cases among other displays of Australian and Oceanic artefacts in a time warp, a crowded dim space with polished dark wooden floors and an elevated mezzanine level of rows and rows of books. When you pushed open the heavy wooden and glass door it triggered a sound tape so that tribal singing and music filled the room. The murky natural light, the vivid objects with their piercing eyes, the singing and droning all emphasised the presence of spirits and power. This striking Art Deco building built in 1930 (and whose designer and architect are, curiously, unknown) is today used as the National Film and Sound Archive. Throughout the building there are many Australian animal decorative motifs like glazed clay koala head rosettes, carved stone frill-necked lizard panels and a stained glass platypus skylight to make up what the Register of the National Estates has described as ‘some of the finest examples of nationalistic Australian Art Deco design and detailing in Australia’. And in the foyer Phar Lap’s great heart, looking bilious green in a big glass jar, was displayed next to a small jar containing the heart of an ordinary racehorse.
I arrived in Canberra in 1977 with a scholarship to do a master’s research degree at the ANU on the theme of the quest in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Thomas Pynchon’s V and Patrick White’s Voss. At the time it was unusual to study either American or Australian literature let alone put them together. Even to be a woman in this atmosphere, though not unique, was odd. The cutting edge of reading was Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, both of which I found dictatorial, unconvincing, dull and irritating. Barthes put me to sleep; I thought most of his comments were common sense, trivial or laboured rather than revolutionary, and while Berger’s writing was lively I couldn’t agree with what I saw as his authoritarian interpretations of ‘our’ responses to art. I did not feel included in his ‘we’.
I had applied for several scholarships, desperate to leave home but not really knowing how. I was offered several but took the first one, which was at the ANU. I remember the application went to an office at Woden and I thought Canberra must be a mythic place if there was a suburb there named after a Norse god. I was also interested in the idea of Canberra’s artificial lake, imagining it to be like a large handbasin, circular with a ceramic rim. One of the first things I did when I arrived was to look for the National Gallery of Australia. The guard on the steps of Parliament House pointed at an empty site near the lake and told me that was where it would be built.
The ANU humanities postgraduate students had offices in Childers Street in old prefab huts with no insulation, and the sight of dense dust motes and the smell of the heat-baked varnish of old yellow desks and brown lino comes back to haunt me when I think of them. A highlight was finding down the back of my desk an old poster of a Canaletto that had been nibbled quite hard by silverfish but still gave a sense of infinite horizon and belief in art that I needed so much in my tiny dusty enclosure. His image of the pink brickwork of the Doge’s Palace faded into white as if the light of the Venetian lagoon was dissolving it.
The year 1981 was one of miracles for me as I was fired from my job with the International Disasters Emergency Committee, found work with the National Campaign for Land Rights and Self Management in Queensland begun by Marcia Langton and others, helped run a conference for them and thus met and began to appreciate the great black humour of Aboriginal people who rather than being permanently made sad by suffering somehow found lots in the world to laugh about. I started a night class in etching at the Canberra School of Art which led to me getting into art school the following year, and I began a weekly radio program on the community radio station 2XX that I called One World, the exhilarating theme song of which was We the people by slide guitar legend Ellen McIlwaine. It begins with her saying the words ‘And this song is for all of us because it’s called we the people’ followed by frenetic wordless singing and very rapid slide guitar playing.
One World focused on social justice and development issues and comprised interviews done on a portable tape recorder and then painstakingly edited back at the studio. The year 1981 was an amazing time to be in Canberra as the Third Congress of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples was held there in April. Indigenous people from all over the world attended; there were forums, dancing, singing, ceremonies and resolutions. It was a watershed experience, a delirious intoxication with justice and injustice, belief and conviction, knowledge, truth and the voice of the land, the earth. It seemed at the time as if indigenous people would at last become more and more part of the equation of daily life all over the world in both politics and culture. I took some words from a paper given at the conference and screenprinted them on a poster: ‘If the transnationals and the colonialist governments continue to defy the natural order of things in their quest for material wealth, mother earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate and the abusers will be eliminated. Things come back full circle, back to where they started. This is the prophecy of all indigenous peoples.’
In a twenty-first century world that overflows with countless examples of contemporary Aboriginal art, it is hard to imagine or describe the excitement that surrounded its emergence, which was of course different for everyone who experienced it. It came in various forms: in galleries, in calendars, in stamps, in cards, in films, in exhibitions and in books. It came as urban works and country works, political works and innovative works, works obviously closely tied to tradition and those dispensing with or transforming it. It came in bits and pieces, it came quietly, it often came with dancing and singing and ceremony, it came in intense exhibitions, in conversations, over months and years, building up momentum and excitement. It came in a series of revelations accompanied by interpretations and explanations. It came in the form of stories and ground paintings, singing an
d a strong sense of the ceremonial. And in a didactic way, as some of the purposes of art in Aboriginal communities and the protocols surrounding it were revealed; for example in Central Australia the complex notion of kirda and kurdungurlu, respectively owners and guardians of country, designs and Dreamings.
The inclusion of bark paintings by three artists, David Malangi, Djalambu Bungawuy and George Milpururr from Ramingining in Arnhem Land, in the 1979 Biennale of Sydney was a historic occasion. Their catalogue entry emphasised their professionalism as artists and their foreignness, their daily existence in another country lying within Australia, by saying that each was no stranger to warfare and had both taken and restored human life (suggesting magical abilities), that none could read or write a European language though each spoke three to nine languages, and that the paintings expressed their spiritual connection to their country and totemic responsibilities to the land and all it contains. It also said: ‘The painters’ only wish is that the Europeans who view their work will look far enough into the dreaming to find a starting point for real dialogue.’
As part of the 1982 Biennale of Sydney Aboriginal art was seen by a big public as a performative event when Warlpiri people from Lajamanu made, sang and danced an untitled large sand sculpture inside the Art Gallery of New South Wales in one of its internal courts. The large six by three metre groundwork drawn from public sacred ritual cycles was made of earth, red and white ochres and white plant down. The Biennale’s subtitle was Vision in Disbelief, and I remember looking down from the balcony watching the performance holding my breath and feeling both incredulous and privileged to be able to see an ancient ritual from the centre of Australia in the middle of Sydney.
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