In November that same year in Canberra the first Rom ceremony to be performed outside Arnhem Land was held at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Performed by the Anbarra people over four days the ceremony involved painting up, singing and dancing, and the presentation of ceremonial poles, one representing wild honey and the tail of stingray, and the other the morning star, masked plover and butterfly. The word Rom may be translated as indigenous knowledge, and is also the name of a ritual bringing reconciliation after a separation. As explained by anthropologist Ian Hughes:
Rom does not frame historical experience as progressively unfolding development, but as the working out of an unchanging law known as the Dreaming, which puts opposed or separated elements into mutual interdependence. Rom emphasises mutual interdependence and adaptation. Unlike Western notions of individuality, Yolngu knowledge is expressed in terms of complementary pairs which come into interdependent relationships, like the salt water and fresh water which mix at a particular place in the river.
I remember sitting on the grass waiting and watching and listening, and as with the dances performed during the World Council of Indigenous People’s conference noticing how the long preparations, the consultations, the quiet times before the performances were as important as the performances themselves, which were over all too quickly.
Over the next few years not Aboriginal art in general but several individual works made by Aboriginal artists made a strong impression on me. In 1983, very large and spectacular Western Desert paintings were hung in the tall angular gallery at the end of a ramp in the centre of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), which finally opened in 1982. Especially I recall Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula’s Yala, Wild Potato Dreaming painted in 1981. Its many yellow ochre concentric circles linked with double lines over a white dotted ground over patches of a range of shades of fine brown ochre marks in paint so thin that it seemed merely to stain the canvas rather than placing a layer of paint over it, were both hypnotic and astonishing. Asserting a closeness to and knowledge of the earth, and the presence of secrets in the form of mysterious mythologies and stories deep in the heart of the continent, the palpable energy and confidence emanating from the work was amazing. Around this time I also recall seeing Mick Wallangkarri Tjakamarra’s Old Man’s Dreaming on Death or Destiny painted in 1972. It was also a revelation. Its thin black, pink, yellow and white paint leaps from the flat surface of the board to vibrate in front of your eyes. I can read its symbols to the extent of seeing that it shows two men sitting in windbreaks with their shields near them. A U-shape is the shape people leave on soft ground after sitting on it and a bough shelter is also like a U. When I first saw this painting I looked around for more information and saw only its title, which was full of import as so little art claims to be about something as important and everyday as an old person thinking about death or indeed destiny. I thought then that one reason this art is valuable is because it is not about art but about life.
In 1984 Aboriginal art was on show at the Adelaide Festival in the form of vast canvases displayed in the single room of the nineteenth-century sky-lit gallery belonging to the Royal Society of South Australian Artists on the corner of Kintore Avenue and North Terrace. I was in Adelaide only very briefly and the gallery was closed when I got there, so I had to press my face up to the gap between the two heavy wooden gallery doors to glimpse a slice of it. What I saw – a fragment of a show called Painters of the Western Desert: Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Uta Uta Tjangala and Paddy Carrol Jungarai, curated by Tony Bishop – made me catch my breath, it was so electric and glowing; the huge paintings pulsated with colour and crackled with energy. They were intensely optical and literally vibrated. The optical physiological power of paint has the potential to imitate the power implicit in, well, everything. The animism in me responded to the works, and while interested in the stories I still don’t think that exhaustive knowledge of them is vital or maybe even achievable: it is the feeling they convey to the senses and the heart that is most important. Something is present and something is transmitted by colour, shape and texture, and this is the power of the work. Its vividness, its truth to the vividness of nature, to the nature of perception, is cross-cultural – or does it travel beneath culture? If we think of visual art as something that though it may include words and explanations is also something fundamentally without words then the languages of texture and of colour, of shape, structure and style of mark, are highly significant, not to show technique but to communicate and to emulate sensation, to return us anew to the vividness of being alive.
Yet another momentous exhibition was Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia exhibition, first shown in New York in 1988 at the Asia Society Galleries, then in Chicago and Melbourne in 1989, and in 1990 at the South Australian Museum. The works ranged over the country and over a wide time scale showing work from as early as possible and as late as possible. One work in particular stood out for me. It was a bark painting by a Tiwi artist based on Melville Island called Big Tom. The word Tiwi means ‘human beings’. Sun Woman at Wurriyupi (1954) is the title of the work and in it the progress of the sun across the sky is shown. But I looked at the work before reading its accompanying wall label and saw a vertical row of four black discs, a quite large one at the bottom then a smaller one and then a very small one and then a larger one, all surrounded by upward streaming lozenges in yellow and red ochre. I decided that it must be showing the sun throughout a day as it looks big when it is near the horizon and small when it is high in the sky then bigger again as it sets. Subsequently finding out the title of the work was very satisfying, as I had guessed what it was about on the basis of my own experience. The colours in the work are very alive, particularly the yellow and its soft glowing luminescence.
In 1989 the National Aboriginal Cultural Institute Tandanya opened in Adelaide, and in 1990 held an exhibition called East to West in which the mapping purposes of Western Desert paintings were emphasised as the artworks were laid out by compass directions to resemble the topography of where they were made. It included crayon drawings on brown paper made by Aboriginal people at Mount Liebig in 1932 as well as the very latest acrylic paintings. Here I first saw Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula’s very articulate painting Straightening Spears at Illyingaungau (1990), a work full of the presence of remembering or memory, and an experience of sand and sun, and shadow and blinding light, and wind and human presence. The activity, of straightening spears, has many layers of experience and implications in it, including memories for the artist and those looking at the work who know the activity. The painting uses variations of two colours of acrylic paint, a yellow ochre and a red ochre. They are painted over a black ground. Rather than being evenly hued there are variations in the density and application of the paint so that we seem to be almost looking through venetian blinds at something shadowy on the other side. Neither colour is particularly lighter or darker than the other one. Neither is positive or negative, but each is both, each recedes and comes forward. This balance between the colours makes them sit on the surface of the painting at the same time as they imply vast space. There is a strong charge of memory in the work. It is possible to think of the horizontal lines made of yellow dots joined together crossing the canvas as the lines made in sand by wind. It is also possible to think of them as the long lines of spears being straightened. Or to see in the shifting parts of the horizontal lines some shadows of people on the ground or their bodies in between you and the sun. There is a notion of squinting, of long shadows stretching over the ground and the shadows changing as the light changes. The painting flows between an evocation of a day, a camp, an activity, a place in the desert and the notion of straightening, of positive and negative forces coming into some sort of balance, of scale and the relationship of the body to the painting. The work is also about its materials or materiality. There is no attempt in the painting to make something regular and even, rather the dippings and re-dippings of paint and brush, the thickness of the pain
t when the brush is full and its thinness when it is running dry, all these small ‘errors’ or slips are integral to the work. This handmade irregularity of the work enlivens it and suggests an acceptance of the warts of life and hence its multifaceted character. The painting is not trying to create an ideal seamless world in art but rather something reflecting and hand in hand with a kind of pragmatism. Turkey Tolson made many other paintings on this subject but only this one has such charge and presence, the sense of shadowed figures in an environment of shifting air and light.
In E.H. Gombrich’s most famous book The Story of Art, which my mother gave me in 1970, Australia is represented only by a photograph entitled ‘Australian native, drawing a totemic opossum pattern on a rock’. This opossum pattern is not very different from those made on paintings on boards or canvas today by Western Desert Aboriginal artists. Gombrich uses the photo as a punctuation point, the last image and final moment of his first chapter which is called ‘Strange Beginnings’. A new, albeit posthumous, version of his Story might place an opossum pattern or something very like it at the end of the book, thus sandwiching The Story of Art with Aboriginal art, taking us from the beginnings of art to today. Gombrich does not mention the opossum painting directly but says in reference to it that ‘image-making in… early civilisations was not only connected with magic and religion but was also the first form of writing… if we want to understand the story of art we do well to remember, once in a while, that pictures and letters are really blood-relations’. This comment connects with the analysis of Aboriginal painting made by Geoffrey Bardon, the schoolteacher who encouraged the contemporary Western Desert painting movement in 1971 at the settlement of Papunya in Central Australia. Bardon described the works being made by Anmatyerre, Arrernte, Luritja, Pintupi and Warlpiri men as proto-writing. His first book on their work, Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert (1979), described the sign system used by the artists and gave translations of the signs. Bardon emphasised the haptic level of communication involved in the paintings and how the artists would stroke and sing the painted shapes and lines. Indeed the early works look soft, as if they have been stroked. He wrote: ‘The painters seemed to me to understand space as an emotional idea.’
Talking about Western Desert paintings in terms of their symbolic meanings, and interpreting their forms as the signs in a pictorial alphabet, is only one way of responding to them. As well as translating them into maps and diagrams it is possible to respond to them on an experiential level, joining your own experience of the earth, your knowledge about weather, landforms, plants, animals and life, to your experience of art, your acquaintance with and responses to paint and patterns, texture, colour, drawing and surfaces. Appreciation of the paintings is enhanced by increased knowledge about their languages, and about the lives and purposes of the artists, yet the works also speak directly and ask viewers to draw on what they already know about the world. About the way cloud patterns resemble patterns on bark or how a brush begins by being full of paint and gradually runs out of it.
In 1991 Geoffrey Bardon’s brother James published an extraordinary but difficult novel called Revolution by Night, or, Katjala wananu (The Son after the Father). The book foregrounds itself as ‘a rough transcription of notes from a Professor Jack Dutruc, a survivor of the Wilier massacres’. The writing is dreamlike without much punctuation. The story is fictional but embedded in facts. Reading it is like being in a sandstorm where moments of clarity are replaced by swirling fog. It lifts the reader into a strange place where ideas are formed and brought to the surface only to slide away. The novel draws on the explorer Charles Sturt’s experiences in his explorations in Australia from 1828 to 1844. It joins the language, often described as purgatorial, in Sturt’s Journal, which combines his record of exploration with his intense religious feelings on entering unknown deserts and strange places, with speculations about the formation of Aboriginal culture and religion as they arose out of those very same places and conditions. It is very much an imaginative stream of consciousness rather than an anthropological approach to the complex and ultimately unknowable genesis of any human culture.
In keeping with its semi-documentary style and in the tradition of the novel that has been ‘found’ by the writer, Revolution by Night finishes with several appendices. They include an essay by Dutruc about Aboriginal art in which he claims that the paintings made at Papunya are simultaneously representations and embodiments of matter; and that they achieve four-dimensionality by incorporating a sense of space expanding in all directions at once. He calls them a system of ‘eidetic recall’ in which the artists ‘see’ the journeys that they recount. Eidetic images are vivid memory images which are viewed by those who see them like actual palpable pictures hanging in front of them. To think about art in the way described by James Bardon means understanding it as a physiological stimulus as well as a conceptual tool. It shows that art possesses a role that is forceful and physical, to be used both for thinking and remembering.
Dreamings, a key term used when explaining Aboriginal cosmology, was coined for this purpose in the late nineteenth century by Frank Gillen, postmaster of the Alice Springs telegraph station and enthusiast for Aboriginal culture. First it was Dream Time, which shifted into Dreaming and then Dreamings. Gillen was looking for a word to translate into English the Arrernte word Alterrenge. It is strange how it came about because though the word for dream in Arrernte is similar in sound, a homophone, to the word Alterrenge, this is not the case in most other Aboriginal languages, though they have a term with a meaning similar to Alterrenge. Jukurrpa is the Warlpiri word and rather than being called Dreaming it is often translated as ‘the Law’.
The word Dreamings has become part of the Australian vernacular, and is used lightly by many people. It is often used in the media and advertising as a synonym for belonging and/or desire, even while maintaining its connection to Aboriginal culture. It possesses the flexibility of a hybrid concept and has developed through translation and mistranslation. Yet the full meaning of it is probably not really clear to many people. Dreamings are not considered mythology or metaphor by the Aboriginal people to whom they belong, but a true account of what happened when the world was created. Dreamings are creation figures and include everything and everytime, from landforms to trees, animals to diseases. They are both handed down and found, they belong to people and relate to things and places but also to events. They are in the past but also in the present. Aboriginal guidelines for living are set out by some Dreaming stories. Yet rather than being Just-So stories or only the setting-out of moral codes that the term ‘the Law’ suggests, it is the case that often in the stories all sorts of apparently random and arbitrary events take place along with the creation of the land and its people, its flora and fauna, often with love stories and sexual misbehaviour involved. This makes them a bit more like stories about Greek and Roman gods than Bible stories (though the Bible has its share of such events).
Dreamings link the past and the present and are also ongoing. Dreamings made something happen in the beginning, they still make something happen and they belong to or are in people living today as they were in people living in the past. Dreamings may be in a painting. Dreamings emphasise continuity and location, and the power of narrative to bring memory and place together. W.E.H. Stanner, an anthropologist who thought and wrote a lot about Aboriginal religion, thought that a better word than Dreamings would be ‘Everywhen’ thus linking place and time with a sense of eternity, infinity and ubiquitous power. Stanner also offers a sense of it as a life force. It was described to him by an Aboriginal man as: ‘Like engine, like power, plenty of power: it does hard-work; it pushes.’ Anthropologist Peter Sutton describes it in the words of Peter Peemuggina from Cape York as ‘Epam epama’ – literally ‘nothing is nothing’, everything means something. In a conversation recorded for the Wagilag Sisters exhibition it was described by Yolngu man Don Gumana as like telecommunications: ‘They’re passing over each other, they’re passing a
way back, they’re passing through one another, same way, all Wititj (olive python), they’re passing a message over one another. It’s like a Telecom. It’s like a Telecom.’ Embedded in them is not necessarily a panacea, a key or a secret but something vital, the power of stories.
A few of the early Papunya paintings showed ceremonial costumes and regalia and resemble illustrations from encyclopedias or ethnographic books. However most of the works are designs which are not illustrations of culture but direct expressions of that culture. They are manifestations of ancestral power. The powerful optical effects present in many of them, such as the Tingari cycle paintings, in which concentric circles pulse and waver, demonstrate knowledge of organic patterns derived from close observation of nature and an understanding of human susceptibility to the repetition of certain forms.
When they found out what was happening at Papunya there was controversy amongst other Aboriginal people in the Western Desert region about whether these designs ought to be painted for public display and sale. The first exhibition of the paintings held at Alice Springs in 1974 was stoned by Aboriginal people in protest at the paintings’ rumoured disclosure of secret-sacred designs, which they also owned. Surrounding communities continued to perceive the Western Desert painters as cultural delinquents well into the 1980s, according to historian Vivien Johnson’s account. This was eventually resolved and now a huge and ever-increasing number of Aboriginal communities all over Australia make art for sale. The financial success of the Papunya artists showed that there was income to be made from art, which neither diluted nor diminished the power of the ancestors but actually raised its status through being visible and valuable in the wider world. This success also made it possible for people to buy Toyotas (Toyota Dreaming) to visit their Dreaming sites and to support their repatriation to their own country in outstations to extend and affirm traditional culture, and to avoid mainstream Australian life. Thus tradition was able to display flexibility and as Clifford Possum’s brother Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri said to Geoff Bardon in reference to the culture providing for its people in this way: ‘The money belongs to the ancestors.’
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