An Opening

by Stephanie Radok

  New Zealand was one of the last habitable land masses in the world to be settled. Migrants sailed in double-hulled canoes from East Polynesia. Many methods have been used to determine the date when they first arrived. Although no single method is foolproof, all agree that permanent Polynesian settlement was established around 1300. Maori genealogies (whakapapa) include the names of the canoes in which they first arrived in New Zealand, thus though they are considered indigenous people and have creation stories for New Zealand, their arrival is part of their story. Yet the Maori call themselves tangata whenua, the people of the land.

  How flexible is the idea of indigeneity? How is connection to place made and maintained? When I was a child indigenous peoples were invisible and talked about as if they were extinct and legendary like the dodo. Today it is impossible not to know that many if not all indigenous peoples have survived into the twenty-first century. In Australia there is a turning point at which you suddenly really see or feel the land for the first time as Aboriginal land. Such encounters are different for each person. It may happen by seeing a movie or a TV show, hearing something on the radio or reading a book about powerful feelings for country, about dispossession, about language and family groups. Or it may be an exhibition of some art that speaks and opens a door. Or you hear someone speak, or dance or sing. Or you are shown a carved tree or artefacts which previously you would have seen as pieces of stone and suddenly realise that artefacts are all around you. At this point you are enabled to see that much of Australia once held voices and movements very different from what it does now, and that it wasn’t that long ago. This is a point at which you see the past as still present, still living, still part of the future. Each person can trace their own understanding of this revelation. Once your eyes are opened it’s everywhere. And you see indigeneity not as something belonging to the past or a stage in the evolution of human development that has been superseded but as miraculously present. A couple of times I went on a tour of rock art sites in the Adelaide Hills and saw paintings and engravings as well as tiny pieces of stone that had been tools. Since then I see each fragment of rock as a potential artefact. Walking or driving around Adelaide you often see trees with shelters in their bases or that have had oval-shaped pieces of bark of various sizes removed from them.

  Babakiueria, a short film directed by Don Featherstone in 1986, introduces an Australia in reverse. It shows a country occupied by white Australians who are having a barbecue when a boat of Aboriginal people arrives on the shore. ‘What is this place called?’ ask the Aboriginal people. ‘It’s a barbecue area’, the white people reply. We then see Aboriginal people as policemen dealing with errant white people whose children need to be taken away from them and who lose their home and most of their rights at the same time. This role reversal is humorous and cutting. Some of the white people protest this treatment while others are compliant and go quietly. The black journalist narrator tells us that she has always been interested in white people, and though we hear this statement all the time about Aboriginal culture or Aboriginal people it is seen to be both intrusive and odd when a simple colour change is made. Seeing this film late one night by accident on TV in my lounge room in Canberra was a highly entertaining shock.

  Another work on black/white relationships that I can’t forget is Joy Hardman’s video I Spy (1997). She went to live in Alice Springs in 1995 and made a work about what she found there. It is unusual in its frankness, which is partly explained by the fact that she had only been there for two years. It played on a TV installed on a bit of sand in the front gallery at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. It is most confronting in its honesty, showing her talking, well whispering actually, and you need to listen a few times to hear it all, about the complexities of the relationships between blackfellas and whitefellas in Central Australia. Her words do not talk up either the integrity of the blacks or of the whites but tell something of the ongoing strange workings between the two. For many reasons such things are often left unspoken.

  In the video Joy, a white woman, wearing khaki shorts and shirt and boots sits cross-legged on the ground holding alternately small pieces of mica, little leaves, crushed drink cans and tiny feathers over her eyes and whispering to the video camera:

  I spy with my little eye something that starts with W, I spy whitefellas trying to help blackfellas, I spy… whitefellas and blackfellas drinking a lot of alcohol, I spy… whitefellas going to work and blackfellas going to social security, I spy… whitefellas making gender politics out of blackfella business, I spy… whitefellas spying blackfellas as the real people at peace with the universe, as more spiritual, as holding answers to bad whitefella ways.

  Riddle riddle me ree there’s something I can see and it starts with B… I see blackfellas with arms and legs in bandages, I spy… blackfellas watching Jacky Chan videos and eating McDonald’s in the MacDonnell Ranges, I spy… whitefellas and blackfellas being careful about what they say about money and blackfella politics.

  At this stage the camera pulls back and we see she is sitting cross-legged on the ground with a series of objects placed in front of her – a glass bowl of water, a shiny metal teapot, a rock, a glass sphere and finally a long piece of mirror. She handles each object and makes ‘magic’ gestures over them while whispering:

  I see … blackfellas with tins on strings like horses with hay bags around their necks, I see … whitefellas writing and filing reports on blackfellas and blackfellas talking in local language about odd whitefellas ways; I see … whitefellas believing they’ve been specially selected to learn blackfella secrets …

  and the video loop begins again.

  ‘Missionaries, misfits and mercenaries’ is the cynical phrase used to describe those who work with remote indigenous communities in Australia, but Hardman replaces the ‘misfits’ with ‘mystics’ in the statement that goes with her work. Her video responds eloquently to her experience of daily confrontations on the border between cultures in an unsentimental oscillation between reality and unreality, romanticism, comedy and tragedy.

  Anne Mosey originally travelled to Central Australia in 1989 to retrace the footsteps of her great-great-grandfather, the explorer Peter Egerton-Warburton. Mosey discovered another country lying within the Australia she knew, a country of prior ownership and belonging whose stories both incorporated and exceeded those concerning her family. As soon as she arrived Mosey began to meet people and to engage with them. When she finally made her trip retracing the steps of her great-great-grandfather she was travelling with seventeen Warlpiri and Pintupi traditional owners. Thus she learned at firsthand of the mingled relationships and obligations of white/black relationships and the impossibility of simply moving through the country as if it was empty before European explorers entered it.

  Some of the works Mosey made about Central Australia were collaborations with Dolly Nampitjinpa, now deceased. The first time they had a conventional exhibition, Dolly showed paintings, while Anne showed drawing and photographs, in a show about cross-cultural collaboration called Commitments at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane in 1990. After that they were invited by curator Tony Bond to do an experimental installation for the 9th Biennale of Sydney in 1992. Dolly came up with the idea of showing her living space and Anne decided to complement it with hers. This first recreation of their respective living quarters was called simply Untitled. They re-staged it at the University of South Australia Art Museum in 1994 and called it ngurra (camp/home/country), (ngurra is a Pitjanjatjara word that means camp and home and country). The installation placed Anne Mosey’s kitchen in Alice Springs and Dolly Nampijinpa’s humpy at Yuendumu side by side like a traditional museum display of habitats.

  The Art Museum, now demolished, was a large white cube with a parquet floor and a vaguely disintegrating ceiling. Mosey set up her kitchen in a corner of it. It looked like a stage-set or a replica of a low rent holiday cabin, only crowded with too much furniture – cheap wood-veneer cupboards, two armchairs and a f
ormica-covered table with two metal and vinyl chairs. There was a TV playing on a tea-chest, a gas stove, a fridge, a washing machine. Some books, a few Aboriginal dot paintings and several photographs made one wall more personal. Many people would feel like they knew this place already, half-office, half-home – ordinary transient accommodation. It was a fairly harsh room that could be imagined as cold and bleak in the morning or, lit with a fluorescent tube or two, steamy with the cooking of food in the evening, or warmed with conversation and endless cups of tea. Depending on our experience it could be imagined as the scene of recriminations and account-keeping of either the emotional or financial kind, a typical white person’s quarters in a remote area work situation.

  Next to this kitchen was a rough shelter made from about six sheets of corrugated iron, a large tarpaulin and some stout sticks. An upright forked piece of wood holding up the roof pole of the shelter was stuck in a large tin of red sand. Other strong sticks leant against the shelter. Apparently multipurpose tools, they were not just pieces of wood but recognisably parts of trees, retaining the lines of growth and the bark that characterised their species. A hearth consisting of a sheet of corrugated iron on which four blackened tin cans held up a grate lay on the ground. Inside the shelter there was a pile of blankets and tarpaulins lying alongside a cardboard box with supplies in it. Rubbish lay around, and there were some big drums with ‘16 KG Flour, Eudunda, SA, packed for The NT’ written on them. There was a coolamon full of seeds and some spinifex. The roof pole of the shelter faced east/west. It was easy to imagine this shelter not in a gallery but on the ground under the stars as a nomadic dwelling, an Aboriginal camp site, easily able to be moved when a new location was required.

  The general impression of both Anne and Dolly’s camps was of shocking harshness and minimalism. The indigenous side of the equation was the most minimal and contained many objects clearly used for multiple tasks, like those stout sticks. The accompanying catalogue included interviews with each artist by anthropologist Petronella Vaarzon-Morel. Dolly’s words, a short extract of which appears below, were printed in the catalogue in Warlpiri as well as translated into English.

  This place we have is our home. In it we have our swags, blankets and billycans for tea. We also cook meat in it on the ground. A White person’s house is different. He’s got good cupboards, a phone to listen to and to talk with someone who is faraway. We have nothing. We just live in humpies. We only get our news from a person who has come from faraway. White people have everything different. They have very good houses and they are clean. Aborigines’ homes are untidy. The billy cans are dirty, and dogs lick tea and soup from the billycans. A White person has a clean house, clean cupboards and rooms and he’s got a bed, table and a very good kitchen which he uses in a lot of different ways.

  We Aborigines have nothing. We have a few things like branches, blankets and a small swag. A White person has plenty of things, everything. White people only know about reading papers to get news from faraway places. They have a lot of books and papers for themselves. They don’t have Dreamings. They haven’t got them, nothing. Aborigines have sacred things. In that way they are rich. They know their Dreamings. Now, today, though they’ve got paper, and they know about liquor. Well Aborigines got that from the White people.

  Anne’s words, some of which appear below, were not translated into Warlpiri.

  From an emotional and philosophical perspective the commonalities between us are the reason for doing the work – not the final aesthetic or the final product. The fact that we’ve worked together, that she was the chairwoman for the Women’s Centre and I was the co-coordinator, the fact that we’ve travelled together, that she’s taught me dancing and singing, that I’ve taken her and other women on yawulyu journeys, and that we’ve worked on the night patrol and so on. For me the connections are much stronger than the differences. But of course, what is seen are the differences, not the connections because they are invisible.

  Connections can be made in many ways. A series of ten photo-compositions called Patterns of Connection (1992) by Leah King-Smith layer and superimpose historical archival images of Aboriginal people from the Picture Collection of the State Library of Victoria with landscape imagery hand-coloured with paint. The work merges the layers seamlessly so that, as is King-Smith’s stated aim, we see these indigenous people ‘in a positive and spiritual light’.

  To describe a few of them is to try to put into words the amalgam of images they involve and their effect. A circular edge of darkness at the top of each photograph makes the viewer feel as if they are looking into a camera lens or a mirror. A white-haired Aboriginal man dressed in European clothes holds a boomerang and poses for the camera. Behind him a couple of white houses can be seen. A white dog with its back to the camera watches him. Up in the sky the arc of the edge of a river appears, trees are reflected in its water. In another image four Aboriginal women wearing white dresses sit in a row. Again, looking at the photograph is like looking through a portal into another time zone and a layer of clouds and trees and reflections is both within, over and above them. It is as if they are spirit beings behind glass in another world, the past, though perhaps it is we the viewers who are behind glass. In yet another image an old Aboriginal man, who looks like a poet or a prophet with a big cloak pinned over his shoulders, looks out of the centre of a photograph, layered inside him is a lake reflecting the sky and a large tree that is lined up with his backbone.

  An intense sense that the people are in the land and that the land is in the people is conveyed by these images, but this is an inadequate description; rather the land is the people, the people are the land, they are one. The works were made in response to a commission to produce a book using some of the photographs of surviving Aboriginal people taken in the nineteenth century at the missions of Coranderrk, Ramahyuck and Lake Tyers, from the collection of the State Library of Victoria. Unexpectedly, the artist transformed the stereotypical view of them as bereft people decimated by loss and betrayal into images of people who are found and whole, strong and almost eternal. Notions of resilience, deep time and connectedness with nature are strikingly present in the works. King-Smith’s hope is that the work will ‘trigger people’s inner perceptions rather than their outer kind of objective, pragmatic mode of understanding’. When first exhibited in Melbourne the works were shown with an environmental soundscape by Duncan King-Smith based on recordings made in the Victorian bush. In his words, it sought to ‘open up the channels for communications from the spiritual force that nurtures natural places’.

  Three artworks, made by Bea Maddock, between 1987 and 1998, display her growing understanding of the Aboriginal occupation of Australia combined with an attempt at understanding her own position in the same country. Each work repeats images of land and uses language in order to emphasise the importance of naming in claiming place and in asserting connection. In we live in the meanings we are able to discern an explorer’s settlement and a vaguely arctic-looking coastline are carefully outlined and coloured-in like a children’s book illustration. We see a small encampment with an Australian flag and a snowy outcrop of mountain, its head hidden in cloud. It is Heard Island, said by archaeologist Rhys Jones to be what Tasmania was like in the last Ice Age. Three lines of script run along the bottom of the seven-panelled drawing – they are Tasmanian place names in an Aboriginal language: minnerronene winnibberler manwoneer….mubberlee towwenric. The simple charcoal drawing is filled in with encaustic – a painting technique in which wax rather than oil or water is used to hold pigment. It is a slow way of working because the wax, which needs to be kept molten, soon hardens, so brush strokes have to be very small. The work gains a degree of luminosity but also a sense of remoteness from the viewer with this technique. Below the drawings are small boxes. In each one there is an identical blurred blue-tinged photograph of the scene in the drawing. All at once map, drawing, photograph, object, the work is both neat and handmade in its construction. It also has a bit of a ba
ckyard feel to it. Its title we live in the meanings we are able to discern is an offering of great thoughtfulness suggesting as it does a potent mixture of limitation and possibility. If we don’t know a lot we won’t be able to understand very much, but as our knowledge expands we will have more meanings to live in. Yet ‘discern’ is such a subtle word; it suggests intuition and feeling as much as information and knowledge. Thus the artist proffers the significance of attentiveness to what may not be taught or said aloud but is nevertheless present.

  Another work by Maddock, Tromanner forgive us our trespass, is a series of dry pale drawings, again made with the slow movements of encaustic, this time showing a bleached-out view of rolling yellow hills in Tasmania stretched over by a pale blue sky holding a few white clouds. There are five panels and on their lower edge are written cursive words in a Tasmanian Aboriginal language: miemtina poimina poymatang … their soft rhythms echo the soft cadences of Aboriginal voices. This time there are Aboriginal artefacts collected by the artist, wrapped and tied with string, in the small shelves beneath the images. Tromanner could be a misspelling or mishearing of Truganini, a name well-known as that of the purported last Tasmanian Aboriginal woman. And maybe the title of the work is a clue that the words beneath the drawing are a translation of The Lord’s Prayer. As Christianity and the writing down of indigenous languages often go hand in hand, prayers are often the first things to be translated and written down. Here the land appears to have been cleared and exposed, bare tree trunks are visible across the painting. To think of it in relation to forgiveness and trespass makes it seem especially bleak and filled with loss. The waxy images are unevenly covered with white lines as if they have been clawed or scratched. It could be the white lines of rain but the land looks so dry. When you read the text or say it to yourself it is like a chant.