The tradition of painting Rover started at Warmun blossomed in the work of many artists, including Hector Jandany, a man of great charisma and warmth whom I met briefly in Darwin at an exhibition opening. Jandany and George Mung Mung helped set up a bicultural Gija/Christian school in the seventies called the Bough Shed School, and Jandany’s paintings, which often brought together Christian and Gija imagery, were used for teaching. Jandany’s technique was to underpaint with thin gritty ochre paint then scrape back the surface with a smooth flat stone before applying more layers of thin paint. He said he got this technique from his grandfather, who used to smooth rockfaces with a stone before painting on them. In their soft ochre colours and delicate forms of trees and hills, bodies of land and of water painted from memory, Jandany’s works possess great emotional resonance, like fragile dreams.
Another Aboriginal artist who brought together Western and Aboriginal stories was Lin Onus, who was born in Melbourne in 1948 to a Scottish mother and Wiradjuri father. His father BiIl Onus was famous for his land rights activism, as well as his business, Aboriginal Enterprise Novelties, which produced boomerangs, woomeras, fabrics and greeting cards imprinted with Aboriginal motifs. Lin learned to paint there and later at a panel-beater’s shop. In 1986 he was invited to travel to Maningrida in Arnhem Land, became a member of the Wunuwun family there and then made annual visits. He said that the most valuable thing he learned from the famous artist and second father to him, Jack Wunuwun, was to approach life with a sense of humour. His paintings often combined detailed photographic realism with rarrk patterning, traditional crosshatching used to give the ‘singing’ power of iridescence (which is also ancestral power) to painted surfaces in Arnhem Land.
One of Onus’s most famous works called Fruitbats (1991) uses a Hills Hoist clothesline as a roost for bats, which are painted with rarrk crosshatch patterns. The Hills Hoist clothesline is a South Australian invention of a single metal pole with four metal ribs spreading from the centre. Between the ribs is wire on which the clothes are pegged. The real genius of the Hills Hoist is the winding mechanism that allows the frame to be raised and lowered and thus to spin in the wind. Its inventor Lance Hill wanted ‘Mum’ to be able to get all those clothes hung up from one place, and not have to be walking all along the clothesline. Onus’s Fruitbats combines this striking and now ordinary though slightly endangered Australian invention with roosting bats. Beneath his Hills Hoist lie scattered flowers. These decorative star patterns appear to have slid off the skins of the bats and lie on the ground like the spattered residue of the bats’ faeces, demonstrating the convergence of beauty and the mundane, decoration and meaning.
In 1986 I stayed for two weeks on Aboriginal land at Ernabella where a friend was working as a teacher, though my permit to be there didn’t arrive until after my return. When I arrived any Aboriginal person I was introduced to immediately called me kunmanara, and I found out that someone with a name like mine had recently died so I was called kunmanara, a name that fills in for anyone with a name the same as or similar to that of the recently deceased so that the dead person’s name is not spoken. So I felt a little like a ghost as I walked around the settlement and visited the art and craft centre, which was very quiet at the time though the air was dense with the smell of wax and dyes from the batik workshop. I wanted to buy a punu, a poker-worked wooden lizard, but no-one wanted to sell it to me. They told me to come back later or ask someone else about it.
While my friend was teaching I read and went for walks. I saw and heard many crows and saw a few dingoes, but they didn’t come near me. Someone told me that one side of the Musgrave Ranges that ring the settlement of Ernabella are men’s mountains so I knew not to walk there. Each day I climbed to the top of the ridge near my friend’s house and after walking along it quite a way sat down and made small drawings of the horizon in blue, yellow and red pastels on small carefully torn sheets of paper attached to a piece of wood with crocodile clips. My goal was to draw the entire horizon, and I had to work solidly to get it done in the time I had. I went to the same vantage point on the ridge every day and looked at the horizon to find the place where I had left off the previous day. It meant becoming familiar with where I was to the extent of giving names to the mountains and valleys, names like soft three leaning, lumpy edge, flat blue or red behind steep blue. This type of drawing is like touching something a long way away with your eyes and transferring that touch to something you can sense in your hands.
One day as I walked back to the settlement some young Aboriginal men called out to me to ask if I had found any gold. My friend informed me that this was a joke about the fabled Lasseter’s Reef, a legendary gold deposit first ‘found’ in 1897. Among the prints that I made from my drawings back in Canberra were twelve black and white woodcuts that I called Pitjatjanjara country – the ladder because I thought about climbing the hills and about what Margaret Preston had said about the ladder of art, and because the landscape seemed to me somehow endlessly revolving and circular. Though there were twelve prints hung on the wall they were six images printed twice which joined each other to emphasise a dreamlike sense of containment, recurrence and circularity.
Another country was the title I gave to a set of colour reduction linocut prints that I made from my drawings of the horizon. The space between where I lived in Canberra and Ernabella was so wide. Being in Ernabella was like being in another country with its own rules and language. I was a foreigner there, yet the prints I made in response to that place are vibrant and loving, full of energy and colour, movement and light. In no small way they resemble works by Aboriginal artists made in the last twenty years suggesting that the colour, the energy and mystery, the knowledge in the land, can be discerned without being taught it or indeed quite knowing what it is, or indeed that the land speaks through art.
I called another set of linocuts, a whole wall of repeated colours and shapes, valleys and hills, Ngura Palya Pulka meaning ‘Our Country/Camp/Home, Good, Beautiful’ in Pitjantjatjara. I walked down the hill from the art school to the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies to ask for the translation for this title and they phoned Ernabella to check with someone there. I found the Central Australian country to be exquisitely beautiful and was thinking of Gauguin’s Nave Nave Fenua, which I understood to be Tahitian for Beautiful Beautiful Land, which is what I wanted translated into the local language. The Institute told me there was no direct translation for the words ‘land’ or ‘beautiful’.
Perhaps Canberra, heart country to me, a place quite unreal with its art deco buildings perched around its artificial lake, its close embrace by twenty-one hills, its long views of the blue mountains of the Brindabella mountain range, its proximity to the whispering bush, and the frequent possibility, when you go for a walk to a hill on the edge of a suburb, of surprising a kangaroo lying in the shade, does have some connection to Central Australia; perhaps it is the light, the clear air and the far horizons.
The tendency of cultures to incorporate new things, to adapt and to find a place for strangers and strangeness, to connect the new with the old, is a significant part of art’s invention, richness and purpose, as it means there is no other, no outsider, nothing that can not be somehow included or accounted for in the world.
Homology means the drawing of correspondences, the recognition of sameness between things. It could involve the indication of likeness, the locating of metaphors, similes, analogies between landforms and the human body. It can be an ecological way of thinking, to talk about relationships between things, the layering of meanings emphasising connections and interdependence. Seeing the earth as a body and the human body as like the earth develops a sense of connection as well as affection. This is not an intellectual affinity – the place of emotion is primary. Anthropologist Sylvie Poirier in writing about her fieldwork in Balgo in the Great Sandy Desert emphasises the Kutjungka people’s sense of interconnectedness with and relatedness to the world:
Going through
the land with Aboriginal people, nothing remains unexplained: each mark, each stone, each tree, must contain meaning which the Tjukurrpa (the Law, the Dreaming) has bequeathed to them… In the Western Desert nothing is taken at face value, the meaning of everything is investigated: a solitary cloud, the song of a bird, a falling star, a birthmark, a sickness, a stone.
Such reading of the world as a book is one way of finding a place in it.
——
The dog and I sit very still in the summer heat. Well actually I sit and he lies, close by, legs straight out, eyes closed, soaking up the heat until he can’t possibly take any more, is panting hard and has to sit in the shade for a while, but always keeping a close eye and ear on me. I have a hat and long-sleeved shirt on and am folded over against the sun but want to be heated by that radiant heat that is like no other. If I sit still for long enough I know I will see or hear something; a camouflaged moth folded flat and symmetrical on a piece of wood, the bright yellow lumps of pollen on the back legs of a bee, a dead beetle being taken apart by ants, a spider repairing its web; I will see a breath of the wind move through the leaves; I might pat the trunk of a tree or run my finger over the sharp spikes of the quartz crystals hidden in some of the rocks edging our garden. When I was a child the pathways outside this house were covered in crushed quartz rock from the nearby quarry. I would walk up the hill with the sun behind me in order to spot the gleam where the face of a crystal was catching the sun and then walk towards that light to pick it up.
References
EPIGRAPHS
GENERAL
Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament, Princeton University Press, 1992, page 227.
JANUARY
Zbigniew Herbert, ‘Pebble’ in Zbigniew Herbert: Selected Poems (trans. Czeslaw Milosz & Peter Dale Scott), Penguin, 1968, page 108.
FEBRUARY
Judith Wright, ‘The World and the Child’, in Mainly Modern: an anthology of verse selected by John and Dorothy Colmer, Rigby, 1969, page 206.
MARCH
Ticio Escobar, ‘Identity and Myth Today’, in The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Theory, (eds) Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt, Ziauddin Sardar, Continuum, 2002, page 151.
APRIL
Toss Woolaston, ‘Man’s Predicament in his Own World’, Christchurch Star, 14 October 1959 (review of the Elias paintings); quoted in ‘Chronology’, Marja Bloem and Martin Browne, Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith, Craig Poton Publishing/Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2004, page 192.
MAY
Gulumbu Yunupingu, at her November 2004 exhibition Garak, the Universe at Alcaston Gallery, reported by Patrick Hutchings, The Age, 14 January 2006.
JUNE
Albrecht Dürer, Painters’ Manual, quoted in J.C. Hutchison, Albrecht Dürer: A Biography, Princeton University Press, 1990, page 68.
JULY
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, (first published 1938), Blackwell, 2001, page 99.
AUGUST
Djon Mundine, ‘Ich bin ein Aratjara’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 75, 1994, pages 10–11.
SEPTEMBER
Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Pluto, page 229, as quoted in Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994, page 8.
OCTOBER
John Ruskin The Laws of Fésole, (first published 1879), Allworth Press, 1996, page 39.
NOVEMBER
Agnes Martin, Writings, (ed.) Dieter Schwarz, 1991, Cantz Verlag, Germany, page 16, published to accompany exhibition Agnes Martin: paintings and works on paper, 1960–1989, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 19 January – 15 March, 1992.
DECEMBER
Trinh T. Minh-ha, installation with Jean-Paul Bourdier, The Other Walk, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, 2006–2009, noted June 2007, Paris.
QUOTES IN TEXT
PAGE viii
Gillian Perry, Paula Modersohn-Becker: Her Life and Work, (diary entry by Modersohn-Becker), The Women’s Press, 1979, page 26.
PAGE 1
Constantine P. Cavafy, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (1904), in Collected Poems (translated by Edmund Kelley & Philip Sherrard), Princeton University Press, 1975, revised 1992.
PAGE 1
John Clark, Modern Asian Art, Craftsman House, 1998, page 9.
PAGE 2
Anselm Kiefer in Boundaries, tracks, traces, songs: Anselm Kiefer in Australia, Art and Australia supplement, Volume 30, Number 2, Fine Arts Press, 1992, page 11.
PAGES 6–7
Marcia Langton, ‘Whitefella Jump Up’ Correspondence, Quarterly Essay, Issue 12, 2003, Black Inc, page 80.
PAGE 31
Rhys Jones, quoted in Graeme Leech, ‘The first boat people’, The Australian Magazine, 18–19 July, 1998, page 21.
PAGE 38
Murray, Les, ‘The Human-hair thread’, Meanjin, vol.38, no.4, December, 1977, pages 550–571.
PAGE 39
Jill Kerr Conway, The Road From Coorain, (first published 1989), Minerva, 1994, page 25.
PAGE 39
Randolph Stow, ‘Raw Material’, (first published in 1961), reprinted in Leonie Kramer and Adrian Mitchell (eds) The Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1985, page 314.
PAGE 39
Heinrich von Kleist in Caspar David Friedrich 1774–1840, (eds) William Vaughan, Helmut Borsch-Supan, Hans Joachim Neidhardt, The Tate Gallery, 1972, page 107.
PAGE 47
Judith Ryan, ‘Rarrk on bark: John Mawurndjul’s medium of power and beauty’, Between Indigenous Australia and Europe: John Mawurndjul, (eds) Claus Volkenandt & Christian Kaufmann, Aboriginal Studies Press, 2009, page 69.
PAGE 49
Rhys Jones, ‘Ordering the Landscape’, in (eds) Ian and Tamsin Donaldson, Seeing the First Australians, Unwin Hyman, Sydney, 1985, page 1985, reproduced in Edge of the Trees, (ed.) Dinah Dysart, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 2000, page 6.
PAGE 61
Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 1945, Princeton University Press, page 283.
PAGE 66
Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, (first published 1930), The International Psycho-Analytical Library, (ed.) John D. Sutherland, No. 17, translated by Joan Riviere, revised and edited by James Strachey, Hogarth Press, 1963, page 1.
PAGE 75
John Ruskin, Works, vii.52, (eds) E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn, London, 1903–12, 39 vols., quoted by Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, (first published 1960), Oxford University Press, 1989, page 339.
PAGE 77
Instructions to Captain Cook, 30 July 1768. www.foundingdocs.gov.au/resources/transcripts/nsw1_doc_1768.pdf
PAGE 78
Transcribed by author from Paddy Wainburranga in Too Many Captain Cooks, 1988, film produced and directed by Penny McDonald, 1989.
PAGES 78–79
Harry Wedge, Adam and Eve getting evicted 1992, acrylic on canvas board, 20.5 x 40.5 cm. Reproduced with text in H.J. Wedge, Wiradjuri Spirit Man, Craftsman House published in association with Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, 1996, page 80.
PAGE 90
Peter Yates, Clive Scollay, Penny Tweedie, ‘Aboriginal Artists from Arnhemland’, European Dialogue: Biennale of Sydney 1979, Art Gallery of New South Wales, unpaginated.
PAGE 90–91
Ian Hughes, ‘Yolgnu Rom: Indigenous Knowledge in North Australia’, in Indigenous Organisations and Development, (eds) P. Blunt and D.M. Warren, Intermediate Technology.
PAGE 95
E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, (first published in 1950), Phaidon Press, 1970, page 32.
PAGE 96
Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya: A Place made after the Story, Miegunyah Press, 2004, page 42.
PAGES 96–97
James Bardon, Revolution by Night or Karkalla Warnun (The Son after the Father), Local Consumption, 1991, pages 226–240.
PAGE 99
W.E.H. Stanner, ‘The Dreaming’ (1953) in White Man got no Dreaming: Essays 1938–1973, Australian N
ational University Press, 1979, page 24.
PAGE 99
Peter Sutton, Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia, 1988, Asia Society, South Australia Museum, page 13.
PAGE 99
Don Gumana, quoted in Djalu Gurruwiwi, ‘The Gälpu Story’, The Painters of the Wagilag Sisters Story 1937–1997, (eds) Wally Caruana and Nigel Lendon, National Gallery of Australia, 1997, page 130.
PAGE 101
Geoffrey Bardon, Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, Rigby, 1979, page 12.
PAGE 119
Peter Sutton, ‘Aboriginal art, the nation state, suburbia’, Artlink Vol. 12, No. 3, Spring, 1992, page 8.
PAGES 119–120
Deborah Bird Rose with Sharon D’Amico, Nancy Daiyi, Kathy Deveraux, Margaret Daiyi, Linda Ford and April Bright, Country of the Heart: an Indigenous Australian Homeland, Institute of Aboriginal Studies Press, 2002, page 15.
PAGE 120
Michael Mel, ‘Art/Body: The Liminal Experiences of Indigeneity’, Artlink, Vol. 20, No.3, 2000, page 43.
An Opening Page 16