Did they have any idea at all of the significance of what they were doing? Hard to believe it could have escaped them. They must have known the art had been made by old people. After all, they had probably been initiated to some extent, if not to the full degree of their fathers and grandfathers. A hundred years ago, instead of this petrol-fuelled orgy, these boys would have undergone a traumatic transition into adulthood. Physically strong and audacious, they would have endured painful and challenging initiations to become formidable warriors, feeding their families, the heroes of their clans. They would have embarked on the education, under the instruction of their elders, that enabled them to survive spiritually and physically in one of the harshest environments in the world. And they would have been put through rituals that were connected to the waterholes and other geographical features that they would spend their lives traversing.
I must confess that I’ve always been fascinated and just a little horrified by descriptions of initiation ceremonies that young men such as these once went through. It was a deliberately fearsome experience. I’ve known two white men who have undergone some part of the process. One almost died from blood poisoning and the other was as mad as a cut snake. At the onset of adolescence, young boys like my car thieves were seized from the protection of their female relatives, whose weeping and screaming would have intensified their terror. Amongst some clans the older men cut their veins and drenched the boys in their blood, evoking the serpent who swallows them and regurgitates them as men. The circumcision, performed with a sharp stone, was witnessed by members of many interrelated clans as the women wailed and painted dancers circled blazing fires.
Once circumcised, the boys huddled by the fire wrapped in the smoke that symbolised rebirth and cleansing. For many nights thereafter, old men painted in red ochre imparted their knowledge of the laws of adult life through slow repetitious singing. The boys were expected to silently endure the physical discomfort, to make a deep commitment to obey the elders, and to guard the sacred laws of a world that was, until this moment, invisible to them. Even today, boys who have taken part in rituals like this are later secluded in a camp until their wounds have healed. They eat little and are instructed further by the men in esoteric knowledge relating to the journeys of their Dreamtime ancestors. Finally, amidst further lamenting and crying, they return to their female relatives, exhausted but visibly altered. The mother now accepts that her boy-child is dead and that their relationship must now become one of restraint and formal respect. Having endured physical and psychological trauma such as this, a young man achieves the new status befitting one who has attained greater knowledge about the nature of the world, and of life and death.
The next phase of the initiation traditionally involved a great journey. In the company of a ‘red ochre group’ of revered elders, the young men would set out to meet distant members of their extended family, and visit sites of importance to their spiritual knowledge and survival. At their father’s birthplace they would be joined by the male relative who had performed their circumcision. Here they gained knowledge of the relationship between human beings and the spirit world, and learned to respect the psychic power of ‘clever men’, known by many names, such as Kadaicha or Mapan, depending on the clan or region.
The boys who stole my car could never have had this profound experience. Now that Aboriginal people live a sedentary life, a journey ‘back to country’ can be hundreds of kilometres off-road, across spinifex and gibber. Two years earlier I had taken Johnny Mosquito and his sons to their country near Lake Mackay. It had required three 4WD vehicles with four spare tyres for each, two weeks provisions and detailed logistical planning. We travelled down to Yagga Yagga and onward to Walgulli and the Munga Munga claypan, before forging our way deep into the desert to Jijigujarra rockhole. The trip cost thousands of dollars. Little wonder that the opportunity to revisit country is rarely possible.
On many of our journeys across the Tanami Desert or Arnhem Land during the last 30 years, my wife, Anne, and I have encountered road blocks and signs forbidding entry. When questioned, the locals would simply tell us that the Law was going through. Young initiates were being collected in one community after another, as the trucks that carried them drove toward Christmas Creek or some other accessible site where they would be put through their initiation. The knowledge imparted over the following weeks would include the location of sacred places and the stories associated with them, cosmological information, practical knowledge of waterholes, soakages, underground water sources, and other natural resources important for survival. This is important business. It continues to be practised by those who are committed to ensuring that culture is maintained and vital knowledge is passed on, but it is bound to lose its deeper significance once the participant no longer lives in this country and is no longer reliant on this information for survival.
Now, I could not help thinking that dropping my young hooligans deep into the desert by helicopter, with a knowledgeable elder who could lead them back to ‘civilisation’, would be just the sort of transformative experience that could set their lives back on course: a kind of Aboriginal boot camp.
Another significant authority earned through initiation is the right to use and depict these places in certain ways through art. These include clan designs and symbols; aspects of Dreamtime stories; and legends to which they are now a party. There are many levels of meaning in these stories and at one’s first initiation only a perfunctory knowledge is imparted. More complex elements of the story must be gained by advancing through further levels of instruction and initiation. Only a few rare individuals become a person of ‘high degree’. As their culture was not written but remembered for more than 40,000 years, those that reached the highest level of esoteric knowledge became the embodiment of their culture: in every sense, ‘living treasures’.
It is only through this process that artists traditionally earn the right to depict clan designs and creation stories. Since the beginnings of the contemporary art movement, artists from each cultural tradition have produced works of art in a readily identifiable regional style. It is considered as offensive for an Aboriginal person to use another’s clan designs as it is for a non-Aboriginal person to do so. Strictly speaking, it is forbidden for an Aboriginal artist to appropriate imagery that belongs to another moiety, skin or clan group. To be taken seriously, their art must be immediately recognisable as an individual interpretation of their own unique artistic inheritance.
Over the past 200 years very few white people have been entrusted with the deep secrets of the most sacred Aboriginal rituals. One exception was the anthropologist T.G.H. (Ted) Strehlow.1 The son of the Lutheran pastor and mission superintendent at Hermannsburg, he was raised by a local Aboriginal wet nurse and spoke fluent Arrernte.2 Strehlow witnessed and recorded some 166 sacred ceremonies, most of which are no longer practised. At the centre was a corpus of esoteric knowledge and ritual the equal of any of the world’s great cosmologies. Strehlow’s photographs reveal the secret world of these ceremonial practices. A close friend of mine, the photographer Jon Lewis, spent an entire day interviewing Strehlow just two weeks before his death. Strehlow remembered the very words an old man had used when relating his hopes, after entreating him to record and preserve his rituals. ‘Wise and honourable men,’ the old fella had said, ‘… will understand what a great centre we had.’
Early in 2012, I did a road trip to Lajamanu with a group of male friends. My companions were the Parisian galleryist Morteza Esmaili and the celebrated Australian landscape painters Luke Sciberras and Guy Maestri. My primary purpose was to organise and film a corroboree3 as part of a Warlpiri book and exhibition project for Europe. More than 50 women eagerly turned up to join the dancing but, other than a few elders, the only men who participated had to be coaxed away from the footy field with an offer of money. Morteza paid them $200 each, but Luke and Guy were of greater interest to them. While Guy learned to use a slingshot made from an old bicycle seat and tyre, Luke ha
d all the women charmed as he flamboyantly beat them at cards, before handing over all his winnings to his favourite. He also sat for hours in rapt attention as they prepared for the dancing by rubbing their skin with animal fat and painting their breasts with ochre. Amongst the Warlpiri, the glistening of skin is a sign of good health and great allure. A good-looking young man like Luke had them all acting up, ribbing each other and laughing.
Warlpiri corroboree, Lajamanu.
Each day Jerry Jangala and other elders made boomerangs with tomahawks and rasps at the back of the art centre. With a billy on the fire under the awning behind the art centre, I sat beside Jerry and pulled out my iPhone on which I’d stored about 30 images of corroborees taken by Strehlow. He examined them intently, and immediately recognised the dances and stories being re-enacted, even though the photographs were taken almost a century ago. Calling over a young man, he showed him a particular image, pointing to the angle of the prone participant, the body decoration and lavish adornment.
‘That your dance there. That mob from Amata,’ he whispered, in instant recognition of the body designs of Pitjantjatjara men from the APY4 lands, even though it was taken at a site more than 1,000 kilometres away. I felt overwhelmed, even frustrated. If only I could show these same photographs to every living Australian. How could anyone deny the profound depth and richness of the culture they reveal? But ceremonies like these were considered secret and sacred, and though they may no longer be practised, showing them to women and the uninitiated is considered taboo.
Today, this life is but a fleeting memory for the majority of Aboriginal Australians. The boys who stole my car were lost. They weren’t hunting: they were chasing cheap thrills, wagging school and stealing from the local store. They no longer followed the songlines5 of the elders, but hung around the edges of town rummaging through old rubbish. Eyes vacant, they sat in the wind and heat with nowhere to go, dreaming only of fast cars, money and booze.
Now, as the sun broke over my Mary River campsite, I woke from my troubled dreams. In my mind, lithe warriors followed the tracks of game, armed with woomera and spears. My face was flushed, head thick and mouth parched. A small handful of spinifex and another of dry leaves from the base of a tree and the coals of my campfire ignited within seconds. I skipped down to the water’s edge to fill my billy and check the prints. They’d dried like parchment: impossible to unroll without humidifying. Fine particles of yellow ochre were now embedded in the paper and the dyes had faded and changed colour and intensity. These could be rehumidified and adhered to Japanese rice paper by a conservator. I began to formulate a plan for the journey ahead. I would travel on to Turkey Creek to have them and the remaining prints signed before returning to Balgo, and turning for home.
OLD COWBOYS
The sealed road between Halls Creek and Kununurra is one of the most physically beautiful drives in the whole country. Nestling in undulating swells of black and yellow soil, mottled rocks, long silvery grass and boab trees lie the legendary pastoral stations such as Ivanhoe, Lissadell, Moola Bulla, Bow River and Mabel Downs.
The old timers I was on my way to see had spent their lives in the saddle. They were the backbone of the pastoral industry on which these legendary homesteads had been built. No-one could have run cattle in this country successfully without them. Their intimate knowledge of the land enabled them to locate waterholes and soaks as they navigated their way across a harsh and forbidding landscape. People like Rover Thomas and Queenie McKenzie didn’t grow up as desert nomads. They’d spent their lives working the Kimberley cattle stations, camping out as far as the Channel Country in outback Queensland as they followed the good grass, and driving cattle west on the long journey back to the loading yards at Wyndham. I couldn’t help but think of their epic journeys as I made my way along the endless outback road.
Over the course of their lives, the pastoral industry changed. When Aboriginal people were finally granted citizens’ rights in 1967, after a national referendum, they were suddenly entitled to equal pay. Station owners evicted hundreds of stockmen and their families who had formerly been paid in rations, and as a result by the mid 1970s the industry was in decline. Bereft after decades of meaningful employment, these old Aboriginal cowboys became marginalised, living on the fringes of Kununurra and other towns. The Gija, who had roamed freely across this region for tens of thousands of years, moved into a small area of crown land at Turkey Creek near the old Violet Valley Station, a former ration depot and assimilation centre.
As I passed the turn-off to Purnululu (the Bungle Bungle Range), I couldn’t help but think of Jack Britten, its most senior living custodian. I was gutted that his prints were the only ones that had been lost in their entirety. I wasn’t looking forward to telling him this news. Rover Thomas may be credited as the founder of the East Kimberley painting style, but Jack began painting before Rover had even picked up a brush. He’d been taught by his grandparents in the early 1970s, using bush gum, sap from the bloodwood tree and kangaroo blood to bind the ochres. In his early paintings he’d mark the dark surface with zigzag, linear and dotted scraffito just as the old Gija people had traditionally decorated their bodies and artefacts. Jack had a sullen disposition. He’d witnessed unspeakable atrocities during his lifetime, and discovered a reef of gold only to be paid for it in rations. His stories of the region reached back thousands of years, but if you google Bungle Bungle Range, dozens of sites will tell you that the range was only ‘discovered’ by a film crew in 1983. I cannot imagine a greater insult.
Jack lived at Frog Hollow, a spring at the westernmost tip of his traditional lands. Thirty kilometres to the north, the Warmun community at Turkey Creek first appears as a series of water tanks hovering above the tree-lined horizon. After pulling in to the council chambers, a demountable adjacent to the community store, I reported my arrival (an obligatory requirement when entering any Aboriginal community). I then drove over the river crossing to the old post office, a classic ‘Queenslander’ on the edge of the community overlooking the cattle country to the east. The wooden house with a traditional enclosed verandah stood on green stilts above a polished concrete slab. With the Council’s approval, Maxine Taylor and her partner, Terry ‘Serge’ Brooks, had set up the old post office as a home and gallery. They earned their living from a tithe collected on the sale of the paintings that were created beneath the house.
As I pulled up beside the cyclone fencing, women and children crowded round the car examining the damage. The story of the stolen prints had reached the artists long before I did, travelling like a willy willy6 across the landscape. The old people were waiting in the cool under the art centre. I went up to them, shaking hands one by one as they murmured their condolences.
Rover was sitting cross-legged and barefoot in the centre of the breezeway, as always a colourful cowboy’s bandana round his neck. He was in his 70s, whitehaired and frail after the latest in a series of mini strokes some months earlier, but he was as pleased as ever to see me.
‘Here’s my boss from Sydney,’ he grinned cheekily, knowing that a payday was just around the corner. I took his hand and put my arm around his shoulder, sitting down next to him. I greeted Beerbee Mungnari, affectionately known as ‘Monkey’, old Hector Jandanay and Henry Wambini, all seated in their customary spot in relation to each other – a seating arrangement determined by the geographical location of each artist’s country.
Rover sat looking south toward Punmu near Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route. He’d spent 40 years as a stockman after leaving home as a ten-year-old. He famously described his peripatetic travels and intimate knowledge of the vast expanses of sparse desert and Kimberley terrain in the simple statement, ‘I been all over, me.’ He had settled at Turkey Creek during 1975, just after Cyclone Tracy flattened Darwin. In all probability, if he hadn’t moved to Gija tribal country, hundreds of kilometres north of his birthplace, his art would have developed along completely different lines (assuming he’d had the opportunity to paint at al
l). When his own Kukatja clansmen began painting at Balgo Hills in the mid-1980s, they demonstrated closer aesthetic ties to the Pintupi painters of Kintore and Kiwirrkurra in their use of representational symbols (such as circles, U-shapes and dotting, drawn from low relief ceremonial ground sculpture). Gija art is quite stylistically different.
Nearby at a large table covered in pots of ground earth pigment was my favourite of all the Warmun artists, Queenie McKenzie. The ‘honourary man’ in the group, she relaxed in the shade of the wooden slats of the verandah. As always, she sat directly facing east, toward Old Texas Station and her Corella Dreaming site. Queenie was always kind and affectionate, her tiny eyes like currants in a pretty face. She and Rover had a special bond. She’d actually saved his life back in the 1920s when he was kicked in the head by a horse. Gamely, she’d sewn his entire scalp back on with a darning needle and cotton string, and the pair were fast friends forever after. He was a ‘quiet boy’ in those days, she used to say, a good worker and a good rider. She called him ‘Cowboy’ and he called her ‘Auntie’. Later, he encouraged her first experiments with painting when she was in her mid 50s, and they often painted sitting together as she slowly evolved into a mature and enthusiastic artist. Tough and self-sufficient as they come, she also had a delightful sense of humour and a friendly open manner. When I first met her in her 60s, she was already a famous figure who could command high prices for her paintings.
The Dealer is the Devil Page 3