The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  Queenie McKenzie, Jack Britten, Hector Jandanay and Henry Wambini, at Turkey Creek, 1998.

  Rover Thomas walking Lissadell Station, 1995.

  Queenie McKenzie’s palette.

  Like the others, Queenie met the news of the prints with philosophical resignation. She had lived a hard life, starting at old Texas Downs Station as a drover’s cook, and later cooking for stockmen, tending and riding horses as they drove cattle across the vast pastoral region of northern Australia. She used to tell me that she knew every rock, hill and waterhole ‘backwards, forwards, up, down, and inside out’. Now, in retirement, Queenie quite simply loved to paint. Every night she went to bed dreaming of the place or the story she would paint the next day.

  Queenie took great pride in looking after her own affairs, and was never more pleased than when showing off her bank book, which at times showed savings in excess of $30,000. This was considered a small fortune amongst people who rarely, if ever, saved. Each time I visited she would proudly open her handbag and withdraw a wallet stuffed with $50 notes. These, she explained, were ‘pin money for the kids’.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  When night approaches, the desert temperature quickly drops. As I put on my heavy woollen drover’s overcoat, I felt the paper bag full of money bulging in my pocket. All was not lost. I had four crates of prints as well as the slightly damaged works by Rover that had been found by the police. Those I had recovered from the river could still be signed, despite needing some conservation work.

  In those days, life in most Aboriginal communities was regulated by the community alarm. The end of the working day was now announced by the shrill sound of the electric metal bell cutting through the dusk. Old Jack got into his car with Hector Jandanay for the drive back to Frog Hollow. Serge and I began ferrying the others to their homes in his troupie.7 Rover and Queenie were delivered to the ‘pensioner unit’, two undistinguished besser-block single-storey buildings, separated by a breezy verandah.

  It was only a year since I’d flown up to Turkey Creek to talk to the artists about making the prints. I’d sat for several hours throughout the heat of the day on the sand beneath the bough shelter that stood outside the administration office, listening to the circle of Aboriginal councillors. Finally it was my turn to speak, and I explained that I wanted to publish limited edition prints by important community artists. Each print, I told them, was a book that had only one page.

  ‘You know, a book can sell for as little as $20 and there can be thousands of them printed,’ I explained, ‘but only 50 or 100 copies would be made of each of these special one-page books, and they could sell for hundreds of dollars each.’

  The councillors in jeans and battered cowboy hats and boots conferred in the local Gija language. I had no idea if they understood my limited explanation. Finally they announced their decision. I could conduct the workshop, as long as the children and grandchildren of the principal artists were allowed to take part. In April, I returned for three weeks with my wife, Anne, and our close friend, the Boston-trained master printmaker, Theo Tremblay.

  Rover Thomas, Punmu – the Universe. Serigraph, edition of 50, 53 x 68 cm.

  Queenie McKenzie, Osmond Creek (Dadah aw Ning). Serigraph, edition of 50, 62 x 71 cm.

  A year later, I took possession of the spectacular results. The highly skilled printmakers at Studio One in Canberra had spent endless hours editioning the prints, each colour carefully applied separately by hand. They included screenprints, etchings and colour reductive linocuts: five editions by Rover Thomas, two by Jack Britten, and others by Queenie McKenzie, Madigan Thomas, Peggy Patrick, Churchill Cann and Hector Jandanay, as well as a number of individual and collaborative prints by Turkey Creek children.

  I was particularly proud of the Rover Thomas prints. Two large etching plates entitled Mount Newman and Red Rock Stockyards were printed as both black-and-white and colour editions. The artwork for Rover’s serigraph Punmu – the Universe comprised a large sheet of cardboard which Rover had painted black, a clear sheet of plastic with five orbs of yellow ochre, and another layer with a misshapen rectangle of white dots.

  This image was so stark and deceptively simple that I had taken it to Sydney with me to figure out how on earth it should be printed. As I contemplated adding sawdust to give texture to the black background, the internationally acclaimed Australian contemporary painter Michael Johnson and his wife, Margo, bounded in to the gallery after a boozy lunch nearby.

  ‘Print the background black four times over, onto black paper,’ he insisted, gesticulating wildly. ‘The black should be so deep you could fall into it!’

  I loved the result, but only half of Rover’s prints had survived the stolen Toyota ordeal, and many of those were badly creased after days in police custody.

  Worse still, Jack Britten’s very special, five-colour reductive linocuts had not survived at all. They had involved more than 500 hours of painstaking labour to print. The process was irreversible. The block was now spent; the prints unique and irreplaceable. Now I would have to tell him that but for a few recovered from the bottom of the river, the print was lost.

  The following morning as the troupie delivered artists to the art centre, all of the boxes were opened and the prints arranged for each to sign.

  Rover was the last to arrive. As he walked down the path leaning on Serge’s arm, Maxine stuck her head out the kitchen window above.

  ‘Hello-o-o Cowboy,’ she called out in real country style.

  Nyumun and Cowboy – Maxine Taylor sits with Rover Thomas as he signs one of his limited edition prints, 1998.

  ‘Hello-o-o Nyumun [auntie],’ Rover replied, with a broad smile across his face, relishing the attention.

  Although his stroke had rendered Rover incontinent, Serge and Maxine always made sure he was immaculately dressed and served nutritious meals. Rover only had to nod in Serge’s direction or utter koombu8 to receive immediate attention.

  I sat beside each artist as they signed the prints one by one: sharpening the pencil, rubbing out any smudges, and carefully turning each sheet of paper to reveal the next. Laying the tissue between each sheet, the prints piled up until they were all returned to their boxes and the lids screwed down.

  Finally it was Rover’s turn. Pulling his wallet from his back pocket, he plonked it down between us and beamed at me.

  ‘Who gonna’ pil im up today?’ he asked mischievously. Everyone, including Queenie, Jack, Beerbee, Freddie, Hector, Maxine and Serge, cracked up.

  ‘I am, Cowboy. I am,’ I promised sheepishly. And, over the next two hours, I handed him $50 notes, one by one, enough to prevent his wallet from closing.

  Just like Queenie, Rover relished his independence above all else, and revelled in his ability to earn large sums of money in a single day. But he preferred to redistribute it in a single evening, laughing and telling stories around a game of cards.

  In the end there had been enough prints to ensure all the artists got some money, except for old Jack. I walked over to where he sat in the shade under the huge boab tree and promised to return in 12 months. Though his print could never be revived as a five-colour reductive linocut, I would use one of the prints from the bottom of the river to re-edition it as a screenprint.

  SONGLINES

  I was stuck behind a nine-axle road train on the corrugated highway between Halls Creek and Yuendumu. Overtaking was impossible. Any closer than 100 metres and you couldn’t see a thing. I slowed until it drew ahead toward the horizon, its dust-trail the tail of a giant serpent moving slowly across the landscape. Before me lay the 2,500-kilometre road across the continent: a trade route crossing dozens of others, each linking country towns to cities and ports in a chain that joins the most significant sites of the commercial world.

  Before the advent of these highways, people followed the rivers and valleys. There were no roads or fences on the continent until the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. Aboriginal people
penetrated deep into the continent, through harsh and often unforgiving territory, guided by the contours of the land. The marks of their journeys were everywhere – inscribed on trees, in sand and earth sculptures, in caves, rock shelves and cliff faces. For more than 40,000 years before the life of Buddha, Christ, or the Inca civilisation, they crisscrossed the continent. Until they began trading with the Macassans, 200 years prior to the arrival of Europeans, Aboriginal Australia evolved in almost total isolation.

  Before the last ice age, the continent was much larger than it is today. It extended well into what are now the ocean oil fields of the North West Shelf of Western Australia, incorporating many of the islands to Australia’s Far North that were separated from the mainland by changing sea levels during the past 20,000 years. As the islands spread, the continent continued to undergo significant change: Uluru (Ayers Rock), for instance, once surrounded by rainforest, became the central feature of a vast desert.

  According to Aboriginal lore, the Australian continent was formed by the great ancestor spirits. These were the first beings to exist and they shaped the land. The mountains, rivers, valleys, natural resources and the ‘living water’ all echo their movements. They hunted, fought, loved, danced and held ceremonies along their travels, leaving behind a numinous topography. They created the interrelationship between the landscape, the heavenly bodies, all living things, and the rules of human association and religious observances.

  The routes of their epic journeys are often referred to as ‘songlines’ or ‘Dreaming tracks’. Many traverse enormous distances, from the far south of the continent to Arnhem Land, from the Indian Ocean to the eastern seaboard. Others travel relatively short distances and peter out. Each Aboriginal clan knows intimately the specific stories relating to their part of the spirit journey, which they are personally charged with protecting. I’ve watched countless artists chanting from the great liturgy of their songline, as they sit on the earth painting their own part of the story. They believe it is their sacred duty to protect and nurture it. Thousands of years before Australia was ‘discovered’ by Europeans, these songlines had become the trade routes along which people of different clans communicated and passed artefacts made by renowned artisans. Ancient stone tools discovered in South Australia, for instance, were made from rock now found only underwater off the North West Shelf of Western Australia.

  During the creation period, ancestors could be both human and animal, thus plants and humans, animals and landforms could simultaneously transform from one to another. As the world took shape it filled up with life and variety. The ancestor creators retired into the earth, leaving the world, which they had invested with Djang9 or sacredness, to reverberate for all time. This sophisticated cosmology, expressed through ceremonies and rituals, inextricably linked every individual to the forces of nature.

  Though the stories linking the different clans may vary slightly, they constitute a unified world view and the basis of Aboriginal law, to this day. They are the very same stories that underpin and inform all Aboriginal art from its traditional form as body painting, rock art and ceremonial sand sculpture, to the most modern, innovative, abstract painting sold in elite art galleries and auction houses.

  Long before the arrival of Europeans there were hundreds of clan groups, each living within its own country, moving from one location to another in a pattern ordained by the yearly cycles of climate, food and ceremony. Their nomadism was far from aimless wandering. They stayed in one place only long enough to feast on an abundant food source, to wait out the coming of drier weather, or to re-create a particular time-honoured ritual at its most sacred location. While they remained as a group within the borders of their clan lands, smaller bands and clan groups moved independently of one another for periods of time throughout the year. Individuals would often travel well beyond their own ‘country’ and live amongst other clans during their travels. This constant movement of people around their clan ‘country’, and along the trade routes, took place without the hierarchical structure of many other societies. There were no chiefdoms, or kingdoms, although there were around 500 distinct language groups.

  In traditional Aboriginal society, people are divided by birth into clans that can comprise up to several hundred people. Each clan has a totem: an animal, plant or nature spirit with which they identify so intimately that they consider themselves descendants and human manifestations of that spirit. By understanding and adopting the attributes of one’s totem, a person identifies with and actually becomes that totem, and this informs the way in which they relate to the natural world.

  I understood all of this as a ‘concept’ from reading various books, but I never really got to the heart of it until I met the great Rembarrnga elder Paddy Fordham Wainburranga, who had travelled from Katherine in the Northern Territory to Sydney. It was in 1988, the year he famously produced a series of paintings called Too Many Captain Cooks, based upon a Rembarrnga creation myth adapted to relate post-contact Australian history from an Aboriginal perspective. At the time we met, his quixotic tales and these seminal paintings had just been synthesised into a film.

  Paddy was a big man and a great raconteur. He could sit talking for hours over a carton of beer. On this rare visit to Sydney, we were all sitting around in my living room digesting a large roast dinner. I asked him if it were possible for a person of European heritage to find or be given a totem. I’d heard so many stories from white fellas in the bush claiming one animal or another as a totem after experiencing some sort of ‘meaningful’ encounter. Could a white person’s totem ever be as authentic as those given to all Aboriginal people at birth, or at other important stages of their lives? I suppose he could have made fun of the foolish wish of the ‘whities’ to share his culture. Instead, his answer did not come for a half hour or more after the discussion had moved on in other directions.

  ‘There’s this little fella we call ’im Wambuk,10 you call ’im fruit bat,’ he said out of the blue. For a moment I had no idea what he was talking about. Ten minutes later, while discussing another unrelated topic, he added dreamily, ‘We call him Wambuk, that little one.’

  During the following days, as I revealed further aspects of my nature to him, he continued to give me information in totally unrelated snippets, about what turned out to be my own totem.

  Paddy Fordham Wainburranga.

  ‘That little one, he always trying to climb up to the top of the tree. You chop him down, he scramble back up to the top of the next tree.’ … later … ‘that fella, you can’t kill ’im! He roll up in to ball, give off the smell of death.’ … and still later … ‘he come and get you the other way!’ … and so on.

  Ever since, this information has affected the way I perceive the world, and even my understanding of my own true nature. For I am a fruit bat. Paddy’s totem was mosquito, and according to Rembarrnga creation myth and custom, I became a relative – though not by blood! Of course, my experience of being a fruit bat could never be as profound as it is for an Aboriginal person, especially of Paddy’s own clan. In Aboriginal culture, each clan has a custodial and managerial role in the maintenance of distinct areas of land associated with their particular totem. Each member of the clan participates in maintaining the secret songs, vibrational rhythms, special words, designs and dances that stimulate the fertility of that species, and ensure its survival and increase. This intimate relationship is at the very heart of the Aboriginal connection to ‘country’ and their Dreaming. All over Australia, clan designs continue to be painted onto the bodies of young men during initiation, and may be worn in ceremonies conducted far from their country, maintaining the symbolic resonance between the dancer and the source of his animal power.

  Ned Grant at Ilkurlka rockhole, Great Victoria Desert, 2003.

  Additional totemic affiliations are inherited through appropriate marriage. These include totems associated with sex, conception, marriage and birth. A totem may also come to a person’s aid during physical or mental duress or in res
ponse to personal attributes. It is forbidden for Aboriginal people to eat any of their primary totem animals, and there may be special times, such as during menstruation for women, when a particular totem animal may not be consumed.

  There are two categories into which all living things and natural phenomena are divided. All creator beings, living animals, plants and all of the items that are made from them fall into either of these two ‘moieties’. Amongst humans, the social division is based on parental descent. It governs the rules of intermarriage, provides a general guide to interrelationships and behaviour, and determines the stories and the ways they must be depicted in art and ceremony. Even using something that belongs to the wrong moiety can cause complications. In the 1990s an attempt was made to dissuade painters in Central Arnhem Land from moving from ‘traditional’ materials to canvas and linen, on the basis that they were made from plants of the wrong moiety. Whether the artists agreed with this or not, canvas and linen have never been widely adopted in Arnhem Land. Printmaking, however, which uses similarly problematic materials, has spread without apparent controversy.