The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  Simon Hogan at Coo-ee Exhibition opening, Sydney, 2003.

  Paddy Fordham Wainburranga, The Kinship System, c. 1994. Natural earth pigment on Arches cotton rag, 145 x 96 cm. In the beginning Aboriginal people were divided into two moieties and eight skin groups.

  The moieties are known by different names depending on the region. Across Arnhem Land they are Dhuwa (literally meaning spearthrower) and Yirritja (spear). People always marry outside of their own clan and moiety. This ensures that clan lands, creation stories and totemic ancestors from both moieties are united in each family. While matrilineal moieties do exist, people throughout Arnhem Land generally belong to the same moiety as their father. In the northeast, for instance, the Manggalili, Gumatj and Madarrpa clans are Yirritja while the Rirratjingu, Marrakulu and Djapu clans are Dhuwa.

  Paddy Fordham famously depicted the Aboriginal social system as eight spirits, four black and four white. Each represented a division of Aboriginal society into its eight corresponding male and female skin groups and two separate moieties.

  CULTURAL REVIVAL IS SURVIVAL

  I pulled over to stop on a shiny patch of gibber. The ancient chocolate-coloured pebbles can often be the best place to throw down a swag at night. The long serpent of dust had disappeared over the horizon. Out here in the desert, not a fence appeared in sight. It was hard to imagine that anything much had changed for thousands of years. But the truth was that over the past 200 years the entire country had changed. The Aboriginal songlines had been cut, clans divided and the country permanently scarred, destroying countless lives.

  All around me Aboriginal people lived in isolated settlements, in Third World conditions, mostly on land that white people didn’t want. They were not communities so much as accidents of recent history, the people trapped in a sedentary life with no intrinsic momentum: a warp inside which they were unable to move forward or back. This was precisely why the Aboriginal art industry struck me, and many others in those days, as such a miracle. Back then it seemed to offer the possibility of real, positive change. It promised enterprise, self-empowerment and cultural revival to people trapped on terminal welfare and handouts.

  I witnessed the repercussions of this thinking right from the earliest days of running my shop, Coo-ee Emporium, at the seedy end of Sydney’s Oxford Street, Paddington. In fact one of the first T-shirts we ever sold carried the slogan ‘Cultural Revival is Survival’. We opened in 1981. A year later we began sourcing art and crafts from Aboriginal art centres. My business partner, Louise Ferrier, and I held the first exhibition for the Indigenous-owned art and craft company, Tiwi Design art centre. The result was a sensation. Huge spreads followed in Vogue magazine, The Sydney Morning Herald and other publications. The exhibition received extensive TV coverage; even a spot on the 7 pm ABC news bulletin. Within just one year of that single event, film crews were making documentaries on the Tiwi Islands, Tiwi Tours began its operations, and the turnover of Tiwi Design art centre increased from $30,000 per annum to $300,000.

  Gabriella Possum at Coo-ee Emporium wearing Cultural Revival T-shirt, 1989.

  It must seem odd now, but many people had similar experiences to mine during the early 1980s. The whole thing happened so fast. We didn’t see ourselves as breaking any new ground. In fact we didn’t catch the wave; it crashed over us. In 1980, Aboriginal art was little more than a cottage industry, generating $2.5 million a year. Within ten years it was valued at $40 million annually. It’s only in hindsight that I can track the trajectory, and the wider implications.

  I’d begun working directly with Aboriginal artists soon after meeting Joe Croft in 1982. Joe was part of what has become known as the ‘stolen generation’. He was born in the Northern Territory on Wave Hill Station, where 200 stockmen working for the British pastoral company owned by Lord Vestey had staged their famous walk-off for equal pay in 1966.

  Of Gurindji Mudbara heritage, he was taken from his Aboriginal mother at birth, separated from his Aboriginal family and grew up in a succession of homes. At 50 years of age he discovered his mother was still alive and living in Darwin. He managed to visit her just once, three months prior to her death.

  You would have thought Joe would have grown up bitter about his fate, but nothing could be further from the truth. He distinguished himself early and won a scholarship to All Saints School in Charters Towers, Queensland, where he went on to become head prefect and sports captain. Joe was the first Aboriginal person in Australia to attend university, and later worked as a surveyor on the Snowy River Scheme. He joined the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in the mid 1970s, working with his childhood friend Charlie Perkins, and brought up three children in Canberra, including the renowned artist and curator, Brenda L. Croft.

  When I met him, Joe was managing the charismatic David Gulpilil, who was already an internationally acclaimed movie star. Gulpilil’s Arnhem Land dance group was under contract to the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs. I was contacted by a shopping mall looking for Aboriginal entertainers to perform for NAIDOC11 Week, so I rang Anthony Wallis at the Aboriginal Artists Agency. He suggested Gulpilil, who would be performing that very night at the opening of the landmark exhibition Objects and Representations from Ramingining. Wallis warned me, half joking, that Joe Croft was a tad shambolic, and might be hard to pin down. Certainly Joe’s stories about managing Gulpilil, which entertained me for many years afterwards, were hilarious, and often pushed the bounds of credibility. Yet from the moment we were introduced Joe seemed to me both affable and uncomplicated, and not long after, he became my business partner. I could relate to Joe’s entrepreneurial instincts. He’d been a bureaucrat, but always dreamed of having his own business. On leaving the public service, he put his long service payment into our partnership. He wanted to lead the way by showing Aboriginal people that they could succeed in business, too. Even today we could do with more Joe Crofts. From that time until his death in 1996, Joe was one of my closest friends.

  Joe loved to talk about art and culture and spent many hours in our shop entertaining overseas visitors with his stories. In those days at least 80% of our clients were tourists and Joe was the first Aboriginal person they had ever met. They too were fascinated by his tales. He often began by saying, ‘We Aboriginal people have been welcoming visitors to this country for hundreds of years, and we shall continue to do so.’ This never failed to grab their immediate attention and bring a smile to their faces. Lots of them came back to Coo-ee over the years, specifically to ask after him. It was also through Joe that I met the great Indigenous identities of the day: Charlie Perkins, Bob Maza, Lillian Crombie, Burnum Burnum, Faith Bandler, Justine Saunders, Bob Randall and many other leaders and activists, including politicians, academics, artists, writers, dancers and actors. They were all impassioned about Aboriginal rights, eager to share their culture, and determined to put Indigenous art and performance on the cultural map in Australia.

  Joe also introduced me to Guboo Ted Thomas, the man who was to provide me with my first insights into the Indigenous world of the spirit. Guboo turned up at Coo-ee in 1984 carrying a small bakelite suitcase full of the files he used to fight for land rights in Canberra. He was small in stature and quite dapper, a bit like Willie Nelson. At that time he wore a finely chiselled beard and red headband, and was yet to affect the long flowing white beard associated with a spiritual elder.

  Me and my wife, Anne, with Joe Croft, 1990.

  At the Coo-ee Trade Routes exhibition in Canberra, 1986: Al Grasby, me, Mum Shirl and Justine Saunders.

  Joe had asked him around to discuss the launch of our first annual Trade Routes exhibition in Canberra. Guboo agreed to appear and, 25 years later, I can still remember almost word-for-word the start of his speech at the opening. Pointing to a magnificent large X-ray image of a plains kangaroo on bark by Kunwinjku artist Robin Nganjmirra, he completely mesmerised the audience. Emphatically, he said:

  This is Dreamtime I’m talking about! We go inside the bones. Inside the body. You n
ever see that in whiteman’s art. You only ever see it in Aboriginal art.

  I have since spent most of my career explaining Aboriginal culture to prospective buyers, but it was at that very moment that I realised that to understand Aboriginal art one had to first unlock the door to its history and the culture which produced it.

  Guboo was born to an Aboriginal father and part Chinese mother on the goldfields in Braidwood, New South Wales. At the age of nine he was taken by his male elders on an epic 350-kilometre walkabout which involved a year of visiting sacred and important sites along the coastal fringe from Mallacoota on the Victorian border to the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney. He was also introduced to all the great leaders of the south coast clans of New South Wales. With the passing of the old men who had accompanied him, he became the last initiated elder responsible for all of these sacred sites.

  Guboo only went to school for a short time where he learned to bake johnnycakes and sew, and was sent outside to garden. When he was still a youngster he joined a Hawaiian carnival troupe that travelled up and down the east coast, playing the gum leaf and dancing the hula-hula. During World War II he worked cutting railway sleepers, digging tunnels and collecting resin made from ‘blackboy’ stems from the grass tree (Xanthorrhoea sp.). After a succession of jobs he became a commercial fisherman out of Eden on the New South Wales south coast, applying the knowledge he had learned watching his father and uncles calling in the dolphins as they corralled shoals of fish onto the shore. Having made Laurie Short, the national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, his ‘blood brother’, Guboo was able to gain access to Neville Wran, the state Premier. In what was the first land rights victory in New South Wales, he won Yuin rights over Wallaga Lake. He was well over 70 when he began working with prominent environmentalists to save the forests of New South Wales from Japanese wood chippers in the 1970s.

  For most of his working life there was no welfare for Aboriginal people and Guboo was an enterprising entrepreneur. He travelled the world more than a dozen times without a penny in his pocket, and spoke at the United Nations on several occasions.

  In the early 1980s he proclaimed the ‘Renewing of the Dreaming’ and, in the face of widespread hostility from his own people, announced that anyone could become a member of his clan, black or white, if they were prepared to commit themselves to saving the forests and the sacred sites. He was never happier than when camping in the State Forest on the south coast, and he began what became known as his ‘Dreaming camps’ while working with environmentalists such as Milo Dunphy. Eventually hundreds of people from around the world came to sit with him and become one with the Great Spirit. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s my wife and I lived for a full moon cycle each January with Guboo and members of his family in the forest. These camps would see up to 700 people coming and going. The culmination was always his birthday, the day after Australia Day.

  Guboo Ted Thomas opening Coo-ee’s Trade Routes exhibition in Canberra, 1986.

  Guboo believed that until the environmental movement took on a spiritual dimension, it would never effect real change. ‘You white people,’ he would say, ‘you’re always yakking on. You live too much in the head and not enough in the heart.’ In the simplest of terms, he expressed the deep spiritual connection that all people share with the land, and their responsibility toward it.

  The Earth is our Mother. When I die I’m going down there. When you die you’re going there too. But what are you doing for the Earth?

  Sitting around the campfire in the deep wilderness with Guboo and the many Aboriginal people we met at these camps, I began to really understand how white settlement had changed the way Aboriginal people lived. It ended their freedom to travel at will on their own lands, and to undertake seasonal ceremonial duties. Along the eastern seaboard the yearly ‘walkabout’, one of the foundation stones on which Indigenous culture was built, ended within a generation. Taking away their children was the knockout blow. The consequences had a devastating effect on the health and spiritual well-being of both the people and the land.

  Guboo certainly taught us valuable lessons about the impact of humans and introduced animals on Australia’s fragile environment. The cattle that roam the State Forests eat flowers and stalks, making it difficult to find the once abundant bush tucker. Bush flies thrive in cattle dung and, carried on the wind, suddenly appear hundreds of kilometres away. In Guboo’s camps, tropical ulcers, running sores and stomach complaints became rampant as the bush flies spread infection each summer. There were other traps for modern campers, who discovered that city people’s frailties and insecurities came to the surface when asked to live outside their comfort zone. I remember one Israeli bolted following dreams of Arab attack. Others saw the Aboriginal spirits moving through the bush around them at night and were scared out of their wits. There were times when the piercing tumult of the cicadas was totally disorienting. Even so, experiences such as this provided only the barest inkling of a life spent with minimal possessions at the mercy of nature.

  Traditionally clan groups never stayed in any one place long enough to spoil it or associate it with too much grief and sorrow. Today, confined to sedentary communities, they are overburdened with what they refer to as ‘sorry business’, and they are constantly reminded of their loss and dispossession. An unexpected consequence of this has been the elevation of the importance of funerary rites. The passing of elders who possessed the most intimate knowledge of country has also led to the loss of many ceremonies that were performed at sacred sites. The proliferation of pastoral leases and the resettlement of different clans into homogenised communities have severely curtailed this vital cultural activity. Ceremonial sites can be hundreds of kilometres away from the mission stations and government settlements that grew into the remote townships we call Aboriginal communities today.

  There is a belief amongst many of the descendants that these sites cannot be visited and used by the uninitiated who have not earned the knowledge or the right to perform the rituals at these places. Guboo did not agree. He understood that the sacred sites were all connected and believed the entire country was in danger of a great spiritual malaise if new custodians were not prepared to come forward and reactivate their power. He did not care if these custodians were black or white. What he cared about was the spiritual dimension of environmentalism without which, he argued, the Australian landscape was inevitably doomed.

  While ceremonial activity remains richly endowed in parts of Arnhem Land and isolated desert regions, this loss of ritual is particularly prevalent throughout those regions of Australia where Aboriginal people no longer live in traditional societies. Even the Tiwi, of Bathurst and Melville islands north of Darwin, who still practised their Kurlama12 increase ceremony as late as the 1950s, no longer perform it in full.

  Little wonder, given the events of the past 200 years, that funerals have become the most ubiquitous of all ceremonies. Aboriginal people all over Australia believe that death originated in a fatal step taken by some ancestral being which set the precedent for all time. It is the responsibility of the living to see that the spirit of a dead person is free to return to the Dreaming in the correct manner. The deceased person’s house and possessions are smoked as part of a ritual that can take months, even years to complete. Clan members may not speak the name of the dead for several years and all tools and personal effects are removed, burned or buried along with the body. Hours of intense wailing and mourning carry the ego and the ancestral soul toward their home in the sky while the totemic soul is ritually returned to the spirits of the natural world.

  The disposal of the physical body varies greatly. It can include interment, exposure to the elements on tree platforms or rocks, cremation, burial in hollow trees, exhumation and reburial and various combinations of these. In parts of Arnhem Land a ceremony is held at the time the body is buried and a hollow log is prepared and decorated with the deceased person’s clan designs and totems. The bones are later recovered, meticulously
painted in ochre, wrapped in paper bark, and deposited inside the hollow log coffin, referred to variously as Larakitj, Lorrokon or Dupun. The coffin is then taken out into the deceased’s clan country to stand until decomposed by the elements.

  It was Guboo, too, who gave me a deeper understanding of the Dreaming. The first person to use the term was Frank Gillen, postmaster of the Alice Springs telegraph station in the late nineteenth century. He used it to describe the Arrernte word Tjukurrpa, meaning ‘to see and understand the law’. Since then, the idea of Dreaming has acquired many different levels of interpretation. Dreaming can refer to the period during which the land was formed and given its sacred stories. It is also both the sum of Aboriginal mythology and the many individual stories of the events that occurred during the earth’s creation.

  Lin Onus, Bulla Gookoop, 1994. Synthetic polymer on illustration board, 63 x 27 cm.

  The Aboriginal view of creation has little in common with the Western notion that all life on earth is genetically inherited and hierarchical, with man the most developed of the species. While some Western academics believe that Aboriginal people have lived here for up to 60,000 years, this is impossible according to Aboriginal cosmology. They have been here ‘since time began’ and all other people throughout the world came from them, and had to leave because their activities offended Aboriginal law. They themselves came directly out of the Dreamtime when the great formative events shaped the world as we know it. Contrary to the Western idea of God ruling in the heavens, Aboriginal people believe that the Great Spirit resides in the earth and sky: the earth is the mother from which one comes, and to which one returns after death.