The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  In the late 1970s when I first became aware of Aboriginal art, the vast majority of Australians identified it with simple depictions of animals on bark most commonly executed in an X-ray style. I would soon learn that this was only a small part of the story.

  ARTEFACTS – EASTERN AUSTRALIA

  Having an Aboriginal business partner like Joe Croft was thoroughly enlightening. He wasn’t really into making money, but he was tremendously curious and interested in everyone he met. Aboriginal people of his generation rarely enjoyed uncomplicated relationships with white people the way Joe did. He was the first Aboriginal person to do so many things – from owning a newsagency to starting an Aboriginal footy club in Canberra.

  Not long after we began selling Aboriginal crafts, we received an unexpected visit from an affable, short, barrel-chested Aboriginal bloke in his mid 60s. He arrived wearing a sweat-stained wide-brimmed hat and broad full-cheeked smile. His name was Eugene Biles, and he had just driven 800 kilometres in ten hours from Brewarrina on the Barwon River, especially to see us. From the boot of his car he brought out a succession of boomerangs and clubs he had made himself from fallen timbers. Gidgee, ring gidgee, fiddleback and mulga were just a few of the names given to these hardwoods by locals during their early contact with Aboriginal clans along the Barwon, Darling and Murray rivers.

  Biles was a master bush craftsman and his artefacts became a unique addition to our range. Each time Anne and I began planning our yearly travels across the continent, Eugene would encourage us to stop off and visit him. Eventually we broke our habit of leaving Sydney before dawn in order to reach Broken Hill by sundown on the first day of our push to Alice Springs. Instead we stayed overnight with Eugene, his wife, Retta, and their family. During our first visit we walked around his bush workshop, a series of sheds made from hardwood branches and corrugated iron, filled with old band saws and jigs, with sawdust up to the ankles. They fussed over us and put us up in their own room. We sat on their verandah drinking instant coffee, overlooking the Aboriginal part of town, which they called Dodge City. The evening meal was a pyramid of meat comprising chops, sausages, patties and steak accompanied by an unadorned and simple salad. Eugene said the best thing they could do for the town, where Aboriginal kids had few if any jobs, was to create a market garden as vegetables were so incredibly expensive. Later, back in Sydney, Anne sent them a coffee percolator and a pack of real coffee grounds, something Eugene never let me forget, as he brought it up regularly with gratitude and genuine affection.

  Eugene Biles in his workshop, Brewarrina, New South Wales, 1993.

  Prior to white settlement, Brewarrina had been one of the great intertribal meeting places of Eastern Australia. In those bygone days, the unemployed young men living in Dodge City would have been valuable breadwinners. Large gatherings of interrelated clans assembled there each year for corroboree. As late as the 1820s more than 5,000 Aboriginal people gathered at the sophisticated stone-walled fish traps5 in the river. An extraordinary feat of organisation, a social gathering such as this lasted from weeks to several months and was a time of feasting, dispute settlement, the arrangement of marriages, competition and communion. Instead of white wigs, black gowns and the gavel, finely calibrated punishment and retribution awaited those who broke the Law. Ritual fighting and the theatre of justice involved the use of shields and clubs adorned with powerful designs.

  Along the upper Darling, Murrumbidgee, Lachlan, Namoi and Bogan rivers in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, the art of making intricately incised and carved parrying shields and broad shields reached its ultimate achievement. The wide variety of individual shapes was tribally, or regionally, specific. Hardwood shields were used to parry blows and charge an opponent. Broad shields were used for deflecting spears with the convex outer face. The majority featured surface designs. Those associated with the southeastern regions were either incised with stone or tooth implements, or painted in ochre, charcoal, pipe clay, blood and animal fat. They commonly included crosshatched, herringbone, zigzag and diamond patterns, as well as parallel chevrons and diagonal flutings with occasional figurative imagery.

  Traditional Aboriginal society was based on a quite sophisticated warrior culture. Clubs made for fighting were also used in dances and ceremonies, and could be elaborately carved with longitudinal fluted or adzed designs, ochre infilled patterns and carved figures. They varied enormously in shape and size with rare examples featuring sharp ends for stabbing and superb bi-conical heads. Many embodied the three great virtues of the most highly collectable antiquarian objects: refinement, function and beauty. They included axe-shaped lyl-lil and distinctive leangle clubs, considered to be the most lethal of all, with their weight and sharply pointed heads that could reach around the narrow parrying shields carried by their adversaries.

  The tools used to kill animals were stunningly effective in the hands of a hunter who patiently stalked swift animals easily scared into flight. The 18thcentury firearms of the First Fleeters were hopelessly inaccurate by comparison and only served to scatter their prey. As a result, the early colony was nearly expunged by starvation. The boomerang, the most beautiful and economical example of a hunting implement, could be small and plain, but I have seen many superb large war boomerangs that had wide tapering curves and exquisite surface tooling. While these were not intended to come back when thrown, other lighter examples, some of which narrow into extreme curved ‘U’ shapes, return very efficiently. Superb boomerangs were originally made using stone tools and bone chisels, but later mid 19th-century examples, made after the introduction of steel, exhibit exquisite fluting and engraving.

  1–2 South East Australian boomerangs; 3 Leangle club; 4 Lyl-lil club.

  Spear-throwers, generally referred to as woomera, were designed to extend the arm of the hunter, improving the speed, range and accuracy of an attack that could come after hours of patient waiting. Woomera were made with knob-like handles and could be coated in gum or resin with a bone blade embedded at one end, and a hook for the spear made of a kangaroo tooth or bone secured with animal sinew at the other. The most elegant examples, from the Murray and Darling rivers and their tributaries, have an elongated leaf form with a flat front and curved back. The hook is carved out of the solid wooden form. Particularly fine examples display delicately detailed incised patterns. These can be quite spectacularly carved, and those created after first contact may feature non-traditional representations of plants, animals, birds and human figures.

  Unfortunately, very few of the wide variety of ornaments used in body adornment amongst the people of the southeastern region of Australia have survived. We know, however, that they were made from hair, teeth, bones, leaves, feathers and other natural materials. They can be seen in the depictions of large gatherings that were made by artists such as the naturalist painter George French Angas, who made several expeditions to the lower Murray River district in the 1840s, and the superbly skilled watercolourist Samuel Thomas Gill.

  No real picture emerged of Aboriginal material culture in North Queensland until 1898, when Dr Walter Roth, the protector of Aboriginals for North Queensland, travelled overland throughout the region. His collection was given to the Australian Museum in Sydney in 1905. It included artefacts that indicated a close connection between the Aboriginal clans of the east coast of Cape York and the people of the Torres Strait Islands and Papua New Guinea. Roth noted that the rainforest peoples of the Far North made crescent-shaped ‘bicornual’ baskets that were used for a variety of purposes, including leaching Moreton Bay chestnuts in water overnight to render them edible, and scooping at shoals of fish.

  1 South East Australian club; 2–4 Western Desert woomeras; 5 Western Australian hair pin ornament; 6 Darling River leaf woomera; 7 East Australian club and cutting implement.

  Miraculously, a tiny number of people have been able to keep this unique and exquisite craft alive to this day. Though they lack the allure of age, these baskets command between $3,000–$10,000 when th
ey occasionally appear for sale. Yet contemporary baskets, and their prices, pale in comparison to the value of earlier 19th-century examples like those offered in Sotheby’s Aboriginal fine art sale in 2007. Perfectly preserved and gloriously patinated, these delicate objects were part of the contents of Muralanbeen Homestead. One spectacular example, displaying subtle remnants of its original ochre, was purchased for $42,000.

  I remember thinking in the early 1990s that $3,000 was a lot of money to pay for a Queensland rainforest shield that I let slip through my hands at auction. Made from the buttress roots of giant fig trees, and shaped by progressive controlled burning over open fires, their surfaces were painted with lawyer cane brushes in earth pigments and charcoal, using human blood as a fixative. These shields are so rare that, almost 20 years later, a perfectly preserved 19th-century piece that had been in one collection for more than 100 years was sold at auction for $85,000. This type of shield was used in battle to deflect spears, stones and later bullets as warriors advanced in a phalanx behind a movable barricade. The heavy hardwood swords that accompanied them could be up to three-quarters of a body length in size.

  Queensland rainforest shield, sword and bicornual basket.

  Imagine being confronted by the highly trained Aboriginal warriors in full war paint, standing like Roman soldiers carrying large patterned shields and heavy ironwood swords balanced perpendicularly with half-extended arm – the position always adopted before battle. Broad and sharp as the blade of an oar, these swords were amongst the most distinctive of all Aboriginal artefacts, and capable of inflicting a painful and terrifying death.

  I had the good fortune to visit the vaults of the Australian Museum in Sydney during the late 1980s where images of more than 100 shields, each exhibiting different clan patterns, were being preserved on a photographic contact sheet more than 20 metres long. We were buying rather crude artefacts with similar designs from a fledgling art centre at Deeral, in Far North Queensland, at that time. After giving it some consideration, I contacted the rainforest artists there and offered to repatriate the photographs of the designs to the descendants of those who had originally made them. I sent them, thinking I was helping to preserve fragments from a dead culture, but never heard back. It wasn’t until I met the aspiring young artist Napolion Oui at his first exhibition in 2010 that I learned this was still a living art form, and a unique visual language. Each design tells a discrete story and was owned by a particular clan or individual. Today Napolion and the highly regarded Michael Anning are just two of the artists who keep this ancient narrative alive.

  Anyone who wants to see more of North Queensland’s rich material heritage need only visit the National Museum of Australia in Canberra or many of its state equivalents. Amongst the diverse array of equatorial artefacts are ornately decorated cross boomerangs, knives set with shark’s teeth, spears with a large number of stingray barbs set in gum at the tip, hardwood clubs topped with pineapple cut knobs, and utilitarian items such as deep softwood bowls carved in crescent forms.

  It’s not hard to imagine the healthy, attractive people showing off lovely necklaces and armbands made from pearl and nautilus shell, bark fibre string, cockatoo feathers, echidna quills and short segments of grass. They delighted in nose pins and bark fibre skirts, and their impressive headdresses were constructed from bark and human hair string.

  In April 2008, I was invited to attend an unforgettable event: the ceremonial reopening of a house in Aurukun presided over by the revered Winchanam clan elder of the Wik people, 72-year-old Arthur Pambagan Jnr. He could barely speak after throat surgery, and wore a rather dapper bandana round his neck, but retained enormous dignity.

  According to local tradition, the house had been abandoned after the death of its owner. Now the three-year mourning period had ended and the house was ready to be reoccupied. The entrance was festooned with colourful streamers and balloons. In front of the verandah, painted men and boys stood in clan groups, each wearing their traditional clan design. About half a dozen young girls swaying in pink skirts were doused with highly fragrant talcum powder, instead of the traditional gifts. Dominating the front area of the house, an elaborate totemic sculpture made from an ochred pole suspended on two forked branches was installed. Painted carvings representing flying foxes and bone-fish hung from it on lengths of fibre string. Each clan group danced in front, wielding painted sticks covered in white cockatoo feathers. I’d only seen this sort of installation in books and the contemporary works of city-based Badtjala6 artist, Fiona Foley.

  Aurukun dancers in front of Bone Fish sculpture later installed at Coo-ee Gallery in 2008.

  As darkness descended, the entire village filed inside the house and there was much whooping and stamping to expel the spirits of the dead. The following day the village returned to tranquility. The art centre coordinator offered me the opportunity to exhibit the installation that I had witnessed being used, and I readily agreed. It made a powerful impact when set up in my Sydney gallery.

  In the days before contact, these same clans traditionally made free-standing sculptures out of clay, painted with ochre to accompany ceremonial dancing. They were first noted by anthropologists as early as 1894. There was no steel in the area until after the 1880s when horseshoes were heated and beaten to make tools. Following the establishment of the Aurukun mission in 1904, the local men were taught carpentry at the sawmill. After being introduced to steel tools, the figures they constructed became more sophisticated, featuring inlaid limbs, teeth and eyeballs. During the 1930s, the Aurukun carvers were further influenced by the wooden effigies of Torres Strait Islanders. The best examples of Wik and Kugu carving to be found in Australian museum collections date only from the early 1960s when Arthur Pambagan, then a 30-year-old, assisted his elders in making them for the ceremonies that were filmed by Ian Dunlop.7 These artefacts were sold through the now defunct office of the Director of Native Affairs, though the artists received no direct payment for their work.

  Most people have no idea that Australia’s Indigenous heritage also includes the Torres Strait Islanders. These distinctly Melanesian sea-faring traders share a gene pool with the stockier clans of New Guinea and the Pacific. They occupy more than 30 of the 300 islands that lie between Cape York and Papua New Guinea. The islands range from coral remnants to sandstone outcrops and fertile mudflats, giving rise to several distinct ways of life, revolving around hunting, gathering, fishing and small-scale agriculture that is unique to this region.

  In the 1860s, traders from Europe, Polynesia, Malaysia and Japan began to employ islanders to dive for pearls, turtle shell and trepang8 among the reefs, and to collect sandalwood. By the 1880s their lives had been further transformed with the advent of Christianity which they referred to as ‘The Coming of the Light’. Thereafter missionaries forbade the creation and use of elaborate dance costumes, traditional artefacts, ceremonial icons and effigies.

  Between 1874 and 1888, everything the missionaries and anthropologists collected was sold at auction in London or divided between three European museums. The haul was extensive and included pearl shell ornaments, bamboo tobacco pipes, stone spinning tops and shell knives, skirts, mats, baskets, turtle and shell fish hooks and piercers, water carriers made from coconut shells, and conical fish traps made from thin strips of bamboo. The patterns used to adorn them were specific to each object, tradition and clan group. Decorative canoe prow ornaments were made across the islands, as were carved magic stones made to resemble human beings, which were placed with other effigies in vegetable gardens to encourage fertility.

  Today, the vast majority of this material resides in the museums of major cities from London to Dresden, St Petersburg to Dublin, as well as several in Australia. The most prodigious collector at the end of the 19th century was Alfred Cort Haddon, whose attitudes reflected the mood of the times. In the reports of his expeditions in 1888 and 1898,9 he recalled having acquired an effigy from Gasu, a revered elder on the island of Mer. Noting that overnight th
e old man had reconsidered, and asked for its return, he wrote in his diary that ‘my collecting zeal was so great that I was forced to disappoint the old fellow’.

  Relating this story reminds me of a conversation I had with Ephraim Bani just prior to his death at the beginning of the millennium. Bani was the seventh traditional chief of Wagadagam, a much loved Mabuiag Island elder and one of the most revered Torres Strait Islanders of his generation. We first met through Joe Croft in the mid 1980s after Bani had returned from one of his many overseas adventures. His early island life had been spent diving for pearl shell, although he later became a highly regarded anthropologist and linguist.

  I was standing at the bar of the Jardine Motel after a perilous two-hour crossing through driving rain and rolling swells in a small dinghy from Moa to Thursday Island. I met up with Bani over a double Scotch. That very week, an article had appeared in The Torres Strait Times about a trip to London made by young local artists. Bani was outraged that they had complained to the media about the ‘theft’ of cultural objects by missionaries and collectors during their whirlwind tour of England’s most important museum collections.