The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  Bani believed that ‘the past must exist for the present to create the future’. As far as he was concerned, many of the finest artefacts had, in fact, been saved, rather than stolen, due to the work of Alfred Cort Haddon, Rev. Samuel McFarlane and others.

  Of the many friends I have made over the years who hail from the Torres Straits, Ken Thaiday Snr, the Erub (Darnley Island) elder and artist, has possibly been the most influential. Though I’d been introduced to him years earlier, our friendship really ignited when he took me to his storage garage in a Cairns industrial complex in 2008. There he showed me a half completed dance machine to be used in a recreation of the story of the ‘Coming of the Light’. Made out of giant pieces of plywood, like a children’s pop-up book, the many moving parts were ingeniously animated by pulling them with strands of fishing line. The different elements depicted scenes from the story that climaxed as the sun rose to the apex, shining directly through a pinhole in a plywood cut-out Bible.

  Ken’s cramped working conditions prompted me to begin looking for a suitable building to house a complex of artist studios for the many Indigenous artists struggling to maintain their art practice in Cairns. Within six months I was proudly standing next to Ken with my Australian Art Print Network partners at the opening of our new multidisciplinary arts complex, Canopy Artspace. Ken had moved his workshop into this studio where he could mentor other artists by example. A strikingly charismatic, gentle and affable elder, he is driven by his desire to make ever more challenging and innovative pieces. During the following four years, Ken was always the first to arrive and the last to leave the building six days a week. A committed Christian, on the seventh day he rested.

  Ken Thaiday Snr, Shark Headdress. Mixed media, 2010.

  I’m by no means the first or last to admire Ken’s legendary inventions. They are whimsical, yet entirely true to a traditional culture in which ornate articulated masks are the focal point of many rituals. Islander artisans traditionally competed to create these eye-catching masks. Ken’s shark headdresses, for example, have huge jaws which open and close, rising high above the dancers’ heads. An aweinspiring symbol of law and order, a headdress such as this plays a pivotal role in the ritual, swaying from side to side, with a plume of white feathers around the jaws mimicking the foaming water of its feeding frenzy. Representations of other creatures such as crabs, seabirds and stingrays are also common.

  Ken Thaiday Snr working at Canopy Artspace, 2010.

  Before the 20th century, headdresses and masks such as these were made of composite pieces of incised turtle shell with detailed painting and infilled decoration. They incorporated feathers from the Torres Strait pigeon, white heron and cassowary. Ken’s contemporary headdresses employ lightweight materials such as plastic piping, plywood, twine and bright enamel paint.

  This dancing has survived and flourished despite the loss of early treasures. Dancers still stomp in unison to the beat of decoratively incised and decorated drums, clashing goa nut rattles held in hands and attached to feet.

  THE FIRST ABORIGINAL ‘ARTISTS’

  Less than a generation after the original 11 sailing ships first brought European ‘civilisation’ to Sydney Harbour, evidence of the riches of Aboriginal culture had all but disappeared along the east coast. Signs of pre-contact society had become so scant that the majority of European settlers in the growing cities imagined Aboriginal people had always walked in rags, naked and dirty, carrying sticks and living in caves.

  On the contrary, however, Aboriginal people built relatively sophisticated dwellings that were perfectly tailored to a vast array of climates and conditions. As evidenced by the surviving artefacts, they adorned themselves with items that could be as delicate and whimsical as Parisian haute couture. Feathers, shells and other decorative ‘found’ objects accessorised their dilly bags, carriers and coolamons, while ingenious hand-made tools facilitated hunting and fishing, cutting, sewing and digging. Their beautifully designed and weighted weapons were wielded with deadly accuracy, while heavier items were left, buried or hidden, to be retrieved sometimes years later upon return. For the most part the seasons and the rhythms of supply dictated the size and number of items that were carried. Nothing extraneous or bulky could be lugged around.

  A small number of Aboriginal artists from Victoria and New South Wales captured the final days of this hitherto uninterrupted way of life. The most notable of these were Tommy McRae and William Barak.

  Tommy McRae had worked as a stockman and drover on Victoria’s upper Murray River during the time that European settlers, gold-diggers and pastoralists were taking over his clan’s hunting grounds and homelands. Nobody knows why McRae began to draw, let alone why he adopted a delicate figurative style in contrasting black and white. His silhouetted figures had elaborate headdresses, sinuous lines of body paint and striped legs. They carried weapons and were generally surrounded by birds, animals and trees. Between the early 1860s and his death in 1901, he produced books of drawings for sale which featured men’s war dances, hunting scenes, images of pastoralists, and the mythic story of ‘the wild white man’, William Buckley, who escaped from a convict ship in 1803.

  McRae’s images were used to illustrate two books on Aboriginal myths and legends that were published in the 1890s, although he was not directly credited at the time. After Theresa Walker,10 the wife of a local landowner, showed McRae’s works to other ‘society whites’, his commissions allowed him to set up an independent camp for his family on the shores of Lake Moodemere near Rutherglen, on the Murray River. The large freshwater lake, rich in plant and animal life, was an important ceremonial site to his people. Most of the distinctive pen and ink drawings, made during the next two decades, provide a unique, often witty, view of the immense changes he witnessed.

  By all accounts, McRae was a captivating and convincing storyteller. His drawings are certainly infused with an animated spirit and a keen sense of observation. Lines of dancers captured during corroboree cross the page, with high flung arms and bent legs interlocking in a rhythmic pattern. Another favourite subject was the moment before attack, which featured intently poised men, often holding bush camouflage before them, their spears about to fly at an unsuspecting kangaroo, emu or fish. While ritualistic fighting duels provided another popular subject, he avoided images of explicit interracial conflict. Typically, the self-satisfaction of the new landowner is conveyed with wry amusement, and Chinese gold-diggers are chased away in comic disarray. McRae found another patron in the nearby property owner Roderick Kilborn, who collected his drawings and regularly supplied him with new inks and sketchbooks. Kilborn also organised commissions, including a gift to the Governor of New South Wales that generated great interest.

  Tommy McRae, Ceremony, c. 1900. Ink on paper, 23.5 x 32.5 cm.

  During his lifetime, Tommy McRae was highly regarded and well patronised, yet sadly it did not prevent his children from being taken from him. Concerted appeals to powerful friends failed to circumvent the laws of the time. When he wanted to buy a house for his family with his well-earned funds, the Board for the Protection of Aborigines promptly dismissed his request.11

  William Barak, Untitled Ceremony 1895. Natural earth pigments, watercolour and pencil on paper, 52 x 52 cm.

  William Barak on horseback, Healesville, Victoria. Taken by Sarah Chinnery, c. 1900.

  After he died, many of McRae’s drawings were collected and housed in museum archives. They were considered to be examples of ‘the dawn of art’, and an historical record of 19th-century life, largely inaccessible to the general or art-loving public. Seventy years after his death, however, a new generation of Aboriginal artists sought out their predecessors with a will to reclaim Aboriginal history and identity.12 Later, during the 1980s and 1990s, his drawings were included in major touring exhibitions. As a consequence, Tommy McRae is now acknowledged as a significant figure in the history of Australian visual art. The value of the few works that remain in private hands is enhanced by their fragility.
In June 2008, a particularly fine example created in 1900, featuring a war dance in ink on a 25 x 30-centimetre sheet of paper, set a new record for the artist when purchased for $48,800.

  Today, however, the best known of the early colonial painters is not McRae, but his contemporary William Barak, whose art was essentially nostalgic. His illustrations of the traditional life that existed prior to the establishment of Melbourne were created during the 1880s and 1890s. Although their deeper significance has been lost they provide a rare insight into the earliest days of the struggle for land rights.

  Born into one of the first Victorian coastal river clans to be contacted by Europeans, Barak was just 11 years of age when he personally witnessed the signing of John Batman’s treaty with his Wurundjeri clansmen in 1835. This led to the establishment of the City of Melbourne. Having joined the Native Mounted Police as a young man, he was hailed as an example of successful Aboriginal integration. Yet he watched with sadness as Port Phillip was turned into grazing land, and the majority of the Wurundjeri suffered starvation and disease. Barak‘s attempts to help the survivors were heroic, and resulted in the establishment of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve on Badger Creek, one of the earliest land rights victories in Australia.

  From the 1860s until his death in 1903, Barak lived at Coranderrk where he mixed freely with members of the white community. He lived for a while with the De Pur family, and also with the widow Ann Bon, both of high-ranking society families. Bon, in particular, was crucial to the promotion of Barak’s art in Australia, and sent several of his drawings back to England.

  Unlike McRae’s silhouettes, Barak’s figures are infilled with various designs. His composition is typically geometric, with human figures and animals arranged in dense patterns. The natural world is not a backdrop to the image, as in Western convention. Each item, be it flora or fauna, is totemic and relates to the individual personalities of the human figures. No two are the same. The designs that appear on bodies, their possum skin cloaks and carved weapons are characteristic of certain regions, specifying identity and place.

  Barak combined charcoal, red and yellow ochres with non-traditional colours. Natural pigments, mixed in a wash with barium sulphate and ivory black, allowed for a greater range of tone and intensity. The green and blue hues which occur in several of Barak’s drawings are probably European watercolours. His use of colour is restrained, however, and most commonly executed in materials either from the earth or strongly related to it. It is tempting to draw a parallel between Barak’s method of combining these materials and the position of Barak himself, situated between his traditional life and European society.13

  The anthropological aspect of Barak’s drawings fascinated the public and buyers of the late 19th century. They tapped into the prevailing European interest in ‘primitivism’ and pre-colonial life. By the time of his death in 1903 he was famous as ‘the first Aboriginal artist’ of the colony. For almost a century thereafter, however, his paintings and drawings were largely overlooked because they’d been trafficked to European collections, and ended up in the ethnographic museums of Neuchâtel, Berlin and Dresden. It is only in recent times that William Barak, the artist, has taken on an almost mythical status in his own country.

  In 2003, the National Gallery of Victoria staged the important exhibition Remembering Barak at the Ian Potter Centre. It prompted a surge of interest in his legacy, and an exponential increase in market demand for his works. Two years earlier an untitled ceremonial image on paper had sold at Sotheby’s for $87,500. This transcended the $78,000 paid for a similar work in 1998. When it returned to auction 11 years later, however, it was purchased by Melbourne art dealer Lauraine Diggins, on behalf of an undisclosed client, for a hammer price of $420,000 ($504,000 including the buyer’s premium). It was the sixth highest price ever recorded for any work of Aboriginal art.

  Barak and McRae remain the most highly recognised individual Aboriginal artists of the colonial period. Yet there were others, including Micky of Ulladulla on the New South Wales south coast and Charlie Flannigan who was executed for murder in South Australia in 1893. Paintings and drawings by these early artists are rare indeed, and only the most fortunate collectors will ever get to own one.

  EARLY COLLECTORS

  Just 20 minutes from the centre of Melbourne, on a narrow, winding and leafy suburban street, an unexceptional brick veneer house contains a treasure trove of ‘primitive’ art. I used to visit the house a lot while I worked at Lawson~Menzies auction house. Rene Davidson was a lively octogenarian who loved to reminisce over a cup of tea and home-made pastries, and I always looked forward to seeing her. She thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to chat about how her husband’s early collecting had spawned an industry. Jim had passed away in 1994, but Rene stayed on, surrounded by their unique collection, until her own death in 2011. They had been traders like me, and like my own home, theirs had been overtaken by their magnificent obsession, becoming a gallery sitting all but invisible in an ordinary suburban street.

  Looking through the bookshelves one could find dozens of out-of-print books illustrating rare and curious objects. Amongst the many striking items were shields adorned with bands of red and white ochre, featuring key designs related to men’s ‘business’ – the very same designs that were used decades later by the founders of Western Desert painting. There were numerous items made using just stone, bone or shell, or fashioned by burning with fire before the availability of metal tools. Many of these showed the remnants of the spinifex resin that was used to repair tools and weapons, fill holes in broken bowls, and prepare the surface of ceremonial objects for decoration. The house was a cornucopia of stone knives, clubs, spears, boomerangs, woomera, coolamon and ceremonial regalia. There were also exquisite items from the northwest coast of Australia, such as the pearl shell ornaments, referred to as lonka lonka, which are engraved with a distinctive array of geometric ‘men’s’ designs. These were worn around the waist as pubic covers in men’s ceremonies that women were forbidden to witness. There were cylindrical bark buckets, specific to the Kimberley region, which were made to collect honey and other foods. These were created by softening bark slabs, sewing the ends together with bark fibre, and reinforcing with gum resin. Bark coolamons were painted with white ochre and decorated with depictions of Wandjina and associated creation beings or totemic creatures.

  Today Rene and Jim’s son, Malcolm, continues to run Melbourne’s Aboriginal and Pacific Art Gallery, the oldest tribal art dealership in Australia. Jim died before I had the opportunity to meet him, but I learned from Malcolm that he was born in 1908 at Landybrandt in Orange Free State, South Africa, to an Australian father and a South African mother. He had an idyllic childhood. Home-schooled, he was allowed to roam freely with Zulu children, hunting wild turkeys and pea hens. At 21, he came to Australia and worked as a surveyor and gold prospector. This work eventually took him to Fiji, Samoa and Tonga where he became fascinated by the art and culture of the Pacific Islands, and met the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead. His appetite for adventure grew, and when he was commissioned to explore and map parts of the prehistoric Fly River in New Guinea in 1937, he ventured forth with alacrity into the mysterious region. After the war, Jim returned to Papua New Guinea to grow coffee in the Whagi Valley. The artefacts he collected during his time there give a rare insight into the culture of Papua New Guinea and attest to his deep respect for the people of the Highland region.

  Jim Davidson in his Hardy Street office, Melbourne, c. 1961.

  Today Rene and Jim’s son, Malcolm, continues to run Melbourne’s Aboriginal and Pacific Art Gallery, the oldest tribal art dealership in Australia. Jim died before I had the opportunity to meet him, but I learned from Malcolm that he was born in 1908 at Landybrandt in Orange Free State, South Africa, to an Australian father and a South African mother. He had an idyllic childhood. Home-schooled, he was allowed to roam freely with Zulu children, hunting wild turkeys and pea hens. At 21, he came to Australia and worked as a
surveyor and gold prospector. This work eventually took him to Fiji, Samoa and Tonga where he became fascinated by the art and culture of the Pacific Islands, and met the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead. His appetite for adventure grew, and when he was commissioned to explore and map parts of the prehistoric Fly River in New Guinea in 1937, he ventured forth with alacrity into the mysterious region. After the war, Jim returned to Papua New Guinea to grow coffee in the Whagi Valley. The artefacts he collected during his time there give a rare insight into the culture of Papua New Guinea and attest to his deep respect for the people of the Highland region.

  Jim visited Arnhem Land for the first time in 1960, and characteristically immersed himself in the art, culture and language of Gupupungu. He regularly visited Yirrkala and Milingimbi and became a close personal friend of Mathaman Marika, the great artist, warrior and ceremonial leader. Such was their respect for each other that Jim was initiated into the Gumatj clan of the Yirritja moiety. During his visits he photographed prominent artists and documented their stories in great detail.

  Decades before Jim Davison took his cameras north, another far more extensive documentation of traditional Indigenous life had been recorded by Baldwin Spencer. The wondrous book The Aboriginal Photographs of Baldwin Spencer contains over 100 large graphic depictions of people actively engaged in traditional life and ceremony.14 Taken between the early 1890s and the 1920s, these naturalistic black-and-white images were so much more immediate than any of the old posed studio photographs of Aboriginal people that I had seen previously. And they were just a sample of the 1,700 superb photographic negatives and extensive documentation that Spencer amassed during his travels to the Western Desert, and subsequently Arnhem Land and the Tiwi Islands.