The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  ANTHROPOLOGISTS, MISSIONARIES AND ETHNOGRAPHERS

  My wife’s Auntie Jean lived in the same house in the sedate Sydney north shore suburb of Waverton for 98 years. As I write, Jean is still alive, and bright as a button. At 105 years of age she is one of a tiny number of Australians alive today to have been a young adult before the completion of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932. Her home is still surrounded by bushland, unchanged since 1908. Yet she does not recall ever seeing an Aboriginal person, let alone being aware of their circumstances, until well after World War II.

  Already, by the beginning of the 1930s, Aboriginal people were ‘protected’ by an ever tightening net of special laws that controlled their movement, marriage, sexual behaviour, the fate of their children, employment, their savings, and the consumption of alcohol. Beyond the coastal fringe, Aboriginal resistance to the expanding pastoral industry had been largely subdued. More than half of the 500 or more clans that existed at the time of European arrival were no longer conspicuous due to disease, violence and their removal from traditional lands. Those who had survived this initial onslaught were segregated on government stations, Christian missions, reserves or detention camps.

  At the end of World War I, Arnhem Land was studded with mission stations and proclaimed an Aboriginal Reserve. The missions brought the European concepts of money, material possessions and sexual morality, and this saw a gradual transition toward European ways. From 1931 onward, non-Aboriginals, apart from the missionaries, needed a permit to enter Arnhem Land, and this limited the number of interactions, and therefore business relationships, in which Aboriginal people could engage. It also marked the beginning of Aboriginal dependence on passive welfare. In 1934, Professor A.P. Elkin, the foundation Professor of Anthropology at Sydney University, called for ‘a positive policy, aimed at the welfare and development for the Aborigines’. Yet, although he galvanised his academic contemporaries,1 he failed to change government policy.

  Charles P. Mountford, 1947.

  In the 1940s, Robert Menzies’ post-war Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, made the federal government’s paradoxical position clear. On the one hand all Aboriginals and part Aboriginals were to

  attain the same manner of living as other Australians, as members of a single community enjoying the same rights and privileges, accepting the same responsibilities, observing the same customs and influenced by the same beliefs, hopes and loyalties as other Australians.

  Yet this was to be achieved by sheltering, protecting, guiding, teaching and helping, and eventually, quietly withdrawing without fuss, as Aboriginal people entered into the wider Australian community.2 For the most part, the final stage has never been reached.

  Between the 1920s and 1950s the inevitability of Aboriginal integration was almost universally accepted. This was the social and economic climate in which art, most notably bark painting, was first produced. Mission authorities acted in consultation with visiting anthropologists and collectors when commissioning paintings, and dispatched them to museums and marketing outlets in the south. Artists were paid with tobacco and other trade goods. Between 1916 and 1958, the Methodist and Roman Catholic churches and the Church Missionary Society all established footholds across the north.3 Regardless of the current cynicism toward missionaries of the period, there is little doubt that far fewer people and their languages would have survived without them. Protectionism came with benefits as well as disadvantages.

  The early bark paintings that have survived, whether collected by anthropologists or sold to a steadily growing market, were actually produced as items for study or as ‘souvenirs’, rather than for any practical or ceremonial purpose. Baldwin Spencer had become the first ‘patron’ of Aboriginal art when he commissioned 50 large barks in the style of rock art on his visit to Oenpelli in 1914. Following this, he’d commissioned the buffalo hunter, Paddy Cahill, to collect a further 120 barks for the National Museum of Victoria. From then on, bark painters learned to anticipate the requirements of particular collectors.

  Successive field trips into the Central Desert and Arnhem Land by enthusiastic academics and impassioned collectors had the unintended consequence of stimulating the production of art for sale or material exchange. Yet the relationship between the protectionists and the free-marketers was almost always fraught with animosity. Prominent academics, for instance, disdained the ‘amateur’ nature of Charles Mountford’s work, even though he was the most influential advocate of Indigenous culture of his era.

  Mountford began his working life as a stable boy, blacksmith’s striker and tram conductor in Adelaide. He began studying engineering at the age of 20, and by 30 he was the mechanic in charge of the Darwin Post Office. After returning to Adelaide in 1925, overcome with grief due to the death of his wife, he travelled around South Australia with his father. They visited and recorded many Aboriginal rock art sites, and during this time Mountford made tracings of Aboriginal rock carvings near his parents’ Peterborough farm. He met the respected anthropologist Norman Tindale at the South Australian Museum to discuss his findings, and upon the establishment of the Anthropological Society, father and son became foundation members. In 1927, Mountford and Tindale published a paper on the carvings,4 and later travelled together through the Warburton Range in Western Australia. They returned with a collection of photographs and over 400 crayon drawings depicting important Dreaming sites and stories. Despite their shared passion, Mountford, the amateur with no formal anthropological training, and Tindale, the professional scientist, inevitably became career-long rivals.

  In 1935, Mountford’s career in the public service took him to Hermannsburg to investigate the shooting of Aboriginal people near Uluru (Ayers Rock). Tensions between Aboriginals and whites in Hermannsburg and Uluru had been regularly reported in the national press as far back as the 1890s. Sexually transmitted diseases ravaged the population. Drought, malnutrition, high infant mortality rates and water shortages had all bedevilled Hermannsburg, and the mission had acquired an unhappy reputation as a place where Aboriginal people suffered the worst effects of integration.

  By this time, a young Aboriginal man in his early 30s had begun to paint watercolours in a European style at the Finke River mission at Hermannsburg. Though his paintings were generating considerable attention, Mountford was at first unimpressed. While many Europeans were surprised that an Aboriginal was able to paint so skillfully, Mountford dismissed his paintings as ‘curios’. He noted in his personal journal, ‘this is, of course, not Aboriginal art’. The young painter was Albert Namatjira, who went on to become recognised as one of the greatest Australian artists of the 20th century.

  Namatjira had been making a meagre living as a camel driver, stationhand and blacksmith when he turned his hand to producing items to sell to visitors at the troubled mission. These included boomerangs and mulga wall plaques, which referenced both Christian icons and traditional Arrernte men’s storyboards. He was 32 years old when he encountered the struggling oil painter John Gardner, who was sitting in the sandhills sketching the irregular outline of Mount Sonder in the distance. Albert dismounted his horse for a closer look, before stepping back a couple of paces to examine the impact of the work. He watched intently from a distance as Gardner mixed waterpaints together and applied the different colours, transforming the sketch. Remounting his horse, he called out before leaving, ‘You know, one of these days I’m going to take up painting.’ Reining in his mount as it shied, he added modestly, ‘Just for a hobby, mind you.’5

  Albert Namatjira and Rex Battarbee, 1953.

  Gardner was travelling with the trained watercolourist and adventurer Rex Battarbee, and from then on Albert frequently squatted on the sand, watching them both at work. Battarbee and Gardner set up an exhibition at Pastor Albrecht’s request before leaving the community, and 300 Aboriginal people attended. The reaction was quite amazing. The crowd shouted for joy upon recognising each location and ‘pulled each other hither and thither’. Gardner introduced Albert forma
lly to Battarbee, and told him he was interested in painting.

  ‘Why don’t you teach him then?’ came Battarbee’s reply. Gardner could hardly afford his own paints and canvas, let alone supply them to a student.6 In fact, it was Pastor Albrecht who paid for the materials that Albert used two years later, in 1936, when he joined Battarbee’s painting trip after pleading to be taken on as a camel man.

  In over 30 years of collecting Aboriginal art, I have never been able to afford a really great early work by Albert Namatjira. I did, however, once hold in my hands two of the very first works he ever painted, on the paper that Batterbee most likely gave him.

  It was in 2005, while I was Head of Aboriginal Art for Lawson~Menzies auction house, that I travelled to the small South Australian township at Murray Bridge to visit the granddaughter of F.C.G. (Friedrich) Wallent. He had been the Purchaser of Supplies at Hermannsburg during the 1930s. Wallent’s son Oswald, who spent much of his life with the Lutheran Mission in New Guinea, had also collected in the region during the 1950s and 1960s. His collection included his father’s diaries, artefacts and paintings. The family offered these valuable items for sale after Oswald’s death.

  I reached the Murray River after driving from Adelaide across Mount Barker and down through parched and bare, yellow and silver stubbled slopes. It was dry, littered with becalmed paddleboats, and lined with giant aging gums. The river appeared to be dying, in the grip of drought. Inside the small fibro cottage, family photos of long departed kin, Aboriginals and their missionary custodians sat framed and staring from around the room. Boxes of watercolours and notebooks gradually covered the table between the tea cups we emptied during the following hours. My subsequent attempt to clinch the deal was thwarted after Sotheby’s specialist Wally Caruana managed to persuade the family that he could do far better for them.

  On 31 October 2006, the collection was advertised on the front cover of Sotheby’s Aboriginal art catalogue. The magnificent early rendition of Hermannsburg mission with Mount Hermannsburg in the background was advertised with an estimate of $40,000-$60,000. Following spirited bidding it sold for $96,000, setting a new record for the artist, which continues to stand to this day.

  Namatjira was 34 years of age when his paintings began to receive acclaim. All 41 watercolours sold within a few days of the opening of his first exhibition in Melbourne, in 1938. Prior to this, he had simply signed his works ‘Albert’ but then began adding his father’s clan name. At his next exhibition in Adelaide, 20 paintings sold in the first half hour. The Art Gallery of South Australia purchased a major work, the first of Namatjira’s paintings to be collected by an Australian public gallery, and in just five years he had become one of Australia’s best-known artists. Indeed Alison French, the foremost scholar of Namatjira’s oeuvre, relates how a small blue envelope reached the post office in Alice Springs in 1951, addressed quite simply to: It had been posted from India by an autograph hunter.7

  Paintings by Albert Namatjira (above) and Otto Pareroultja (opposite). Their distinctly different styles are easily discernible.

  During World War II, as his brood grew to include ten children, Namatjira spent most of the winter months painting and selling works direct to eager buyers for between one and five guineas each. Such was the intensity of the demand that the ‘authorities’ decided that an advisory council should be established to supervise both the standard and sale of his works. Albert was told to restrict himself to just 50 paintings per year and to fix his prices at between three and 15 guineas. Regardless, paintings in his next show in Melbourne sold for up to 35 guineas, and his exhibition in 1945 netted 1,000 guineas, enabling him to build a cottage a few kilometres from Hermannsburg.

  Gradually Albert began to invite other Arrernte artists on his painting expeditions, including his sons Enos, Oscar, Ewald, Keith and Maurice and the three Pareroultja brothers. Charles Mountford made several films about Albert, and in 1948 he and Axel Poignant released their film Namatjira, the Painter. By then, such was his fame that Albert was honoured by a visit from His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester, then Governor General of Australia. One of his works was presented to Princess Elizabeth on her 21st birthday.

  Albert Namatjira was the first Aboriginal artist to be recognised internationally, and the first Aboriginal person to be listed in Who’s Who in Australia. His watercolour landscapes have become synonymous with the Australian outback. The Western MacDonnell Ranges, the morning light touching Mount Sonder, the gleaming white ghost gums against Glen Helen’s red escarpments, and the waterholes of Ormiston Gorge reflecting the clear blue sky have all become part of our national collective consciousness.8 Albert’s paintings brought him wealth and fame; however, they were always more popular with the general public than with art critics. In fact, no single Australian artist in the 1950s loomed larger in the popular imagination. Sir William Dargie won the Archibald Prize with his portrait of Namatjira in 1956.

  The following year, Albert and his wife were granted Australian citizenship, ten years before it was extended to all Aboriginal people. This entitled him to vote, own land, build a house and buy alcohol. Yet his fall from grace was equally dramatic. Only two years after achieving citizenship he was dead. He’d been charged with supplying alcohol to Aboriginal people in his community, and although he fought the sentence in both the Supreme Court and High Court, he was sentenced to jail for six months.

  What the white establishment failed to understand, then, and still struggles with, is the intolerable pressure that success brings to bear on Aboriginal artists. Namatjira had little choice but to share his provisions in accordance with the traditions of Aboriginal culture. One of the purposes of the bark paintings of animals, for instance, is to map the division of the spoils according to familial obligation. This system of obligatory sharing is deeply embedded in Aboriginal culture. Namatjira became a classic tragic figure of operatic dimensions at the peak of his career precisely because he was caught in the quicksand between white and black law. Throughout his trial he stood tall and proud but, on hearing the final court decision, he broke down and cried out:

  I cannot go on like this. I cannot stand it any longer. I would rather put a rifle to my head and end it all than go on. Why don’t they kill us all? That is what they want.9

  He had lost his will to paint and his mind was in turmoil. Although he lived another nine months his spirit was broken.

  Albert Namatjira’s rise to national and international acclaim predated the genesis of the Western Desert art movement at Papunya by more than 30 years. After the rise in prominence of the ‘dot’ painters, his ‘Europeanised’ work and that of other Hermannsburg painters came to be considered a rather kitsch anomaly. Nevertheless, by 1994, his paintings had recorded 43 of the highest 50 sales results for Aboriginal artworks at public auction. Following Sotheby’s decision to hold stand-alone Aboriginal fine art sales the following year, this declined rapidly. With the growing number of early Papunya boards being offered for sale on the secondary market, just seven of his results remained amongst the highest 50 by the end of 1997. At that time, his record price at auction was the $38,000 achieved for a fine example nine years earlier, in 1988. It has only been since the turn of the century that Albert’s artistic legacy has undergone extensive re-evaluation, and his works have once again become highly sought after. His best ten results at auction have all been achieved since 2004 and range from $45,000–$96,000. This surge in the value of his paintings, and in fact the growing interest in the entire Hermannsburg School, is in large part due to the National Gallery of Australia’s 2002 exhibition, Seeing the Centre – The Art of Albert Namatjira 1902–1959, which toured to the state galleries of South Australia, Victoria and Queensland during 2003.

  Of all the other Hermannsburg painters, by far the most interesting was Otto Pareroultja. Twelve years younger than Albert Namatjira, Otto was the eldest of three brothers. Rex Battarbee referred to the brothers as the ‘breakaway group’ because their approach was so different to
the Namatjiras’ apparent naturalism. Landscape painting, as taught at the Lutheran mission and practised by the majority of community painters, was like a ‘freeze-frame’, and rendered the landscape static. By comparison, Pareroultja’s desert landscapes exhibit a distinct dynamic originality. When he first began painting in 1947, his brilliantly coloured, densely patterned and rhythmic landscapes drew comparisons with European modernists such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. He used watercolour exclusively over the course of his career, but his style and subject matter became markedly more ‘Aboriginal’ as he grew older. Both Rex Battarbee and the Arrernte-initiated novelist and anthropologist Ted Strehlow pointed out the connections between the swirling parallel lines and concentric circles of Pareroultja’s paintings and the designs found on the sacred tjuringa stones associated with men’s ceremonial life. The best of his works were created late in his 20-year career, which ended six years before his death in 1973.

  Pareroultja’s life was not as conflicted as that of Albert Namatjira. Perhaps because he was less famous, Pareroultja’s work was largely overshadowed by Namatjira’s until the early 1980s, when several of his paintings featured in important exhibitions. A reassessment of his artistic legacy began in earnest in 1989 with his inclusion in the Great Australian Art Exhibition 1788–1988 at the Queensland Art Gallery.10 Since 2006, when a truly magnificent Central Australian landscape from the collection of Gould Galleries sold at Sotheby’s for $84,000, interest in his work has soared.

  At first, watercolour painting appeared to supplant much of the craft in Hermannsburg, but craft production continued to be a popular pastime here and elsewhere in the region. Bright acrylic paintings and crayon drawings from Pitjantjatjara men were collected during Charles Mountford’s anthropological field trips in the late 1940s. These stood in stark contrast to the comparatively subdued palette of Arrernte watercolours. Pitjantjatjara women had begun working with Win Hilliard in 1954 at the Methodist mission at Ernabella to the south, producing vibrant paintings as well as a variety of crafts. During the following 32 years Hilliard spent at Ernabella, she demonstrated great cultural insight and sensitivity as she focused on teaching useful skills which women and girls could employ to generate income.