The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  Local legend has it that, following the tracks of their scrapings less than five years later, Lang Hancock ‘discovered’ the world’s largest iron ore deposit and staked his claim. It was to make him the richest man in Australia. Decades later, his daughter, Gina Rinehart, who was named the world’s wealthiest woman in Business Review Weekly in 2012, became embroiled in a bid to import cheap foreign labour to work the mines she inherited from her father.

  In 1949, hundreds of Aboriginal strikers were seized by police at gunpoint and put into chains. McLeod was jailed no less than seven times. When the strike concluded, many Aboriginals refused to go back to their former positions in the pastoral industry. They eventually pooled their funds from surface mining and other cottage industries to buy or lease stations, including some they had formerly worked on, aiming to run them as cooperatives.53

  At exactly the same time in the far southwest of the state, Noongar children who had been forcibly removed from their parents and sent to the isolated Carrolup mission, were being introduced to music and drawing by their schoolteacher Noel White and his wife, Lily. Their rapidly growing ability attracted the attention of art patron Florence Rutter who arranged to exhibit their works in eight capital cities around Australia before touring them to New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The children’s growing renown upset the Western Australian Department of Native Affairs and the school was closed down after just six years. More than 55 years later, in 2004, a collection of these pastel landscapes, created by 10 to 14-year-olds, was rediscovered in pristine condition at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, by Professor Howard Morphy of the Australian National University. The collection, comprising just over 100 vibrant drawings, had been in the American university’s vaults for more than half a century.

  From the 1880s onward, vast areas of the Kimberley region were leased from the crown. The legendary Durack family and their string of cattle stations, Lissadell, Argyle, Rosewood and Ivanhoe, became the storybook pioneers of European settlement. Their epic cattle drives across the Far North to the loading docks of Wyndham resounded with the crack of stockwhips and the sting of red dust, and created the great Australian myth of the outback. Popularised in Mary Durack’s novels Kings in Grass Castles and Sons in the Saddle, Australia still sells this image abroad. It’s part of the Aussie brand, kept alive by R.M. Williams outfitters, Crocodile Dundee’s exploits, and even Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 hyperbolic movie Australia.

  The reality was quite different. The introduction of equal pay for Aboriginal workers had the unfortunate effect of forcing most of them off the cattle stations. Unable to find paid work they formed fringe camps as close as they could get to their traditional lands. Thousands of Aboriginal children of mixed blood were removed from their mothers to be ‘assimilated’ in foster homes between the 1930s and 1970s, further fragmenting families and isolating individuals.

  Even so, those Aboriginal people who, through their isolation, managed to maintain their customary life, continued to make and use a range of traditional tools and weapons. Men still hunted using distinctive long lightwood woomeras to hurl slender spears with delicately serrated spear points. Women made bark buckets and coolamons to collect wild honey. In the fertile Ord River basin, hooked boomerangs and broad softwood shields were still made. They were not dissimilar to those that the Gurindji, Mudbara and Warlpiri made and used in the northern reaches of the Tanami Desert to the east. Around what is now Billiluna, Halls Creek and Balgo Hills, artefacts resembled those of the Western Desert, and in the Fitzroy region the boomerangs and shields were similar to those of the Pilbara and Dampier Peninsula. The Badi people living on the isolated Dampier Peninsula north of Broome continued to make rafts from mangrove wood, and engraved pearl shell with their distinctive geometric designs. The finest examples were snapped up by eager collectors, while the remainder fed an ever-growing tourist market. With little infrastructure, demand outstripped supply and competition for quality art and artefacts was fierce.

  Wattie Karruwara painting a replicated rock shelter in the Western Australia Museum, c. 1970.

  No Kimberley artists were recognised by name until the 1950s, when senior Wunambal elder Micky Bungkuni and his nephew Wattie Karruwara began to paint Wandjina images onto bark. Prior to this, unattributed items were produced for trade and exchange with the missionaries, who travelled by luggers up and down the coastline. The local clans did not possess the technical prowess of those in Arnhem Land, and for this reason their early barks were knotty, irregular and poorly prepared. As no fixative was added to the pigment, few early examples have survived. Wandjina images were in such demand that they were also incised or painted on boab nuts, emu eggs, pearl shell, didgeridoos, bark buckets and baskets.

  Wattie Karruwara was born in the Hunter River basin in the far northwest of Western Australia around 1910. He was jailed at just 11 years of age after being implicated when two shipwrecked sailors were speared and killed by the owner of a stolen canoe. Eventually released as a minor, he was set free in the alien surroundings of Perth where he spent the next 20 years. He worked as a police tracker before managing to return to his own people at the Mowanjum mission in the north. Here he began painting infrequently under his uncle’s guidance. Only a small number of his paintings have been found over the years through the networks of various anthropologists who studied in the Kimberley area at the time. His earliest recorded work is titled Wandjina Man with Long Neck, which was collected by anthropologist Norman Tindale in 1953; however, Karruwara’s most important body of work was created as a result of his relationship with the young American student John McCaffrey, a PhD candidate at Stanford University.

  After winning a Fulbright scholarship in 1964, McCaffrey elected to work with Ronald Berndt at the University of Western Australia. Providing several artists at the Mowanjum mission with European materials, he was astounded by the results. He subsequently collected more than 300 boab nuts, coolamons, didgeridoos and paintings from Karruwara, Alan Mungulu, Mickey Bungkuni and Wattie Nyerdu. Along with the many traditional designs, there were 39 carved boab nuts by Jack Wherra. In a dazzling sequence of interwoven frames, Wherra created images of white settlement, station life, violent disputes, card games, fights over women, and horse wrangling. Wherra’s style was directly influenced by the comic books he had traded during more than 20 years of incarceration.

  Carved boab nuts by Jack Wherra.

  Though barely half his age, McCaffrey developed a close friendship with Karruwara. Following the example of Charles Mountford, McCaffrey encouraged his Ngarinyin friend to make small portable paintings. Berndt had supplied McCaffrey with three prepared bark blanks from Arnhem Land, which became what are now regarded as the first high-quality bark paintings produced in the region. The predominant subject of all these works is the Wandjina.

  When I walk through the rooms of my own home, I am always struck by the power of these mysterious beings. In the bedroom, the bathroom and above the kitchen bench sit Wandjina barks that I bought for no more than $10 each 20 years ago. These were created in the 1980s at a time when they were relatively common in galleries like my own. Today, barks just like these are snapped up for around $1,500 when they appear at auction. Little wonder that the most powerful early examples by the greatest exponents of this genre now fetch astronomical prices.

  These powerful ancestral creator beings can be found on cave walls and rock overhangs throughout the lands of the Worrorra, Ngarinyin and Woonambal people. Emanating from the clouds and the sea, the Wandjina control the weather, lightning and thunder; bring the monsoon rains; and maintain the fertility of land and animals. They are said to have lain down in caves and, following their time on the earth, their trace remained imprinted on the rock walls. Before every wet season their custodians maintain the remnants of these spirit ancestors by restoring and repainting them. Because of their power over fertility, large crowds of Wandjina figures often fill entire rock galleries in the company of Rainbow Serpents and related totemic animal
s. It is believed that they were once so numerous that the entire Kimberley region was crisscrossed by their paths.54

  All Wandjina have ghost-like white faces and bodies. Their heads are surrounded by a halo that represents the clouds, with lightning striking the ground. They have large dark pool-like eyes. The oval shape on their chest is the source of their spiritual power, echoed in the pearl shell pendants that are ceremonially significant in this region. Wandjina are rarely painted with a mouth. The reason for this differs amongst various tribes. In the Kalumburu area, the Wandjina are believed to have lost their mouths by closing their lips too tightly when the first bolt of lightning struck. The Worrorra alternatively believe that the Rainbow Serpent sealed the mouth of the Wandjina, and if they were depicted with mouths it would never stop raining.

  The Ngarinyin believe that the ‘big boss’ Wandjina can rally his attendants when conflict occurs between humans. They are convinced that the disruption of the annual ritual of retouching the Wandjina is directly responsible for the decline in their well-being today. An urgent desire to redress this dire situation prompted the legendary elders Jack Dale and David Mowaljarlai to create powerful Wandjina figures during the 1990s. Dale is often referred to as the ‘Grand old man of the Kimberley’, and is now rated amongst the most important of all Aboriginal artists. Mowaljarlai was Aboriginal of the Year in 1992, and was awarded an Order of Australia medal in 1995.

  Wattie Karruwara’s Wandjina paintings are considered amongst the most distinctive, and are rare and valuable. They feature long rays emanating vertically from the headdress. They have small eyes and noses, and delicate hands and feet. Many of the finest are now in museums and national art galleries. Several were donated by linguist Peter Lucich to the University of Western Australia in the 1960s. Those created during the 1970s for Helen Groger-Wurm are now in the collection of the National Museum of Australia.

  McCaffrey noted that Wattie painted ‘sometimes up to eight hours straight, in a trance like state with eyes open’.55 After contracting leprosy, he completed a whole series at the Derby leprosarium. In all, more than 38 watercolours were exchanged with McCaffrey. Their beauty resides in the naive charm of the semi-naturalistic depictions of the flora and fauna of his country. Only a handful of his bark paintings remain in private hands, and few have found their way to auction. It is the watercolours that have achieved his highest prices. In 2002, Sotheby’s set his record at $59,250 and this, no doubt, prompted the legendary sale of the entire remaining McCaffrey collection at the request of his widow Winifred the following year. The sale, unprecedented of its kind, was beautifully documented by Sotheby’s, and positioned Wattie Karruwara as a significant figure in Kimberley art history.

  Wattie Karruwara, Untitled, c. 1965. Watercolour, 56 x 76 cm.

  Alec Mingelmanganu, Wandjina, c. 1980. Natural earth pigment and natural binders on canvas, 121 x 65 cm. Sold at Sotheby’s Australia in 2003 for $175,000.

  Other than the great unknown cave painters, however, the greatest masters of the Wandjina tradition were Charlie Numbulmoore and Alec Mingelmanganu. The highest prices at auction for their works have been $228,000 and $244,500, respectively. These are staggering amounts for paintings that only a decade earlier would have been considered artefacts or ethnographic curiosities. In Numbulmoore’s case, the use of his image on the cover of the book Images of Power: Aboriginal Art from the Kimberley (National Gallery of Victoria, 1993) only added to his status as one of the most important exponents of this art. Amongst the Ngarinyin he is the most seminal figure of the Wandjina tradition.

  Once again, the few biographical details of Numbulmoore’s life that exist are traced solely through his encounters with those anthropologists who collected his work. Born in 1907, he lived for many years on Gibb River Station in the central Kimberley area. It was here in a cave near Mamadai where anthropologist Ian Crawford first recorded him repainting Wandjina figures during the 1960s. Few pre-1970s examples of his bark paintings remain intact, but fortunately those on more durable surfaces, such as slate, hardwood coolamons, and even cardboard, have survived. Helen Groger-Wurm later collected the artist’s work on behalf of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in 1970. That same year the collector and grazier Tom McCourt purchased a number of his paintings on bark, plywood and cardboard.

  The finest of all of the Wandjina artists, however, is surely Alec Mingelmanganu. His work was first noticed when the anthropologist Kim Akerman discovered a discarded Wandjina painting, formerly used in ceremony, during his visit to Kalumburu in 1974–1975. It was later shown during the 1975 Derby Boab Week Art Show under the title Australian Gothic.56

  Although Mingelmanganu painted during a very short period in the 1970s, and died in 1981, the artworks exhibited in his one-man show in Perth in September 1980 are considered amongst the finest depictions of Wandjina ever to have been produced for sale. They are highly distinctive and unique in proportion, composition and tonal quality. Their pointed shoulders mimic the giant depictions of Wandjina that stunned Akerman and Ian Crawford when they came upon them on the Lawley River in 1979. The majority are now in major state galleries, including two in the National Gallery of Australia, and one each in the National Gallery of Victoria and the Berndt Museum of Anthropology, Perth.

  Mingelmanganu’s desire to replicate the grand scale of the Wandjina he had seen on the walls of caves in the Kimberley led him to ask for large canvases, similar in size to those he had seen in Perth by artists Robert Juniper and Vaclav Macha. This resulted in four masterpieces in the last years of his life, three of which hung for many years in the foyer of Lord Alistair McAlpine’s Australia Bank building in Perth. Mingelmanganu’s paintings now rank amongst the most loved and highly collectable of all Aboriginal art. His paintings are so rare that only 11 of his works had appeared at auction before 2006, and not one of these had been painted on bark.

  Imagine my surprise when I came across a very distinctive Wandjina bark in a lawyer cane frame in the attic of a house in Perth, while acting as the Aboriginal art specialist for Lawson~Menzies auction house. The owner’s daughter had no idea, but I recognised the artist immediately. The bark had belonged to a doctor who had worked amongst the Aboriginal people of the Kimberley for several decades.

  I promptly rushed this long lost Mingelmanganu Wandjina to Sydney, and it appeared in our November auction catalogue with an estimate of $40,000–$50,000. It sold for $38,400. Just eight months later, it turned up in Tim Klingender’s Sotheby’s catalogue with an estimate of $80,000–$120,000. This time it sold for $102,000, a hefty 265% increase in value. Klingender had stolen my thunder.

  Found in a Perth attic, the long lost Mingelmanganu Wandjina bark.

  Go West Young Man

  A young white man makes the fateful decision that sparks a cultural revolution. The focus moves west with the outstation movement while Cyclone Tracy strikes the Top End, igniting a remarkable cultural revival in the Kimberley.

  THE BIRTH OF A HOME-GROWN ART INDUSTRY

  I remember a little shack in the corner of a vineyard, and a very Bacchanalian weekend spent there with a bunch of university friends, during the first Griffith Wine Festival in 1970. I was studying agricultural science. Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint had just been published, and we were all reading it. We got spectacularly stoned and drunk after winning a keg of wine in a raft race down the Murrumbidgee River. The high point, however, was running into Al Grasby, one of the Labor Party’s most flamboyant characters. Al was the Federal member for Riverina. I admired his non-conformist colourful style and his bold embrace of multiculturalism. I was also flattered that he remembered my name after a brief meeting at university some months earlier. He went on to become a much admired mentor and friend.

  A year later I graduated from Sydney University as one of the first students to study climate change and major in ecology. It was a volatile period. I’d been thrown through a plate glass window on Pitt Street during an anti-Vietnam War demonstration that went
terribly wrong. Now I began a final year studying for a diploma of education, while teaching at a private Catholic school in western Sydney. But my passion was for Third World development, and I longed to travel. I was a typical middle-class kid who knew nothing at all about the people living in the Third World, right here in Australia.

  In 1972, Gough Whitlam led the Australian Labor Party into office after 23 years of conservative rule, and Al Grasby became Minister for Immigration. The Whitlam Government was filled with inspirational reformers like Al, from Tom Uren to Clyde Cameron and Jim Cairns. It made sweeping changes to Australian society, championing equal pay for women, ending compulsory military service, and pulling Australia out of the Vietnam War. It ended the White Australia policy and capital punishment; instituted universal health care and free tertiary education; and implemented free legal aid. The dark ages were over, and the general feeling amongst socially aware well-educated young idealists like myself was absolutely euphoric.

  The most outstanding and influential public servant of the period was Dr H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs.1 ‘Nugget’ is Australian slang for a dog or horse that is short-legged and stocky. Coombs was both. Though short in stature he was a big-picture strategic thinker. He believed self-determination and autonomy were the only way to ensure that Aboriginal traditional life would survive and flourish.2 He advocated ‘two way education’, describing purely Western education as ‘cultural genocide’. For Coombs, attempts to interfere with traditional customary law were inappropriate and eurocentric. He agreed with the philosophy of his close friend, the anthropologist William (Bill) Stanner, who said that waiting for Aboriginal people to ‘unlearn being Aborigines in mind, body and estate’ was a malignant ‘fantasy’, the consequences of which could be seen in ‘a thousand miserable encampments around the continent’.