Every night we stayed up late, singing, laughing and drinking beer. Bede and I got on so well he made me his ‘brother’, long before I met Dominic Martin in the Western Desert and understood the obligations I was inheriting. All I knew was that here were people I could relate to, and when they said, ‘Hey brother, come up and visit us,’ I have to say, I couldn’t wait.
We held their exhibition at the Hogarth Galleries around the corner, as the emporium was yet to take over the first floor of the adjoining shop to house its own gallery. The Hogarth mezzanine featured mannequins dressed in the designer outfits, while the large gallery space below became a floating forest. Ceiling to floor drops of printed tulle, French voile, shot taffeta and Thai silk hung interspersed between giant ochre-decorated bloodwood Pukumani poles. The exhibition’s stunning success propelled me headlong into Aboriginal art.
What Coo-ee Emporium didn’t have was dot paintings because I hadn’t really been exposed to them, and I was instinctively drawn to the earthy naturalistic feel of Arnhem Land and Tiwi art. In any case, Papunya Tula artists were represented by the Aboriginal Artists Agency and The Company. Many of the most important paintings from Papunya were being earmarked for international exhibitions, or for The Company’s galleries. As a result, I was effectively locked out of purchasing them. Having started my business with a $10,000 loan from my parents, I couldn’t afford the best paintings, but I invariably bought pieces that were of a sufficiently high standard for an emporium. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but a number of masterpieces were being created in the Western Desert while we were enjoying commercial success with Tiwi Design art centre.
At Cape Fourcroy, Bathurst Island, waiting for a shot crocodile to surface.
While our Oxford Street strip flourished, the majority of the founding artists of the desert art movement were leaving the strife-ridden Papunya community. Three hundred Pintupi returned to their homelands, creating the township of Kintore on the Northern Territory side of the Western Australian border. Within four years some had pushed another 250 kilometres further west to establish Kiwirrkurra. This enabled them to live close to the primal source of their Dreamings. Ancient practices that had been in decline for decades were reinvigorated through painting and passing stories on to the next generation. Painting also provided the financial means for a degree of self-determination.
Andrew Crocker, a gangly, quixotic English barrister of independent means raised the profile and sales of Papunya Tula significantly during his tenure as art adviser from 1980–1981. Several artists moved to working on large canvases, and were exposed to international travel through the exhibition, Mr Sandman Bring Me a Dream, which toured the United States and the United Kingdom. For years afterwards we sold the accompanying catalogue, which was the first published account of Papunya art. Armed with a list of Australia’s wealthiest people, the slightly toffy Crocker had canvassed contacts around Australia and overseas including, significantly, the Western Australian mining magnate Robert Holmes à Court. By encouraging the millionaire’s interest in the paintings as contemporary art,4 Crocker had a hand in creating what would become one of the finest Indigenous art collections in the world. Crocker’s creative accounting enabled Papunya Tula to break free from dependence on annual government grants. He also encouraged a wider group, including a small number of women, to become involved in producing artworks.5 By employing a ranking system that set a standard for pricing their works, he rated Clifford Possum and Uta Uta Tjangala as Papunya’s most accomplished artists.
In his early days at Papunya, Crocker was taken under the wing of the gravelvoiced ‘wisher and dreamer’6 Charlie Tarawa Tjungurrayi. Seeing his potential, Crocker coaxed him into the limelight, as both a representative of the Papunya Tula company and also as an artist in his own right. Aided by the money generated from his art sales, Tarawa moved back to Kintore in his Pintupi country 25 years after he had left by camel in 1956. He was forthright in his opinions and aspired to a piece of land that could be fenced off, and which he could call his own. Tarawa travelled with Crocker to Europe, America and England, where he met Queen Elizabeth II after a brief stay on Crocker’s country estate in Somerset. Five years later, Crocker organised Tarawa’s retrospective for the Orange City Festival, the first for any Papunya artist. It later toured Australia. Tarawa was deeply affected by these experiences, and his relationships with white friends. At the same time, his own people were experiencing all the difficulties of their exodus back to Kintore, and his authority and political position within the Pintupi community was somewhat compromised by his painting exploits.7 There is no doubt, however, that Tarawa played a vital role in asserting the growing economic freedom and political status that could be gained from painting.
There have been a number of excellent books written about the artists who played a leading role in the growing art activity at this time. Vivien Johnson’s wonderful Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists is a personal favourite.8 She was indeed fortunate to know many of these artists. I can only offer a quick survey of the key figures in this account. (You can see their artworks and read my own detailed profiles of all of the major artists of the movement from this and other regions by logging onto the Australian Indigenous Art Market Top 100 Artists at www.aiam100.com.)
Billy Stockman was a dedicated family man and leader of the outstation movement, and was the first to return to the west. He set up his outstation at Illili, where he passed on his Budgerigar, Water, Snake and Wild Potato Dreamings. As others followed his example, they found that they too were able to live from the proceeds of their art sales.
By all accounts, Yala Yala Gibbs was more solemn and introspective than Stockman. He set up camp at Mantardi, where he painted large acrylic canvases, one of which was shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
John Kipara was a talented tracker who was cast in an Italian film about the last traditional hunter-gatherers on earth, during the early 1970s. He painted at Walungurru and proudly hunted well into his 60s. The extrovert Timmy Payungka was an initiated man of high degree. He settled 30 kilometres from Kintore with Uta Uta Tjangala, and the meditative traditional healer John John Bennett.
Shorty Lungkata was another assertive leader who continued to paint from Kintore where he settled with his family in the early 1980s. So too did Anatjari Tjakamarra9 who played a leading role in the establishment of Tjukurla outstation, situated between Kintore and Docker River.
In 1984 something extraordinary made international headlines. After hundreds of Pintupi had moved west, a group of nine desert dwellers, quickly dubbed ‘The Lost Tribe’, were encountered by outstation Pintupi, walking east from Lake MacKay. At first it was feared the naked nomads were Kadaitcha, or revenge killers, but they were just as afraid of their more domesticated cousins, and initially resisted attempts to bring them into the vicinity of white people. Driven from their remote territory by the lack of water, the arrival of the nomads sent shock waves through the Pintupi community and beyond. After the eldest brother Pierti returned to the desert alone, leaving the group without any knowledgeable male elders, two of the elderly female nomads approached ‘Dr’ George Tjapaltjarri to request he provide instruction for the younger teenage brothers, Walala and Warlimpirrnga, so they could be formerly initiated into the Law.
My daughter, Mandala, with ‘Dr’ George Tjapaltjarri at Gallery Gondwana, 1997.
Amongst the first to learn of the nomads’ arrival was 40-year-old Kiwirrkurra resident George Tjungurrayi, who had seen white men for the first time himself at the age of 17. The return to country was stimulating intense ceremonial activity, and mature initiated men like George Tjungurrayi were preoccupied with men’s stories associated with the travels of the Tingari ancestors. These related to significant sites in the surrounding region and Lake Mackay. Like those of many others, Tjungurrayi’s early 1980s paintings of the Tingari were characterised by the ubiquitous dotted grids of lines and circles. By the mid 1980s, however, he had expanded his palette beyond the autumna
l tones created by the basic red, yellow, black and white, and was employing a wider array of colours and experimenting stylistically.
Several outstanding artworks resulted from the establishment of the Kintore and Kiwirrkurra homelands at the beginning of the 1980s. Of these, Uta Uta Tjangala’s masterpiece Yumari (1981) was possibly his largest and most significant. Yumari is a rocky outcrop in Tjangala’s home country and the key ceremonial site of the area. In this painting, which follows the mythical Tingari ancestors travelling across vast stretches of country, the story elements and natural features blend seamlessly into a beautifully balanced geometry of concentric circles and connecting lines enclosed within the central abstracted figure of Yumari. His body stands out amidst intense, minutely dotted background configurations. The work was exhibited at the XVIII Bienal de São Paulo in 1983, and is now in the collection of the National Museum of Australia. The well-known academic Dick Kimber recalls watching Uta Uta sit cross-legged in the middle of the monumental canvas, singing as he painted. Eleven of his kinfolk, including Anatjari Tjampitjinpa, Charlie Tjapangati and Yala Yala Gibbs, later joined him to assist with the dotted infill. As they painted they talked excitedly about the practicalities and possibilities of the Kintore outstations.10
As a direct consequence of the sale of this and other works, Uta Uta was able to set himself up with his family on a small outstation west of Kintore.11 Many of his offspring and immediate family became artists who carried desert painting into the next decade and beyond. They included his wife, Walangkura Napanangka, and their five children. Unlike most of the desert painting founders, Uta Uta’s late career works are considered of equal or greater importance to his early boards. This was amply demonstrated when he won the National Aboriginal Art Award at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in 1985. He lived until 1992.
Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula was one of the most innovative and versatile artists of the early desert art movement. He was also one of the youngest, and shyest. Yet he was open to experimentation, and embraced less traditional mediums. In the 1980s he travelled to Paris with Joseph Jurra Tjapaltjarri to create a sand painting as part of the Peintres Aborigines d’Australie exhibition. He collaborated with the renowned non-Indigenous artist Tim Johnson, supervising Johnson’s use of sacred designs in his 1983 work Emu, Porcupine and Bandicoot Dreaming. Johnson got plenty of flack from casual observers for using dotted backgrounds in his work, but seemed particularly adept at negotiating his way through the cultural issues with Aboriginal men like Tolson, Michael Nelson and Clifford Possum, who had a genuine affection for him.
Another who lived and worked at the new settlement of Kiwirrkurra through the mid to late 1980s was the gentle and quietly spoken Anatjari Tjakamarra. At the beginning of the 1990s he had solo exhibitions at John Weber Gallery in New York and Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne. Anatjari lived beyond the regular reach of Papunya Tula for a large part of his later life, and no doubt for this reason he was one of the first Pintupi artists to work independently. He became the first Western Desert painter to be represented in a major international contemporary art institution when a work exhibited in 1988 at the John Weber Gallery in New York was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
While all of these artists made a valuable contribution to the growing renown of Western Desert art during the 1980s, not one was to have a more profound and lasting effect on its future than Ronnie Tjampitjinpa. The quintessential modern nomad, Ronnie travelled constantly. His works first appeared in Papunya Tula exhibitions during the 1970s, and by 1983 he had moved his family to the small settlement of Ininti Redbank, near Kintore. He stopped painting for a few years while working on important land rights claims and acting as the chairman of the Kintore outstations council, but soon returned to paint with renewed enthusiasm in the mid 1980s. He had found that politics was ‘too much humbug’.
After Ronnie won the Northern Territory Art Award in 1984, several non-Indigenous contestants complained that Papunya art was ‘folk art’ and not worthy of the prize. The award’s judge, Nancy Underhill, defended his entry, Happening at Mt Liebig, as ‘genuine art of the highest standard’.12 He won the Alice Springs Art Prize in 1988 and had his first solo exhibition at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi the following year. Later, during the 1990s, he began scaling up characteristic Pintupi design elements (as seen on men’s dance boards and ceremonial objects). His paintings from this period onward emanate an eye-catching, mesmeric pulse. As demand for his work grew, Ronnie emerged as a leading figure amongst those who sustained the boom in the national and international reputation of Aboriginal art. More than any other figure, he challenged fixed perceptions of Western Desert art, and freed up possibilities for the next generation of painters.
While works by Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, Turkey Tolson and several others continued to gain favour during and beyond the 1980s, those by other desert movement founders languished. Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula’s eyesight had begun to fail by the mid 1980s and his painting became infrequent. Both Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa and Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, who had been amongst those who had fundamentally shaped the Papunya art movement during its first 15 years, found it difficult to make a stylistic transition during the late 1980s. Though Long Jack was awarded first prize in the Northern Territory Golden Jubilee Art Award in 1983, and took out first prize in the Alice Springs Art Prize the following year, his works rapidly fell from favour. Kaapa’s floral backgrounds and decorative content haven’t stood the test of time either.
Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri was one of the few Pintupi artists to stay on in Papunya after the exodus of the early 1980s. He finally settled at Nyunmanu, near Marnpi, with his second wife, the artist Elizabeth Marks Nakamarra, and their three children. The need to support his young family, however, saw Namarari move into Kintore and travel more frequently to Alice Springs. From the late 1980s onward he sold more and more of his paintings independently.
The market was changing, and so too was the painting. As the Papunya men began to experiment, loosening the restrictive rules and patterning that had helped to consolidate the earlier phase, each worked with greater confidence in his own signature style. Generic Tingari paintings began to fall from favour as the market embraced an ever-growing number of regional styles.
Men had dominated the painting scene from the outset, but women gradually became more visibly involved. Kaapa’s female relatives had been the first desert women to openly assist a male artist. They did so until his death in Alice Springs in 1989. At the same time Linda Syddick Napaltjarri, who was Shorty Lungkata’s adopted daughter, became the first of a younger generation of women to develop an art career while living in Alice Springs.13
The strategic placement of overseas exhibitions had created the market for Aboriginal art during the 1970s and it was vital that this promotional activity continue through the next decade. In 1981, the changing face of Aboriginal desert art was showcased in the exhibition Contemporary Australian Art at the Pacific Asia Museum in Los Angeles. These works were drawn from the private collection of the great American collector, Richard Kelton. In Australia, exhibitions featuring Western Desert art included Dot and Circle at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and at Flinders University in South Australia, and Face of the Centre held at the National Gallery of Victoria. The Inspired Dream toured nationally and internationally throughout 1988 and, at the end of the decade, Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia showed at the Asia Society in New York. But the majority of the overseas exhibitions were curated and toured by white anthropologists for ethnographic institutions. With major events such as Australia’s Bicentennial celebrations and World Expo in Brisbane the Australian government’s focus was at home, and it lacked the commitment required to continue fueling international interest.
Sitting in my shop, I could see that almost 80% of all sales were overseas visitor–related. Clearly the industry’s apparent success at generating overseas sales was based on high-end tourism. This was what I a
lways referred to as ‘hidden’ export. The failure of government to understand this fact made it extremely difficult to mount a case for govenrnment patronage to fund exhibitions abroad. If these were to continue, the burden would have to be largely born by the growing number of private galleries.
This lack of government commitment was to have a profound effect during the decades ahead. Galleries like ours were constantly offered opportunities to showcase Aboriginal art overseas, but we couldn’t afford to fund them without help from government agencies such as the Department of Foreign Affairs or the Australia Council. A ‘Catch 22’ existed. You could expect support if you applied on behalf of particular Aboriginal artists, but if you applied as a commercial gallery for an opportunity that would promote the industry as a whole, it would invariably be rejected. Applications to the Australia Council were biannual, making it impossible to give firm commitments to overseas venues, unless you had enough capital to mount your project independently. We only managed to travel overseas by selling works ahead of any exhibition. Fortunately, I had always treated high-end tourists as ‘collectors on holiday’. Long before the internet, we zealously fostered and maintained relationships with them by fax and snail mail.
The Dealer is the Devil Page 23