The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  The Yuendumu Doors project also propelled Paddy Nelson to the forefront of the Warlpiri art movement. His early paintings were characterised by fluid brushstrokes depicting variations on classic Warlpiri iconography. They exhibited a far more eccentric compositional placement than those of the more formal Pintupi and decorative Anmatjerre styles. While Paddy Nelson’s early works exhibited the same exuberant freedom seen in the Doors project, he developed a sophisticated edge and tighter design, as his familiarity with the acrylic medium grew. His subject matter centred upon his Dreaming sites over a wide area of country, southwest of Yuendumu.

  Mural at the museum in Yuendumu.

  Surprisingly, the men eagerly embraced the more vibrant colours provided to them, even synthetic pinks, purples and blues. These suited the Warlpiri appetite for gestural freedom, and the region rapidly developed its distinctive style. Warlpiri paintings stood in stark contrast to those of the Pintupi with their restricted palette and more formulaic patterning.

  From the moment of its establishment, the art centre at Yuendumu gained a reputation for collaborative works, like the large women’s painting that was exhibited in their first show. Reflecting the myriad ties and obligations that typify this community’s distinct culture, the artists often worked together in family groups, with older artists instructing younger ones. Two years after painting the doors, Paddy Nelson and the original group of elders created Star Dreaming, depicting the fire ceremony associated with the constellations. This magnificent painting now hangs in the National Gallery of Australia.

  Art production at the southern reach of Warlpiri land went from strength to strength, but in the north it was quite a different story. The Warlpiri settlement of Lajamanu, 600 kilometres north of Yuendumu, had been established on Gurindji land at the end of World War II. While the senior men in Lajamanu did create a sand painting for the 1982 Sydney Biennale, they remained sceptical about the benefits of painting for sale, even after hearing of the success of the Doors project. In 1983, 12 Warlipri men from Lajamanu, including Abie Jangala and Jimmy Robertson, travelled to Paris to create a large ground painting at the Musée d’Art Moderne for the exhibition D’un Autre Continent: l’Australie: Le Rêve et le Réel. At the insistence of the leader of the Lajamanu group, Maurice Luther Jupurrula, they told the media in France that they had come not as artists, but as cultural ambassadors. Nevertheless, Jupurrula’s untimely death two years later broke the resistance toward painting amongst the senior men, and several joined the traditional painting course established by adult educator John Quinn in 1986. More than 100 men and women eventually enrolled in this training course, during which the peripatetic Andrew Crocker visited and taught artists how to stretch their canvases. Following Quinn’s departure late that year, Crocker became a champion for the emerging Lajamanu artists, whose first exhibition was held in 1987 with Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne.

  In 1983, 12 Warlpiri men from Lajamanu visited Paris to perform at Peter Brook’s Theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, and made a ground painting at the Musée d’Art Moderne.

  Another successful show was held at the prestigious Rebecca Hossack Gallery in London during the following year, as a result of Crocker’s advocacy. Hossack, a statuesque beauty who was born in Melbourne, has gone on to establish several galleries from London to New York. In 1993, newly elevated to the role of Australian cultural attaché to the United Kingdom, she was famously saluted by Sir Les Patterson (an alter ego of satirist Barry Humphries) as ‘one beaut Sheila’ and ‘my worthy successor’.

  By 1989, both men and women in Lajamanu had embraced the painting movement, and Warlpiri men from Yuendumu had participated in the landmark exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.24 This exhibition stood in stark contrast to the Dreamings exhibition at the Asia Society in New York. The exhibition, and Aboriginal participation in the New York show, had been organised by anthropologists and curators who conformed to the old museological approach. In Paris, the curator Jean-Hurbert Martin, who had worked with Gary Foley, Bernhard Lüthi and urban Aboriginal artists, adopted a modernist discourse, rejecting the concept of ‘primitivism’ in 20th-century art as a colonialist construct. It marked a turning point in the way European audiences related to contemporary Indigenous art in general, and the Warlpiri art of Australia in particular.

  Just as Crocker was gaining wider support for the Lajamanu artists, fate intervened. He was killed during a visit to Namibia, when a terrorist bomb exploded in a hotel bar. His untimely death, followed by a long period of local council mismanagement (which led to the loss of the Lajamanu Community Development and Employment Program (CDEP)25 for more than a decade), meant that these artists were never again adequately funded or supported. Halfhearted attempts were made to resurrect the art centre during the 1990s, but Lajamanu’s isolation slowed the public emergence of their art significantly. As late as 1988 there were still no telephones to connect its inhabitants with the outside world.

  In London with Rebecca Hossack and Jimmy Robertson, 2001.

  In 1989, a satellite dish arrived in Yuendumu and was transported on the long drive up the Tanami Track to Lajamanu. I’d sent several typed and carboncopied letters to the art educator John Quinn and later to Andrew Crocker, but you can only imagine my surprise when I received a phone call from the community and was asked to urgently attend a teleconference link-up with the artists. This was five years before most galleries had acquired a computer.

  With Coo-ee’s curator, Christine Watson, I raced over to the Australia Council for the Arts to pick up Allan Warrie (then the remote area project officer for the Aboriginal Arts Board), and rushed to the AUSSAT telecommunications office in Terrey Hills. We were escorted into a room dominated by the largest television set I had ever seen. Lajamanu was connecting by satellite for the first time to the outside world, and we watched in astonishment as about 30 artists were introduced to us, one by one, their paintings piled before them. Crucial relationships with a number of the senior artists, in particular Abie Jangala, Lily Hargraves, Liddy Nelson and Lorna Fencer, began through that singular experience. I held an exhibition of their works later that year, and over the ensuing decades Anne and I visited and worked with each of these extraordinary people on many occasions.

  Later in 1989, Perth gallery director Sharon Monterubio, ‘Monty’ for short, flew in to the small community. Impressed by Abie Jangala’s ‘awesome and imposing presence’ she began to present his work in Western Australia, as I did in Sydney. Exposure in Judith Ryan’s Paint Up Big exhibition, at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1990, brought many of these artists to national prominence. Exhibitions with William Mora and Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne, and Coo-ee Gallery in Sydney, consolidated their success. Abie Jangala became the first artist from Lajamanu to have solo exhibitions and develop a national profile. His distinctive artworks featured bold rainmaking icons, highlighted by single rows of red and yellow dotting. The ‘boss’ of all Water Dreamings including rain, clouds, lightning, thunder and frogs, Abie’s numinous icons shimmered above intricate textural fields of white dots. Paintings by the exuberant and uninhibited Lorna Napurrula Fencer were quite the opposite aesthetically. Her eccentric singular vision was evident in even her earliest paintings, as she applied gestural and intuitive brushstrokes loaded with brilliant colour.

  A number of great artists managed to develop important careers in Lajamanu through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, in spite of the difficulties of working without adequate community support. Those who painted with great promise were Ronnie Lawson, Billy Hogan, Liddy Nelson, Louisa Lawson, Rosie Tasman, Joe James and Teddy Morrison. Of these only Abie Jangala and Lorna Fencer emerged to rank amongst the 100 most successful artists in the annals of Aboriginal art, even though they were not given the opportunity to paint regularly until well into the 1990s. In 1997 Abie Jangala’s graphic 1987 Water Dreaming featured on the cover of Stories, the book documenting the Holmes à Court Collection’s European travelling exhibition;26 and between
2011 and 2013, Lorna Fencer’s solo retrospective exhibition Yulyurlu toured venues throughout Australia attesting to her own singular creative genius.

  In Willowra, the third major Warlpiri community, situated on the eastern side of the Tanami Desert, painting never really took hold. While canvas and paint were made available through the CDEP program for a period in the late 1980s, no art centre was ever established. The few artists who have emerged from here move between Willowra, Alice Springs, Darwin and cities in the south to paint and sell their art. The best known of these have been Janet Nakamarra Long and her brother Malcolm Jakamarra Moloney. Being of mixed blood (a Warpiri mother and Irish father) Moloney was ‘discovered’ by the authorities at six years of age and taken, under the Northern Territory Aboriginals Act 1910, to Adelaide where he spent the next 18 years. On his return to Central Australia in the mid 1970s, he was initiated into manhood and learned the sacred songs and dances of the Lander River Warlpiri.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Looking at life in Warlpiri communities like Lajamanu today, it’s easy for white people to get a false impression. If stumbling across a ‘sorry camp’, which is often almost as big as the township itself, and continually swells and shrinks on the tides of misfortune, the impression is of people living in abject poverty. This is a place for mourning. If these shelters were made from gum branches and twine, they would be considered romantic. Instead, through Western eyes, they look like a Third World slum, made from discarded building materials chosen for their effectiveness, rather than aesthetic appeal. Twisted cyclone wire stretches over star-pickets, rusted corrugated iron from the local tip keeps the rain at bay, clothes are thrown on top to provide shade, and mattresses sop up the dirt. Dogs and flies add insult to the European sense of the sanitary. In the sorry camp people live as they used to, as desert nomads sleeping simply under the stars. The long nights are filled with keening for those who have died. The spirits run free.

  The adjacent township is a different place. Prefabricated houses sit on concrete slabs, where extended families of up to 20 people live crammed into each house, enclosed with few windows. Graffiti-covered walls are filthy with dirt blown in on the wind, and the kitchens stink of boiled or fried meat. Little wonder they are easily abandoned for life around an open fire. In the sorry camp you see all this exposed. It’s not a place for visitors, and they are not welcomed here.

  What is going on in the sorry camps is a deep mourning that is impossible for outsiders to really understand. Sorry is about more than personal loss or displacement. It is a culture being mourned for; a way of life of which most of white Australia is unaware, although the loss is just as poignant.

  When I see the sorry camp in Lajamanu, I remember all the wonderful Warlpiri people I have known and who have passed away. I think of Abie, Jimmy, Toby, Lorna, Liddy, Billy and Joe. Great old Warlpiri people from a world so different to my own who were willing to share their culture with me in a way that was genuinely profound. I’ve met and worked with hundreds of Aboriginal people over the years, and have family connections to the Tiwi, but it’s the old Warlpiri of Lajamanu who still haunt me. Living in harsh and unforgiving country, their resilience, resourcefulness and warmth are a constant reminder of their extraordinary durability. Times may be tough but they never give up. The men and women continue their ceremonial life. Their stoicism is exemplary.

  When I think of Lajamanu, I see the old corrugated iron tuckshop and schoolyard shelters meticulously covered by Lily Hargraves and her countrywomen with their Dreaming stories. Instead of being saved by a major collecting institution, they were bulldozed by an uncaring headmaster in the dead of night. I think of old Lily Hargraves as I first met her, a remarkably straight-backed and forthright good-looking woman. Today, a feisty octogenarian, she walks around with her digging stick to lean on, always followed by ten or so dogs. She could be living in a house in town with others, but she prefers her old caravan on the outskirts of the community, and the company of her ‘puppy dogs’ who keep her warm through the cold winter nights.

  EASTERN DESERT – UTOPIA

  A saucepan of hot wax simmers on banked-up coals and twigs. On the red desert sand a group of Anmatjerre and Alyawarre women and children, some huddled in blankets and beanies, discuss the application of the wax while the inevitable sleeping dog twitches its tail at the flies. Nearby the pannikins of batik equipment sit on a delicate platform built on forked twigs, with switches of dried leaves providing shade. A collection of blankets, billies, blue tarps and old pieces of plywood constitute the makeshift sleeping arrangements beside which vivid skeins of silk, up to five metres in length, have been hung out to dry. Rippling in the hot wind, their blazing floral motifs, bush bananas and lizards are startling against the intense blue sky, shimmering gold and russet.

  Sitting amongst this group of obscure disadvantaged women is one particular 70-year-old former camel driver, who will emerge within a decade to become one of the greatest contemporary artists of the 20th century; whose name will be mentioned in the same breath as Pollock, Kandinsky, Monet and Matisse. An artist who, like Madonna, the most famous international icon of her generation, will come to be recognised by a single name: Emily.

  Emily didn’t meet white people until she was about nine years old. The adopted daughter of Jacob Jones, an important law man in the Alyawarre community, she worked the cattle on pastoral properties at a time when most Aboriginal girls were employed as domestics. Married twice, but childless, Emily lived with her family at Alalgura and later with her husband at Woodgreen Station, until she left him, and returned to Alhalkere (Soakage Bore) on the northwest boundary of Utopia, where she was born around 1910.

  Certainly no pushover: the late, great Emily Kame Kngwarreye. [courtesy Tara Ebes]

  Emily’s kin had survived for thousands of years in this dry, flat country. Belying the optimism of its name, Utopia is harsh, uncompromising and prone to extreme drought. It never was and never would be a tourist destination. When the Aboriginal Land Fund Commission purchased the Utopia pastoral lease in 1978, it probably expected to create a major settlement like Yuendumu or Papunya. Instead the eastern Anmatjerre and Alyawarre owners settled in 14 small encampments, sprinkled across 1,800 square kilometres.

  In the late 1970s, batik printing was introduced to the women in Utopia by the adult educator Jenny Green and schoolteacher Toly Sawenko. No-one could have imagined the effect this humble effort would have on the Aboriginal women over the following decades. The silk batiks were exhibited for the first time in 1980 at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs. It was something of a coup when the Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural Institute offered to show them during the Adelaide Arts Festival the following year.

  One person who was immediately attracted by the news of the Araluen exhibition was Don Holt, the third generation pastoralist who ran Delmore Downs Station, situated adjacent to Utopia. As a young man he had mustered cattle alongside the Anmatjerre and Alyawarre men, whose families did domestic chores and collected rations from the homestead. He’d known Emily Kngwarreye, in particular, since childhood. Significantly, Holt’s wife Janet (née Wilson) had been the art coordinator at Papunya following Peter Fannin in the mid 1970s. The silks she and Don decided to purchase at Araluen became the first of hundreds of individual ‘Emilys’ they would eventually collect.

  A spate of exhibitions followed, prompting major public gallery purchases, yet six years later the batik project was still not financially viable. But in 1988, just months before his untimely death, the indefatigable Andrew Crocker persuaded Robert Holmes à Court to purchase 88 batiks.

  The collection went on tour to Ireland, and later that year the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) mounted an exhibition for Mary Reid Brunstrom’s Austral Gallery in St Louis in the United States. The show included batiks as well as paintings by Western Desert artists, including Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, who travelled to America for the opening. In 1990, Ho
lmes à Court’s art curator, Anne Marie Brody, edited the definitive book on the nascent Utopia story.27 It included photographs by Nicholas Adler that are some of the most engaging portraits of Aboriginal people that I’ve ever seen.

  From the outset, Emily Kame Kngwarreye was the undisputed ‘Queen’ of the group. The women’s primary inspiration was food gathering rituals and the bold marks traditionally used to paint their skin for ceremonies. Now, having experimented with these designs for more than a decade, their technical skills and confidence freed them to experiment with new materials and approaches. Having used brushes to apply the wax to fabric, many soon found they preferred the directness and ease of painting with acrylic and canvas. From the first paintings they created for CAAMA’s Summer Project of 1988–1989, it became clear that these painters had a radically different approach to painting than those in other communities.

  Fate also played its part in bringing these artists international renown. A chance encounter with a CAAMA representative in Sydney saw artist Christopher Hodges open the gallery Utopia Art in Sydney in 1989. With support from CAAMA’s shop manager, Hodges developed an ongoing relationship with the artists of the region. Between 1988 and 1989, 81 completed paintings were catalogued, and then shown at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney. Once again Robert Holmes à Court snapped up the entire exhibition, and the artists’ success snowballed. CAAMA handed over $1 million to Utopia artists during the following year.