The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kame-Summer Awelye, 1992. Synthetic polymer paint on Belgian linen, 121 x 208 cm. This exceptional painting celebrates the life cycle of Kame, the finger yam, with its daisy-like flowers which form seeds, a traditional food source. It sold for $156,000 at Lawsoñ~Menzies auction in 2005.

  When Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s first exhibition went up, Robert Holmes à Court pounced again. He bought everything. Within a year, however, Holmes à Court was dead – felled by a heart attack at the age of 53. Tragically, both he and Crocker died young, yet both left an indelible mark on the Aboriginal arts industry. For his part, Holmes à Court ensured that Emily and the Utopia movement gained immediate and enduring recognition.

  Emily’s earliest works featured visible linear tracings, following animal tracks and the roots of the Kame (yam). Fields of fine dots across the painted surface partially obscured the symbolic elements. These were shown in two very successful Sydney exhibitions during 1990, as well as the Abstraction show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Emily also created works for Gabrielle Pizzi’s exhibition in Melbourne, and the CAAMA–Utopia artists-in-residence program at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Perth. The paintings included in these exhibitions are now some of the most highly prized of all Aboriginal artworks.

  As her fame grew, Emily’s success opened doors for a number of other prominent Utopia artists, most notably Ada Bird Petyarre, Kathleen Petyarre, Polly Ngal(e),28 Lilly Sandover Kngwarreye and Gloria Petyarre. With no official art centre located on Utopia land, Rodney Gooch, who for a time acted as CAAMA’s store manager, and then as an independent agent, became a key promoter of these artists. While Gooch worked with Christopher Hodges (who acted as CAAMA’s primary agent), others who actively promoted Utopia artists were Allan Glaetser, who ran the store in Utopia for a time before working for the Central Land Council, and the Holt family. Once CAAMA’s Summer Project had been completed, the Holts began supplying Emily and other Utopia women with art materials in earnest. At the same time they also championed works by several important eastern Anmatjerre men, including Lindsay Bird Mpetyane, Cowboy Louie Pwerle and Dave Ross Pwerle.

  Don Holt had access to the upper echelons of Sydney society through his mother Jessie’s connection to the landed gentry. Jessie was related to the prominent Paddington gallerist Chaney Coventry. After appraising Emily’s paintings Coventry advised the Holts to purchase everything that she produced in order to avoid other dealers ‘spoiling’ the market.

  Emily was 79 when she began painting in 1989, and she created the vast majority of her works between 1990 and her death in 1996. As it turned out, she was to prove far too prolific and elusive for any one dealer, and any attempt to monopolise her output proved futile. Nevertheless, the Holts purchased around 1,500 of her paintings over the following seven years and amassed a formidable personal collection. They cultivated relationships with selected galleries in Sydney and Melbourne, later expanding to include Chapman Gallery in Canberra. Due to their strategic placement of Emily’s works outside Alice Springs, her paintings did not appear in any quantity in the town until the early 1990s. This kept Emily out of tourist galleries and shops at a vital early stage of her career, thereby establishing an aura of collectability and exclusivity around her name.

  Competition for ‘Emilys’ became so fierce that many dealers fell out over her and remain rivals to this day. Gooch continued to supply Hodges. Paul Walsh sourced paintings for Melbourne dealer Hank Ebes and his partner, at that time, Michael Hollow. Later, after moving to Alice Springs and opening his own gallery in Todd Mall, Hollow commissioned works directly too. Tim Jennings, who developed a genuine affection for the Utopia artists, moved from his Mbantua Store into a larger space on the corner of Todd Mall and Gregory Terrace. By supporting Emily and her relatives during these early years, Jennings developed his business into the biggest wholesaler of Aboriginal art in the world. Fred Torres, the son of Emily’s niece Barbara Weir, took ‘auntie’ Emily and other family members to Adelaide in 1990, and began to develop a network of outlets supplied by his own Dacou Gallery. Her reputation soared as dealer after dealer beat their way to her camp, and such was Emily’s energy and output that no-one will ever know just how many other people she painted for.

  Don and Janet Holt at ‘Emily’ opening, Japan, 2008.

  During her whirlwind career, Emily’s success also gave rise to a number of seismic shifts in the Australian art world. Among them were: the ascendance of women’s art in the Eastern and Central deserts; the opportunity for galleries to source high-quality art from outside the art centre system; and the emergence of entrepreneurial and prolific artists capable of gaining unprecedented earnings.

  Emily could paint a number of paintings in a single day if everything was laid out, ready and waiting for her arrival. There was an unending stream of buyers with blank canvases and open cheque books, keen to get a piece of her action.

  At one point she was making enough from sales to provide her entire extended family with cars and sundry other luxuries. Though she paid no taxes, and was principally remunerated in cash, for several years no other woman in Australia earned more than she did. And the tax department has been chasing the dollars ever since.

  BALGO HILLS

  Balgo Hills is one of the most isolated communities in Australia. Referred to by locals as Wirrimanu, literally meaning ‘dirty wind’, it lies on the cusp of three deserts, the Tanami, the Great Sandy and the Gibson. Across these arid regions permanent water sources are spoken of with whispered reverence as ‘living water’.

  The dozen or so clans which gathered here from the 1940s onward came from vastly different landscapes: rich flood plains fed by enormous river channels in the north, flat rolling expanses of spinifex, harsh deserts, and dramatic rockstrewn gibber plains in the south. Since so many of the first generation who began painting here from the mid 1980s had left their native ‘country’ as mature adults, the art in Balgo Hills invokes specific sites in lost landscapes to which they can rarely, if ever, return. Balgo Hills became a nexus of different traditions which were primarily united by a deep sense of loss and separation from home. As the homeland movement gathered momentum during the early 1980s, Pintupi, Warlpiri and Kukatja men travelled back and forth between Balgo Hills, Yuendumu, Kiwirrkurra and Kintore, visiting relatives and exchanging news about the painting movement. By 1982, the Catholic Church had started a painting class at the Adult Education Centre run by Sister Alice Dempsey. Many years later she recalled the way in which ‘they asked for the door to be opened’ and thanked God that she didn’t ‘close that door on their first interest in painting.’29

  Just as it had in Papunya, painting struck a chord amongst the senior ceremonial custodians of the most secret and sacred Dreamings. It also attracted a divergent group of young and old, men and women.

  ‘It was wonderful to see them standing in groups painting’ said Sister Alice. ‘No one dictated. They all knew innately what to do.’

  Between 1982 and 1987, important ‘culture men’ and ‘culture women’ experimented with cheap student’s acrylic paint on small canvas boards. I bought the first of these in 1986, after receiving a packet of 96 photographs from Ken Neilsen who ran Goolarabooloo Arts in Broome. They were broken up with elastic bands into twelve sets, each containing eight images from a batch of paintings he had received from Sister Alice. In each group there were two or three gems by older artists, a similar number of good works, and several that were unsellable. Ken Neilsen had also sent these images to several other galleries including the Hogarth and Gabrielle Pizzi. Nevertheless I successfully purchased four sets, and to my absolute delight the paintings arrived soon after.

  Some months later, I was invited by Neilsen to deliver a paper on marketing art at the one and only Kimberley Art and Craft Conference, held at Broome’s old ‘Conti’ Hotel. I was particularly struck by another paper delivered by Joel Smoker, titled ‘The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg’. He warned artists and arts administrator
s drawn from across the Kimberley, and as far afield as Perth and Canberra, of the dangers inherent in treating the emerging arts industry as if it were a cargo cult, and some sort of universal cure-all for unemployment in Indigenous communities. How I wish that they had taken notice and passed his warning on to their colleagues. Also at the conference was the young and enthusiastic Andrew Hughes who had just been appointed the first art coordinator of the newly funded Warlayirti Artists Aboriginal Corporation at Balgo Hills.

  In those days discovering a whole new community of artists was a novelty. If you brought a bunch of painters to town you could still get a page 3 news story simply by taking them down to wet their toes on Bondi Beach. I first exhibited paintings from Warlayirti artists at Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery in April 1987 and wasn’t surprised when they sold out on opening night. They were so highly colour-charged, and different to anything Sydney audiences had seen before. They were also affordable. Even major paintings could be purchased for less than $3,000. By the end of 1987, highly successful exhibitions like my own had been held at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi and at Birukmarri Gallery in Fremantle.

  The Warlayirti art centre operated out of a ‘donger’30 between the two main camps in the community. This large metal container served as both the art centre and as accommodation for the art coordinator. Sometime between 1989 and 1992 when Michael Rae acted as art coordinator, the centre moved into a permanent building that was at the end of an accommodation block used by schoolteachers. By now it also serviced artists residing in townships established on former cattle stations at Mulan and Billiluna and the homeland centre of Yagga Yagga, 120 kilometres through sandhill country to the south.

  Alongside their older relatives, a number of young men and women, most famously Matthew Gill, depicted Christian narratives with figurative elements in a faux desert dotted style. Though popular at the time, this conflation of styles would be completely unacceptable in today’s Aboriginal art market. Some of these works continue to hang in the church and presbytery today, demonstrating just how far painting in Balgo Hills has progressed since it began in the mid 1980s.

  Susie Bootja Bootja painting ‘living water’ at Balgo Hills, 1995.

  During the early days of the art cooperative, cheap cotton duck was stretched and primed in a mid-grey by mixing black and white gesso.31 Artists worked on this with unmixed primary acrylic as they sought to represent the intense colours in their natural environment, which they associated with health and vitality. What seemed at the time to be a full colour revolution at Balgo was in large part due to Michael Rae’s willingness to supply a broader colour range. Women painters like Muntja, Susie Bootja Bootja and Tjemma Freda Napanangka seized the opportunity to evoke the luscious colours of the plants and flowers of their desert environment.

  The taste for luminosity spread quickly as the male and female painters worked alongside each other. From the outset, old Mick Gill Tjakamarra, an important rainmaker, was seduced by blue, a non-traditional colour, which he used to depict water, alongside brilliant reds and yellows. Early paintings by Mick Gill’s diminutive, yet ‘larger than life’, wife Susie Bootja Bootja epitomised the Balgo women’s panache for experimentation. Together they shared an artistic cross-fertilisation particularly in the way they would blend traditional ochres with the new paints available during the late 1980s. Time has seen the cheap acrylics used by these and other early Balgo painters fade against their grey backgrounds32 and rob most of the canvases of their original vibrancy, leaving them more rustic in appearance.

  Of all the female first generation Balgo artists, Susie Bootja Bootja displayed the freest use of colour and expression. Her early figurative works featuring waterholes with snake creators spouting ‘living water’ combined both traditional and Western representations of country.

  Milliga Napaltjarri with one of her puppy dogs, Balgo Hills, 1995.

  On the first of my many visits to Balgo Hills, Susie whispered into my ear, ‘Libbing water, this one … that shin-ake he been making libbing water.’ Then, emphasising the inherent magic in this, she made a startling, gushing ‘whoosh’, as if the snake was spouting water right there, in front of my eyes.

  Milliga Napaltjarri was almost 70 when I first met her, a frail-looking waif of a woman. Matchstick thin, she had grown to adulthood prior to contact with Europeans. Her home was a shelter comprising cyclone wire suspended above four star-pickets on which her bedding and all of her possessions, meagre though they were, lay piled during the day. It provided her with enough shade to sit comfortably and watch passers-by. Here she painted works that were acclaimed for their reach toward pure abstraction. Her wondrous canvases were characterised by spontaneous bursts of colour. Milliga applied impasto-like clusters of coloured dots over an underlay, representing the body designs for women’s rituals, in a similar way to Emily Kngwarreye, 1,000 kilometres to the east; however, while Emily always used a brush, Milliga put her fingers into the paint, and then dabbed them on the canvas, just like people telling stories on the ground.33 She painted for a very a short period, and left a precious and rare legacy. Sadly Milliga never had the opportunity to paint on a grand scale, nor was she given access to the finest pigments as Emily was. Her best paintings are relatively small, and the vitality of their pigmentation has degraded over time. They are consistently undervalued by an art market that lacks historical perspective, and is constantly allured by the new.

  In those days we always swagged out on the edge of the cliffs outside the township overlooking the pound where its gibber plains stretched as far as the horizon. Amongst the rocky outcrops, two perfect nipple-topped breasts, the Wati Kutjara, Two Man Dreaming site, sit evocatively in the distance. Every trip was different. We’d visit the old Balgo mission and scavenge for handmade nails and old implements like prospectors looking for gold. We’d drive south to the tiny community of Yagga Yagga or west with the art coordinator, Robin Beesey, to Mulun.

  Locals referred to Robin Beesey as Wati Ngintaka, the Goanna Man, because he was famous for shooting a running lizard at a range of 300 metres – an act that impressed the hell out of everyone. One night, after setting up camp in a dry riverbed, we shot a bush turkey at twilight, and plucked and cooked it in the dark. These birds are tough to pluck and just as tough to eat. When we woke up the following morning we were covered head to foot in feather down.

  Yagga Yagga was literally the back of beyond. It was so remote that it was rumoured that there were people ‘out there’ who still had no contact with white men. Bai Bai Napangarti and her husband, the revered elder Sunfly Tjampitjin, lived there. I remember one time we turned up and had to stand by sheepishly as Bai Bai unleashed a tirade at Beesey: a 15-minute earful for having the temerity to bring Gadiya outsiders into her camp. She had important issues to discuss, and sensitive information to impart about the content of her husband’s paintings. I felt terrible, but an hour after her harangue she took my hand, perhaps sensing that I would buy his painting and help provide tucker for their campfire that night. She was right: I did.

  Off to one side, carving a killing boomerang, sat Tjumpo Tjapanangka. Though still middle-aged, he was renowned in the area as the last of the real bushmen, and the greatest artefact maker. Tjumpo moved into Balgo Hills after Yagga Yagga was abandoned around 1996. In time, he became a truly innovative painter. His earliest paintings were rendered in the autumnal colours characteristic of Kukatja works of the late 1980s. He then developed a fluidity of line that initially traced, quite literally, the creekbeds that link the claypans and prominent features of his inaccessible custodial country; however, these works were just a precursor to the mesmerising paintings he would produce during the latter part of his life.

  Sunfly Tjampitjin, Yagga Yagga, 1994.

  On each of these trips we’d assist Beesey as he recorded art centre code numbers and artists’ names on the back of stretched, pre-primed canvases before distributing them. This practice of handing out and collecting canvases on a weekly rotation, with names alrea
dy recorded onto the back, continued until 1994. It inadvertently led to a great deal of misattribution, which has never been officially acknowledged. It was common for husbands and wives to complete canvases together. The collaboration between them ensured that each individual painting contained a broader range of information and often depicted larger tracts of land than individual specific sites.

  This was the case with Eubena Nampitjin, who developed her aesthetic alongside her second husband, Wimmitji Tjapangarti. They began collaborating in 1988, and their art flourished under Michael Rae’s guidance. Early works portrayed Dreaming sites, country and ancestral travels in the most intimate cartographic detail. They are to this day the very finest paintings that have ever emanated from the community. Initially Wimmitji and Eubena worked in earthy brown and red toning with areas of white dotting and lines. By 1989 they had begun to experiment with soft floral patterns, transforming the complex dotting and composition into delicately beautiful and opulent works.34 The attribution of these ‘collaborative’ paintings was always a matter of chance. Whether a painting was credited to Johnny Mosquito or his Wangkatjungka wife Muntja Nungurrayi, Tommy or Millie Skeen, Wimmitji or Eubena, depended on whose name the art coordinator had written on the back of the canvas at the time he distributed it. They were all inseparable, and painted together from the earliest days of the art centre. Even though Muntja was an extremely accomplished painter, later to become quite prominent in her own right, her early paintings were almost always attributed to Johnny. Similarly, Helicopter Tjungurrayi’s assistance in Lucy Yukenbarri’s early paintings has never been acknowledged.

  Male and female artists were not encouraged to paint their own individual works until James Cowan arrived as art coordinator in 1995. As the art centre flourished and demand for their paintings grew, Wimmitji began painting less and Eubena painted alone. Helicopter had been extremely reluctant from the outset to put his name to works, but finally relented and stopped assisting Lucy. Their paintings, and those that Johnny and Muntja created together prior to this interventions were infinitely more complex and accomplished than any that came after. In all the years that have followed, none have ever been reattributed as the work of both husband and wife, despite intense controversy over the issue of ‘assistance’.