The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  Lofty’s artistic style was particularly refined, though firmly rooted within Western Arnhem Land conventions. Figurative elements stood on an unadorned red, brown or black ochre background. His predominantly white figures were infilled with a combination of X-ray details of their internal organs, and his own uniquely identifiable crosshatched rarrk patterns.

  Lofty became strongly associated with Mick Kubarkku, another Stone Country artist, who had been drafted into the army when a young man. Though the design elements in their works differ greatly, they were exhibited together in the important 1995 landmark exhibition Rainbow, Sugarbag and Moon and accompanying catalogue mounted by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

  Mick Kubarkku had little contact with Europeans before World War II, and never learned English. His paintings were less refined than Lofty’s and many of his contemporaries. They were, in fact, similar in style to the rock paintings at Kubumi where he lived as an old man during the most productive period of his life. Kubarkku, whose name was more familiarly written as ‘Gubargu’ until the late 1990s, was renowned for paintings and sculpture characterised by tilted bands of ochre crosshatch, and patches of black dots on a white ground. These were often applied to the heads, hands, feet and internal organs of his figures, which were highly stylised but grew increasingly rough as old age encroached.

  George Milpurrurru, Gurrumatji – Magpie Geese, c. 1990. Earth pigment on stringybark, 63 x 156 cm.

  Those who have seen the award-winning film Ten Canoes will recognise the recurring motifs in the emblematic paintings of another prominent bark painter of the 1980s. George Milpurrurru’s art pivots around the hunt for the eggs of Gumang, the magpie goose. Milpurrurru first gained national recognition after being shown in the Biennale of Sydney in 1979, along with David Malangi. Both began painting at Milingimbi in the 1970s. They and their contemporaries54 placed Central Arnhem Land firmly on the art map during the 1980s. Their zest for experimentation led them to combine an array of artistic traditions beyond those that were culturally proscribed. This gained them public recognition and enabled Milpurrurru, in particular, to take advantage of the blossoming gallery scene. His first solo exhibition was held at The Company’s gallery in Sydney in 1985, the year before he exhibited in the Biennale of Sydney for the second time.

  In the late 1980s, he was a major contributor to the 200-pole Aboriginal Memorial masterpiece, and during the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People in 1993 he became the first Aboriginal artist to be honoured with a solo retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia.

  Unfortunately, the art market’s obsession with the ‘new’ saw interest in George Milpurrurru’s work decline rapidly following his death in 1998. To this day the highest price ever paid on the secondary market for one of his strongly stylised and graphically refined paintings is just $9,775, and this was set in 2000. Works by his contemporaries have fared no better as serious collectors have either turned their attention back to works created prior to the 1980s, or forward to the newest stars. Jack Wunuwun and Jimmy Wululu were both highly successful Central Arnhem Land artists of the 1980s. Though their works reside in the most important state and national collections, such has been the decline in interest for bark paintings of the period, that Wunuwun has a record price of just $11,400 at auction, and Wululu has fared even worse at $5,100.

  Johnny Bulun Bulun, Goonoomoo, 1983. Lithograph, 56 x 38 cm.

  Paddy Fordham Wainburranga, In the Beginning of Time, c. 1994. Earth pigment on Arches cotton rag paper, 145 x 96 cm. In the beginning all living things were divided into two moieties.

  Wunuwun, in particular, was a highly distinctive artist who lived at Garmedi outstation on the Blyth River with Maningrida’s pre-eminent artist of the period, his brother-in-law Johnny Bulun Bulun. During the late 1980s, these two artists became primary influences in the life and career of the southern Yorta Yorta artist Lin Onus, whom they adopted as ‘son’. Bulun Bulun was not a prolific painter, but he travelled to the east coast on several memorable occasions. He was one of the very first important Arnhem Land painters that I ever met.

  Joe Croft had arranged for Bulun Bulun and England Bangala to work with master printmaker Theo Tremblay at the Canberra School of Art. Johnny’s image, Goonoomoo, painted on a lithographic stone, was printed as a limited edition. It was a ‘first’ on two counts. In arranging and paying for the edition, Joe became the first Aboriginal print publisher, and the print itself was the first lithograph ever produced by an Arnhem Land artist.

  Always ready to take on an interesting challenge, Johnny completed a number of important commissions in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and his work was presented in a solo exhibition at the Hogarth Galleries in Sydney in 1981. As a clan leader he was second only to George Milpurrurru amongst the Ganalbingu elders, who included Djardi Ashley and Dorothy Djukulul. During the following decade all of these artists would become embroiled in the seminal judicial battle over Indigenous copyright. Bulun Bulun’s emblematic painting, Magpie Geese and Water Lilies at the Waterhole, was reproduced overseas without the artist’s permission. It was printed onto 7,000 metres of fabric and imported into Australia. Following an epic battle to prove his individual copyright, Johnny won the case, and recovered the fabric, which sold through the art centre thereafter.

  One of the most highly inventive bark artists to emerge during the 1980s was Paddy Fordham Wainburranga, who I introduced to readers right at the beginning of this book in the story of how he gave me my totem during one of his rare visits to Sydney. An elder of the Rembarrnga clan, Paddy produced 23 of the 200 painted hollow log coffins in the 1988 Aboriginal Memorial. He is best known, however, for his magnificent narrative paintings on bark and paper and his sculptural interpretations of tall wispy Balangjalngalan spirits. Like malevolent bogeymen, these spirits, he explained to me, stole wayward children away from their camp, and taught them their own language, thereby preventing them from ever communicating with their parents again. When he found himself with a few days to spare while staying at our place in Bondi, we decided he should enter a digital artwork in an exhibition organised by Telecom for the Paddington Festival. Paddy took a roll of fax paper from my office and drew three 4-metre long Namorodo spirits before feeding them back into the machine. He then painted over the image to complete what became one of the winning entries. Telecom bought the three works on paper immediately, and Paddy left for New Zealand three days later, cashed up and raring to go.

  Paddy was always approachable and amusing. A renowned song and story man, he became the Aboriginal face of the Katherine tourist industry, painting small barks and making highly prized didgeridoos for Mimi Arts and Crafts. During the mid 1980s, Paddy befriended Indigenous entrepeneur Glen Bird, and gave him the name Balang. Of Waka Waka descent from the east coast, Bird assiduously promoted Fordham’s work and encouraged him to paint a series of narrative barks and paintings in ochre on full sheets of Arches cotton rag paper. The most important of these were purchased by the National Gallery of Australia, the National Maritime Museum and the Australian War Memorial after a very successful exhibition in 1990 at Coo-ee Gallery in Sydney.

  Paddy interpreted historical events from a uniquely Rembarrnga perspective. His alternative view of the sequence of events following the ‘discovery’ of Australia by Captain Cook was featured in the film Too Many Captain Cooks (1988),55 and in large thematic paintings such as The Coming of the Welfare System, World War II Supply Ships, How World War II Began and Macassan Traders. These images on large bark slabs and Arches paper were a contemporary equivalent of the way in which Aboriginal artists recorded on cave walls the first ships, white men and foreign animals that appeared in the region. They offered an alternative, Aboriginal view and comprehension of contemporary Australian and world events that was received with enthusiasm, amusement and even wonder at the time.

  While Paddy was best known for these history paintings, his most enduring contribution to Australian art,
and the preservation of Aboriginal culture, was his large narrative depictions of traditional Rembarrnga myths and legends. These presented an insight into how Aboriginal people believe life began, how they came to be divided into moieties and skin groups, what ‘pay back’ means in an Aboriginal context, and how the clan system relates humans with the spirits, with nature and with each other.

  One of Aboriginal Australia’s most unique and accessible characters, Paddy left an artistic legacy comprised of many truly great paintings and sculptures. Of these, a collection of six large bark paintings depicting Payback System, Balangjalngalan, Kinship, Chicken Hawk and the Python, Marriage and Totems which were commissioned in 1987 by Glen Bird, were held by a private owner for 20 years. When offered for sale at Lawson~Menzies in November 2007 they sold for $55,200, setting the artist’s current market record. Not much to pay for six large magnificent barks by such a legendary figure.

  BAD BALANDA BLOOD

  There are certain chapters in the history of the Indigenous art industry that read like an extended soap opera. It has often been too easy to cast certain key personalities as the villains in some sort of black and white melodrama. Every art market is an elitist construct in which provenance is of primary importance. In a luxury market, the most powerful dictate the terms of engagement by insinuating that other sources are déclassé or unsafe. It is sufficient to spread rumour and innuendo about one’s competitors in order to taint their reputations and damage their businesses.

  Take, for example, the story of Neil McLeod, one of the most important conduits between the market and artists of the Kimberley and Western Arnhem Land since the 1970s. McLeod has worked with major institutions and famous anthropologists, and published more than 50 natural history and wildlife books. He has walked a fine line between white society and Aboriginal Australia for more than 30 years while travelling extensively all over Australia and the Pacific. He is one of the few white Australians who have been willing to take on certain responsibilities associated with being initiated into the Law.

  Over the years, however, McLeod’s reputation has been repeatedly attacked.

  He has made fast friends with many artists in the bush, but he’s also alienated a small number of city ‘experts’ who continue to this day to infer that he has been unreliable, if not outright dishonest. He has often been portrayed as a shambolic amateur, when he is in fact a multi-award winning professional photographer. 56 (I urge industry insiders to read this extensive endnote and also endnote 62.) He has even been accused of faking paintings, though this has never been substantiated.

  For many years McLeod turned the other cheek, but it got to the point where people who knew better, including myself, advised him to address the accusations. While I made it my business to interview as many people who have known and worked with him as I possibly could, he commissioned the academic Dindy Vaughan57 to thoroughly investigate the extensive field notes and diaries he’d amassed during his 33 years in the field. A highly regarded oral historian, Vaughan began the task in 2006. She spent two years interviewing him, going through all of his extensive photographs, slides and transparencies, and crossreferencing all of his diaries and field notes with their record of interview. A major book, Real People Real Time: Neil McLeod’s Life with Aboriginal People, which documents his entire collecting history, is due for release during 2014.

  It is impossible to examine McLeod’s story, however, without considering his relationship with that other larger-than-life character, Dorothy Bennett. Unfortunately Bennett died without ever publishing her own detailed collecting history. She did, however, talk extensively about her life in 1996 in an interview with Kay Goon,58 for an article in the magazine Northern Perspective.59

  Bennett and McLeod made their first field trip together in 1983, although they had met earlier. Having worked in Arnhem Land for more than 25 years, Bennett, the mentor, introduced McLeod to Bobby Barrdjaray Nganjmirra and his family as well as many other Arnhem Land artists. They worked together without incident until 1986, when Bennett made a fateful decision that was to cost her dearly. Despite opposition from The Company headquarters in Sydney, she took an exhibition to Tokyo, Kyoto and Kobe in Japan. There had been earlier conflicts, but this was her final undoing. When she and her assistant, Shirley Collins, returned to The Company gallery they ran in Darwin, they found that it had been closed down. Although Bennett had built a solid reputation throughout Australia and overseas, when The Company broke with her in 1986, she lost her ‘official’ status, and was forced to compete as an independent dealer.

  Without the government patronage she’d enjoyed for decades, Bennett was forced to work as an independent supplier, valuer and consultant for Collins, who had opened her own Raintree Gallery in Knuckey Street, Darwin. She also continued to work with Neil McLeod who opened his own Collections of the Dreaming Gallery on 30 May 1987 in Tecoma, Victoria. Bennett officiated at the opening, which was filmed by Channel 9. Music and dance were provided by Ralph Nicholls’ Bungul Dancers and both Bobby Nganjmirra and Djawida Nadjongorle attended.

  In May the following year, McLeod installed a spectacular ground floor display at the entrance to the International Art Fair in Darling Harbour. He and Bennett attended the exhibition each day and were both interviewed in the The Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph, on radio and TV. Dorothy even appeared on the Ray Martin Show, then Australia’s most popular live daytime TV program.

  George Chaloupka and Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek at rock art site in the Western Arnhem Land Stone Country.

  As time progressed, however, their relationship slowly deteriorated. Bennett was fiercely protective of her sources and clients, and notoriously wary of her competitors. McLeod admired Bennett’s ability to cope with the rough terrain and negotiate her way with administrators and artists as a single woman, but he found her manner patronising. Though he continued to hold her in high regard, and never doubted her love for the people and theirs for her, she was not an easy person to deal with.

  Competition for the best paintings from Kunwinjku artists in Oenpelli was fierce.60 McLeod began dealing directly with many of them, paying more, and recording cultural information in greater detail. His perspective differed to Bennett’s, and he found the men were far less reticent to reveal cultural information when speaking with another man. Bennett interpreted this as a direct affront to relationships she’d built over nearly 40 years in the field. Far from feeling excluded by the men, she insisted they ‘had always been glad to sit down at night and give me the full meanings of the paintings I had collected from them’.61

  Despite mounting tension, Bennett and McLeod continued working together. Following the success of the 1988 International Art Fair, they remained in close contact as McLeod consistently sent Bennett money for artwork, and photodocumented her personal collection at his own expense.62

  By 1989, however, the Australian economy was in free-fall after the boom years of the 1980s, and McLeod found it difficult to keep pace with Bennett’s constant need for money. She had developed a serious gambling problem.63

  The relationship was further affected by her alliance with David Cossey, the owner of Adelaide’s landmark Gallerie Australis. Cossey had proposed that Bennett commission major works in ochre on Arches paper for American collector John Kluge. This project eventually resulted in a book, Kunwinjku Art from Injalak. Bennett worked with Cossey and the newly established but unfunded Injaluk art centre, and they became increasingly adversarial toward anyone else competing for the artist’s loyalty, especially McLeod, and the former policeman turned art dealer, Reg Mason.

  At the same time, the Aboriginal art market was responding to a range of creative opportunities from fine art to fashion. Amongst the emerging Australian fashion icons were Ken Done and Jimmy Pike, Jenny Kee’s Flamingo Park, Linda Jackson’s Bush Couture, and Tiwi Design art centre, while Desert Designs was generating retail sales in major cities around the world. Australian fashion promotions took place at the iconic American depa
rtment store Neiman Marcus, at Daimaru and Isetan in Tokyo, and at Olivia Newton-John’s Los Angeles design outlet Koala Blue.

  Bobby Barrdjaray Nganjmirra painting high in his country.

  Bobby Barrdjaray Nganjmirra invited Neil McLeod to go through the Law. It was, recalls McLeod, ‘something the old man wanted done, not something I requested’.64 McLeod’s close friend and neighbour, Lin Onus, also went through the Law at this time, and the experience was to prove significant for both men. Bobby Barrdjaray Nganjmirra painting on slate while wearing his Collections of the Dreaming leather jacket at the Neil McLeod Studio in 1989.

  This was the context in which Neil McLeod began to develop a range of high quality hand-painted leather garments in collaboration with a number of Arnhem Land and urban Indigenous artists. It was a major venture requiring a vast sum of money for the time. The launch was attended by a great deal of publicity on radio, television and in the daily news, including a fashion parade on the Ray Martin Show. Annie Lennox, Mick Jagger, Chuck Berry and the Everly Brothers all purchased leather items from the range. The timing was not good however, and McLeod lost heavily.

  Eighteen months later, the great Kunwinjku elder McLeod’s initiation went through three separate stages. The ceremony was conducted by Djawida Nadjongorle, a Dhuwa moiety elder. Bruce Nabeggeyo cut McLeod’s upper arm, then chest, and finally his stomach. Bobby could not conduct this ceremony himself, as he and McLeod were both of the same Yirritja moiety.