The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  Dorothy Bennett’s kinship had been determined much earlier during the 1950s, when she had been designated a suitable ‘wife’ for the great North East Arnhem Land elder Mawalan Marika. This kinship affiliation made her ‘daughter’ to Bobby Barrdjaray Nganjmirra, who in time became her most important Kunwinjku informant.

  Little wonder then, that Bobby’s insistence that McLeod go through initiation became a flashpoint in McLeod’s relationship with Bennett. Her reputation with museum curators and major collectors in Australia, Japan and the United States had been enhanced by her intimacy with these artists and her access to the cultural information they provided. Now McLeod had his own supporters, not the least of whom was George Chaloupka OAM, Emeritus Curator of Aboriginal Rock Art at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, with whom McLeod stayed whenever in Darwin, and Dr Robert (Bob) Edwards, by now the Director of Art Exhibitions Australia.

  Bobby Nganjmirra was of primary importance as a source of cultural information on Western Arnhem Land art and culture. He was the traditional custodian of Malwan and his father and uncle had been the traditional owners of Nimbuwah, both extremely sacred places. Bobby often painted imagery of both sites. Among his main themes were Yawk Yawk sisters, Luma Luma and Yingarna, which emanate from Malwan and Kudjekbinj. In accordance with traditional law, he would not pass on any details regarding the deeper levels of meaning attached to these sacred Kunwinjku sites and designs until one of his three sons or other men, selected as being worthy, had gone through several ceremonies. He feared that his culture was in its death throes, without its deepest cultural secrets being passed on to the next generation.

  Women such as Dorothy Bennett and Felicity Wright, the first art centre manager at Oenpelli, were at a disadvantage to their male counterparts. They could be told ‘open’ stories about ceremonies, but never the ‘closed’ information available to respected men. Even McLeod‘s initiation only entitled him to a small part of the vast corpus of Kunwinjku knowledge. Nevertheless, he subsequently went to many closed ceremonies, and learned and recorded the stories. His participation in these rituals placed him under certain obligations to his fellow clansmen, and as a result he was required to visit the region regularly in order to take his part in the ceremonies. He was also expected to provide reciprocal arrangements such as paying fares for Bobby and his relatives to visit him in Melbourne where they worked, at times alongside Lin Onus and others, in a studio environment he created for the purpose.

  Three months after the initiation, and a full 18 months after the launch of his fashion label Collections of the Dreaming, McLeod was attacked in the media by Judith Ryan, the curator of Aboriginal art at the National Gallery of Victoria. She was not in favour of encouraging artists to produce works on products such as slate and leather.65 Lin Onus and all of the other artists involved signed a letter to the National Gallery of Victoria Director, James Mollison, protesting vigorously that they had the right to work in whatever medium they chose.

  The whole sorry episode was to have devastating consequences for McLeod just two years later.

  URBAN ART

  The story goes that an Aboriginal inmate stole a spoon, sharpened it to a blade, and used it to cut old linoleum from the floor of his prison cell. In sheer desperation, he scratched marks on it, channelling a powerful magic that dissolved the jail walls, returning him to the ashes of the campfire where he had played with twigs and charcoal as a child.

  For Kevin Gilbert, serving a life sentence in the 1960s, this most primitive act of making art connected him to the tribal mind of his father and grandfathers, to the cave walls of his ancestors, and to the hessian bags and old pieces of tin of the fringe dweller’s humpy. His prison cell became the poet’s crucible, and in time he produced prints, paintings and many plays starting with his most famous, The Cherry Pickers, which was smuggled out of jail on toilet paper.

  In stories like this we find the first sparks of the urban Aboriginal art movement. In jails, art schools and community centres, Aboriginal people discovered that art could be the key to their liberation. Lin Onus began as a panel beater and a spray painter. Tracey Moffatt started as a child making home movies in the backyard. Gordon Syron taught himself to paint while serving a ten-year sentence at Bathurst Gaol. Others picked up chisels and ink, dedicating their earliest works to relatives who had died in custody, or were shot down defending their land.

  Despite the air of promise, many of the emerging urban Indigenous artists felt misunderstood and marginalised. Many were of mixed parentage, often born and raised in white society, and conflicted about race and gender. They felt they were not accepted as ‘real’ Aboriginals, and their art was not deemed ‘real’ Aboriginal art. Non-Indigenous artists who appropriated traditional Aboriginal imagery were seemingly spared the criticism levelled at their own efforts. This frustration produced many of the most important political prints and posters of the 1970s, but it was not until they emerged from the teaching institutions to forge a collective identity that these young urban artists were recognised as a movement. In Sydney, they were showcased in several important exhibitions which defined their artistic community. These included the 1981 exhibition Artists for Aboriginal Land Rights, and Koori Art 84, at Artspace Sydney, which were important precursors to a wave of exhibitions that hit the mainstream.

  It was the birth of a political art movement. A moment in history before all the squabbles divided us, when the artists, private dealers and those who worked in the institutions felt united. A whole generation was excited by the possibilities, and so was I. Many of us felt emboldened by the success of the civil rights movement in America. Young black and white artists and activists mingled freely at exhibitions such as Urban Kooris, curated by Christine Watson and Suhanya Raffel, for the Willoughby Workshop Arts Centre in 1986. This exhibition defined the core group that would become the Boomalli Artists Cooperative. The following year Watson also co-curated Aboriginal Australian Views in Print and Poster with painter Jeffrey Samuels for the Print Council of Australia.

  One of the most important curators of the period was Anthony Bourke, who was nicknamed ‘Ace’ for his form on the tennis court. Tall, aquiline, cultivated and fastidious, Ace would have made a name as an international curator if he’d moved in a more cosmopolitan milieu than Sydney of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. Even so, he was behind some extraordinary exhibitions from Cape Town to New Delhi, including Art and Aboriginality in the United Kingdom. He became a friend and mentor to the significant photo media artists Michael Riley and Tracey Moffatt. Through these friendships Ace curated the first Exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers at the Aboriginal Artists Gallery in Sydney during the 1986 NAIDOC week. Amongst the six Indigenous photographers featured was Mervyn Bishop, a former Sydney Morning Herald photographer, and winner of the 1971 Nikon-Walkley Australian Press Photographer of the Year.

  Ace always had a keen sense of history and his place in it, possibly as a result of being directly descended from two of Australia’s early governors, King and Bourke. I remember clambering onto the awning of his Oxford Street loft apartment soon after we’d first met to get a better view of an early Mardi Gras parade. The enormous loft was filled with tribal art and I noticed that the stove had never been used as anything but a filing cabinet. He dined out religiously.

  For more than 20 years Ace played a formative role in the promotion and presentation of Aboriginal art. Yet today he is far more famous for a youthful exploit recorded for posterity in the YouTube smash hit Christian the Lion, which at last count had attracted 17 million hits. Living in London during the swinging ’60s amongst a host of hopeful young Aussies, Ace and his flatmate John Rendall liberated a young lion cub from a small cage in Harrods and took it home to their furniture shop, the Sophistocat, on Kings Road, Chelsea. The cub grew rapidly as it gambolled in a nearby rectory garden, courtesy of the local priest. A chance meeting with the two stars of the film Born Free, Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, led to a plan to repa
triate the lion to George Adamson’s sanctuary in Kenya. A year later, dressed in turtlenecks and flared jeans, they made the trip to Africa where they learned that Christian had found a mate. Unable to find the lion, they were about to leave when Christian strolled into camp, and in one of the most moving scenes ever hoisted onto YouTube, an emotional reunion ensued with the lion smothering Ace in hugs, and introducing the two men to his svelte young wife. The reunion spawned several books, generating funds for the Wildlife Preservation Trust and dozens of conservation projects.

  After working for The Company in the Rocks, Ace took over the directorship of Clive Evatt’s Hogarth Galleries, just around the corner from my own Coo-ee Gallery in Paddington. During the 1980s the area was a magnet for young creative people. While Ace cultivated friendships with a range of artists whose works he championed, Joe Croft’s presence at Coo-ee attracted a whole generation of creative Aboriginal people: the singer Bob Randall, actors Lillian Crombie, Justine Saunders and Bob Maza, and the educator, ambassador and larrikin Burnum Burnum. Anne and I became especially close to Burnum, who would never fail to take three of four Tiwi Design shirts to look his best before leaving for any overseas trip.

  Burnum was the quintessential showman, with a sense of humour often to be found in Aboriginal reconstructions of Australian history. In 1988, during the bicentennial of the arrival of the First Fleet of British ships in Sydney Harbour, Burnum went to England. Standing naked but for a possum skin cloak on the White Cliffs of Dover, he formally took possession of England on behalf of the Aboriginal Crown of Australia. He promised to teach the English how to have a spiritual relationship with the earth, and show them how to get bush tucker. He promised not to souvenir, pickle and preserve the heads of 2,000 of their people, nor to publicly display the skeletal remains of their Royal Highness, as was done to Tasmania’s Queen Truganini. Neither did he intend to poison their waterholes, lace their bread with strychnine, or introduce them to highly toxic drugs. He acknowledged the need to preserve the Caucasian race for posterity, although he did not rule out conducting experiments by measuring the size of their skulls for levels of intelligence. He promised not to make a quarry out of England and export its valuable minerals back to the old country Australia, but to encourage Earth Repair Action66 to unite people, communities and religions in a common, productive, peaceful purpose. Finally, he gave an absolute undertaking that England’s citizens would not be made reliant on government handouts for the next five generations, but would enjoy the full benefits of Aboriginal equality.

  Gordon Syron, The Narcissistic Red Coat, 2000. Oil on canvas, 71 x 60 cm (including frame).

  After returning to Australia, Burnum, once more garbed in possum skin, became the first ‘Mayor of Paddington’, and rode around in an open-topped pink Cadillac during the local arts festival. Guboo Ted Thomas was not particularly amused. He had witnessed Burnum’s birth under a gum tree, and had been present when he was christened Harry Penrith. There was always a friendly rivalry between the two. Every time Guboo came to town he’d hang out in the back of our shop. He was amused by Burnum’s antics, but a little peeved by his ability to steal the show – like the time Burnum was photographed on the cover of the Australian Weekend Magazine as Neptune, with his beautiful blond wife, Narelle, posing as a mermaid. Inside the magazine, another photograph showed them standing in a gold Mercedes convertible, the wind rushing through their hair.

  Burnum loved to play with the mainstream media. He felt he could empower Aboriginal people by flaunting his Aboriginality and did so whenever he could. There has never been anyone like him since.

  Meanwhile, back in the 1980s, the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative was born at the top of a narrow ricketty staircase on the upper floor of an old Chippendale factory. The gallery was packed out for its first exhibition, Boomalli Au-Go-Go. You couldn’t breath for the number of people and the good will that spilled from the gallery on opening night.

  Not all the Sydney artists were involved in Boomalli. Released from jail in 1972, Gordon Syron still rankled with anger at the failure of the legal system to deliver justice to Indigenous Australians.

  Self-taught while incarcerated in Long Bay jail, he’d painted the trial of a white man by an all-black judge and jury. It hung in the artist’s cell where he was serving a life sentence for a death that was the result of tribal retribution.

  The artist Gordon Syron discussing the painting he created in his jail cell in 1978 with the Honourable Adrian Roden QC.

  First exhibited under the title The Real Australian Story, it was later renamed Judgement by His Peers. In explaining the background to this work, Gordon Syron has said:

  This painting is my most meaningful work. It is the story of my life. This trial happened to me. I challenged the jury system of Australia. I asked that I be judged by my peers and your peers as your equals. I asked to have some Aboriginal people on my jury. One lawyer said that I wasn’t black enough to be black and the other lawyer said tht I wasn’t white enough to be white. They then argued this point in front of me for some time. Both my parents are Aboriginal. It was such an insult to me and my family. I was judged by an all-white jury. (If you are a pink fella then according to British law and now Australian law you are entitled to have a pink person on the jury). I served a life sentence.

  Once on the outside (he was released after serving 10 years), Syron became a co-founder of the Eora College with Bobby Merritt, and the first art teacher there. During a remarkable 40-year career Syron has mentored and inspired generations of Koori artists. He repeatedly returns to the white crossed belts on the chest of the ‘invading’ British redcoat as a symbol of black repression, in much the same way Sid Nolan used Ned Kelly’s helmet to symbolise the downtrodden whiteman at heel to ‘British’ justice.

  If I were to propose the most influential urban Aboriginal artist of this generation, however, I would have no hesitation in choosing Lin Onus, despite the fact that he was never associated with Redfern and the Sydney push. Had he not passed away at just 48 years of age in 1996, he would be in his mid 60s today and continuing to play a leading role in shaping contemporary Australian cultural life. Lin was a visionary, whose Yorta Yorta mentors had been some of Australia’s most outstanding Indigenous political leaders of their generation. From the 1890s onward, Lin’s Yorta Yorta forebears had regrouped at Cummeragunja, near Echuca on the Murray River, after their population fell from more than 5,000 to around 300 lost souls. Lin’s father, Bill, was one of the founders of the Aboriginal Advancement League in Victoria. Another notable Yorta Yorta was Ralph Nicholls67 who played for Fitzroy Football Club in the VFL, and boxed for Jimmy Sharman in his travelling carnival tent. He also ran in professional foot races before becoming a pioneering campaigner for reconciliation and, toward the end of his life, Governor of South Australia.

  To my mind, however, the most inspiring Yorta Yorta was William Cooper. Following Kristallnacht, in Berlin in 1938, Cooper was so outraged by the persecution of the Jewish people in Germany that he led a delegation of activists from the Aboriginal Advancement League to the German Consulate in Melbourne. It was the first such protest in the world against Nazism. This may well have influenced Lin Onus when he advised me in 1991 that I should go to Germany to come to terms with the genocide of my own people.

  Lin was to become one of Australia’s most successful modern artists. His apprenticeship began at the side of his father who was a prominent artefact maker in Melbourne. It continued as he learned spray-painting techniques as a panel beater. By 1974, he was painting watercolours and photorealist landscapes, strongly influenced by Albert Namatjira, who had stayed with Lin’s family in Melbourne. For one of his first major commissions, Lin completed a set of paintings about Mosquito, the first Aboriginal guerrilla fighter. They held pride of place on the walls of the Advancement League in Melbourne, until they mysteriously disappeared several decades later.

  Lin’s development as an artist languished through the 1970s and early 1980s. Thoug
h accomplished, there was nothing particularly Aboriginal or original about his work. By the end of the 1980s, however, he was represented by Gabrielle Pizzi in Melbourne and Painter’s Gallery in Sydney. His art was transformed by a visit to Gamerdi outstation in Arnhem Land in 1986. In a gesture without precedent, the renowned cultural custodians Jack Wunuwun and John Bulun Bulun accepted him as a ‘son’, and permitted him to use their clan designs in his work. From this moment onward he was able to develop the distinctive visual language that characterises his finest works. Described as ‘a kind of postmodern Bowerbird Dreaming’,68 his late career works are a unique synthesis of Western and Aboriginal space and design.

  In his depictions of the Barmah Forest and the flooded eucalypts near his Yorta Yorta homeland, crosshatched fish often hover beneath the water’s surface, or a single jigsaw puzzle piece is missing from a perfectly rendered photorealist landscape. Onus wanted to show that anyone who opens their eyes and their minds could grasp the true meaning of the Dreaming.

  His works could also be wry comments on politics, and the reality of life for Aboriginal people in post-colonial Australia. Writer Christine Nicholls once described his humour as ‘postmodernism without tears’. In many works he challenged the Eurocentric view of history. In its place he provided an alternative, stating, ‘Some people write history; I can’t write so I paint.’69 In Kapt’n Koori (1985) for instance, Onus created an Indigenous superhero for his son, Tiriki. In 1988 he painted discarded beer cans littering the cracked dry surface of an Aboriginal homeland – a comment on the way substance abuse destroys the Aboriginal spiritual connection to the land. He mischievously painted a portrait of the activist and stirrer Gary Foley, sitting on a tree stump watching the right-wing radio talk show host John Laws pick nits out of the hair of the then Victorian Premier, Jeff Kennett. The two had famously labelled Foley a ‘barbarian’ in an on-air interview.