The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  A national authentication scheme could have worked only if, as Jon Altman had pointed out, it was supported and promoted by a ‘broad industry alliance’.60 To be effective it also had to become synonymous with a brand that customers could trust and seek out because it guaranteed that Indigenous people would benefit.61 But being ‘the devil’, the dealers and galleries were excluded from active participation in the scheme. NIAAA’s label had to rely on Aboriginal artists proving their Aboriginality and paying for labels to put on their products and this clearly was never going to work.

  After squandering a reported $5 million on this failed scheme, NIAAA itself disappeared into the ether. Charlie Perkins lost his bid to become ATSIC Chairman and, tragically, this great Aboriginal warrior passed away shortly after. It was to be a decade before another opportunity would arrive to identify legitimate Indigenous cultural product and, when it did, it would be focused on the production of fine art rather than crafts, and on dealer probity rather than the heritage of the artist and the authenticity of the product.

  OWNERSHIP

  The Kimberley was really hot at the end of the 1990s. Hoards of grey nomads and tourist companies catering to both the luxury and backpacker end of the market had ‘discovered’ the stunning landscapes, the pure coastal waters and rich Aboriginal heritage. Kimberley artists were now enjoying the spotlight formerly concentrated on the desert painters. There was in fact so much demand from urban galleries for Kimberley paintings that the rivalries amongst dealers began to play out in that region with a similar intensity to the scandals of Alice Springs. As elsewhere, the Aboriginal artists themselves were quite mystified by the squabbling amongst the white people. The whole idea of working exclusively for any Gadiya didn’t suit them at all. Eventually even the police were dragged into it.

  The major protagonists were all strong personalities, used to the harsh climate and the demands of working with people who needed a lot of support to engage in making art. The financial pressure too was intense, as outlay was constant and income sporadic. Not surprisingly, gossip about who was paying what, who had snaffled whom, and what the working conditions or perks were, ran rampant. Jealous whispers swirled around every canvas, and poison trickled into the city galleries via their suppliers.

  Having been cast adrift from the newly incorporated Warmun art centre, Maxine Taylor and Serge Brooks purchased a house in Wyndham, and many of the artists who had liked working with them at Turkey Creek began to visit regularly. Shuttling back and forth from Perth to Wyndham, Taylor and Brooks often stopped in at Frog Hollow to see Jack Britten, who wouldn’t paint for anyone else. From the point of view of the Warmun and Waringarri art centres, Taylor and Brooks were stealing their talent.

  Meanwhile, Kevin Kelly had gone out on a limb to set up his own privately funded gallery and workshop, Red Rock Arts, in Kununurra. He worked with the most important East Kimberley men while cultivating his own small band of artists from communities as far afield as Billiluna, Broome and Victoria River Downs. He introduced the ochre paints and techniques used in the style of the East Kimberley to these artists, nurturing the careers of Nancy Noonju, Billy Thomas and Billy Duncan amongst others.

  Jennifer Field was an enterprising community development worker who wore her heart on her sleeve and was passionately involved in the cultural activities of the female Gija artists. She built up good rapport with the women from Turkey Creek while running Ochre Gallery in Kununurra, which for a short time relocated to Broome before eventually closing. She later published the very beautiful book about Queenie McKenzie, Written in the Land.

  Another late entrant into the fray was Pam Linklater and her Our Land Gallery. Pam was a salt of the earth character with a heart of gold. She had a voice like gravel, a cigarette invariably to hand, and always gave the artists a fair go when they came in ready to work.

  By the end of the millennium all of these dealers posed a serious challenge to the ‘official’ art centres at Waringarri and Warmun. The struggle for loyalty became so virulent that I could never pay a visit to anyone in the area without being greeted with a barrage of bickering. The artists themselves, faced with a growing number of choices in regard to their art practice, did their best to avoid taking sides in the whitefellas’ conflicts, and painted for anyone who showed an interest.

  Jimmy Nerrimah at his solo exhibition opening at Coo-ee Gallery, Bondi Beach, 2003.

  Further to the west, at Fitzroy Crossing the opposite was happening. Fitzroy Crossing is an ugly township situated within a beautiful oasis above the flood plains of the Fitzroy River. It is one of those legendary places that tourists dream of visiting, although in reality it is a mere fly-speck halfway along the 1,000-kilometre drive between Kununurra and Derby. It services the Aboriginal people of four different language groups who live in more than 30 outstations and communities. After rain, the waters rise up to 15 meters along the sides of the bleached pre-Devonian limestone walls of Geikie Gorge. Life here was good for the traditional owners in pre-contact times. It was quite different to that of their southern neighbours, who lived amongst the endless dunes and secluded springs of the Great Sandy Desert.

  First established in the early 1980s, the Mangkaja art centre was referred to by locals as the ‘50 Cent House’ because of its shape. It grew to support artists from both the surrounding desert and riverine regions. Karen Dayman, who ran the art centre, wasn’t under the same financial pressure as the independents. She encouraged cultural collaboration, and oversaw the making of banners to promote the art centre’s first exhibition at the Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute in Adelaide in 1991. Mangkaja became well known for collective projects such as this, culminating in the huge Ngurrara canvas that documented the famous Wangkatjungka land claim.

  Ngurrara was to become one of the most famous collaborative art works in the history of modern Aboriginal art. The first attempt to create it in 1996 measured 5 x 8 metres, but was rejected as inaccurate by some of the artists who worked on it. A second canvas, 8 x 10 metres, was completed by 60 artists a year later. Amongst them were all of the art centre’s most important painters, including Butcher Cherel, Jimmy Nerrimah, Jimmy Pike and Spider Snell.62

  Dayman did her best to avoid conflict. Despite often competing interests, she managed to enable artists such as David Downs and Jimmy Pike to reap the benefits of individual representation. She spent well over a decade at Mangkaja and, to her credit, she placed greater emphasis on helping artists meet their cultural objectives than on sales. She understood that in spite of their desire to make money, visiting country and activities like digging the sand out of an old waterhole were far more rewarding at the end of the day.

  At this stage in his illustrious career, Jimmy Pike, who had been forced by circumstance into white society, turned his back on it. By the mid 1990s, when a major solo exhibition of his work was held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the man himself had all but disappeared from the art scene. Having returned to his Wankatjungka desert homeland with his partner, Pat Lowe, they worked on a number of books together, including Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen (1997), a delightful fantasy about Aboriginal land rights. Though he died of a heart attack at 62 years of age in 2002, Jimmy’s vivid, ground-breaking designs continue to star in Desert Designs pieces on the catwalks of world fashion to this day.

  Patsy Anguburra Lulpunda – she painted her first canvas at 101 years of age.

  It was the special relationship Jimmy Pike and David Downs shared with white entrepreneurs that had fostered their careers during the 1980s. Now Western Kimberley storyteller Jack Dale emerged in the same way. Already in his late 70s, his friendship with Neil McLeod began during the 1980s.63 After urging the old man to record his knowledge and traditions for years, McLeod finally facilitated workshops at Dale’s home in Derby in 1997. Dale was one of the last of a dwindling generation to possess a complete knowledge of the rituals, law and culture of his people. His most compelling and mysterious works focused on the Wandjina and othe
r vital spirit beings, while his more abstracted works featured the dramatic Kimberley country. Patsy Anguburra Lulpunda, then more than 100 years of age, also painted for the first time during two workshops at Dale’s home during 2000.

  Paddy Bedford stayed with his old friend Jack Dale on many occasions and participated in several of McLeod’s workshops during the late 1990s. Bedford was already an old man, but he was also the rapidly rising star of a new enterprise, Jirrawun Art, managed by Tony Oliver, who wasn’t too happy to find Bedford had worked with McLeod. At the same time, despite oodles of documentary footage authenticating his painting practice, and a heap of working photographs, rumours began to spread that Jack Dale was physically incapable of creating the works which Neil McLeod was selling under his name. Once more, the same protagonists with the same jaundiced opinion of McLeod made claims that could not be substantiated.

  Even five years later resentments still smouldered, and the rumours were fanned into life again, with devastating results. The Western Australian police paid a surprise visit to Fremantle’s Japingka Gallery, which was hosting Jack Dale’s second solo exhibition. The constabulary weren’t there to admire the art. They were on the look out for ‘fakes’. A jealous rival gallery owner, who also paid Dale to paint, had apparently given them the tip-off that Dale simply wasn’t capable of producing works of such high quality on his own.

  At the time of the police visit, McLeod was in Melbourne purchasing art materials for Dale’s next series of works. The owners of Japingka Gallery, Ian Plunkett and David Wroth, willingly provided the police with several of the artist’s works for examination. Neither McLeod, nor any of the galleries that represented the elderly artist through him, had ever hidden the fact that Dale was at times assisted by members of his immediate family. But once again, the practice was used to tarnish the reputation of a great old Aboriginal man, and the standing of his supporters.

  Patsy Anguburra Lulpunda, Blackbirds, 2000. Natural earth pigment and acrylic binder on canvas, 83 x 86 cm

  During what proved to be an exhaustive investigation, the police sought out experts such as Vivien Anderson, Dale’s representative in Melbourne, and anthropologist Kevin Shaw, a specialist in Kimberley culture. Never shy of voicing an opinion, Hank Ebes publicly excoriated the police over their conduct during the investigation. This was ostensibly a clash over the ‘ownership’ of an artist, he insisted, and they were wasting valuable police resources.

  All of the paintings were subsequently given a clean bill of health. The investigators returned the paintings to Japingka Gallery with a note saying, ‘The Western Australian Police Service has completed its investigation relating to the artwork and no further action will be taken by this agency.’64

  Jack Dale Mengenen in Derby, 2009.

  Jack Dale Menengen, Bold Bluff, 2004. Earth pigment on linen, 120 x 150 cm.

  Jack Dale was renowned for images drawn from Kimberley history. In the 1920s, members of his own family were killed by frontiersmen at Bold Bluff near Saddlers Creek, as recorded in the book Jack Dale Mengenen, co-written with Neil McLeod in 2010:

  The blackfellas had been rounded up to help build a wagon road. Those who were too old or not strong enough to lift the heavy stones were hit on the head with an axe and killed.

  The wagon road has not been used for many years and has nearly disappeared. In 1996, I went back to that country to find that a lot of scrub has grown back over the road, and many creek crossings have been washed out by wet season rains. A lot of people lost their lives for nothing’.

  FIN DE SIÈCLE

  By the end of the millennium, the notion that Indigenous culture had been hijacked by the art market had become conventional wisdom and was rarely contradicted. The market was held responsible for just about everything that had gone wrong. In the Sydney Morning Herald Indigenous curator Hetti Perkins wrote:

  The tiny percentage that Aborigines receive from the enormous economic and tourism revenue reaped from the Aboriginal arts ‘industry’ contradicts any perception that Aborigines are profiteering from their culture.65

  ‘Who is cashing in?’ Perkins asked. ‘The market is overheated, and now it’s the artists who are getting burnt.’ Pointing out that a number of brilliant artists had been ‘dragged into a glaring public trial by media’, Perkins blamed the language barrier for declarations by artists such as Turkey Tolson and Clifford Possum. ‘Who can gauge the subtleties of translation and inference between the questions, Are you paid for painting? or, Do you paint for money?’ she wrote. She had a very good point.

  On the eve of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, journalists began to quote a figure guestimating total Indigenous art industry turnover at $200 million per annum, but this staggering figure was not supported by a single piece of empirical data. It was true that the value of Indigenous art production had risen from $2.5 million in 1980 to $18.5 million in 1987.66 However, in its first attempt to quantify the gains of the commercial art sector, the Australian Bureau of Statistics conducted a study which indicated that only $15 million was generated by Aboriginal art out of the $131 million total sales value of all Australian contemporary art between 1996 and 1997. This study recorded sales from 457 commercial art galleries. Incredibly, of that $131 million only $2.8 million was profit. Most art galleries were actually either losing money or barely staying afloat.

  I read the Australian Bureau of Statistics study and knew the $15 million figure was wildly off the mark. Even so, it was clear that the commercial galleries were not reaping enormous profits at the artists’ expense. In my own opinion, the Indigenous art industry’s worth was closer to $60 million, but it was certainly not $200 million. The $200 million figure gained currency because it was useful to those at both ends of the growing industry divide. The dealers used it to portray the industry as being a vital and important vehicle for international trade and promotion. The advocacy bodies and Indigenous bureaucracy argued that it demonstrated the disenfranchisement of the artists from the spoils. In the midst of all the hype, neither got it right.

  The conundrum dominating the national conversation around Indigenous art at the end of the 1990s centred on the expectation that it should significantly improve Aboriginal people’s lives and welfare. Yet few Indigenous people controlled or managed their own businesses in the arts industry, and even the most successful of the community enterprises, including Papunya Tula, had barely improved the social conditions in the communities they serviced.

  There were several reasons for this. Big money passed through the hands of highly successful individual artists, but none went into community development. Most of it was consumed by daily necessities for immediate and extended family members, and after that into luxuries, just as it does amongst white Australians.

  For decades, art has been one of the only economic enterprises in remote communities that has enabled Aboriginal people to earn money other than through passive welfare and mining royalties. Art centres proliferated across the country because of this.

  In 1999, ATSIC published the first volume of The Art and Craft Centre Story.67 The report, commissioned by the advocacy body Desart, was researched and written by former art coordinator and consultant Felicity Wright. It surveyed the 39 Aboriginal community art and craft centres in remote Australia, of which 19 were located in Central Australia, 14 in the Top End, and 4 in the Kimberley. There had been a phenomenal increase in the number of women making art. According to art centre staff the total number of artists represented was 4,546, of which 61% were women and 39% men. On average this worked out to be approximately 150 living artists serviced per art centre. While just 8 art centres had been established between 1967 and 1979, 31 had opened between 1982 and the end of the century.

  This didn’t mean, however, that the number of really talented artists who were able to generate a significant income grew at the same pace. In fact, treating art as an employment strategy simply meant there was more mediocre art.

  And it certainly did nothing to address the i
mpoverished conditions under which the vast majority lived.

  There was also an expectation that the art centres would eventually be fully staffed by Aboriginal people. For practical, cultural and social reasons, however, art centre managers had always been imported from outside the communities. But the bureaucratic push to ‘Aboriginalise’ staff positions in the 1980s and 1990s was repeatedly frustrated in the field because of a lack of funding. An Aboriginal person could remain a ‘trainee’ for 20 or 30 years and never graduate to a ‘real job’. My own son-in-law, a Tiwi with tertiary business training, was the workshop manager at Tiwi Design on Bathurst Island for more than 20 years, but he was still paid by the Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP), the equivalent of work for the dole. The manager of Bima Wear, just a kilometre further up the road, was quoted in The Art and Craft Centre Story as saying ‘I’d love to see a Tiwi person run this operation but we are generations away. Not enough people are completing education.’ In the vast majority of cases the Aboriginal executives and management committees of art centres endorsed white staff to speak on their behalf, and write submissions, reports and grant acquittals for them.68

  So what in fact were the benefits gained by the art centre model? Motherhood statements about fostering art and culture in communities and bringing on the next generation resonated strongly with those in favour of Aboriginal empowerment. Yet such were the overheads of the major city galleries that the fine art market depended on name artists whose works attracted big price tags. Given the dearth of important international touring exhibitions curated by institutions, overseas promotion had been left largely to the private sector. Galleries required increasingly expert staff and deeper and deeper pockets for the production of sophisticated marketing material, up-market venues and all the other ploys required to sell Aboriginal art on a par with ‘white’ art. Art centres encouraged a proliferation of artists, inundating the market with product, and encouraging more and more galleries and retailers to open.