The Dealer is the Devil

by Adrian Newstead

  Perhaps my experience of this rich community is why I have always found it hard not to take attacks on white dealers personally. In 2003, Richard Bell published his Bell’s Theorem: Aboriginal Art, It’s a White Thing. Playing to an essentially disaffected black audience, Richard cleverly promoted the notion that only black people should interpret, promote and even sell Aboriginal art. His word play and temper resonated strongly with many contemporary observers, but to my mind it was yet another cheap shot. I could think of dozens of arguments both for and against the points he made. Certainly he had compelling reasons that framed his arguments and behaviour, and I could appreciate those intellectually, but at a gut level I found the way in which he simply dismissed the passion and hard work of so many good ‘white’ people to be lacking in grace.

  Richard Bell, Pigeon Holed, 1992. Installation with 6 black and white photographs and signage, 6 x images 25 x 15 cm.

  Ultimately, Richard did me a favour. I would not have felt compelled to write this book had Bell’s Theorem never appeared. The initial drafts were titled ‘It’s More than Just a Black and White Thing’. Even so, I share Bell’s outrage at recent moves to spackle over the inconvenient truths of black/white history and relations. To Bell’s mind, ‘Reconciliation’ is a metaphor for ‘reckon silly nation’. I’m as amused by that as the next person. But I have too much respect for the importance of reconciliation to follow him all the way. The notion that Aboriginal spirituality is exploited by galleries as a way to ‘close the deal’ is dangerously reductionist. It hinges on the belief that Western culture, and every ‘dealer’ working within the Western paradigm, is morally bankrupt and rapacious. That’s far too binary a view.

  Once Aboriginal people were no longer nomadic, making art became a vital new form of ceremonial activity. Painting in particular is important to Aboriginal artists. It enables them to pass on stories to young people so that they too will look after their country. The recognition they receive both within and outside their communities is empowering. It also creates an opportunity to share their culture with whitefellas. The Aboriginal art industry is a two-way street, not a case of one group exploiting another. Money is way down on the list of positive benefits for the majority of artists.

  That’s not to say an art movement can flourish without money. In a recent email, a hard-pressed art coordinator wrote to me:

  I have huge overheads. Today more than 40 artists painted at the art centre and all wanted money at the end of the day – not to mention the astronomical costs of materials and running this remote business, which need to be covered every day. The artists I have been dealing with for 12 years want cold hard cash! That is my reality.72

  Bell believes that the marketplace has reduced Aboriginal culture to a mere commodity; that it’s become a spectator sport, run and consumed by white people, with an infrastructure that offers huge rewards to but a chosen few. It is, he argues, the result of a particular marketing philosophy, not a relationship. By the summer of 2003, I had come to a similar conclusion, having watched as the market appeared to grow exponentially. Undeniably, Aboriginal art was being hijacked by those who were promoting it as an ‘investment opportunity’, and this made me distinctly uncomfortable. As Aboriginal art moved into the contemporary interiors of the upper middle classes, its content wasn’t relevant to this new genre of consumers. The influence of elite dealers, and the rise of investment galleries, was giving collectors who knew nothing about Aboriginal culture the confidence to buy the art for the first time – as if it were a commodity on the stock market. This in turn created a bubble, echoing the international trend to trade art at auction.

  Every art movement has its golden moment, and flourishes for a finite period only. There were less than 1,000 Indigenous paintings produced in Australia prior to the 1970s, and possibly 10,000 in the 10 years following. From 1980 onward, the movement flourished as old people in community after community passed on ancient stories to their descendants. Today there are just under 100 remote art centres and dozens of private dealerships. I would estimate that more than 60,000 works of art are created each and every year, and more than half of these are little more than decorative wall-fillers.

  Those who initially sustained the movement grew to adulthood prior to contact with the outside world – from William Barak and Tommy McRae to Albert Namatjira through to the early bark painters of Arnhem Land, and the Western Desert masters at Papunya. They were the last to remember the nomadic past of their clans and practise ceremony to its fullest. The old men were the heartbeat, then the older women added their voice. During the 1980s urban artists heard the call. Young people today are plugged into the digital age and embrace global trends in photography, video art, hip hop and animation. I find it tremendously exciting that this has been happening at the same time as a new art centre in Far North Queensland nurtures an elderly artist like Sally Gabori, or another introduces new materials and techniques to an artist like Rosella Namok.

  At its peak, the painting movement that I experienced and loved first-hand was like a fire advancing through the spinifex: each place it touched was hot one moment and spent the next. Its most important artists were those that continued to blaze – like the few great trees that continue to burn long after a fire has moved on.

  The question now for Aboriginal culture is whether it can remain potent, and meaningful. Will beautiful, fresh new shoots emerge and strong exotic saplings grow in the ashes? Sceptics say that the Dreamtime and the old way of life is part of a romantic past; that the knowledge that made Aboriginal art special is gone forever. Are they right? I agree that most of the great art of the painting movement has already been produced, but what cannot be overlooked is the resilience of Aboriginal creativity. Just a few of the brightest stars of the current urban-based generation include Danie Mellor, Daniel Boyd, Adam Hill, Vernon Ah Kee, Joshua Bonson, Christopher Pease, Brian Robinson, Tony Albert and Christian Thompson. Out in the communities they include Djirrirra Wunungmurra, Daniel Walbidi, Gunybi Ganambarr, Theresa Baker and Christine Yukenbarri. They may not yet be amongst the top 100 artists of the movement, but if I ever write a sequel I expect whole chapters will be devoted to them and others who are only now emerging.

  The steady march of an Aboriginal aesthetic into mainstream Australian art is now unstoppable. Many major white Australian artists are openly influenced by Aboriginal art without copying or stealing it. It can be seen in the still lifes of Margaret Preston, the landscapes of John Olsen and Fred Williams, the abstracted imagery of Ildiko Kovacs, David Larwill and Marina Strocchi, and the work of multimedia artists John Wolseley and Greg Weight, to name but a handful.

  In my experience the success of the Aboriginal art movement has been entirely due to the fact that black and white people have had a positive effect upon each other.

  IMAGINE

  Imagine an Australia where the Aboriginal people negotiated a treaty and were never invaded by Europeans; where the trade routes embedded in the great songlines across the continent remained intact. Imagine what Australia could have been like today, if Aboriginal people had continued as the sovereign owners of the country. Imagine the Badi people farming pearls in partnership with Japanese traders; the Gija mining gold and diamonds and trading with the Chinese; the Pintupi sharing culture and wisdom with eco-tourists in a sustainable glass tower adjacent to Uluru; the Eora, enjoying the fruits of environmentally friendly condo development around Sydney Harbour.

  Instead, when the British arrived, the Aboriginal people hindered their urgent colonial need for a terra nullius, a ‘land belonging to no-one’.73 Within decades, armed with exotic diseases and guns, the settlers had infiltrated the entire continent, leaving Aboriginal culture intact only in those places that were beyond the reaches of their exploitation. Everywhere they restricted Aboriginal freedom to travel and disrupted their ceremonial practices. Along the eastern seaboard the yearly ‘walkabout’, one of the foundation stones upon which Indigenous culture was built for over 40,000 years
, ended within one generation. The consequences of European invasion were devastating to the health and spiritual well-being of the Indigenous people and their land.

  Yet Aboriginal culture did not, as was widely expected, pass away. It answered back. Over the past 200 years more than 5,000 artists have reaffirmed, piece by piece, the story of their inheritance and their dispossession. Of perhaps one million paintings, at least 50,000 comprise a priceless legacy. It has been, without doubt, the most moving and enduring effort of any in Australia’s history. The corpus of knowledge is matched only by the holdings of the greatest libraries, the finest churches and religious monuments of the world. By comparison, the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Snowy River and Ord River schemes, and the Overland Telegraph are just pieces of regional infrastructure.

  Much of this art has been scattered, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, on the whim of the commercial market to the far corners of the globe. They remain fragments. Until recently, few exhibitions have ever followed a complete songline along its entire journey. Now institutions such as the National Museum of Australia have begun to work with Aboriginal artists combining painting, performance, video, animation and digital imagery in order to re-create the ancient highways of song.

  Anne and I got a little taste of what the future holds during a recent visit to Canberra. Here in the nation’s capital, one of the most carefully staged and least exciting cities in the world, the National Museum’s lakeside amphitheatre rustled with a highly expectant crowd. By the stage, a huddle of knitted beanies poked out of a mountain of blankets. A group of shivering old ladies from the desert chanted like a hive of bees. Cameras and microphones were trained on two small campfires downstage, so we could smell the smoke and hear the crackle of the wood. Soon, seven other women who were hiding behind the stage shrugged off their coverings and danced across a field of red sand, as giant flames flickered on huge panels behind them. Enter the wrong-skin young warrior, Wati Nguru, who is overcome by his lust for them. They flee his unwanted advances, and although he can’t fulfill his illicit desires, the sisters can never rest. As the screens fill with vivid tracts of the actual country, he chases them from one sacred spot to the next, and eventually right up into the sky where they become the Pleiades, a small but shimmering cluster of stars in the Milky Way. Unfortunately the museum had cut out all the bawdy bits, which Aboriginal audiences enjoy the most, and the translation was so simplified we missed the real thrill of the chase. Yet the performance was enough to catch a glimpse of the majesty of the whole story, and how captivating it would be if we could know it more intimately. With a multidisciplinary approach including geology, botany, archaeology but most importantly art, the museum is planning to tell the whole story of the Seven Sister’s Dreaming in 2016.

  It has been my privilege, and certainly not mine alone, to witness so many moments like this over the last 30 years. The contemporary Aboriginal art movement has seduced, challenged and rewarded me to the extent of having shaped my whole adult life. I never tire of the thoughts and feelings it inspires in me. I am humbled by it, angry about it, and continually refreshed by the people it has brought into my life. It is why I have written this book. I can only hope that you get as much out of it as I have. If so, then you will be immeasurably enriched by the deep truths of Aboriginal culture, as I have been.

  Only time will tell whether or not Aboriginal culture in its most meaningful sense will continue to evolve. Unless it does, all the codes, royalties, accolades and prizes will be worthless. Without the continuity that anchors Aboriginal art to the Australian environment, and connects Aboriginal artists to the narrative passed down by their ancestors, Aboriginal art will cease to be a movement and will become a museum exhibit or assimilated into the contemporary mainstream. Ironically many people thought this would happen 200 years ago, and every 50 years since then the demise of Aboriginal culture has been loudly predicted from the sidelines. In my lifetime I’ve watched it wither and bloom a dozen times in hundreds of places. My money is on the movement. Devil or no, I’m betting it will survive, long after you and I are at one with the Dreaming – dusty specks beneath the Milky Way.

  EPILOGUE – EMAIL FROM A MATE IN THE OUTBACK

  dear adrian,

  i have been gladly receiving news of what is happening at cooee.

  i wish i could be there for the talk, and the opening of another interesting show.

  i am also looking forward to the release of your book, adrian … and will read it greedily.

  i want to stay in touch with you, not just for my own pleasure and stimulus, but for the sake of a small number of young folk whom i teach out here … in whom I believe is not just ‘talent’, but potential greatness as artists.

  these few youngsters literally amaze me almost weekly with their momentous abilities, their openness to ideas and love of materials, especially paint.

  some of them, i believe, have something that you would want to see.

  no kidding … i have not seen anything quite like this before, anywhere, over 35 years of working with young folk.

  i want to stitch a conversation with you on this matter.

  … these kids have little idea or connection of their inside brilliance to the outside world … they don’t know how gifted they are

  no way of verifying their inside, their intuitions, within this small town’s ways and habits.

  these kids are not mature … but deeply dare to inhabit risk, visually.

  i am asking you to listen to me

  i want to create with you, an avenue of possibility for them.

  i want to make a meaningful connection for them, … with your gallery … breaking existing barriers.

  are you interested in the idea? … your badgering friend, warmly, and with respect,

  rick ball

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I originally began this book with two quite distinctly different stories: that of the history of Aboriginal art from before European contact through to the beginning of the Western Desert art movement in the early 1970s; and that of the period after which I personally became engaged in it.

  Those who read my drafts suggested I revisit the first part, the early history, and relate it in the same anecdotal style as the latter. And so, in order to integrate the two seamlessly, I began with a direct extract from my 1998 diary entries.

  It was on my travels in 1998 that my car was stolen in Balgo Hills, and I was later to discover the artists’ prints at the bottom of the Mary River. The surviving prints were signed by the artists, along with those that had become a unique collaboration between the artists, the printmakers, the thieves and the environment. These took up the entire back of the car, as each one had dried like rolled parchment and could not be flattened.

  The story of the theft of my car and its aftermath was recorded in my diary while still fresh in my memory, as I sat for several days in a desert garden overlooking the MacDonnell Ranges in Alice Springs.

  Later, after journeying back to Sydney, I took the rolled prints to a paper conservator who arranged for them to be rehumidified, adhered onto Japanese rice paper, and framed. They were later exhibited alongside paintings created by my close friend, the multi-disciplinary artist Adam Rish, in collaboration with the artists of Balgo, Warmun and Kalumburu. The exhibition, Toyota Dreaming, related the story of the theft and recovery in a most effective visual presentation. It was a tremendous success and generated numerous articles in the media. I was more than compensated financially, and I had enough money left over to reprint old Jack’s lost edition, depicting his beloved Bungle Bungle ranges as a screen print.

  During the years that followed I longed to find more time to write, and I always imagined this story would eventually become an important strand within a novel. It was my editor, Ruth Hessey, who suggested it would make the perfect vehicle through which to explore the basis of Aboriginal culture and the way in which European settlement has impacted upon it. As this and other personal reminiscences were ada
pted for this book, Ruth and I worked together to weave more of my own story into my account of Aboriginal art history. This may appear to some ‘insiders’ to have been overly self-indulgent on my part – yet, on the other hand, if it makes the contents more accessible and helps ‘outsiders’ to appreciate Aboriginal culture more deeply, then it will have been more than worthwhile.

  ADRIAN NEWSTEAD

  Bondi Beach

  July 2013

  ENDNOTES

  FOREWORD

  1 Canteen Anna (Anna Fierling), nicknamed Mother Courage, was a cunning food vendor who was determined to make her living from the 30 Year War (1618–1648). Over the course of Brecht’s play, she loses all three of her children, during the war from which she sought to profit.

  2 This title is from Frank Herbert’s most highly developed third stage guild navigator of the Dune trilogy.

  BOOK 1

  1 Theodor George Henry Strehlow (1908–1978).

  2 Language of the Arrernte clan of the Central Desert.

  3 A theatrical Aboriginal gathering or ritual re-enactment.

  4 In 1981 the South Australian state parliament gave Aboriginal people of the Anangu, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara clans title to more than 103,000 square kilometres of arid land in the far northwest of South Australia. The main communities on these lands include: Indulkana, Mimili, Kaltjiti, Pukatja, Amata, Pipalyatjara and Watarru.

  5 See Chapter 3 for a more detailed discussion of songlines.

  6 A mini twister of dust and sand.

  7 Australian slang for a Toyota troop carrier.

  8 An expression for needing to urinate.

  9 A word most commonly used amongst Aboriginal people in Arnhem Land, meaning ‘sacredness’.

  10 The spelling is ‘Lambulk’, although I always remembered it as being pronounced ‘Wambuk’; Rembarrnga speakers I have questioned since have referred to it as Lum, as in ‘bum’, and balk, as in ‘bull’; that is, ‘bumbull’.