His method is far from swift, or fluent: he spends as much time thinking out his work as making it. From time to time he will paint his Springvale country and its underlay of stories, but the resultant canvases seem to hover on the verge of abstraction.
He works on a large scale. The formal beauty of his paintings owes nothing to a sweetness of surface; his shapes have a striking resemblance to the patterns of chaos theory, or the flows of amniotic fluids.
Peters’s curator and close friend, Tony Oliver, who comes from a Melbourne contemporary arts background, is clear about what is distinctive in these paintings. “Rusty’s conceptual works are very far from outsiders’ stereotypes of the Dreaming,” Oliver says. “In the most successful of his paintings, idea and form are distilled; there’s a marriage that makes a unity and wholeness. That’s their power: simplicity that says a lot, with economy. I can’t think of anything in Western art that’s similar.”
Peters speaks in almost agonised fashion about the fusions and oppositions of his work. Soft of voice, his rangy limbs contorted, he has a habit of illustrating the act of thought by gesture: a tap to the head, heart and midriff to catch the synthesis of deduction, emotion and intuition. Ideas certainly predominate in his portrayal of human growth and evolution. “You too,” he says, “had a waterbrain and now it’s full of thinking. As people learn to make things, they get more and more ideas. But we’re from the water in the start, everybody – Gija and white.”
This philosophy of strict identity under the skin is quite unusual in the traditional Aboriginal world and it informs much in Peters’s art. He is blunt about what has changed in race relations over the course of his life. Black and white were still at odds when he was growing up. Now, though, he feels a process of mutual fascination has begun: “We want to learn each other’s law now. That would be best, to follow both ways, so Aboriginal men can understand white men and white men understand Aboriginal ways. Before, white men didn’t like black people much – we used to be at cross-purposes. Now we’re together and we can talk about ideas, and share, and it makes me feel good inside – I love it.”
This sharing, though, for all its intellectual charm, and the spark in the paintings it produces, can cause problems. Peters is always coming up against the puzzling, challenging mutability of the mainstream Australian world. “White law is always changing,” he says. “But not black law: that hill there never changes in position, that river can’t come over this side.”
Country, the landscape, is what sets the template within which Peters’s art, for all its originality, must stay. He is, then, constrained always to think inside a tradition: to illustrate his new ideas within the framework laid down by the first creators of the East Kimberley.
But this reinterpreting, this painting at the boundaries, is not some arbitrary, vaguely modern quest for theme: it is an artist’s response to changed conditions. Peters aims not just to analyse those changes, and understand the mind’s course in their midst, but to show through art – to teach. Of course the art is intended for the mainstream connoisseurs and gallery-goers who admire it, but he has another target as well – the young Gija girls and boys of Turkey Creek and the outlying East Kimberley communities, whose path in life is hard.
“The old people put their stories on the rocks,” says Peters, “and we know them still. Some of the old law used to take three or four months in the bush, in the early days. I’m trying to pass that knowledge on – but the young people don’t listen. A lot of young people know a little of the culture but not the language. I have deep worry for the young people: they smoke ganja, drink, hang themselves. In my day, we didn’t do those things. I’m painting for them too – to try to give them their traditions.”
And so the great themes in Peters’s paintings, for all their sheen of abstraction and elegance, come into painful focus: death, language loss, the role of memory in man’s progress. This reflective art is forced into being and lent its tension by the crisis close beneath the surface of the Gija world.
Daisy Andrews
LIGHT SOFTENS ON THE RED CLIFFS, shadows steal across the creek-bed pools and mounds of spinifex. Sunset falls at remote Lumpu Lumpu – a landscape familiar, for more than a decade, to enthusiasts of the indigenous art world. This is the country that Marnmarriya Daisy Andrews paints; its rich colours and sharp lines made her the winner of the 1994 Telstra Art Award. It is her sole subject, her constantly explored and varied theme.
Daisy, though, is distinctive among the desert artists of the Walmajarri tribe, as a visit to Lumpu Lumpu in her company makes quite clear. This country which she depicts with such care is not her birth country. She has been here only on two or three occasions. Her relationship with it is both tortuous and complex.
She was born, in fact, well north of here, displaced, already exiled, in the river-bed beside old Cherrabun Station, near the Kimberley town of Fitzroy Crossing where she now lives. Unlike the other prominent desert painters at Fitzroy’s Mangkaja Art Centre, Daisy has tended to avoid the forms and symbols of the traditional past. Dreaming places and Dreamtime events are absent from her work. Rather, from the first, tentative paintings she made on paper, in a striking palette of colours, in mid-1991, she has been struggling to capture and show versions of landscape – and struggle seems the exact word to describe her trajectory and manner, so different from the serene assurance that mantles many of her painting colleagues.
“I think, and I see this country in my mind and hold it there,” says Daisy, “I don’t get my ideas from anybody. They’re my own. I always go back in my mind to the same country, and I paint it that way.”
The ranges of Lumpu Lumpu, of course, are not simply a landscape of nostalgia. They have their story. Even before Daisy first saw them, she knew them; she had been told about them by her cousin, the artist Boxer Yankarr, who died eleven years ago. Boxer had been with his family at a waterhole between the red peaks, swimming, when a group of white men on horses attacked; suddenly he was swimming in blood; his father had been shot before his eyes. This narrative made a strong impact upon Daisy, who came to look on that country as a place with a special connection to her.
“I think about it all the time,” she says. “No one can stop me from painting this; I’m still worrying about this place: where the old people used to live, before there was any English language, before white people came. They had their own bush foods, bush meats.”
Daisy’s paintings, then, for all their depiction of tree and earth, for all their precise topography, are not so much landscapes as memory-scapes – memorials to empty country. Perhaps the most startling aspect of her work is the absence of human figures from the hills and valleys she portrays in such sweeping style: it is as if she is showing a perfect landscape, where no human form, no human grief intrudes; and also the country as it is now, devoid of ancestral life.
This tone of mingled joy and mourning was already obvious to art curators Hetti Perkins and Djon Mundine more than a decade ago when they surprised the art establishment by giving Daisy first prize in the benchmark Telstra Aboriginal Art Award. She was the first West Australia-based painter to win it, and it was the first time the prize had gone to a work on paper. The medium she had chosen, its capacity for conveying sharp planes of colour, seemed ideal then for Daisy’s art.
Hence the fascination that lies in her evolution as a painter, since she decided to follow the lead of other Mangkaja artists and begin working on canvas. A creative renaissance has been the result of this drastic late-career shift in medium. For some while following her early success, and a brief prominence painting a twelve-metre stage-set for a modish Western Australian Opera production of Alcina in 1996, it had almost seemed Daisy was an artist becalmed. After all, she had long since found her subject, her medium: her formula.
The recent shift to canvas occurred during a year of great trials, in which she lost her husband, a sister and a daughter. Something new has come into her work, with the thicker colours, with the finer gradation
s and effects of scale. A sense emerges now of the depth lurking in her versions of country: how precise they are, how full of hidden emotions. Her landscapes have moved beyond mere statement of implicit tragedy. The meanings are multiple now: here are the ranges of Lumpu Lumpu, full of light and textured variation, glimpsed in differing conditions by an artist desperate to show them, to plumb their every aspect and detail. Smudged, smoke-filled sky above the range-line; moonlit, half-darkened folds of country; the valleys in wet season, lush, ablaze with pink and purple flowers – Daisy has been painting all these aspects of her imagined homeland, without ever painting a simple transcription of country.
At this point, it becomes all too plain how inadequate the established categories are for an artist such as Daisy: a 72-year-old traditional desert woman, and also a modern painter agonising over effect and theme: a Walmajarri painter, with the vivid sense of place so evident in the work of her school’s fellow members, and also an individual, alone in her art, following her intuitions on a private journey.
Daisy’s own language is not rich in words for conveying these ideas, and the wider world has, until now, been little inclined to linger over notions of personal creativity among the desert artists of the older generation. The testimony, though, is plain, in Daisy’s landscapes – those deserted, heartbreaking Edens. It is plain, too, in Daisy’s solemn, uplifted manner as she makes her way through the mazy, grass-covered valley floors of Lumpu Lumpu, looking vaguely for the tracks of goannas to kill, but looking much more upwards, at the ridge-lines, at the colours and the shadows as they fall.
“Beautiful country, Lumpu Lumpu,” she says, with a touch of pride, much like an artist showing off her own creation. “Beautiful country: when I paint it, the paintings make me happy – and also sad, for the memory; and that’s why, when I come here, I’m happy and sad at the same time as well.”
Jukuna Mona Chuguna
WHEN SHE WAS A LITTLE GIRL growing up in the Great Sandy Desert, in the long, quiet days before Western time began, Jukuna, the older of two sisters in a Walmajarri tribal family, used to hear stories about the people with pink skin: the “kartiya”.
“I kept asking my grandmother about them,” she remembers. “I imagined kartiya were like trees or dogs or something.” What were kartiya really like, she asked. Did they look like blood, or were they like ashes? And her grandmother would answer that they were like people, with two eyes, a mouth and a nose, and two hands. “I was really curious about these kartiya …”
Almost as striking as the story itself was the occasion when Jukuna chose to retell it publicly, in front of a Western audience. Perhaps half a century had passed since those talks with her grandmother in the desert. It was the cool mid-dry season of 2004: Jukuna Mona Chuguna, now seventy-one years old and a famous artist, her paintings much prized by collectors, was standing before an appreciative group of mainstream Australians – the mythical-seeming “kartiya” people – at a launch party in Broome’s Kimberley Bookshop. She was marking, with a little speech, the publication of her life story, the first autobiography written in an Aboriginal language by a desert-born Aboriginal woman. She was also saying a private farewell to her beloved sister, one of the book’s principal figures, who had died a year before.
Restrained in her manner and her bearing, precise in her words, eloquent in her descriptions, Jukuna has long stood out as one of the most cerebral and reflective among the desert people who now live at Fitzroy Crossing, a bustling Aboriginal township in the Central Kimberley, far from their own land. Perhaps this condition of exile makes up one aspect of Jukuna’s face, which, for all its loveliness and clarity of expression, often betrays a certain quiet, inward-turned quality. For in one corner of her mind, she is always elsewhere, remembering the desert, remembering her journey away from that distant world, where waterholes held magic watersnakes, and the rhythm of life was dictated by sand-dunes, and spinifex fires, by winds and life-sustaining rain.
“I wrote my book,” she says, “to recapture those early days. When I go back and look at its pages now, it opens my mind to that time again, and that helps me remember my life, and pass on to my grandchildren the way to live, to be safe – so they can use that knowledge themselves and pass it on and on.”
Jukuna’s childhood days form the bulk of her narrative in Two Sisters, a slim book which also contains an appreciation of her sister’s life, written by Broome-based author Pat Lowe. Jukuna’s original Walmajarri text is included as a final flourish at the end of the book: “Wangki Ngajukura Jilingajangka” (“My Life in the Desert”).
Missionary linguist Eirlys Richards recalls how she first became aware that Jukuna had begun work on the manuscript. “One day in the late 1990s,” says Richards, “when I was visiting Jukuna at her home in Bayulu, she reached into her bag saying she had written something and wanted to show it to me. To my surprise, she produced a writing pad with three or four pages filled with Walmajarri. I sat there and read an account of a young woman leaving her family in the desert to walk with her husband to the unknown country of the white people.”
That journey, of course, is one nobody in Australia will make again. Jukuna’s narrative is the record of the transition from the world of immutable ancestors and spirit-laden landscape into our own flickering, fast-changing realm. She tells the story of her desert childhood, when she walked the sand-dunes in a small group with her mother, grandmother and female relations, afraid to stray too far from camp. Her retrospect is deeply coloured by her sense of loss. “Ah, the open country,” she says. “In the early days, it was freedom, that open landscape, that was home – and that I’ll never forget.”
The idyll came to an abrupt close. Life in the Great Sandy was no longer sustainable after the desert people began to leave and drift northwards into settled areas. Newly married, Jukuna followed her husband to the cattle station country, in search of their relations. They travelled by sandhills and remote rockholes, until they reached a windmill water-bore. They were on the margins of Cherrabun Station. How strange things there were to their eyes: fence-posts, cattle, iron tools. One old Aboriginal man was shown an artificial water-tank on top of a rise; he glimpsed over its edge, saw the full water, and staggered back. “His stomach lurched in fear,” writes Jukuna, “because he’d never seen water like this, south in the desert. He was speaking to the snake he believed was in the tank.”
Jukuna and her husband, Pijaji (today well-known as a desert artist under his Western name, Peter Skipper), began a station life, working on Cherrabun and other properties, raising a family. Many of the old desert people passed away; times changed, and the family moved around, making visits to Derby and Fitzroy Crossing, both sites of Christian missions, where work and rations were available.
At the adult education centre in Fitzroy, Karrayili, Jukuna began the relentless process of her self-transformation, learning English, preparing the dictionary of her language and helping devise a system to capture the elusive, consonantal sounds of Walmajarri in writing. She also found a fresh outlet for her constant thoughts about her own country, so far away from the lush Fitzroy valley. “I began painting pictures of my homeland on paper, the jila [underground wells] and the jumu [soaks], the rockholes and the sandhills. At first I painted small pictures and later on, large pictures. Over the last few years,” she continues, “I have been painting some very big pictures at the Mangkaja Arts Centre, some of which are sent away to the cities where people buy them.”
This is rather to underplay her painting life, and her success: even amidst the vivid jumble of canvases in the vast corrugated-iron Fitzroy studio, Jukuna’s works have a shimmer of their own: with their strange mood of bright, fervent colour and deep calm, they seem to murmur of the desert, the wind on the sandhills and past time.
But Jukuna is increasingly preoccupied now by the future before the Walmajarri: indeed, all her activity – the creation of land claim canvases, the preparation of dictionaries, the writing of her early days – seems designed to pres
erve a culture, rather than to advance her individual reputation.
Hence her almost antiquarian love of old, half-vanished desert words, her precise recollection of vanished traditions, her wish, above all, to spread this knowledge to the wider, English-reading public. “All the time I was writing this book so other people could know my story,” she says, “and know that we came from the desert. I was always sad that my people couldn’t go back and look at the country, and so I decided they, and others too, should be able to read about it.”
In elegiac yet half-optimistic fashion, Jukuna concludes her “Life in the Desert” with a brief return to this theme, recounting the public talks she and her fellow Walmajarri have begun holding about a move back into the desert country: “Some of our people are saying that it is too far away from town. Those of us who come from the desert say it is not far at all. Town people see our country as dry and waterless; to them it is just a lot of sand-hills and valleys. We desert people see that too, all the sandhills and the valleys, but we also see food in plenty growing.”
Jukuna ends with the slightest of references to the devastation exile seems to bring in its train, then provides, with her closing words, a sweet, resonating envoi to a life, a tradition, an entire culture: “There is no grog down there for people to drink, making them drunk and irresponsible. It’s a good, remote place to live.”
Walangkura Napanangka
LOOK INTO THE FACE of Walangkura Napanangka – a lovely, life-filled face – and all the limitations of her body seem to dissolve. Late-blooming star of the Western Desert art movement, matriarch and provider for a large extended family, Walangkura has been unable to walk for much of her life.
Yet her remarkable story is little known by the collectors and art gallery curators who snap up her work. Beautiful though her paintings are, and full of the mystery and depth of the desert, they tell nothing of her trajectory. They are rich with sinuous, unimpeded movement: they show sandhills, rockholes, gatherings of ancestral women, the play and flow of colours in the shifting light.
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