These are the product of her happy bush childhood: Walangkura was born about sixty years ago at a rockhole in the hills close to where the remote community of Tjukurrla lies today.
Her early days were spent travelling through the subtle landscapes between Docker River, close to the border between the Northern Territory and Western Australia, and the vast, salt-mantled Lake Macdonald, far to the north; for years she soaked up this country with her deep-set eyes.
But when she was in her teens, in the mid-1960s, her family group encountered one of the welfare patrols sent by the Commonwealth to “bring the desert people in”. Together with other groups of the Pintupi people, she was conveyed to Haasts Bluff settlement in the ranges outside Alice Springs where her brisk introduction to Western life was a spell working in the community laundry.
Soon she moved to nearby Papunya, where she met Uta Uta Jangala. “He was a kind, gentle man,” she remembers of her late husband, “though he did often walk around with two very large boomerangs.” It was an encounter with consequences: the other man to whom Walangkura had been promised as a young girl exacted a bleak revenge punishment and struck her across both legs, crippling her. The terms of her existence were changed – in multiple ways.
Uta Uta Jangala was not only a devoted husband who loved to carry his young wife in his arms with him through the bush, he was also a Pintupi thinker of great reserve and profundity. Together with a small circle of men living in the bleak confines of Papunya, he helped found the desert painting movement and produced, in the early ’70s, a range of small, jewel-like boards that are widely admired by connoisseurs and eagerly collected to this day.
“I still worry for him,” says Walangkura. “I still see him in my mind: I’m listening for him always in my memory. He’s here” – she gestures around – “and so I haven’t lost him, even though he’s passed away.”
There were five children from the marriage. All were born in Papunya; three of them are still living. But Walangkura’s path was always to be marked by journeys, transformations. In 1984, another chapter opened; many of the Pintupi moved back to their homelands and took up residence in the new, ultra-remote settlement of Kintore. Walangkura still spends much of her life there, even though she also has family in Tjukurrla, close to her birthplace. It’s a challenging existence. Kintore is a small community, carved from hard country, freezing in winter, burning in summer. Many of the older generation living there are famous artists, who make thousands of dollars from their canvases; meanwhile the youngsters, beautiful and full of balletic grace, must face the demons of grog and petrol-sniffing. The surrounding landscape, dominated by two austere, isolated mountains, is of haunting splendour, while the settlement has all the baffling complexity of the desert world.
Walangkura started painting there almost a decade ago, after her husband’s death. “I’m painting true stories of country and places where my people used to walk around,” she says – but this is saying far too little. Almost at once, Walangkura had her own look in art, her tone and style. It is geometric, with a grand, sombre quality; blacks, reds and her favourite colour, a deep sandy orange, predominate: in these paintings the weight of the desert seems strongly expressed.
“I’d been watching my husband,” she says. “Watching how he painted. I’m doing it myself, trying to look after myself now because no one else is looking after me.”
To watch her paint, as she does on almost every day she spends at Kintore, is to see the alchemy of Western Desert art at work. In the mornings, she is collected from her camp and brought to the painting shed; there she is pushed about on a customised contraption that was built for her years ago by the Centre for Appropriate Technology in Alice Springs. It has a tricycle base made from flat board, with half a plastic seat for her to sit on and a small safety runner so she can keep her balance.
Walangkura tends to rely on a younger relative to push her and manoeuvre her into place near her canvas; if she has a large painting to do, she will crawl into position on a blanket in its centre and work outwards. As she paints, her two beloved camp dogs, Witun, who comes from distant Wanarn, and Odiy (“the dog with the No. 6 tail” – permanently curved like a question mark) look on, hoping for scraps. A dollop of chewing tobacco will be at hand; as will a digging stick for goanna hunting, a plastic shopping bag full of white bread and that standard desert accoutrement, a frozen kangaroo tail for the lunchbreak. Other painting women cluster about – Walangkura often has that frailest and most elusive of the desert princesses, Makinti Napanangka, watching closely by her side.
There are obvious restrictions on Walangkura’s life. Her dependency is absolute, her needs great, yet she is the least demanding of the older Kintore women. She gives away what she earns; she receives her visitors with over-brimming love. The fence of language might be expected to divide her from Westerners; it is a barrier she easily surmounts. Even the most severe restrictions, with thought, can be overcome – a duplicate of her wheeled charabanc waits for her in Tjukurrla whenever she makes the trip down backroads south from Kintore. Last year, Walang-kura was able to travel to Borroloola, near the Gulf of Carpentaria, with a team from the Kintore Women’s Centre. It was the first time she had set eyes on the sea. “Oh,” she remembers, “the water – and that jungle country up there. Lots of trees!”
Is personality reflected in the austere forms of Western Desert art? Does Walangkura’s course through life leave its traces in her work? Certainly the enthusiasts who have bought her paintings from group exhibitions in recent years respond to an individual quality that sets her apart from her talented colleagues. (Though things can get confusing, as far as names go, in the desert realm; there’s another much-collected artist named Walangkura Napanangka, and a third, recently deceased painter with the same name, but better known as Walangkura Reid, was our Walangkura’s cousin-sister.)
“I don’t say I’ve had a hard life,” Walangkura muses, even as she runs through her losses: a husband, two children, a bush way of life. “I don’t look at myself and feel sorry for myself. I can get about, and if someone heaves me around so I can make my paintings, then I’m happy.” Others, both desert people and Westerners, who watch Walangkura and know her story can only respond with astonishment and admiration. Hardship has bred in her a kind of resilient acceptance, a joy in life. It’s this quality, a promptness and an openness to experience, that looks out from her face.
George Ward Tjungurrayi
THIN HANDS REACH ABOVE the ox-blood expanse of stretched canvas, touching, stroking, defining space. Then, in black paint, with slow, steady pressure, George Ward Tjungurrayi marks out a set of interlocking planes. He ignores the blowing dust, the camp dogs scratching at his side, the hum of Pintupi voices, the coming and going of women and children in the Kintore painting compound. He lies on one side, wearing a well-worn red and black beanie. All day long, his arm moves at unvarying speed, as his design – his dream, his law – takes shape.
Ward, who received the Wynne Prize for landscape painting in mid-2004, is a reticent and silent Western Desert man. This cast of character can cause the odd practical problem, now that he’s become one of the nation’s most admired, and most keenly collected, artists: he’s not at home in English; sees no merit in photographs; is uneasy in big, bustling towns like Alice Springs.
“I’m a bush man, me,” he insists, with a distinct, proud edge in his voice.
Ward was born, probably in the early 1950s, near the spot where the remote West Australian bush community of Tjukurrla lies today. His father died while he was still very young. It was only in his teenage years that he first encountered Europeans, when a Commonwealth welfare patrol came upon his family group camped by a desert waterhole.
After travelling to the government settlement at Papunya, first home of the desert painting movement, Ward worked briefly as a fencer and a butcher in the community kitchen.
He also met and married his wife, the somewhat formidable Nangawarra, a member of one of the desert�
�s most dominant families. Once their first child was born, the couple moved west to Warburton, then on through the ranges to Docker River, to Warakurna, and at last to the newly established Pintupi capital of Kintore, in the looming shadow of Mount Leisler, where they still spend time today.
It was here, just over a decade ago, that Ward first painted on canvas: a handful of elegantly “classical” concentric roundel works from that time survive. But it was only over the past three years, after the death of his brother, Yala Yala Gibbs, a celebrated artist, that the responsibility to paint fell squarely on Ward’s shoulders. By this stage, he was a senior desert man: he lived deep in the world of law. The canvases he began producing for Alice Springs-based Papunya Tula Artists were like nothing else that had come before in the desert art movement: sombre, cerebral, full of grave intellect.
National Gallery of Victoria indigenous art curator Judith Ryan quickly caught their splendour. “He hit on this sophisticated, geometric, filled-in style almost at once,” she says. “I have the sense that he began to paint only when he was ready, in full command of both story and country – and he seems able to harness considerable power and visual energy almost every time he approaches a large canvas.”
Once Ward has blocked out his painting’s various fields, he fills each one with parallel lines, tight-drawn. They have the feel of contours, making up recurring patterns: wavy paths, tilted circles, chevrons. This underpainting process can be protracted.
The work still bears no resemblance to its final form. Then he takes up his dotting stick. A transformation begins. At last, after several days of meticulous detailing, the shimmer of the finished surface begins to show.
Ward’s large-scale works depict the ancestral desert narratives, relating to the country west of Kintore – above all, the snake-rich landscapes around Lake Macdonald. But they are not maps, as much as expressions of a world, a logic, a sense of how space is enlivened by spirit.
Just as the creation journeys they refer to operate on many levels, so do the paintings: to the outside eye, they possess an austere beauty; when explained in detail, they can serve as visual cues to a complex story-system; but all the while their air of coherent depth comes from the underlying mental architecture of the desert world.
This particular canvas, as the artist explains while painting, refers to an elaborate story, also encountered in the works of various senior Pintupi figures, most of whom have passed away. It describes journeys taken by the Tingari ancestors – men, women, children, dogs – who once moved through the landscape, but are all transformed, now, into rocks, or water-snakes. A cataclysmic storm fell down upon them: black clouds, rain, lightning. Gradually, a complex narrative emerges, which involves shifting of shapes, claypans formed by nose-blowing, descent of figures from the sky. Many things are said of Ward’s canvases, both by him and by his immediate family.
Ward’s brother-in-law, Frank, for one, advises that the artist paints some canvases in a pinkish palette because the colour feels “strong and balanced”, while the black colour is chosen because it’s “good and healthy”. Then again, black and pink stand respectively for winter and for summer landscape, and much more. Western eyes interpret differently, and notice other things.
Anita Angel, curator of the Charles Darwin University art collection, and a prominent collector in her own right, greatly admires Ward, while gauging his paintings largely in formal terms. “It’s instantly recognisable, he has a style, but it’s more than just a style,” she says. “He’s coming from somewhere deep within his mind’s eye to draw out what he does. He’s not experimenting, he knows exactly what he’s doing; he has something to say about what he sees, and feels, and knows.”
Angel suspects a connection between Ward’s spare imagery and the incisions made upon the material objects of desert culture: ritual items only vaguely known to outsiders. This obscure, shielded element that so clearly lies within Ward’s work makes all the more striking his strong appeal to serious collectors of contemporary art.
The NGV’s Judith Ryan also highlights the continuing tradition beneath Ward’s novel surface. “The aesthetic’s changed, the style has changed, the art’s concept remains the same,” she says. “It’s refined and refined over many layers, and that gives it a rever-berative shimmer, a final precision of detail. Art of this kind has immense potency. It’s not difficult at all for today’s collectors to have a passion for it, because it’s minimal. It’s towards the minimal edge in terms of design, and in its lack of figuration and restricted palette.”
A week has passed. The painting is complete, its structure so majestic and interwoven it seems to outreach the eye’s capacity to see. Ward leans back, and glances down; but the artist’s face is quizzical. He makes his trademark shaking movement with his painting hand. He adjusts his beanie, his long-sleeved shirt and close-fitting trousers, summons his dog-pack, and walks away. Behind him is his painted mirror of the desert: it lies gleaming on the dusty ground.
Aubrey Tigan
THE DREAMS CAME BACK to Aubrey Tigan in earnest some seven years ago, when he began carving his ancestral designs on Kimberley pearl shell once again. The cyclonic swirls and stepped meanders, the tight chevrons and wavelet lines he glimpsed insistently in his mind’s eye: what were they but the remembered essence of his island country?
“I saw an old man, in my dreams, and he would keep coming, and telling me to carve that shell,” murmurs Tigan, a reflective, reserved Aboriginal man in his mid-sixties. “It was a calling. Those dreams were coming to me, in my imagination, telling me to go and carve the pearl shell. And you have to listen to your dreams, not just leave them. If you leave a dream, you know, it can do you harm, and you can die.”
Tigan spends much of his time at Djaridjin, near One Arm Point, on the Dampier Peninsula some 200 kilometres north of Broome, where he is widely known as the master carver of pearl shell, or Riji. But his forebears were the Djawi people, who once lived a raft-based, almost marine existence, moving constantly amid the exiguous Montgomery Islands of King Sound, where the tidal races are the largest in the world.
The Djawi were masters of this remarkable environment. They would collect pearl shell from the submerged reefs around them, smooth them down and carve them with striking patterns, then trade them on to neighbouring tribal groups. In this way, pearl shell, gleaming with its rainbow shimmer, entered the continent-wide Aboriginal economy, and the further it travelled from the north-west coastline into the Central Deserts, handed on from tribe to tribe, the more prized it grew. It was this trading conveyor belt, which still functions in subterranean fashion today, that lent pearl shell its strange central role in the Aboriginal artistic renaissance of the past three decades – and that gives Tigan’s art a distinct familiarity for those who know desert paintings.
The great theme of Tigan’s carvings is the key pattern, which he explores in dozens of subtle variations. This pattern is also found on sacred boards and in cave art throughout the Western Desert, for a very simple reason: the ancestral pearl shell traded down into the heart of Australia now lies at the core of desert magical beliefs. In fact, among the Pintupi people, these pearl shell discs are the highest pinnacle of secret and sacred male ritual, and serve as the prized possessions of traditional healers and rainmakers. Women are not allowed to see them under any circumstances.
Western Desert art is often no more, and no less, than a transcription of pearl shell patterns: only that pattern has been overlaid with legendary significance, and linked with the sand-dune landscape and the deeds of ancestral creator heroes. For desert men, pearl shell, with its flashing gleam, is life, and water, and the evanescent, creamy, rain-promising light that sometimes surrounds the sun. And thus, a celebrated contemporary work from the Western Desert, like Jackie Giles’s large fretwork painting from the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2006 Land Marks show, for example, will bear a haunting resemblance to its pearl shell cousins.
Anthropologists and art experts are still piecing toge
ther the fragments of this story, which is helping them to construct a picture of Aboriginal society in the days before Western contact as a pulsing, dynamic world where new tastes and cults would spread like wildfire across tribal borders. The pioneer of these pearl shell studies is anthropologist Kim Akerman, who has helped build important museum collections of carved Riji works from the early decades of the twentieth century.
But pearl shell’s increasing popularity, and Tigan’s rise to prominence in the realm of contemporary Aboriginal art, owes a great deal to a pair of more newly fledged enthusiasts. Broome pearling magnate Steve Arrow has dedicated the past decade of his life to researching the origins of the pearl shell tradition, while local gallerist Emily Rohr has gradually shaped a broad market taste for this seemingly highly traditional art form. Tigan’s works, though, scarcely need strong advocacy. They are few in number, and each has a subtle presence. In them, the shape and curve of the shell are married to the design; the coded meaning of the Djawi symbols can be sensed by even the most untutored eye, and yet it is the balance and the beauty in the pattern that predominates.
“They have a strong appeal as art objects,” says Rohr, “and I think the reason for that appeal is simple: it’s not just the deep tradition of the art, but the way that it comes from nature, and the way that the pearl shell itself is sculpture. The nacre being coated over and over seems like a metaphor for life; it speaks of the triumph of survival in the coastal landscape. This is all connected to the mystery of the pearl – a jewel made by a living thing, with a responsive human design traced on its surface.”
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