Tigan himself is somewhat bemused by the growing appetite for his work, as fashion in indigenous art shifts from painting and towards more traditional objects and artefacts. “I’m surprised white people are interested in it. I say: why? But it’s important there is someone still making this art – it’s me. It’s not just pictures in old books. I’m here, making the pearl shell, so the world can see it.”
It is an arduous craft. A master carver needs more than dreams; there must be method and discipline. Tigan’s uncle gave him these instructions when he handed down the skill: “You don’t just make the design – you think about it. Never hurry a job. Do it from the inside of your spirit, from your soul. That much – an inch – at a time.”
The carvings fall into four broad categories: the mazy key meanders, which seem to originate from the region of Cape Lagrange, well south of Djawi country, are among the oldest designs, as are the simple, elegantly symmetrical mirror patterns, and the symbolic depictions of men and women. Many “new” forms have presented themselves to Tigan in his creative dreams: the cyclone whorls, and rain, wind and current emblems fall into this group. And a final group, which are key patterns shaped to recall a human form, may well be distant echoes of the rock art traditions of the north Kimberley mainland, which his Djawi ancestors could have seen and handed down.
“These are things,” says Tigan, “that we have to do by the law. I’m just following in the footsteps, keeping the law alive. And when I make those old Djawi designs, I feel happy, it takes everything away from me – I’m like a free man, free inside, it goes right through me. I am back in my country.”
But that Djawi country, so close to Tigan’s family home, remains difficult to grasp – in many ways. The tidal channels of the Montgomery Islands were left outside the boundaries of the recent Bardi-Djawi native title determination; and they are hard to reach in Tigan’s 3.5-metre, 15-horsepower-engined boat.
“Sometimes,” he says, “if I want to go there, to my country, I sit back and think. Sometimes, I think, I want to go and get some pearl shell; and that will draw me to go there. We believe that our home is calling us to go back there. The pearl shell, for us, is more, much more than gold: it’s more than money, or anything, for an Aboriginal tribal man.”
It is the shimmer calling, and the gleam. And the pearl shell holds its secrets, too. There is the mystery of how the carved Riji ornaments of the Kimberley coast, used for open initiation ceremonies, and widely seen by women, became transformed in the desert into secret tokens. And another mystery lurks suggestively in the unrecorded past. The famous Aboriginal meander pattern, found not just in paintings and on pearl shell, but on shields and sacred boards, only occurs in north-west Australian indigenous art. It has been endlessly diffused and transformed – but some anthropologists and historical researchers believe its origins may lie overseas, in key-pattern porcelain ware traded across the Indonesian archipelago, and brought by Macassan trepang fishermen hundreds of years ago to north Kimberley shores.
Can this startling idea be true? Could one of Australia’s most central designs have been copied from a plate, or a china fragment? The sacred is often forged in the most baffling places.
Aubrey Tigan stands, like the still point of a tidal whirlpool, at the centre of these interlocked traditions and resonating designs. If he knows a deep story, he isn’t telling. He holds up a gleaming, patterned shell fragment, and turns it in the late Kimberley light, as cyclonic cloud-forms veil the sinking sun.
His look is reticent, his words soft: “It comes,” he says, “from where it comes.”
Billy Benn Perrurle
A SHORT WHILE AGO, the much-admired Central Australian landscape artist Billy Benn Perrurle made a brief visit to Hart’s Range, his home country along the Plenty Highway, which he had not seen for many years. Holding court at his long painting desk, brush poised, stroking his greyish hair with a delicate hand, he says: “That was the first time I’ve been there – home – for a really long time. I was working there when I was young, and I’m happy in my country.”
Immediately on his return to Alice Springs, the effects of this journey became plain. His paintings, which had been evolving in recent months away from his original, minutely detailed style, suddenly took on an abrupt, expressionistic grandeur. His brushstrokes became loose and free, he painted at lightning speed, his palette shifted from his trademark softly blending pinks and mauves to thick, turbulent yellows, icy whites, deep blues that gave off a murky glow. And it was not only the colour of his mountain landscapes that changed but their mood, their tone, their contour, too: the far-off ridges turned into tall, cliff-surrounded mesas and the valleys lay between intruding ramparts like so many clefts of molten light.
How to conceive this drastic change? How, indeed, to approach the art of Billy Benn, a painter whose work has been eagerly collected since his first solo exhibition, staged at Melbourne’s Gabrielle Pizzi Gallery in 2002? Not only does he lurk behind the veil of his largely traditional Alyawarre background, he also inhabits a mental world of his own.
The studio where Billy Benn paints, Mwerre Anthurre, is a component of the Bindi organisation, a workshop for people with disabilities, located in the light industrial western fringe of Alice Springs. Men and women of varying ages, backgrounds and gifts work at Bindi, and it was there, while engaged in making metal boxes, that Billy Benn picked out a little painting corner and began depicting his father’s country on tiny strips of foam-plastic, or wooden boards discarded by the local timber mill.
Those early landscapes had a special character; they were at once precise and steeped in nostalgic distance, and seemed to whisper inside one’s head like the words of a dream. Pale trees, pink, folded ranges, all caught in the smallest brushstrokes: there was nothing like them in the world.
Connoisseurs across the country quickly developed a passion for them: Bindi expanded its special painting studio, and other gifted artists, encouraged by Billy Benn’s example, began to emerge. Virginia Quin, who has guided Bindi’s progress for many years, sees Billy Benn as the hero of this art current. “He was driven to paint,” she says. “Whatever was to hand, he painted. As a direct result, he has enriched our world.”
He also provided employment to indigenous people: Bindi’s art centre coalesced around his example. “Billy Benn has taken us on a special trajectory, giving status to people with disability and widening the human rights of individuals,” Quin says. “His paintings extend Bindi’s philosophy: they help find people’s place, where they fit in.”
But the paintings also speak, in urgent terms, of an individual’s emotional journey. Billy Benn’s first style, with its microscopic scale and its grasp of the country’s pulse, had a completed quality about it. Few of the gallerists who were clamouring for his work could have expected the transformations that have come pell-mell in the past year.
Mwerre Anthurre’s present art co-ordinator, Catherine Peat-tie, arrived at Bindi’s workshop to find her name artist painting vast swathes of heaving purple range. “I never saw those typical early forms of sweepy mountains that he became famous for in his first exhibitions,” Peattie says. “I’ve always seen him working on landscapes with bright colour contrasts and dramatic patches of darkness. But still they have those same fragile, expansive qualities like his early paintings, and they still seem very remote.”
With “outsider” artists – the term was invented by Jean Dubuffet for his collection of unconventional creators – the temptation to read biographical events back, in direct fashion, into the artwork is always strong. And Billy Benn has lived, in the past year, through tumultuous times. Although Bindi protects and nurtures its members and offers support and understanding, rather than intrusion or inquiry, Peattie knows some of the story and is inclined to link Billy Benn’s life changes to the developments in his art. In her view, a recent spell of serious illness, combined with the inf luence of his visit to the red rock hills of Hart’s Range, lies behind the latest transformation i
n his work. Recently she prepared a brief tone-portrait of this changing “memory landscape”.
“The closed plane of the canvas has been gently surrendered to invite the viewer into the landscape,” she wrote. “It is not only a visual journey, it is an emotional passage, with abrupt stops and fragile, watery layers. We are transported somewhere almost dreamlike at times, where our sense of scale is slightly disturbed and the geology appears transient.”
Peattie has spent long hours at Billy Benn’s side, surrounded by his work: her cautious words suggest the difficulties that lurk in the task of interpretation. In some of these paintings, she finds a tone of seclusion and intimacy, and a sense that the landscape is protective. Others convey a shifting, contradictory air: “Sometimes we are left wondering at the end of the story.”
Billy Benn has his own ideas about the effect of his recent travels. “My memories of country are stronger now, so it’s memory, here, in the brain,” he says. “Always I’m thinking of nice things in my paintings. I’m painting the feeling of being really good and happy all the time.”
His conversation proceeds in phased components as he remembers when he worked as a stockman on the eastern desert stations, with cattle, and sheep too, making great droving journeys. One, above all, stands out: a long trip, all the way from Mt Riddock, through Hart’s Range and Huckitta, up the track to far-off Neutral Junction.
Those were also the times he enjoyed singing at the various mission churches. He learned his favourite anthem, “Amazing Grace” – still a source of great solace to him – as well as his traditional ceremonial songs. Billy Benn has strong ideas about the unity of mankind and the shared blood of people of all races, and he likes to illustrate those ideas on diagrams, written on white notepaper in approximative hand, for words, in his view, have power as much as images.
“My idea is, in this painting, I’m right in the front, in my mind: I’m looking, looking,” he says. “Oh, it was like that before, when I was running around, as a kid, and Mum and Dad and family, the water running, the big clouds coming.”
This prelapsarian note in Billy Benn’s words seems strongly echoed in his painted images. The world he records is one caught before sundering, disaster and grief.
Strikingly, there are no people, indeed no living forms, in the art he makes. Yet grief, complexity and depth lurk inside his landscapes, and a glinting strangeness, a sense of something veiled or lost, lies at the heart of their communicative force.
Before Billy Benn on the narrow work desk rests a long, thick-painted board: blue jagged cliffs, a saffron sky, deep swirls and intermingling shadows in the air. It is his entry for a prominent art contest, and, as with all his most recent paintings, it carries a charge of disquieting tension.
His hands move slowly above its glistening surface and a smile gives form to the race of his thoughts. “I’m the lucky one,” he says, with great emphasis. “The lucky one to find my own power in Australia.”
Angelina George
BLOOD-RED ROCKS, STARK CLIFFS, a still lagoon, a snaking, pale blue river channel. Cloud shadow on stones, the glare of sunlight; landforms receding, jumbled. A shimmer of hills, caves, ridges, hollows – ochre and pink, jasper and porphyry, shot through with intruding shades: teal green, lead grey, singed brown. All these features are traced in detail, precisely rendered in swift, symbolic shorthand. Range lines too, the water’s flow, fire scalds, the rock’s veins, the earth’s great curve: a whole universe lies caught in this vast canvas, a monument of north Australian landscape art that was tossed off in a mere two weeks by a slender, 68-year-old woman from the forgotten south-east corner of Arnhem Land.
Angelina George’s My Imagined Country – near the Limmen Bight measures 2 metres by 2.5 metres. Its austere sweep is not for art-lovers seeking easy pleasures, although even a few minutes of attention makes plain that this painting captures precisely what mid-century artists such as Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams and Russell Drysdale all yearned to convey on their despairing northern treks.
Perhaps, in decades to come, My Imagined Country and the series of similar works Angelina George has poured out all through the dry season months of 2006 will make their way to a great public collection: a wise curator of the future might eventually choose to hang such canvases alongside the synoptic paintings of artists such as Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts or William Robinson.
Some aspects of landscape painting come only with time and deep immersion in a chosen subject, and so it is with Angelina George’s art today: there is a spellbinding precision in her private visual grammar, in the assurance that sweeps up whole winding valley systems with a brushstroke, then pauses to pick out the individual leaves on the branch of a foreground tree.
She knows her country: the stony hinterland downstream from Ngukurr on the strong-f lowing Roper River. When she was young she used to walk it constantly and explore its every curve and fold and fissure. She belongs to the freshwater Nyameratjara kin-group and speaks the fast-vanishing Mara and Warndarang languages as well as the vivid Roper region Kriol. Her family defines her in Aboriginal art circles. She is the youngest of a group of five redoubtable sisters, the “Joshua girls”: a group that includes well-known artists Dinah Garadji and Gertie Huddleston, whose naive, Edenic landscapes were once much in vogue. George used to paint flowered scenes and Bible cameos that resonated with the spirit of her strong Christianity.
“I always felt I wished I had the seed to plant flowers,” she remembers. “But I realised even when I was a child, and I had chalk to draw with at school, that I can paint them and remake them that way.”
A tone of reminiscence, and re-creation, also suffuses her thoughts as she considers her more recent work, which tends to feature versions of ancestral country and memories of distant battles associated with creator beings, as much as her experience of landscape.
“I used to walk through the valleys and creeks and billabongs, across the rivers: we had to find our own tucker and we knew where to go hunting. Then we’d find a camp for the night. Bush flowers and all that, it was wonderful. Animals, trees, beautiful rocks. I was happy then. When I look at places or imagine them, and I remember I was walking round there, or collecting sugar-bag [a kind of bush honey], or fishing, it makes me sad – a tear comes to my eye, and it reminds me of when I used to walk around with my brothers and sisters, or my mother.”
Yet George’s large canvas has a further aim, beyond serving as a simple memorial to her family’s heritage. The rocks and ranges she depicts are bare and burned. A devastating fire has swept through, disclosing the land’s shape and contours. It is hard not to read the work, which is utterly devoid of human traces, as testament to a cataclysm: an act of mourning after some scorching holocaust.
Fire has special meaning for the artist: she was born on 25 November, a day felt by Roper River people to be linked to the Gunpowder Plot when “fire was burning overseas”. But if the land is scourged and empty, there are still invisible, hinted presences.
“When I was painting that large landscape, I was thinking all the time about that little ghost, Casper, that Friendly Ghost, because I used to watch that Friendly Ghost program sometimes,” George explains. “And so I would call that river the Casper river in my mind, though that’s not its real name. It’s true there’s sadness in my paintings and so you need friendly ghosts to protect you against the darker figures in that landscape, the bad ones. Sometimes when I walk in the night I feel someone present with me, and that’s why I’m not frightened. I know there’s someone watching for me, caring for me, close to me. It says in the Bible we’ve got our own little angel looking after us, you know.”
A second strategy of concealment and revelation is active in the painting. George, for all her fervent Christianity, responds to country as a traditional Aboriginal woman. For her, it is an enlivened landscape, full of sacred places: places that cannot be shown.
“Some areas,” she says, “I just can’t put in. My special area, because there’s culture on tha
t spot. So I have to change it, hide it.”
There is a vividly painted grove of trees that dominates the lower left of this particular canvas: the trunks are sinuously seductive. Some are blazing white, some dark in cloud shadow. They serve to mask the landscape’s most sacred sites. Birds take shelter in the refuge of their leaves and branches, and seem to hint at the possibility of new life rising through the burned, cleansed world.
And yet another veil is cast across the country by the artist’s subjective style. For nothing is precisely rendered here: rather, as Goethe said of his method in Elective Affinities, it is all true, but none of it is real.
George’s long-time dealer, Darwin gallerist Karen Brown, feels the big painting and all the artist’s newer work should be regarded more as “experience of country” than as directly transcribed landscape. The large canvas is painted with an almost classical vanishing point, but from a high aerial perspective its maker could never have glimpsed.
It hardly aims at photorealist accuracy: in fact, its extraordinary colour scheme, its free, sketchy brushstrokes and its inner translucence call to mind romantic or expressionist painting more than some serene Constable account. The hills look like waving dresses in the way they fall; the bare central ridges seem like striated oyster shells; mauve heat haze, trembling, hides the detail in the distance beneath the serrated horizon line.
“I couldn’t believe how I’d done all that, and it looks like a rocky, ragged mountain,” George muses. “It looks hot; the sun’s beginning to go down. I always think in my imagination about that Limmen Bight country, my grandmother’s country. It looks like a ruined city to me, sometimes. I just picture where it is and how it seems. When you listen to the story about a place and look at the picture, then you are really there. When I paint the picture, I always feel it’s like looking at the true country, even if it’s in my mind.”
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