Coming to terms with a new-made painting of this scale and ambition is never straightforward. But My Imagined Country sets many thoughts in train. It encourages the viewer to travel further into George’s universe, where harsh land is intimately rendered and the artist always seems to be standing by one’s side. It calls to mind the long tradition of indigenous landscape painting, from Albert Namatjira to today’s master of the central ranges, Billy Benn. And it suggests the depths that can lurk beneath a surface painted in acrylics over a few days in a Winnellie workshop shed. Colour balance, subtle shades of variation, effects of scale and distance – all these lead the eye up the bright blue, winding Roper River, to an appointment with the sublime.
Joan Stokes
THERE IS A FAMILIAR, distinctly conventional template these days for the established stars of remote Australia’s indigenous art domain. Their work will be austere, and finely detailed, heavy on the Dreaming and the totem, yet almost devoid of personal experience or individual world view. What, then, are we to make of the vivid, driven, utterly unexpected Joan Nancy Stokes, a Warramungu woman, from a traditionally-accented background, whose fiercely coloured works are figurative, drenched in subjective messages, rich in the joy and pain of nostalgic memory?
Her story alone sets her apart, and suggests how broad-brush and reductive our stereotypes of “proper” Aboriginal art have become. Unlike most contemporary indigenous master artists of the Centre and the North, Stokes comes neither from the sand-ridge deserts nor from the tropical stringybark forests of Arnhem Land. She is from the elusive Barkly country, the endless-seeming tableland that stretches from Tennant Creek as far as the Queensland border and Camooweal.
Her paintings are not the minimalist creation narratives or the highly patterned, cross-hatched works we now anticipate from desert or Top End artists addressing the contemporary market. It would be hard to imagine Stokes’s paintings entombed as blown-up signifiers of difference on the walls and ceilings of a fashionable Paris museum. Rather, they are celebrations of the universal texture of human experience: specific, recollected scenes, evocations of a social landscape, life-sketches from the last days of the pastoral frontier – but seen from the Aboriginal perspective, and captured by an indigenous eye. Stokes’s trademark works show large swathes of country, filled with human incident and movement; all the detail of the stock-camp life is there: the rolled-up swags, the cattle and the bridled horses, the Aboriginal stockmen and their families in jeans and workboots pausing for a mug of billy-tea. This – life in the landscape – is her urgent, constantly retraced core subject, but she ranges much more freely. She paints the history of Australia, the tragic impact of settlement, the depredations of alcohol, the proud departure of Australian troops for the Gulf War, even the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York.
Stokes was born forty-five years ago at old Frewena Roadhouse, near Tennant Creek, just as the pioneering era was coming to a close in the northern cattle country. She was brought up on Rockhampton Downs station, where she roamed free, and mixed happily with the stockmen and managers, black and white. An intense love for those days suffuses her paintings: although she is depicting a worked, transformed, colonised landscape, they seem like recollections of paradise from an exile’s standpoint. While she was young, her beloved father, John Jangala, also told her the tales of his own early life, and through his words she felt the shadow cast by the stolen generation era. This recollected storyscape forms the core of Stokes’s art, and almost all her most successful paintings deal with her own reminiscences, or with Jangala’s journey through the stock-camp world.
“I remembered everything I lived through, and I concentrated hard on everything he told me,” Stokes says, in her clear, precise way. “I really want to tell the world that story. In my society, we always tell verbally. It’s in our memory. So I suggest that our history is through our knowledge.”
Memory; knowledge. Those were the sparks that burned inside Joan Stokes as a young girl. When she was about ten years old, she began a private knowledge campaign of her own: she taught herself, in the most painstaking way, to read and write, borrowing books, tracking and decoding the signs on their pages. She would be locked up in library rooms overnight by accident. Soon it became clear she had exceptional gifts: she was sent off to school in Darwin, and her trajectory into the world of recorded narrative was set. At twenty, she moved away for good from the station country, to Tennant Creek, then north; she became a teacher and eventually a medical receptionist.
In her early adult years she suffered in an abusive marriage. Members of her family began to die from the plague of alcohol. Her natural response was to write, to fix their memories on paper, and her own. The first result was “Soul Mates”, the story of her parents’ lives, a narrative of almost unbearable immediacy and subjective force. “It was one winter night,” it begins, “as the trees and the grasses were moving vigorously to the howling wind, the cold breeze hitting the little girls’ tiny faces making them cry for their mothers’ warm hug. The news had reached the mission that the police were coming in the morning to collect the half-caste children …”
About six years ago, Stokes walked into a smart Darwin exhibition space with some sketches under her arm, and a notebook full of stories. “I want to be a painter,” she said, and showed off her early efforts, and keen-eyed gallerist Karen Brown snapped her up. “Painting just came to me,” Stokes reflects. “I would admire the work of other artists, then I started off doing some drawings, and that made me realise – that I was an artist on the inside.”
It’s been a swift learning curve, from Stokes’s first exhibition, heartbreakingly entitled The Richness of My Life and Culture, with its bleak depictions of alcohol, family disruptions and death, through to her latest solo show, held last year, a dreamy pastoral retrospective – We are the Plain Country Barkly Tableland Mob.
While refining her raw painting style, and expanding her field of subjects, Stokes has also continued writing in determined fashion: bush stories, imagined stories, transcriptions into English from the Warramungu campfire legends of her early days. Many of her paintings can be best grasped as illustrations of her personal master narrative: there is a taut, urgent quality to them: they are in fact a pouring torrent of testimonial works, consciously designed as records of a threatened culture.
“When I went to school, and my education grew, I realised many of the children and older people couldn’t catch or understand the past, and many of the younger people were alcoholic, and I said to myself: you don’t get people telling stories any more. So I’m always telling stories in my paintings. For every one of these paintings I’m doing, my children know which painting goes with which story. It’s an educational thing for my people, and for people overseas and interstate. That broadens the story, and the picture of the lifestyle of my people at the time when they were on the stations.”
One of the more striking consequences of Stokes’s chosen theme and subjects is the appeal her work seems to make. Although she was swiftly recognised as “an original”, and selected for group survey shows like the National Aboriginal Art Award, the collectors who respond to her work tend to be entranced by its humanity as much as its Aboriginality. Australians who live on the land, or who remember the tone of the mid-century station culture, stare with knowing eyes on Stokes’s versions of pastoral. The titles of the works alone tell the story: We Go Swimming on the Good Old Playford River, Smoko-time, Boys, or The Black Riders are Stuntsmen. But Stokes is not some treacly indigenous Pro Hart knock-off. No one who has glanced at her accounts of the Australian past will forget her haunting Ned Kelly series, nor her scything record of first settlement, with a uniformed company climbing ashore at Botany Bay, above the devastating, all-describing caption: “The Beginning of the End.”
In fact, Stokes is something much more intriguing than a mere bush artist, and much more uncommon. She is a hybrid fig-ure, both deeply traditional in her cultural patterns and private resonances, and highly f
ormed in the subjective patterns of Western art. At once individual and familial, modern-minded and respectful of the fast-vanishing past, inclined to minutely detailed picture-making and afloat also on a stream of words, she switches between her influences, infusing the strengths of each into the other, producing the jar and shock of a novel vision.
Inevitably, there is a yearning tone about her remembered landscapes, and the warmth and tenderness of the stock-camp life she shows – but the close pressure of these memories is what serves Stokes as her chief creative spur. The latest series of paintings she has executed are large, loose-painted, rhapsodic green gardens, gardens of plenty shot through with the shades of eucalypt and coolibah, of riverweed and Mitchell grass.
“In the time when our ancestors were always walking the country proudly, they sang songs and did corroboree to respect the spiritual ancestors and that’s why the country is so fruitful,” says the artist, by way of gloss on these new works, before recalling her own mother telling her “in touching voice” that “this here is the blackfella’s garden.” The past of ceremonial traditions is thus rescued from oblivion, and conceived anew in tones of tranquil defiance, through the white world’s words.
Art of this retrospective kind, like much of the finest Aboriginal art, raises the question of return – and return is a problem much on Stokes’s mind. After all, Frewena Roadhouse and Rock-hampton Downs are just a day’s drive down the Stuart Highway from Darwin: her country is hardly in some remote, unreachable location like the far-off, near-mythic homelands of the Western Desert artists. But Stokes feels all the ambivalence of an artist who knows she feeds off distance, and who understands the sundering effects of loss and time.
“I still have that pain for home,” she says. “It’s permanent. So I’m going to go back, maybe, one day, with my children and grandkids, and take some pictures of where I grew up, and that old roadhouse that was our holiday camp. What I liked about it was just putting up the tent and living in the bush – free. And when I go down the track, and pass that country, I long to turn off, you know, and go there – but I’m not prepared to go back at the moment.
“Maybe one day, when I have my children all together, it will be a relief thing for me, taking them back, and telling them, this is what it was like when I was a kid, the way my father told me, this is how it was. Only I’m not sure” – and now her voice falls soft – “I’m not sure that I can handle it.”
But she handles it, of course, constantly, and effortlessly – she is there in her mind’s eye, and in her art, every day.
V. DREAM PLACES
Warburton
UPON A LOW PROMINENCE beside the deep red Great Central Road, more than 600 kilometres east of Kalgoorlie and 1,200 kilometres west of Alice Springs, a strange building, all fluid perimeter curves and rippling roof lines, looms among the sandhills.
Here, at the far-flung Aboriginal community of Warburton, the remotest settlement of any size in Australia, a remarkable museum, gallery and cultural precinct – something living, experimental, and quite unlike the glassy art palazzos of coastal capitals – now stands open. Within the Tjulyuru Centre, pride of the Ngaanyatjarra people of the Western Deserts, one finds not just the rich, tapestry-like canvases of the Warburton Art Collection, but a grand, long-held idea brought at last into reality. One finds, too, that rarest thing in the cloistered spaces of a museum environment – artists at work, wandering up and down their gallery, considering and examining their masterpieces, touching them, singing to them, taking in the odd splendour of their surrounds, the freshness of the filtered-air environment contrasting with the blazing sunshine, the ochre soil and dusty spinifex visible outside.
Lalla West, the junoesque and radiantly assured painter of Kungkarragkalpa Tjukurrpa (Seven Sisters Dreaming, 1994), stands beneath her best-known work with a tranquil smile, tracing the narrative of her traditional story through several thousand kilometres of ceremonial journeying. Before a stark, deep-orange canvas depicting elongated lines of waterholes, artist Fred Ward nods gravely and hints at the depth of the subject matter: “Danger, danger,” is all he will say.
Upon a red leather viewing stool, Elizabeth Holland, Pulpuru Davies and several other stars of the Warburton women’s art world rest, and look about their handiwork: “We wanted the cultural centre to be built here,” says Holland, “so we could keep all our paintings and artefacts for our children to see in the future, when we’re all gone. We don’t want them to be away from us, in Perth or in Sydney or Melbourne.”
This sentiment, though, is mere shorthand for an enterprise unique in the Aboriginal art movement’s thirty-year history. Warburton, isolated in the Gibson Desert, came late to painting on canvas and boards, and came with strong ideas about how best to manage the transfer of its sacred material into the Western world while protecting the interests of the Ngaanyatjarra communities.
When the Warburton Arts Project was established in 1990, it was already clear from the example of Papunya and Yuendumu that production could be a form of despoliation. Magnificent pieces were being created only to vanish into the abysses of museum storerooms and private collections. How to ensure that no secret images proliferated; how to protect the cultural heritage of a people defenceless before the power and desire of the art-buying establishment; how, while asserting one’s traditions, not to sell one’s soul?
The first co-ordinator of the project, Gary Proctor, had a vision of a local cultural centre – part keeping-place for old stories and cherished art, part workshop for new ventures. The central element of Warburton’s strategy, though, was decided by the Ngaanyatjarra artists’ new determination to keep their paintings.
A core collection of 300 works, some of them so ritually significant that they can never be viewed by outsiders, was gradually built up. Both manifestos of land ownership and evidence of the continuing power of story and Dreaming tradition across the Western Deserts, these paintings also mark an extraordinary efflorescence of creative energy: an upwelling of colour and pattern fully comparable to the first output of other, better-known Aboriginal art hot spots such as Balgo or Maningrida.
Art from the Ngaanyatjarra lands has been sold during the past decade but chiefly in one form – the art glass, deeply grooved panels bearing traditional patterns, that has become the Warburton trademark in the wider world. The first, tentative steps towards developing an “export trade” in paintings on canvas have only recently been taken, with new art centres being established in small, outlying communities, where jewel-like work is being produced. But few paintings have left the Warburton Art Project’s tumbledown headquarters. The upshot is that this little community houses the most substantial holdings of Aboriginal art in the country under the direct ownership and control of Aboriginal people.
But this strategy, it is now clear, has had its attendant costs: for Warburton paintings simply do not circulate in the art market, or hang in profusion in public galleries. There have, of course, been travelling exhibitions, but the names of senior Warburton artists are scarcely familiar in the big cities of Australia, and the characteristic regional style, the Ngaanyatjarra feel and sheen – these are delights that have long gone largely unknown.
For metropolitan admirers of Aboriginal art, this is an odd state of affairs. You might liken it to having a deep knowledge of the Italian Renaissance while remaining ignorant of the existence of Siena. The analogy is a precise one: Warburton is a crucial element in the Aboriginal tapestry of the Central Deserts. It is in this region that the great westward Dreaming tracks run out.
Many of the artists here are related to the great names of Kintore and Kiwirrkurra, and their canvases comprise a crucial, missing fragment of that complex, interdependent jigsaw first unveiled a generation ago at Papunya. Here are such richly decorated canvases as Mrs Davies’s Yankaltjunkunya (Emu and Turkey Story, 1991), a shimmer of pinks and creams and lilac-blues dissolving into landforms, rockholes and Dreaming creatures; or the Warnampi Kutjarra (Two Mythic Water Snakes, 1991)
of Stewart Davies, coiling their way through landscape between Wiluna and Pukara beneath rain-laden clouds.
Inevitably, though, the long-lasting boom in Western Desert art is at last reaching out towards the Ngaanyatjarra lands, and the first large-scale commercial exhibitions of new art from this tradition are now being staged. This has posed an intriguing question for connoisseurs: for what value should be placed on a new painting by an artist such as Mrs Davies, a figure of commanding cultural and social authority, and a painter whose charm and delicacy hold sharp appeal for Western eyes?
Who will calibrate the secondary market for a new group of masters, none of whose works has yet been offered at auction? Where, too, are the far Western Desert art guides to rival the armadas of books detailing the development of the Papunya school?
Perhaps, though, the most critical issues surrounding Tjulyuru, and all the artists of Warburton, as they gather amid the gleam and dance of their canvases, have to do with the future. It remains unclear just what the next generations of Western Desert artists will paint, or make, and in what style; and the place of an art so deeply rooted in a vanishing traditional way of life is also elusive.
Among the more intriguing pieces in the centre’s opening display are a handful of small, undemonstrative objects: footwear made, almost Meret Oppenheim-style, from tree-bark or from emu feathers. These bush objects, at once practical and imbued with obscure yet profound ritual significance, point to the sunken wellsprings of Aboriginal material culture, and its capacity to innovate and reinvent itself from half-known, submerged aquifers.
Often one feels, in the spaces of Tjulyuru, that one is surveying emblems of a new and unsuspected continent; often, too, that the objects before one’s eyes are at the same time strange, foreign and intimately familiar. Such is the quality – unsettling, humbling, uplifting – of the few galleries that offer their visitors a significant private experience.
Another Country Page 19