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A yellow landscape, with thin figures and rows of twisted van Gogh houses; a blue-washed, crowded bird’s-eye view; a monolith-like range of buildings, ochre-brown – how insistently, how immediately the paintings catch the eye: they have the urgent stab of memory about them, as well as something strange, half-known, new.
Even the formal opening of the first survey exhibition in the Tjulyuru Cultural Centre had an unusual flavour to it: “mission-era refreshments” were passed around – quite appropriately, for the fifty paintings of Mission Time and their accompanying suite of photographs attempt nothing less than a re-examination of a vanished episode in remote Aboriginal community life.
It is a project of a kind hardly seen before in the short, rich history of the Aboriginal art movement: for these paintings do not show ancestral creatures frozen in the ever-present abstraction of the Dreamtime, nor are they depictions of distant ceremonial sites. This is the raw, recent past, gathered up in memory, recorded, poured out in a sudden burst of collective creation – and now added to the Warburton community’s growing painted archive.
It was almost inevitable that the Tjulyuru Centre should eventually turn its attention away from the dotted Dreamtime stories that make up the bulk of Western Desert painting and choose to investigate the recent past. Warburton, after all, has a lot of past for such a small place.
The settlement lies amid a throw of pinkish ranges along the exploration routes traced out in the 1870s by Gosse and Giles. Here, around the rockholes of Milirrtjarra Creek, people from the Ngaanyatjarra language group of the Gibson Desert would congregate in times of drought; and here, in 1933, after an initial survey by R.M. Williams, the United Aboriginal Mission decided to establish its most isolated outpost. For forty years, until the establishment of an autonomous community council in the mid-1970s, the missionaries built up and ran Warburton, overseeing contact with a wide range of desert peoples, providing schooling, medical care and the religious teaching that remains vivid in the Western Desert world.
In many, if not most, of the Aboriginal communities across Australia that came under missionary control in the first half of the twentieth century, those times have become a byword for paternalism and the suppression of traditional ways. Intriguingly, though, as Mission Time makes clear through its paintings and its important catalogue, these decades are recalled now in Warburton as a kind of “golden age, free from contemporary problems of alcohol, petrol-sniffing and competition for limited resources”. The exhibition’s co-curator, Albie Viegas, says, “the memory of the mission is overwhelmingly positive”, even though the paintings record the austere rules and regulations imposed upon the community.
Lalla West smiles as she recalls the mission era of her childhood: “They were good times – our past that we have to remember well.” “Our past” – and hence, of course, the potency of this exhibition, staged in a site close to where the United Aboriginal Mission buildings once stood, and bringing together paintings that recreate the compound, its gardens, garages and playgrounds.
“I can still picture the mission houses,” remembers artist June Richards, “the dining room, where we had to go, line up, march in and say our prayers” – and here it is anew, the map of her memory, turned into the blazing landscape of Early Days.
What we see, then, in these paintings, is Aboriginal history being seized by Aboriginal people, being shaped, rendered, reassessed: an art of the near-present, concerned with the reflection of experience in all its ambiguous complexity – joy and sadness muddled up together.
Something of this quality seems to be caught in the introduction to the catalogue of Mission Time, written by one of Warbur-ton’s most prominent figures, Livingston West. There are times, he says, while driving through the bush, when he comes across the old mission road and wonders to himself just why the missionaries came. “It was like a western movie where people were going into the wilderness. The missionaries went on until they came to Old Well. This is where the spring water flowed and it was like a promised land, and they knew they had come to the right place. The missionaries did their job and then they went.” And what remained? Memories, a new community, a new kind of society with its own fervent blend of Christian and traditional beliefs: art, too, an art that has welled up afresh in recent times as senior men and women strive to pass on the texture of their childhood to the next generation.
“History painting” of this kind is not completely unknown in the Western Desert: there have been isolated instances in the communities of Santa Teresa and Mutitjulu. Never before, though, has there been such a concerted attempt to preserve the fragmenting record of the past – it is almost as if, say the curators, these works represent some kind of “cathartic release”.
None of this, of course, would be of more than local interest were the paintings not as they are: urgent, vivid, full of intensity, of bright movement and life. They are nothing less than a new channel for desert art.
Even the most jaded postmodern art consumer would find it hard not to be swept away by the range of emotions on view in this tightly linked group of works: there are mazy, half-abstract canvases conveying the power relations that once held between the missionaries and the desert people; there are haunting topographical diagrams; there are landscapes, seen from multiple perspectives, that almost cry out for individual, psychological interpretation.
Many of the artists of Mission Time appear to have found the experience of painting about events in their own lifetime curiously liberating. Christine West, artist of Mission Home, perhaps the single most startling image in the show, is a well-known painter in the traditional, lushly dotted Warburton women’s style. “First time I made this one,” says West, “no dots. Because you know, I don’t like dots; they make my eyes go funny.”
There are canvases, too, that capture the overwhelming impression the mission buildings first made on young bush eyes. Phillip West’s intensely observed House, grand and solemn as a rocky outcrop, records in detail the looming structure of the mission garage. It is the artist’s first painting; it is also a re-creation of a house that he built from the ground as a young man.
A “golden age”, then, anatomised – but also an age of stress and strain, half-evident in the segregation, so painfully depicted, of children from parents. June Richards, who grew up in the mission compound not knowing who her parents were, remembers staring out through the fence at the “wild” Aborigines outside, wondering whether she was looking out at her mother and her father; and such memories seem reflected in the double nature of many of these landscapes, with the order and charm of the mission compound half-belied by dark, overhanging, troubling banks of cloud.
“I believe these are very inventive, confident works,” says Viegas, “works generated at a time when a lot of people were painting together, turning over their experiences, bringing them to the surface. They are collective memory recalled in a set of individual ways. They aren’t paintings painted for sale to outsiders, and they certainly aren’t about blaming the missionaries.” In short, the paintings are about the past explored, held up, made present in the most dramatic way – and in these canvases, once more, desert artists are overturning preconceptions and producing new work fit to astonish the wider world.
Wingellina
AROUND WINGELLINA, SPINIFEX and scrub stretch in windswept folds. Even in the hot, wet summer months, this desert community is a hard place, with acute health problems and faintly forbidding atmospherics. All the stranger, then, that one of the most concentrated indigenous artistic renaissances yet seen in Australia should have flowered, and almost as abruptly collapsed, right here.
Some 200 Aboriginal people live at Wingellina. The settlement, no more than a scatter of houses round an airstrip, is also known by the name of a nearby rockhole, Irrunytju. It’s a marginal kind of place, almost lost in the slopes of dunefields, perched just twelve kilometres from Surveyor General’s Corner, the map-point where the boundaries of the Northern Territory, Wester
n and South Australia meet.
It’s also the border post between the two great cultural zones of the Western Desert, the Pitjantjatjara and the Ngaanyatjarra lands, and Wingellina people feel ties both ways. Even the township site is somewhat arbitrary: the community grew up in the mid-1970s around a chrysoprase mine that briefly operated here – and if you run your fingers through the red dust of the streets and walking paths, you can still find cast-off chips of deep-green stone scattered everywhere.
Not much has gone ahead in this corner of the desert since, and only one avenue has really offered itself: for the old men and women gathered at Wingellina knew well that making art – mining culture, you might say – had proved an economic lifeline for other communities through their region. They only had to look around: east and south-east lay the Pitjantjatjara heartlands, home of hardline ritual ceremonies, and well serviced by successful arts centres and craft shops.
West was Warburton, the metropolis of the Ngaanyatjarra world, where an arts project of more than fifteen years’ duration has developed a painting movement into a coherent, evolving school. And northwards, all through the Centre, were communities like Kintore and Kiwirrkurra, Haast’s Bluff and Yuendumu – places that, for a generation, have been world-famous through their art.
Wingellina, though, was not the most promising place for a late entry into this crowded field: it had no arts adviser, no arts centre, and every attempt to secure government funding was turned down.
Into this context, some five years ago, came Amanda Dent, a South Australian, thin, elegant, a jeweller, indeed a human jewel herself: clear-thinking, true-hearted, prepared to engage deeply with the old men and women of the community. Dent realised how keen the desire in Wingellina had become for some – any – kind of outlet.
There were talks among the old ladies. A plan shimmered into view. The women decided they would start up an arts centre themselves. How? By pooling their pension money and starting a second-hand shop. In mid-2001 they were loaned a spare room in the little community hall. They cleaned it up with building materials scavenged from the dump, and collected a stock of merchandise. Dent contacted potential donors of second-hand clothing: St Vincent de Paul, the Quaker Shop, the Balnarring Primary School. A bizarre, indigenous version of the quintessential battler’s success story unfolded, full of turbulent griefs and joys.
“I’d come in cold, of course,” says Dent. “I’d never been to another arts centre so we just invented it as we went along, based on what some of the women wanted to do.”
They set up their tiny quarters, the community paying Dent’s minimal wage, all other outgoings covered by shop proceeds, sale of woven baskets and bush medicines. Canvases were bought. The ladies began to paint. Soon Dent had the sense of being in a whirlwind.
It’s been customary in recent years for there to be an abrupt, impressive release of visual energy when painting begins in a remote Aboriginal community. Something raw and pure tumbles out. With Wingellina, though, with the new-formed Irrunytju Arts, it was much more than that – and I remember with great precision the moment when Dent and the painting ladies unrolled their first batch of canvases before my eyes: What fields of dazzling colour, what mazy, interweaving lines! The richness of altarpieces; the appeal of impressionists.
Dent herself was at a loss to explain how this alchemy was occurring; she, together with her chief co-worker from Wingellina, Jean Burke, had hoped at most for meaningful economic activity. In a little essay, she tried to express her feelings: “The senior artists have powerful spiritual links to the desert, which are associated with the Tjukurrpa (law or Dreaming tracks), based on a network of traditional journeys their ancestors travelled as ‘country’ was forged. Their paintings embody the authority of intimate knowledge; possess abundant beauty, creativity, and integrity. Each painting depicts a fragment of a larger story.”
For Dent, authenticity was underwriting the art. Certain other aspects of Wingellina might also have played a role: it’s hard not to be struck by the extreme contrast between the austere, difficult tone of daily existence on the community, where the clinic is the chief hub of social life, and the serene, tranquil world evoked in the canvases poured out by the senior artists.
A core group of women painters quickly emerged. They have distinctive personalities, which are sharply expressed on canvas. Kuntjil Cooper, whose wandering lines and blocked-out patterns became the first trademark of the Irrunytju style, had a fierce determination to paint and could barely be distracted from her task, in those first, creative months, to take on supplies of food and drink.
Kuntjiria Mick, whose swirling work still shows figurative traces, is almost blind as a result of her exposure to radiation when she lived near the Maralinga test site half a century ago.
Wingu Tingima, in her eighties and to Western eyes the most consistently sublime of all the Wingellina artists, often depicts the Seven Sisters story, a key theme of desert religion. She gives off a kind of pure happiness while painting; the problems in her life seem to focus purely on the puzzle of why her antiquated hearing-aid won’t work.
But these figures seem the very pattern of convention beside Alkawari Dawson, the rake-thin queen of the painting room, whose work forms itself into contorted galaxies of colour and whose character finds release in a baroque penchant for mimicry.
Dent watched this riot of visual splendour unfurling in front of her. “I always believed the quality was there – I suspect it’s every where in the desert,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting it to come out so quickly, though. I certainly didn’t think the centre would become so greatly respected and loved by the artists.”
After a few months, the men of Wingellina became curious. They started coming in and asking for paints and canvas. The first of them was a silent, senior man named Tommy Watson, whose wife had passed away the year before. “He was passionate for very different reasons from the women,” Dent remembers. “The cultural thing of wanting to express something from deep within.”
Watson, a figure of complete solemnity and calm, moved quietly through the little world of Wingellina, surrounded by a large, obedient dog-pack; if asked about his work, he would counter, in those early days, with an offer to take the questioner to his outstation, as if a glimpse at the country would be enough to explain all he paints – the wavy lines of sandhills, the floating shapes and luminous, deep-hued grounds. It was soon apparent to Dent that he was a major creative force, and his work was immediately singled out in the competitions and survey shows that glut the Aboriginal art world.
Other men of similar stature were also coming to the centre, among them the grave, snowy-haired Clem Rictor and the local healing doctor, Nyakul Dawson. These are individuals who, with their tone of abstraction and gravity, seem to have stepped straight from the world of desert song-cycles. Yet in their painting style they are quite different from the women artists: sharper, more prompt and energetic. When they are at work, the men have a tendency to paint early then sit together throughout the afternoons in contemplative silence, looking at their canvases, sometimes singing to them, in a shaded spot just off the Wingellina square.
Amid this progress Dent was troubled by one thing: why were all the painters old people? She concluded that the modern, Western administration of Aboriginal Australia favoured the young, who, as English speakers, held the positions of political power; the senior figures, who were keepers of all the ritual knowledge, had been displaced. Painting was how they could display their authority.
Dent was put in touch with a handful of galleries. Would they like to have a show from Irrunytju Arts? Under strict conditions: group exhibitions only, and separated by gender. The galleries took a look at the images, and jumped. A series of high-profile shows – triumphant shows – were held, in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney – and Wingellina exhibitions are still critical events for connoisseurs today. Even the jaded realm of institutional art collecting took notice: Irrunytju canvases have been snapped up by the National Gallery of Vict
oria, the National Gallery of Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
Cheques were now pouring into Wingellina, and with them came envy. Money is a delicate subject in a community where no one has ever had any to speak of, where jobs and economic activity are almost non-existent, and poverty the standard state of play.
Tensions developed. The senior artists wanted to strengthen their arts centre and deepen their practice, their late-dawning mirror of tradition and the course of their lives. But key figures in the community, which notionally at least owned Irrunytju Arts, were aware of the centre’s profits and wanted them more generally spread: people knew, for instance, that Wingu Tingima was thinking of buying her own Toyota troop-carrier for travels back to her country.
The way these problems are usually managed on remote communities is by placing the arts centre at arm’s length: incorporating it. Dent began thinking on those lines. She had a long-term vision: grow Irrunytju Arts, encourage younger painters, record traditional songs in a heritage project, with the artists taking other members of the community out to their special sites.
Meanwhile, the financial position was, despite all the success, worsening: Wingellina community had run out of funds, while the side-projects were eating up the quarter-share of painting sales that went to the arts centre. Dent hit on several schemes, some with a faint air of desperation about them. She even arranged for her star artists to make little paintings that could be turned into mass-produced magnetic jigsaw puzzles for tourist sales.
All through the mid-months of 2003, there was a mood of consolidation, of resolve hanging over Irrunytju Arts, as if both Dent herself and the key figures in the Wingellina renaissance sensed what lay ahead. An Irrunytju Cultural Heritage Collection, first embarked on some years before, was reactivated, and grew to include fifty major paintings.
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