Another Country

by Nicolas Rothwell

  There was also a need for history to be set down – in paint. A set of major canvases documenting the mining years at Wingellina from the ’60s on was dispatched to Warburton’s Tjulyuru Gallery for a landmark exhibition tracing the activities of geologists and mining companies in the Western Desert. The Wingellina canvases were the key component of that show: the largest, and most striking, Bill’s Story, a group work by the senior men, depicts in lyrical dissolves of colour a mysterious episode in which a chrysoprase miner accidentally dynamited himself.

  Perhaps the most intriguing of the ideas Dent and her painters came up with was the ultimate free-market scheme to solve their financial shortfall: they would put their paintings directly to the test. In co-operation with gallerist Vivien Anderson, Dent arranged to hold a direct auction of Irrunytju canvases at Sydney sale house Cromwell’s in August 2003. A blaze of painting followed: in the event, seventeen of the eighteen canvases on offer sold – a painting by Tommy Watson fetching the top price of $36,300 – and the total realised at the auction exceeded the $100,000 target required to keep the arts centre going. This kind of self-financing was, to put it mildly, unusual in the subsidy-addicted Aboriginal art world.

  However, rivalries had by then deepened at Wingellina. A climac tic meeting had been held in the community, ostensibly to discuss the arts centre’s incorporation. Several social fault-lines had developed: between factions among the local advisers; between those in favour of a nearby nickel project and those against; between a group of traditional owners, mostly younger men, and those long-time residents whose own country was far distant.

  Dent was on the wrong side of these divides. A couple of her key supporters were away. She herself, her presence, had become a point of contention. Heartbroken, she realised she would have to leave everything she had helped build up. She drove out from the Irrunytju Arts Centre, heading slowly towards Adelaide.

  The artists were in a fury of despair. Some resolved to abandon the community in their turn. The Wingellina renaissance – one of the most surprising, most poignant chapters in the modern story of the desert – seemed to be over.

  But the key to desert tales is that their twists can never be caught in advance. What the saga showed was rather how fragile a new wave breaking in the hectic world of indigenous art can be. Things came together at Irrunytju Arts, and for a brief interlude, something wonderful was made in conditions of deep adversity.

  “It sounds like a mad opinion,” says one Alice Springs arts adviser who followed the Wingellina episode. “But matters may well have turned out then the right way: these splendid paintings were created, the power of those artists was displayed to the world: then, suddenly, at the absolute peak, when everyone was begging for Irrunytju paintings – wham: the whole thing seemed to be gone.”

  For many art lovers who regard the Aboriginal painting movement as a way of delighting outside society while generating revenue, pride and cultural strength for remote indigenous communities, this argument may be a little hard to take. But it has a kind of logic: Is a renaissance not somehow more perfect for being brief as a supernova’s glare rather than having a protracted, disappointing afterglow?

  In retrospect, those few months when the first, splendid phase of painting was under way in the little hutch in Wingellina, when there were twenty or more artists struggling for floor-space and canvas, had their own shape and value. They will be remembered for their jewel-like intensity.

  In fact they may well be understood in time as one of the purest sunset gleams to come out of the Western Desert – for the last men and women raised with traditional beliefs, in pre-contact conditions, are all passing away now, and what follows them, what comes from their children raised in bush communities rather than beside desert rockholes, will be something new, and very different.

  On the day Dent decided she would have to leave Wingellina behind, I ran these ideas past her. “You mean it was all for the best?” She paused for a while. “Well,” she said eventually, “I must say, over the years I’ve been out here, I’ve been thinking about that: what the artists were aiming at, what they had in mind when they were coming to me and telling me they wanted an arts centre.”

  She’d concluded that they wanted to paint because “it was the way they could prove what they really were, and still are – giants, giants of grace and beauty in their desert landscape. Art was the only way they could show themselves to their community, and to the world.”

  And so a cycle in the story of Western Desert art came to a close. Its patterns, though, still repeat, in a strangely concatenated way. Amanda Dent’s stay at Wingellina was mirrored by the tenure of another dedicated co-ordinator, Mary Knights, who remained in the community until mid-2006, restored its reputation for artistic creativity, and wrote, on the basis of her experiences there, a dazzling monograph, simply titled Irrunytju Arts. Tommy Watson rapidly consolidated his position as one of Australia’s best-known indigenous artists. Private dealers were strongly attracted to the Wingellina school: they pounced, and tempted several of the most established painters, chief among them Tommy Watson himself, away from the Irrunytju Arts fold. Wingellina community remained divided by fine-grained, fierce local power politics. And Amanda Dent herself returned, in triumph, to the desert, and started up her own arts centre, Tjungu Palya, close by in the Pitjantjatjara lands. Repetition, variation: the elusive, rhythmic glow of the Tjukurrpa’s light.

  Jirrawun: Beyond the Boab

  IT BEGINS IN ONE SENSE HERE, the modern story of the East Kimberley, a vexed, disjointed, highly coloured tale: right here, in soft scrub land beside a shady, spreading boab tree. This is Mistake Creek, where one day early in the previous century a group of Peggy Patrick’s maternal Gija ancestors was ambushed, shot dead and burned.

  “That’s the place where my mother’s mother was killed; her own father, own mother, own brother, own sister. Only four survived. The really young ones they killed with a stick.”

  From this spot, guided by Peggy’s signs and words, one begins to see a rich, imprinted landscape all around. Close by to the east rise the pink-hued Carr-Boyd Ranges and, on their flank, a vast diamond mine’s stepped, despoiling open cut. Just west is Turkey Creek, an Aboriginal town with fourth-world living standards, where Peggy stays from time to time. Northwards lies Warl-pawun, where her brother, Gija leader Timmy Timms, first formed his proposal for a sustainable, artistic, economically independent indigenous community.

  That dream, that transcending of the past, was to be fulfilled, or so its gleaming blueprint ran, at neighbouring Bow River, a one-million-hectare cattle station on prime pastoral land. It has been pursued and cajoled into life over recent years with funds from a most unusual donor: Argyle, the company that operates the diamond mine and has been the protagonist in an act of consistent cultural patronage without parallel in Australia.

  The Kimberley’s tangy, long-preserved frontier style was already changing when Brendan Hammond, a venturesome South African executive, arrived in the late 1990s to run Argyle, the jewel in mining multinational Rio Tinto’s Australian empire. Hammond moved his family to Kununurra, a modern settlement built as the centrepiece of the Ord River irrigation scheme.

  It was a place where cultures met and clashed. Aborigines, jobless since the contraction of the pastoral industry, walked the streets. The European population, mostly horticulturalists, tourist traders and mine-site contract workers, maintained their separate realm. An atmosphere of waiting hung above the little town: waiting to see if the ambitious stage two of the Ord project would go ahead; to see if there was truth to rumours that the Argyle mine would close; above all, to hear the outcome of a far-reaching native title claim that had asserted control over much of the region.

  It was hard for Hammond not to make comparisons with his background, hard for him not to want to make a difference. Meanwhile, the mining world of Northern Australia was changing. The Native Title Act may have accomplished next to nothing – but it did, through its negotiation clau
ses, make forced allies of miners and indigenous people. And Rio Tinto, a fairly cerebral multinational, had read the signs early, leading a philosophical realignment of the industry. No longer were Aboriginal land-holders enemies to be manipulated and steamrolled; they were part of the landscape, the fundamental interest group to be worked with.

  But how? The standard script was well-worn: employment, training, all the tools tried by government departments, even if they were deployed with much more urgency.

  Rio Tinto’s brains trust, led by Paul Wand, head of its foundation, and Bruce Harvey, an effervescent geologist, came up with a blueprint. The way ahead was to create robust regional economies and make Aboriginal communities into helpers, to go beyond just paying rent, and to start developing the social potential of regions where long-term mines were in place.

  There was an end in view – Hammond, like other Argyle managers before him, wanted to take the mine underground to unlock the billions of dollars worth of diamond pipes that must be lurking deep in the volcanic rock. To do that, he would need a new agreement with the traditional owners, who had long been appalled by the scant crumbs tossed them in the mine’s early days. Hammond and Argyle needed a new climate: you could almost say a partnership.

  Out in the domain of the Gija, developments were also under way. The old people, the last survivors of “the time of fear” when killings stained the country, were dying out and with them their memories were vanishing as well. A new generation was growing up into unemployment and alcohol. The one obvious hope lay, bizarrely enough, in the preserving force of culture – more specifically, art. The East Kimberley school had begun in strange circumstances in the ’80s when Rover Thomas, a stockman from down the Canning Stock Route, began painting as a result of a prophetic dream.

  “Rover was one of the wildest cards you’d ever want to meet,” remembers Kununurra gallery owner Kevin Kelly, who presided over the artist’s last, great painting years until Thomas’s death in 1998. “He was the first Aboriginal person from up here to have modern shows in big cities, and it all began through ceremony and the need to create images to tell the story.”

  Now his lush, minimalist works are the most expensive and most keenly bought-up paintings in the indigenous art market. Together with his fellow innovators, Thomas had shown how to communicate a tale in paint to the wider world and also make tradition yield returns.

  This example was in the thoughts of Gija leaders in mid-2000 when, faced with the collapse of the local outstation corporation, Timms sat down to craft his plan for the future. He also knew that the troupe of Gija performers, which he had led with Peggy Patrick, had just been the hit of Darwin’s Telstra Aboriginal Art Awards. They had displayed there, for the first time to Western eyes, a sombre dance ceremony brought to being by old artists years before.

  Timms’s vision was at once practical and multiple: he wanted to build a viable community based around a working cattle station run by Aboriginal stockmen, with school, art studio and dance ground. There would be professional dancers and painters, this place acting as both a nursery of culture and memory and a foundation for economic independence. The plan, presented to government and the corporate sector, was just what Argyle and Rio Tinto had been looking for.

  But the world of the Kimberley being hard and full of obstacles, the utopian future began to go wrong. On the last day of the last millennium, Timms, in his mid-eighties, died. His funeral at Bow River, attended by 1,200 people, was for many of those present one of the most charged events of their lives. A violent wet season storm sprang up at its close and double rainbows stretched across the sky. The old leader lies in Bow River’s handsome cemetery now, his clap sticks and didgeridoo upon a bed of plastic flowers – and without his guiding presence, family disputes have cast insistent shadows over the cattle station he chose as his people’s new foundation ground.

  The flimsier-seeming artistic wing of his enterprise, though, has flourished, largely thanks to a helper figure so implausible that no self-respecting novelist would dare dream him up.

  *

  It was in the mid-’90s in Little Collins Street that a Melbourne art scene enfant terrible named Tony Oliver first met and became fast friends with Gija painter Freddie Timms, son of the old Bow River boss. Oliver had in his art-school days set up Reconnaissance, a short-lived, ultra-contemporary space in Gertrude Street, Fitzroy. He was a former under-19s Victorian Football League star. He had known and exhibited Andy Warhol. He was, in short, not your usual Aboriginal art adviser.

  At a hinge-point in his life, Oliver went with Freddie Timms to the Kimberley, moved into Crocodile Hole outstation and set about rewriting the rules of the indigenous art game. He introduced the Gija artists to the consignment system so the painters would own their works until they sold and then receive a percentage rather than the usual cash pittance up-front. He staged a sellout show for Timms at Frank Watters Gallery in Sydney. New artists emerged. A collective was formed, given the name Jirrawun – “one”, or “unity”. Gradually, the artists reconceived their work, began painting on a large scale and showed their ochred images in Western contexts. They came to look almost like modernists, and Timms, on a stroll through some exhibition down south, might even give a private smile of acknowledgment as he glided past a Mondrian or Rothko and recognised kindred spirits.

  Yet the Jirrawun group were grand, traditional Gija men and women. There was Paddy Bedford, star of them all, a slight figure in his eighties. There was Rusty Peters, a tall, rake-thin horse-breaker who spent five years reflecting in silence before committing his life philosophy to paint. And as driving force among them there was Timms, former head stockman on Lissadell, a soft-speaking figure whose love for the Hornblower television series had led him to adopt a short-bob ponytail.

  Together, these artists acted on Oliver – they “grew him up” in their way as much as he shaped them. This was the point of Jir-rawun and the secret of its wider success: it was a hybrid art that brought something of the East Kimberley’s scale and depth to inner-city gallery walls. It brought history as well.

  Bedford, Peters and the other senior artists depicted not merely the vast landscapes of their country but also the things that had happened there. Governor-General William Deane chose on his last official engagement in mid-2001 to visit the Mistake Creek massacre site and express, beside the giant boab, his personal grief and regret. An unlovely historical controversy followed over graves and dates – but the evidence was coming out.

  Indeed, by the end of 2002 it was plastered on the walls of galleries and art museums across south-eastern Australia when Jir-rawun had solo or group shows at GrantPirrie Gallery in Sydney, William Mora and Gould Contemporary in Melbourne. Its artists were the centrepiece of the Art Gallery of NSW’s East Kimberley survey, True Stories, and the Ian Potter Museum of Art’s Blood on the Spinifex, a visual and topographic record of early massacres – twelve works of cool, quiet loveliness. In the years since that initial explosion of success, Jirrawun’s star has continued to rise; Paddy Bedford was the subject of a 2006 retrospective at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and the younger Jirrawun painters have demonstrated a remarkable capacity both to remain true to their initial themes and to modulate their styles.

  Above all, Jirrawun has fulfilled its artists’ greatest wish and brought their stories out from the Aboriginal art ghetto into the watching world. The year ahead is bookmarked for an assault on the international art arena, but already Timms, Peters, Bedford and their companions have breathed fresh life into the Kimberley’s long-forgotten past.

  *

  The intriguing question remains: What precisely did Argyle Diamonds and parent company Rio Tinto want from all this goodwill expenditure? The answers are multiple, for mining corporations, like most collectivities, are coalitions of contending interests. On one level and in the absence of effective governmental programs, Argyle was simply fulfilling the lead development role and promoting its cherished dream of a robust regional economy.


  At a more basic level, executives such as Hammond, who have felt the bite of Kimberley life, believed that funding culture in a damaged landscape was the right thing to do. And there are specialists in the field who know, and say so in soft voices, that the clock hands in much of Gija country stand at a quarter to midnight. Without concerted revival efforts, when the older generation has gone, a kind of anarchic, mine-threatening social meltdown could result.

  Underneath it all, as cynics quickly claimed, was the bottom line. Hammond completed his time in the Kimberley, and moved on. Argyle reached an agreement with the Kimberley Land Council, and is now pressing ahead with its underground mine – a project that should yield handsome profits down the years.

  But there is still another way to conceive of the story of Jirra-wun and its unusual early sponsor: disturbance of the country has helped fund new life. A familiar kind of circle is being traced. Once, in the Gija’s ever-plastic story system, the Dreamtime barramundi, hunted by her enemies, leaped high through a pass in the ranges, leaving her white, diamond-like scales upon the rocks – where Westerners, at last, would find them. And so today the bleak frontier history of the East Kimberley is yielding its seed in turn for new, redemptive forms of art.

  Jirrawun: Beyond the Frontier

  OFTEN, WHILE DRIVING THROUGH the outlying Iraqi desert, hurtling past its bleach-pale sand-dunes, I see them, for they have become a part of me – just as they linger in the minds of many who meet and come to know them: the artists of Jirrawun, those kings and queens of the East Kimberley. It might be a stray sight or sound that brings them back to me, or some sentence or gesture of theirs might come to the surface of my thoughts – but most frequently I think of Jirrawun for a different, more specific reason: as I drive past a wrecked, burning vehicle from some military convoy, or the remains of an IED attack along the Baghdad International Airport Road, or as a roadblock manned by dubious-looming paramilitaries looms ahead, my fingers close around a little piece of ochre I always carry with me as a guardian charm, deep in my coat’s inmost pocket – it is white, with pink hues shot through it, like a constant, mineralised, Kimberley dawn: and I see Freddie Timms leaning towards me, handing me this piece of country and murmuring, “We’ll be coming with you in your head – you won’t be lonely. Just remember us.”