Another Country

by Nicolas Rothwell

  And I am back, at once, on the creaky Jirrawun verandah, watching the kites circling at sunset above the flame-red peaks and the boabs, while the shadows gather and the evening parade of dilapidated four-wheel-drives drifts by. Beside the swags and sofas, in the far corner, immobile, gazing straight ahead, sits Paddy Bedford, PB, a scatter of fresh gouaches strewn before him. On the phone, arguing, waving her hands in a dramatic agony of frustration, Peggy Patrick is busy taking on the whole world’s bureaucracy. Silent, rake-thin, his face almost hidden beneath the brim of his dark Akubra, Rusty Peters is staring out, not just towards the driveway and his battered Hilux, but into a world of geometric archetypes: and Freddie – Freddie is hunched at his table, an austere painted canvas before him, its lines and arcs and fields of colour like an array of emblems, of warnings, full of opened secrets to see and hear.

  Close, despite the distance. Not artists alone, but individuals, with their stories reaching back in time and their longings for the hidden future.

  When I first came upon Freddie, in the tangy, run-down Coles Arcade in Kununurra, the meeting didn’t go too well. He said next to nothing without prompting. His eyes were bloodshot; there was heaviness about him, as if the surrounds were eating into him and using up his energy. The only thing that made him stand out was the restless way he patrolled about the little town’s strange circular street-grid in his official four-wheel-drive. It was hard to miss his surveying, inquisitorial presence, for on the driver’s door was a large sign-panel: “Jirrawun Arts, Mr Freddie Timms, Chairman” – much like the labels head stockmen on Kimberley cattle stations or local state politicians affix to their Toyotas as they cruise through their landscapes.

  Years went by. Freddie’s reserve began to ease: he would try to explain some things about his paintings: always in the form of terse, single-sentence reports. Visits to his own world would always coincide with disasters: a close relative mysteriously slain on the roadside; a young favourite niece dead on the disco-floor at Turkey Creek. The terrible weight of the Kimberley, its past, all the things the landscape hid inside it, seemed to rest on Freddie’s shoulders – and it was only when I could read the presence of this force that his paintings, with their poised finesse and diagnostic clarity, began to come into focus.

  Trips away, though, always went differently. In Darwin, or in north-east Arnhem Land, where Freddie’s grievous duties no longer consumed him, he was a softer man: long, light-hearted conversations, about the different effects of VB and XXXX beer on the creative imagination, or the varying prejudices of northern Australians, would unspool during aimless-seeming drives that always reached their destination at the perfect time. “Ah – sunset on that beach” or “Look – the concert’s just beginning” or “Stop the car: there’s that man I have to see!” And Freddie would stride off, leaving veiled, half-completed strings of thought behind him, and I would see him plunge into the waiting world like some ambassador with protocols and plans of statecraft locked inside his head.

  *

  Sunlight was filtering through the leaves of the ancient Mistake Creek boab: Peggy Patrick, wearing a bright pink top, pink floral dress and smart black court shoes, ran briskly through the events that took place, almost a century ago, underneath the shade of its canopy. Here is where they burned the bodies: here where her grandmother hid away. Notes are taken, documentary pictures too, as though the past could be exhumed, and its flow and run of causes fixed. I was standing off to one side, trying to solve familiar problems: how to behave, at such a place of memory; how to re-imagine the crush of vanished experiences. She came over to me.

  “You’re a good-looking boy,” she said, and glanced down and took my hand, and kissed it, lightly, with the rapidity of a humming-bird, several times. “You like Aboriginal women?”

  “Well, of course,” I was beginning to reply, but Peggy had swept far ahead.

  “I had a white boy, not long ago – here in the Kimberley. He slept with me every night, but he wouldn’t do anything …”

  “That must have been quite frustrating …”

  “But he loved me. I liked him.”

  The light and shade from the boab played on her face. She was standing, by this stage, pressed close up to my side, leaning her weight against my shoulder, the light floral aroma of her scent forming a kind of veil around us as she whispered these confidences.

  “Don’t be so sad about all that history,” she went on. “That was a long time back. There are other stories now.”

  But wasn’t the past imprinted in her thoughts at every second, I wanted to ask, as we picked our way back slowly across the red soil and lush grasses. Didn’t she feel the intruding weight of time shaping her thoughts, crying out, taking possession of her, in just the way it did whenever she sang, in her high, keening voice, ancestral mourning songs?

  “Of course,” she murmured. “Of course I see them all time, my people gone, there’s a big mob of them out here – but there’s this world too. Don’t worry about the old boab tree. That’s all gone now, and we all live here together. The tree – we just paint him to remember him – he’ll be with me even when he’s fallen down.”

  And those words, breezily thrown out beside the highway, as road trains full of condemned cattle from the great stations of the East Kimberley came hurtling past, stayed with me – and I can see Peggy, even as she speaks them, drawing her jet-black, wavy hair from her face, shading her eyes from the burning sun, smiling at the strange patterns and echoes of her frontier life. Far from Mistake Creek, and far away from her, I still know something of the boab’s fate: it fell to the ground, tamed by age, this past wet season during a lightning storm – but it still survives, and puts forth new leaves and sheen-covered pods. And it lives on in colour too, in Peggy’s Andy Warhol painting series, its gaunt trunk against blank colour fields, like a stamped shape of memory, or a sheltering embrace – and the colour of the background, in some of the emailed images I study on my computer screen halfway across the world, is bright pink, and gleaming with the Kimberley light that shone that humid day on Peggy’s startling dress.

  *

  “Winfield Blue - go get him!”

  The master of the painting movement was in a demanding mood. Paddy Bedford gave his wheezy, amiable laugh, and insisted, pointing: “You! – you go get ’em.”

  The late sun glowed on the peak before us. Our long discussion, about colour, and fried kidneys, and the merits of their consumption as an exclusive diet for breakfast, had taken an unexpected turn.

  “Buy them for you …? But you’re a millionaire.”

  And as I said this I could picture, for a moment, the celebrated primal scene, shortly after PB, already in his mid-seventies, sold his first painting, for scores of thousands of dollars, to some distinguished, modernist-accented gallery curator in Melbourne or Sydney, and the cheques came trickling through to the Kimberley. PB went missing, to be rediscovered hours later surrounded by empty bottles of fortified wine and a sprawl of young Gija and Mirriwong women, drunk as a lord, waving his arms with vague expressiveness and shouting, to anyone who came within earshot, “I’m a millionaire …”

  And perhaps, by now, he is, although most of his financial efforts go into expenditure on behalf of members of his extended family, and his needs seem not to extend beyond cigarettes, and kidneys, and a sofa to rest on when his painting arm gives out. When you live on the threshold of a world where ancestor spirits and Dreaming forces hold sway, the anchors binding you have little purchase – although the old stockman in PB does come to the surface from time to time, in startling ways – as when he makes his appearances at gallery openings in hand-tailored Italian suits, clutching an antique, silver-handled walking stick. So: the Win-field Blue request. I headed off, into the dark of Kununurra, searching as I drove for the vanished tribe of teenage girls notionally in the care of Jirrawun, and wondering if they were about to raid the premises of some fast-food outlet again, or if I’d find them camped amidst the shopping trolleys near
Tuckerbox – and this fruitless operation distracted me, and pushed the Winfield Blue question from the forefront of my thoughts.

  When I next saw PB, how profound the sulk! It lasted, in fact, several days, until we undertook an unusual journey together, in time as much as topography, down the winding Wyndham Road, past the castellations and spurs of the Cockburn Range, which were still green-flanked and lush at that early time of year. Eventually we reached the old town graveyard, burial place of Paddy Quilty, the dictatorial station boss after whom, more than eight decades ago, PB was named. We filed into this little enclosure with its jumble of sad, frail tombs – all of us except the inheritor of the name itself.

  “You’re not coming in, Paddy?”

  “Why should I go see that old fucking bastard,” he spat out, the f, of course, rendered as an abrupt Gija p-sound with the lips – and in that response all the depth and scale of master–servant relations, of intensity and violence on the old runs of Bedford Downs, lay revealed.

  Some days more, and we stood together before another graveyard, amid the coiled hills of Bow River, grandest and most expansive of the stations carved from the East Kimberley bush a hundred years ago. Here, beneath a scatter of plastic flowers, in a heaped grave, rests the old Bow River boss, the unseen animating presence and chief visionary of Jirrawun. This time, PB, beside the other artists present, approached slowly, wracked by sobs and tears, as if the grief of parting with the dead man, dead for years, was striking him that moment for the first time – as if he could no longer even breathe for sadness. He lowered his head, and took off his Akubra, and held our hands for support. And it seemed to me then that the lines and sweeps and swathes of colour in his paintings and gouaches spoke not just of charming Dreamtime figures and their ceremonial landscapes, but of all that remembered love and pride and anger burning in the artist’s heart, burning now, like a hidden, unquenched bushfire, across all the Gija realm.

  Baghdad, 2005

  Peppimenarti

  THE PLAINS OF PEPPIMENARTI, green and lush, are glinting in the wet-season light. Dragonflies flit above the pools of water in the road; kingfishers streak between the white gums and pandanus trees. Out past the old wooden stockyards, where Slim Dusty once lent a hand, stretch paddocks full of cattle and marauding buffalo. There’s a creek crossing close by, rich in turtles, black bream, barramundi. Everything is exploding in colour, sensual richness and growth, here beside the shining flood plain, at the remotest north-west tip of the Northern Territory. Peppimenarti is home to a community of 300 people; home, too, of Aboriginal Australia’s most immediately seductive painting movement.

  It was only after a brief, instructive visit to an international contemporary art biennale held at Noumea’s Centre Jean-Marie Tjibaou in 2001 that the women artists of “Peppy” began painting. At once, the canvases they produced had a distinct air of resolution, a completeness and authority.

  Word spread fast: by 2003 Regina Wilson, the undisputed queen of the Peppy circle, had won the general painting prize at the Telstra Aboriginal Art Award. Group and solo shows of work by the star Peppy artists are now a regular feature of the Sydney and Melbourne gallery scenes.

  The translation has been rapid: from bush to city; from a painting workshop in a converted “silver bullet” trailer to glass-fronted gallery spaces. Much more momentous, though, has been the transfer of idea and of technique that gives the art of Peppy its virtuosity and its appeal.

  Wilson and the other painting women, Theresa Lemon, Margaret Kundu and Mabel Jimarin, take their inspiration from a traditional form. Their art begins in weaving; they are bringing out, on canvas, in paint, many of the colours and the patterns that fill their teeming natural world.

  In similar fashion, the best-known male artists from their region now paint, on canvas, fine circles and arcs – echoes of the symbol-laden fretwork that once was carved on ceremonial spearheads and spear-throwers.

  Wilson herself is pretty clear about what’s happened; the art’s first, transforming move. “My painting is about my weaving and my mother’s weaving,” she says. In fact, her mother was the most celebrated weaver in the Top End, and made not just dillybags and narrow-necked canoe-bags but elaborate “syaw” fish nets, of the kind that had been used for river-hunting by generations of her ancestors. In the early days, these were made with palm leaf and vine fibre, and brightly dyed in contrasting colours. “We’re teaching our children now,” says Wilson, “so they don’t forget what we were doing before. That’s why our painting, that idea, went from weaving into the canvas: We’re proud of it. So when we pass away our children can take it on.”

  The story of this art is also, inevitably, the story of the community itself. Peppy was an isolated stock camp in the days when Slim Dusty sang about its plains and anthills. It was established as an Aboriginal outpost more than thirty years ago, under the dynamic impulsion of Wilson’s late husband. Its founders were making a conscious departure from the nearby Catholic mission of Daly River; they wanted to preserve the traditions of their parents, who stemmed from the tribes of the coastal plains and the inland ranges.

  “We’d talk about them,” remembers Wilson, “how they used to make mats and catch fish. They’d dry their fish nets, roll them up, and then walk on, for weeks, from here all around the gulf, as far as where Western Australia is now. They would swim the creeks and rivers: they were really hard, those days.”

  The women artists can still picture the time when they were all young girls growing up in the mission compound: “The old people would walk up, with their big fish nets and bags, they’d cross the Daly in the flood-time to come and visit us there – they’d stop a couple of months and then walk back: that’s how far they would travel on foot.”

  And the emblems of that tradition are still being made at Peppy today. Just as before, the dillybags and canoe-bags, the mats and nets are being woven from the fibres of the sand palm and the vine, and stained in the blue dye of the mimeli berry, or the orange-red roots of the “colour tree”. Those ancestral patterns lent their stamp to the first paintings the Peppy women made.

  Wilson’s initial canvas hangs in the council offices: it is a carryover, painted stitch by stitch, of a traditional woven design. “I didn’t know how to paint at first,” she says. “All I had were ideas from weaving.”

  Very soon, though, there was an abstraction from the original thought: the constant, subtle modulation that marks out Wilson’s current work began. The paintings she and her fellow artists make now are both art product and record of a process; the unending detail of their pattern-creation can consume a week, or a month, in the painting room – a month in which the painter’s thoughts will return insistently to the old, lost days she is recreating, streamlining in the realms of geometry and imagination.

  In much the same way, Theresa Lemon, who lives at Emu Point community, just a short air hop from Peppy into the rugged hills, takes old styles and turns them to unfamiliar ends. Lemon’s early canvases also display a precise, near-obsessive detail of brushwork: the weaver’s legacy. But she is not just evoking the rhythms of a craft; she is plunging into colour – the deep blue of the mimeli berry, the fiery red of the fish-trap dye.

  These colours themselves imply the Top End’s rhythms. Lemon’s paintings – which may depict, for instance, both the pale flowers of the mimeli and its bluish berry-clusters – betray a certain preoccupation with the cycles of becoming and passing away, with the mark of time.

  And so with the other artists: old patterns yield fresh fruit. Incised spears become shimmers of line on ground; woven sun-mats turn into a whirling painted galaxy, while basket designs re-appear as fields of shimmering growth and form. Purple and red, orange, yellow, brown, even jet-black – the shades of nature on the flood plain, the dyes lurking in the roots and leaves of the plants and palm trees.

  Much more, though, hides in the thoughts of the men and women living here, as the rain-veils tumble from the clouds, and the sun’s beams pour down between the
rainbows. A new way of conceiving tradition has begun to emerge in Peppimenarti. Perhaps the originality of that conception, as much as its truthfulness to memory, accounts for the appeal these paintings make to outside eyes.

  Ernabella

  SOMETIMES THE GREATEST BREAKTHROUGHS come by pure serendipity: a stray word, a chance meeting, a sudden gesture reveals the road ahead, the way a creative individual or a school must take to fulfilment. And so it proved, some four years ago, in a back room of the crowded arts centre at Ernabella, in the remote Musgrave Ranges of desert South Australia.

  It was late in the day. A group of Pitjantjatjara women, all established painters and batik artists, were gathered in the newly finished ceramics studio. Merran Hughes, a visitor from Alice Springs, and an impresario of the Centre’s celebrated Beanie Festival, paused on her way out, and glanced down at the table, where a spherical terracotta vase lay, unfired, with a cutting tool close by. “Do you know how to do sgraffito?” she asked the ladies around her, casually, and made a demonstration mark on the curved surface.

  Beside her, Malpiya Davey, one of the emerging stars of the local painting and print-making tradition, picked up the cutting tool and filled out the design. It was clear in that instant that something beautiful and new had just been made. A world of potential had opened up.

  A few seasons on, Ernabella’s fine art ceramics have won fervent admirers across Australia. Exhibitions have been held, collections, both private and public, are being formed, the artists are exploring the possibilities of their medium almost daily in new ways. Even the most casual eye can catch the magic in these pieces: the interplay between design and surface contour, the elusive meander in the decorations, the desert echo in the ochre colours of the fired clay.