Another Country

by Nicolas Rothwell

  How to tell the difference between the good galleries, which sell high-value work that has been produced in decent fashion, and the less savoury outlets? It can be hard, especially because the primary efforts of the carpetbagging gallery are devoted to proving its own legitimacy. In fact, the definition of carpetbagging is contentious: some private dealers have strong relationships with their artists, treat them well and receive good art in return. Some new city galleries simply seduce star painters away from their local art centres, operating effectively as “thieves of artists” and undermining the parlous finances of community-based art enterprises in the distant deserts.

  The ambiguity is fuelled by the plethora of trade groups. The Commercial Galleries Association is for the high-end operators. Art Trade, set up by noted industry figure Adrian Newstead, groups together a rather broad church of member galleries. Its head, Ian Plunkett, who runs Japingka Gallery in Perth, believes as much as a quarter of all indigenous art being sold is dodgy. “Greed drives the market now,” he says. “Any other business this size would be regulated.”

  Art Trade has an elaborate code of ethics that its members are required to uphold. But the only sanction that can be applied to a member gallery is expulsion, and complaints can be made only by fellow members. Art Trade has an investigations panel composed of indigenous board members, but it has never gone as far as expelling anyone. Once a former member dropped out of the group before action could be taken.

  Plunkett’s gallery offers customers a money-back guarantee and he thinks this would be a good thing to make standard across the industry. He also believes there should be a set price range for particular artists to prevent rip-offs. But that would be hard to enforce.

  “There’s no doubt the reputation of the industry is at stake,” Plunkett says. “Over the last two years, people have started coming in and asking to your face how much money the artist is being paid for their work. It’s quite confronting. People have heard the stories; there’s an awareness and scepticism beginning that I’ve never come across in any other field.”

  There are three more, outlying circles of the indigenous art galaxy. A secondary market of great power is formed by the big auction houses, which run distinct ethics codes of their own in their respective campaigns to avoid handling carpetbagged art.

  Alongside the gallery system, as a vital support network, are some of the art magazines, glossy on the outside, anodyne within, stuffed full of large gallery advertisements for art of varying quality. Increasingly, complaints are being made to these magazines about their role as legitimisers of unsafe attributions. I have seen samples of this correspondence; suffice to say that the editors of these magazines display, in their replies, a brave confidence in the honesty of the advertisers who keep them afloat.

  And beyond this circle, the last: the outer depths of the internet, where paintings by desert masters are on sale for prices above $50,000, and the rhetoric and sales pitching take on a surreal intensity.

  How does this elaborate market work for an individual artist? Let’s take a prominent example, Makinti Napanangka, one of the most beautiful of the old women painters from Kintore. Makinti is about seventy-five, frail, stick-thin, a princess of great reserve. She speaks barely any English and has a speech impediment.

  Her best work is ardently collected and hangs in all prominent state galleries. It catches the deep desert’s inner light and endless variation. It is easy to imitate but impossible to match. On good days, Makinti can be found cross-legged, painting away at the Kintore painting house of Papunya Tula arts. There are, however, other times when some in her eager extended family, in concert with private dealers, set her up with canvases and paint with her, or for her, or drive her the 500 kilometres into town to work there.

  The canvases done under these circumstances may or may not be autograph. They look very different from her classic style. Makinti tells the fieldworkers at Papunya Tula that when she’s at work for other outlets, she will sometimes paint the lines while her family members paint the circles.

  The carpetbaggers pay cash to her family, and after Makinti has raised a large enough sum for their purposes she may be allowed to go back home. The paintings then go on sale in Alice Springs or in city galleries. They are offered widely. The images of Makinti holding up the art made in her name have an odd resemblance to images of Western hostages in Iraq pleading for their lives. It is not, one feels, the ideal existence for one of the nation’s most treasured artists.

  The key point, though, is that no one has done anything illegal, although an obvious deceit has been committed somewhere along the line. Makinti is fulfilling her cultural duties. Her family is trading an artefact that they have helped bring into being. A private dealer may be slipping them cash for the work, but that hardly makes him unique in the Central Australian environment. He can say he believes he has a Makinti to offer. And the gallery that takes the work and sells it on can claim to be proud it has developed a link with this great painter who also works for the august Papunya Tula. From backyard to drawing-room wall in a few easy steps.

  Reform proposals fill the air. Art Trade, Desart and the Central Land Council all describe the status quo as unacceptable. There are suggestions for a strengthened certificate of authenticity and for an Aboriginal art dealing licence. The National Association of Visual Artists has arranged – guess what! – a consultancy to help draw up a code of conduct for the trade.

  But the problem, of course, is not just technical or legal: it is moral. The dark side of the desert painting trade is a national disgrace, and it is also destroying the broader Aboriginal art industry, the one viable source of income and the one productive economic activity for indigenous people across remote Australia.

  This gold rush is already over, and the integrity of the market has long since been compromised. The case for profound inquiry and a degree of official regulation is unassailable. Perhaps a correction can be achieved in time, but it will require prolonged reflection by gallery owners and, above all, by purchasers on their conduct and their motives.

  There are two distant parallels to keep in mind as one looks at desert art of unclear provenance. One is the slave trade, for there is something unlovely about indigenous Australians being driven, for whatever motives, to subject themselves to labour exploitation.

  And the other is the trade, during and after World War II, in masterworks of Western art expropriated from Jewish households. This art came to be seen, in time, as tainted to an unbearable degree. The work retained its beauty, but the way its new owners had acquired it was increasingly regarded as unjustifiable. And a bleaker prospect awaits as the shake-out in the indigenous art trade begins. For the past three decades, Aboriginal art has been the key channel bridging traditional and modern Australia, bringing together the cities and the remote world. As prominent collector Colin Laverty says, with much sadness: “So far, art has been the key way that Australia at large has come to understand and learn about and have respect for Aboriginal people, and there’s been tremendous respect for the achievements of the artists. So it’s not just monetary value that’s at risk here. If the art is seen as being without cultural authenticity, and it can’t be sold, there could be a lessening of respect for Aboriginal people through that effect.”

  So this affair comes down, inevitably, to the issue of personal responsibility. The cultural climate of a nation is built brick by single brick.

  Art buyer, as you read this, is your conscience clear?

  EPILOGUE

  Journey to Yankaltjunku

  IN LATE APRIL SOME YEARS AGO, at the onset of the winter season, when the cold nights and clear skies come, I took up an invitation from my Western Desert friends to travel out with them into their country, which had lain unvisited for decades. I drove off in the grey dawn from Yulara resort west towards Warburton, through the landscape of dune-fields and desert oak groves round Docker River, past the curve of the Rawlinson Ranges and the tall white radome of Giles weather station, tur
ning over recent episodes in my life as the hours passed, and yearning for a spell of silence to chart a course ahead.

  I had my misgivings about the journey, for the long bush trips of those years, designed to collect evidence for claims to native title, had something of the military expedition about them, and I was unsure, too, whether the deep desert, alive with its ancestral presences, would be the best place for me in my unsettled state, poised as I was between projects, with all my most cherished convictions wavering.

  But those misgivings pale beside the ones that fill me now, as I gather up my notebooks full of jottings, pull from between their pages the scraps of card and folded paper smudged by engine grease or kangaroo blood, and call to mind those days, which lifted me to the stars with happiness, and brought me down into the pits of grief, until the link between the two, that we so love to hide, was shining clear, and it became vital for me to clasp that link, to take it deep into myself and hold it still.

  And I wonder, now, if this is a story for the telling, when so much has changed, and is still changing, in the Gibson Desert, and so many of those who made that trip have passed away. At times, I have even wondered if it is a story at all – a tale of nothing and of everything at once, its movements measured to the desert’s own unyielding, circling rhythms.

  I have turned away from this story, I have made light of it, I have resisted telling it: and it has forced itself on me, it has weighed on my heart and echoed in my head. Indeed, my memories of those days only strengthen, and I come to realise how much they opened up the far reaches of the Western Desert for me – and then my regret as I think back on them seems boundless, until I am obliged to tell myself that they live on in words, inside me, and I can always be, as I was that first evening, just as dusk fell, driving on the straight road into Karilwara, catching the sun’s last glint on the rooftops, watching the mauve light deepen behind the Clutterbuck Hills.

  *

  I pulled up beside the nurses’ quarters. At once, a pack of envenomed camp dogs, barking, howling, surrounded me. On the veran dah was the arts co-ordinator for the desert lands, Esmee, crouched upon a rolled-up swag, stores and supplies piled up at her side. Spread out on the concrete floor at her feet was a topographic map, and a group of anthropologists were kneeling over it in a devotional pose, their voices mingling as they traced out route patterns with their hands. I waved, and warded off the dogs; the languid joy one feels at the end of a long drive swept over me.

  “You’re going away,” said Esmee, in a cold voice. “Really, everything’s in flux, right now.”

  “I am?”

  “Away from Australia, we gather.”

  “That’s the first I’ve heard of it. Who told you that?”

  “Mr Giles,” said Esmee. “He’s quite upset. You know he thinks he’s got a special bond with you.”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s one of the problems of having a desert magic man for a friend. They see things about you. They see through you.”

  “Perhaps that’s a good thing,” I said, “when we’re all so hidden from ourselves.”

  “And sometimes,” Esmee swept on, “they can see things before you’re aware of them. He’s not here right now. He’s gone off to Balgo and Kiwirrkurra on a social call. You know how much people here hate partings.”

  She came over to me, and lowered her voice: “I suppose, now I think of it, that might be why you were asked to come on this journey in the first place. To strengthen you. To bind you to here.

  To show you something more of this world, so at least you would know a few things. And maybe to bring you back one day.”

  She glanced off, towards the little community. A couple of lights shone beside the diesel tank and the corrugated-iron store shed. In their glow, the graffiti and stencilled children’s paintings of ghosts and spirits gleamed on the foundation brickwork.

  Thrown by this reception, I strolled over to the anthropologists. There were Chris and Dianna, a couple whose fulfilled, contented manner I had always much admired.

  “Chris and Di,” I said.

  “You can’t call us that any more,” they chorused at once.

  “Those names have gone underground.”

  It was the usual problem: deaths, in nearby communities, of people with similar-sounding names.

  “So who are you now?”

  “He’s James, and I’m Inyalangka,” she said. “But of course if you come to dinner in Alice Springs, we can revert to our old identities.”

  “Isn’t it quite confusing,” I asked, “to change both your names at once? You could imagine a script where it would be rather destabilising for a partnership.”

  “Not for us! We can cope with a certain shifting of the nominal field. Besides, you know that in the desert relationship terms are everything; personal names don’t matter that much out here, or where we’re going.”

  She waved evocatively at the map. I peered down. There was almost nothing on it except contour lines, and little notes in italic script: “average height of sand-dunes 9 metres”.

  “Yankaltjunku,” she murmured, and tapped her hand on the nearest fold.

  *

  Deep in the Hickey Hills, a plateau of dune and mesa north-east of the Gibson Desert Nature Reserve, a pair of ridges twist round to create an enclosed valley system, bisected by a deep trap-rock channel. Even to the eyes of survey pilots on their overflights, it seems a striking formation; but for the desert people this is the backdrop to an encounter that takes place in both past and present time. It was here that the paths of the Emu and the Bush Turkey, a creature of disquieting innocence, first crossed. The Bush Turkey was camped, together with his only son, in the low bushes to one side of the valley when they saw the Emu drawing near.

  “Why do you care for your young son in this way?” the Emu asked. “I don’t. I killed all of mine, and ate them.”

  This lie fell into the landscape, and I imagine its force of persuasion resonating outwards, whispering like a soft wind in the needle leaves of the grevilleas and in the stems of the spinifex; then strengthening, gathering momentum, until it blew like a gale across the hills and the inchoate country. In the Emu’s eyes blazed the desire to be believed. The Bush Turkey cocked his head to one side, and took in all the Emu’s charm. How natural it all was in the telling; how clear the example. That night, in a dark, quick movement, the Turkey killed his only son. But when the next day dawned, the Turkey caught sight of the Emu, in the creek-bed, walking, surrounded by his clutch of young children. Outraged, guilt-struck, longing for death and recompense, he fought the Emu at the top of the long creek, at the first small canyon, and at the large rockhole, where, even today, the marks can be seen of great birds’ claws. The two killed each other; the Emu’s children saw the dust of the battle, and fled.

  I still remember the first time I came across this legend, and caught its glancing rhyme with the Old Testament, its scene of tragic awakening, its climax of self-sacrificing revenge. I was in Perth, standing in the angular exhibition spaces of the West Australian Art Gallery, gazing at a pink-hued canvas, its background so mazy and its line so meandering that the central figures refused to resolve themselves: there were roundels, and growth patterns, and the marks of steps. Landscape forms and bush flowers seemed to shimmer in and out of view. The pink was the dawn, and sunset, and it was the damp, blood-stained ground. Through the centre of the painting curved a stream, which was also a water-snake. I was lost: I consulted the wall-text, which was brief: “Yankaltjunku – the artist’s country”, it read. “By Pulpuru Davies, born in the north-east Gibson Desert.”

  *

  And the next morning, as were preparing to leave, I soon caught sight of Mrs Davies, whom I had come to know well in the course of my short visits to the desert lands. Her character, which was sharply etched, had the appeal of an algebraic formula. She was generous, and she was capable; she had the untarnished self-reliance of desert people raised
in pre-contact times. I would study her for hours, on bush forays, and never catch her unaware of what a social moment might demand. She watched everyone, saw every gesture, expressed all she wished to say in the most fluent style. There was a directness to her, and a courtly, formal manner, which masked a capacity for harsh command. Yet these various aspects of her nature all stemmed from her sense of tradition, and her need to maintain the contours of the ancestral world. No one could have seen more clearly the devastation done by the strangers coming into her country; no one could have been more caring in their welcome to such ambiguous guests.

  My regard for her had grown despite our lack of a shared language – and as a result of experiences of this kind, I am almost tempted to believe that the absence of an easy medium for exchange of thoughts or feelings lies at the heart of such connections, and that words, and ideas, and the mutually buttressing flow of conversation only obscure the natural affinities which bind people together. Between Mrs Davies and me, though, words could not mislead. She stood before me, iron crowbar in one hand, beanie jammed down almost to her eyebrows, interrogating me, greeting me, marshalling her children and grandchildren, issuing instructions until the final steps before departure were done: the stores and bedding were on the roof-racks; the passengers had piled into the four-wheel-drive troop-carriers; last of all, the dogs and children arranged themselves in the remaining corners.

  *

  We lurched off, at speed, down corrugated tracks, the walkie-talkie alive with urgent communications in desert language. I stretched back against the hard jump-seat. Dogs struggled; babies screamed; the heat built up; the coat of red dust across the back seats thickened. All round me were faces, familiar and unfamiliar, young and old.

  Directly opposite me, beaming at me, sat Janie Ward, a diminutive desert woman for whom I had long felt a special fondness. Janie reached into her bag, then leaned towards me. In her outstretched palm was a greenish fruit: round, mottled, and slightly the worse for wear. I picked out the seeds, its tart flesh began to soften on my tongue, and I was transported back to the trip down the old Gunbarrel Highway, when I first spent time with her. We were out alone, hunting goannas; suddenly there were bush fruits all round us on the sand: quandongs, bush raisins, bush tomatoes. I walked together with her, across the sandhills, for hours, collecting this harvest, listening to her singing gently as we went, dissolving my thoughts in the sound of her voice.