by Rod Moss
‘But don’t cry for me,’ he insisted. ‘I’m too much crying already myself.’
He would bring relatives from Utopia and Harts Range to see the drawing when they were on town visits. Other people from town camps trooped along with him, expressing their excitement in Arrernte between themselves – and broken English to me – and ran their fingers over the graphite. They took to wandering around in the kitchen, curiously handling the gadgetry and appliances as if they had never seen them before. One man took me aside. Holding both my shoulders, he eyed me intensely and whispered close to my face.
‘I can see God in heaven any time. My time or yours.’
I didn’t really know what angle he was coming from. Nonetheless, I was disarmed by the power of his belief.
When Xavier visited his father’s traditional country in Harts Range, or was not in his usual haunts, Petrina would come and sit near the drawing. Often she would draw pictures of her ‘country’ and affectionately talk of it, and of her sisters, brothers and mother. Once she came drunk and argumentative and hit the drawing. I jumped from my seat and led her to the kitchen, trying to assuage her with a cup of tea.
Petrina and Xavier loved looking through my journals and coffee table books, delighting in the sight of earlier versions of me with family. I’d kept journals since I was sixteen, substantial quarto-sized books in which cards and photos were included alongside the written entries. One image of me dressed as a woman for a school play when I had long hair made both of them laugh until they fell over. It was a great favourite when they wanted to show other relatives the albums. Photos of dwellings that I had taken in Rajasthan in 1984 perplexed Xavier. He could not believe that people would live inside houses made of mud in case they were washed away in a slither of clay.
One day Xavier came across my copy of Geoffrey Bardon’s book Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, which documents the emergence in the 1970s of the Papunya Tula Aboriginal painting movement. When he came across a particular reproduction of a sacred painting, he hurriedly closed the book and walked with it to my bedroom. He laid it on the floor and scrutinised it. He summoned me.
‘Do women sleep in here?’
Elaine was in Sydney for a year studying pre-school education.
‘No, Xavier.’
‘This only for men’s eyes.’
Xavier also studied the collection of photographs by Frank Gillen and Baldwin Spencer from my 1912, red clothbound volume of Across Australia. It had been given to me, but I’d never spent much time reading it. Spencer’s racist paternalism was a deterrent and I found more appeal in recent scholarship and anecdotal writing. It was long out of print. Even an abridged, large-format version published in 1982, emphasising the photos, had been removed from local bookshops. This was due to concerns from conservative Aboriginal elders who, now conversant with the reproductive capacity of photography, considered its material too secret for general publication. On most occasions when he visited me during the following three months, Xavier brought other men from Whitegate to see the book.
2Their English surnames, taken from their earliest association with whitefellas, were commonly used, as were their Aboriginal names. Miners, missionaries and pastoralists were the outriders of settler culture, though the overland telegraph line workers, on the heels of the explorer Sturt, were the first non-Indigenous men in the Centre between 1870 and 1872. The cattle industry began at Deep Well with William and Mary Hayes. Hayes expanded his empire as other leaseholders failed. One of his sons, Ted senior, took up Undoolya Station, 10 kilometres east of the present township, in 1920. His descendants still live there.Back
THE SHEDDING OF SKIN
FAMILIES ON SAND HILL OF HOMELANDS
APART FROM THE PAINTING OF XAVIER, the artworks I made in the eighteen months after arriving in Alice Springs were surrealist, symbolic images about the tensions I had felt in coming to terms with the land’s somnambulant boniness. The lavenders, oranges and pinks were foreign to my palette. I stuck mostly with pencil. The open expanses were overpowering. And yet the colour and structure of the landscape made me feel that I was floating in a digestive system, all coruscated liver and fat. The intimate scale of rock forms and their interlocking geometry gave me a sense that they were playthings for capricious, creative hands.
The natural beauty was omnipresent. The valleys in the unsettled country near my flat looked more ordered, more garden-like in their self-propagation, than the efforts of suburbanites. An astonishing number of buildings had been erected as the population doubled through the mid-1980s. Buildings were not permitted to exceed two levels, and perhaps developers banked on the awesome beauty of the MacDonnell Ranges to distract the eye, as block after block succumbed to the most banal structures, resulting in an ugly confusion of colours and designs. This had its own surreal bent in an unintended way. But what kind of art might make a less offensive bridge? I was disrupted by the noise and the uncouth thrust of materials and men on the landscape. Making drawings from my flat of the nearby despoliation enabled me to express my uneasiness.
The desert lifestyle was also unfamiliar to me. What constituted an ordinary day? What was a regular chain of events? What of the weight of the air, the pressure of great radiance on the eyes? There were seasonal guarantees: the yellow-topped flowers pursing through after winter rain; summer migrations of kites and bee-eaters; the mournful trill of the curlew mid-winter wending his way up the creek beds from south; and the irritation of a trillion tiny ants with the initial heat of spring. As repetition gradually became meaning, these were fixed in my calendar as certainly as the advent of tourists filling the town’s few corridors after Easter.
UNTIL 1988, THE STUART HIGHWAY south of the Northern Territory– South Australian border was unmade and a formidable challenge. Abandoned auto-carcasses littered the road at 50-kilometre intervals. Coober Pedy, where garages profited on the fallout, was a halfway haven and a measure of one’s fortunes. Car stories were rife. All the teachers in the government flats had extraordinary tales. While these highlighted the difficulty of living such a distance from the nearest, sizeable population, they gave us a sense of camaraderie.
My first trip to Melbourne was during the winter semester break in 1985. It was a chain of events, not the long distance drive I had anticipated. I made the trip with an English backpacker with the idea of sharing the driving and hefty petrol costs. I’d been up since well before dawn, stacking the car. Just before the South Australian border, I asked Sylvia to take a turn at the wheel. I slipped into slumber within minutes. We advanced only a few kilometres when she lost control on the corrugations. I awoke to the bouncing and jolting of the car as it rolled several times. Amazingly, a light aircraft witnessed the whole event from above and soon taxied up beside us. Somehow we escaped injury. Within minutes a lorry appeared with the road crew’s mechanic. They popped out the windscreen, refitted and inflated the tyres, and pushed out the roof. A busload of Japanese tourists stopped and got out briefly to photograph the event. In an hour we were away, minus the windscreen which marked ‘the site’. Just before departing Coober Pedy, pre-dawn the following day, I picked up two folded fifty-dollar bills scuttling in the breeze. The find helped buoy my spirits as we blasted south into the first rain on the plains in eighteen months. Then five hours south, at Hesso pumping station, we had two tyres repaired. The light alloy wheel rims had been mauled into octagons. The high-speed wind and rain caused cold sores to form on my lips and blood curdled in the corners of my eyes. We stumbled, almost eyelessly, into Melbourne. My closest friends, John Anderson and Graeme Drendel, would revel in my accounts of these experiences with fascinated horror. But my parents never understood why I would put myself through such ordeals.
After that trip, I walked the nearby hills, reflecting on where I had come from, and the friendships I had sacrificed to be here. Each time I left Melbourne dramatised the warmth of my family and friends whose faces I saw les
s and less.
NOWHERE ELSE IN AN AUSTRALIAN city were Aboriginal people so conspicuous. Nowhere else was the disparity in living styles so clear. While whitefellas busied themselves in a nine-to-five work regime, blackfellas seemed in perpetual party mode at the river, lolling around under the shade of the gums. During down time, whitefellas relaxed in the air-conditioned comfort of bars, cinemas and cafés whose dress codes prevented access to a large proportion of the blackfella population. Singlets and thongs were impermissible. Shoes were essential. Blackfellas occupied the parks, seeming to refuse participation in labour and production. And that was enough to provoke anger and racist comments among some job-holding, tax-paying whites.
The tense racial situation was palpable. Property and theft crimes regularly took the front pages of the Territory tabloids, sending messages that its black community was out of control. You could feel the red alert in shopkeepers when Aborigines entered their shops. As many as two hundred teenagers meandered the streets at night, at loose ends, and, given the violence and drinking parties at home, they had little incentive to face their family campfires. School drew in some of the teenagers, but sizeable numbers – disinclined to engage in the education system – also drifted the streets during the day. The deepening divide between blacks and whites was revealed by the petty crime and vandalism of so many disenfranchised black youths.
I was surprised to learn from the town’s lone police forensic officer that most of the criminal violence in and around Alice Springs was inflicted by blackfellas against other blackfellas. The statistic at greatest variance from the national averages was homicide; rates here were between five and six times higher. Vandalism and petty theft by blackfellas of white property were mere nuisances in comparison.
How much of the recklessness conformed to the brutal archetypal lessons of Altyerre/Dreamtime myths? These creation stories that accounted for the form of the country and shaped the mode of social conduct were as rife with rapes, dismembering and murders as the Greek myths. The many video shops in town were generously stocked with dramatised images of contemporary violence. But that was film and mostly American content. For Arrernte it was not some remote, historical event. Here, now, the escalating and largely grog-fuelled violence was the inevitable expression of a culture weak and lost.
The growing numbers of people from differing Aboriginal groups drawn into town, which was built on land traditionally belonging to the Arrernte, had escalated these difficulties.
LATE IN 1985 I TRAVELLED to Melbourne then Sydney with a handful of my students to the Turner and Monet blockbuster exhibitions. Both nineteenth-century artists had altered the way European people looked at land. We found that both men eschewed topographical detail, enlarged the colour palette traditionally associated with landscape and emphasised clearly visible brushing, which enlivened and agitated the images. While in Sydney I arranged for us to visit Lloyd Rees in Lane Cove. He was generally regarded as the grand old man of Australian landscape painting, a living national treasure. It was a coup to meet a painter whose late career work shared some of the spectral manner of the great Turner and Monet paintings.
‘Have you got a question to ask me?’ he said when I rang.
‘I will by the time we meet,’ I demurred.
The students and I spent a long afternoon with Rees whose speedy mind and tongue belied his arthritic jauntiness. During our conversation I asked him how it might be possible to produce metaphysical art in Australia.
‘We do not really accept this land,’ he said. ‘Nor do we have sufficient density of population. Not until one or both of these conditions is satisfied will we get metaphysical landscapes.’
But the finest Aboriginal paintings are touted, among other things, for their metaphysical language, and Rees acknowledged that.
‘How can you walk barefoot in this prickly country?’ I asked Xavier’s youngest brother, Christopher, a few weeks later.
We were standing in the scree near a water-holding crease in a granite boulder, at the base of a low hill. Xavier said it was his ‘one-eyed Dreaming’, drawing attention to the squint in his left eye. Both men seemed untroubled without shoes. In fact Christopher had removed his thongs at the car so that thorns wouldn’t wreck them. There was no way I could make my bare feet accomplices to this foraging among the bullhorn jacks and the bogan flea burr. I had just slashed my jeans on a splayed branch of dried witchetty bush.
‘I’m not frighten of country, Rod. I love my country.’
Rees’s equation came to mind. I doubted I’d ever get to Christopher’s acceptance of the earth. I saw how the Arrernte kids played forever in the dirt while non-Indigenous kids moved over it, about it.
A significant amount of tourist trade in town was based on Aboriginal culture and its artefacts. The shopping mall on the main street was choked with so-called galleries filled with acrylic dot paintings. These coded patterns, depicting stories or parts of stories, explained the artists’ relationships to their country. Their products ranged from up-market, large canvases to the shameless, expediently prepared canvas boards that they made, hoping for a quick sale to procure a flagon of wine.
Many Indigenous desert painters had rocketed to international stardom – their paintings, that is. A day after stepping off a flight that gave him introduction to the Queen, I saw Clifford Possum in one of the storm drains by the railway, dotting a boomerang.
When I asked Xavier whether he did any painting, he answered disdainfully that he would never sell his Dreaming. His father had never taught him painting.
‘Only been teach me country.’
Not much art activity extended to Whitegate. However, Xavier and the others could interpret the dotting tradition, derived from ceremonial sand paintings. No one had paid employment and the only money came from social security cheques each fortnight.
A few Eastern Arrernte relatives still living at Santa Teresa community painted watercolour landscapes. In 1952, a Catholic mission had established Santa Teresa, 80 kilometres south-east of Alice, where Xavier’s generation of Whitegate families grew up. Their style is reminiscent of the conservative artist Rex Batterbee and his Western Arrernte student, Albert Namatjira. 3
EARLY IN MARCH 1986, an American poet and critic, Peter Schjeldahl, through mutual friends, had arranged to stay with me for a few days. My friends said he was a prominent name in the United States, but I had never heard of him. The apogee of his tour was to be the keynote speaker at the Adelaide Arts Festival. Part of his agreement to tour the art centres of the eastern capitals was to include some experience of Central Australia.
I picked him up amid a gaggle of American travellers at the airport. He was lean, edgy and way out of his New York martini and art milieu. He wanted the Rock, and he wanted it direct. I suspect he felt it lay around one of the few corners in the initial thirty kilometres. With the long weekend in view, I obliged, and with only the clothes on my back we headed directly to Uluru/Ayers Rock. He even wanted to drive, to feel the vast and fast-moving bitumen kilometres under his hands. We talked relentlessly on art, baseball, football (his code and mine), and a great deal on film. He appreciated the cinematic dimension of the country immediately. But he refused my invitation to sleep outdoors, having made enough concessions to space in the previous five hours’ drive. While we circumnavigated the Rock he scribbled notes, small epiphanies of praise and surprise. We walked the Valley of the Winds at Kata Tjuta/the Olgas, a potent setting for filmic revelations.
A couple of days hence we lobbed up at my flat. I couldn’t believe how well we got on. We shared a few tastes in painting, and most particularly we enthused about the great Frenchman Manet. We were mid-conversation when a torrent of stones hit my neighbour’s roof. Going to the upstairs bedroom, we caught a glimpse of some Aboriginal kids from the nearby Ilpeye Ilpeye camp darting around the corner of the fence.
Peter’s equanimity had been troubled
since he had got off the plane on the Alice Springs tarmac. And he reflected on this in a letter two months later, reporting that he had already told me that he found shaking hands with an Aborigine at Uluru to be a ‘slighting’ experience in spite of the man’s gentleness. Hand shaking had been rendered inconsequential. And there had been a small, dusty bloke of Aboriginal descent with an unfocused gaze and rangy posture standing in a store. Peter had felt the temporality of the building as a sense of the bush’s eternity pervaded through the bushman’s being. Now he saw kids provoking my neighbour, a security guard at the Pine Gap Surveillance Station. What if he came out shooting?
Right then, in my flat, he questioned why I didn’t paint what I was encountering. He challenged me, saying that the country lacked a visual history of such stories and suggested I paint those stone slingers. ‘Put up or shut up. There is nothing like it in Australia,’ he said bluntly.
While there was little realist, figurative social commentary in Australian art, he indicated that the situation was otherwise overseas. I’d dined out on descriptions of my encounters. How would I meet the challenge in constructing paintings of equivalent impact?
EXPERIENCES STEMMING FROM WHITEGATE CONTINUED to consume and confound me. I am a fourth generation Australian, astray in my own country. There were many sources for my reverence – the sound of the Arrernte language, the barrage of requests made of me, and the amount of touching and embracing that occurred in casual encounters. Even things familiar to me – like the few transistors and cars – were adapted and placed according to community needs that I had little sense of. If I purchased a radio my controlling rights would be insisted upon. However, I was amazed that Xavier spent his entire pension cheque on a formidable cassette radio and, though he called it his, he offered no resistance to any of his brothers borrowing it for as long as they liked.