by Rod Moss
Gregory teased me about my lack of business hair. That was grey hair. Contrary to whitefella vanity, the Whitegate men looked forward to their emergence, which they believed conferred eminence and wisdom.
At the close of the weekend, we paused to say our goodbyes. Gregory gently pulled my head through the car window and tongue kissed me.
‘We all love you.’
Janet looked at the ground. I was flabbergasted.
‘You don’t believe me?’
Again he reached into the car and tugged my ears, fastening his lips to mine.
As we returned to town, Mercia Neil, Xavier’s older sister, spotted a large lizard. I was astonished that she could see a camouflaged reptile in the bush some 40 metres from a speeding car. She swivelled her head, her eyes caressing the swiftly advancing panorama.
THE DAY BEFORE I LEFT FOR PERTH I made a valedictory circuit of Whitegate. Mercia and Joseph senior’s eyes were puffed with tears. I was passed from her group to Noelly’s then Xavier’s for more hugging and tears. The kids grappled with my knees and nearly caused me to topple. Jude jumped on me telling me I was his best mate. Arranye was so tearful he struggled to say his Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
‘We gonna be miss that little white taxi, my son,’ he said, trying to add humour to the moment.
He promised that when I returned, he would show me paintings in the country. This was the first I had heard of the existence of artworks in the region. I drove slowly out through the gate, my chest and throat throbbing, giddy with goodbyes, my shirt wet around the shoulders from a blend of tears. None were mine. I bottled my emotions, I guess instinctively, in an effort to stay clear, unlike the Arrernte men, who shed tears when the occasion drew them. Arrernte culture knows not of manly bravado on the subject; in fact, expressing sorrow allows them to share in each other’s humanity.
The Spencer and Gillen book had continued to fascinate the Whitegate men. Apart from its appreciation in my flat, several times I’d come across a small group passing the book between them around Jude’s fire. That last night, Graeme Hayes, about Xavier’s age, came to my door to ask if he could borrow it while I was away. I didn’t feel comfortable with loaning the book for such a lengthy period. I was aware that the information and images of their ancestors were intensely precious to them but I didn’t want the book to vanish forever. It was long out of print and couldn’t be replaced. I was concerned about inadequate weather protection and storage. Rather than offend, I suggested he request a copy on short-term loan from the college library.
I packed a few art books, my paints, clothes and bedding into the Subaru. First I’d have Christmas in Melbourne, where I planned to meet Elaine, before making the transcontinental drive to Perth. We had temporary accommodation arranged with one of the Carine College staff, in North Fremantle. And my fears had been assuaged. As it turned out, Elaine was far more excited than I was about the move west.
WEAVING AND WRITHING
JUDE WITH RONJA IN A COOLAMON
THE HOT TREK TO PERTH was free of car mishap. I had driven the Nullarbor stretch on my way to Strelley in 1980 and it proved no more interesting to me this time. We’d given ourselves a week to find accommodation and reorientate. Apart from a detour to check out Wave Rock, we were happy to cruise over the Darling Range, sight the city, and have the plains behind us.
At Carine College the class numbers were three times the size of those in Alice Springs, and the expectations and competition among the students were greater. We soon located the small Montessori pre-school in the northern suburbs, where Elaine had been appointed.
February was far more oppressively humid than we’d anticipated. Alice’s rare days of humidity preceded a handful of wet summer days, troughs extending south from the Gulf of Carpentaria. Perth’s wasn’t Top End heat, but you wore the weather constantly like an unwanted coat. And no weather map had prepared us for the sea wind that blew so regularly; it was affectionately named ‘The Fremantle Doctor’. If you fancied an ocean dip, you did so before 10a.m.This was the stuff of skin cancers.
Elaine and I talked about starting a family. She expressed confidence about the longevity of our relationship. Although I’d never seriously thought about having kids before, I warmed to the idea readily, and was glad of Elaine’s conviction in her own capacity as a mother.
In early March we took a beach house at Watermans Bay, twenty minutes’ walk from the Carine campus. That walk twice a day through pristine scrub was a saviour from the tedium of the suburban beaches. At the start of June Elaine became pregnant and immediately terminated her job of a few months, fearing that stress might endanger the pregnancy. During June and July, she went to Dorset, England, to see her parents and siblings.
After she arrived back in August, some evenings we’d walk up the nearby hill. We’d sit on top of the water tanks there, wondering if on a clear day we might see Madagascar, which, we joked, seemed closer to us than either Melbourne or Alice Springs. Jokes aside, the distance was actually productive. Being away from Alice allowed me to reflect on my interactions with the Whitegate families, and think about ways to compose paintings that would say something about the experience.
As much as I could, on weekends I would walk over to Carine College to paint. The scale of the work I was doing was too big for the small fibro walls of our shack. My art was a talisman and kept me in contact with the Centre. But for the first time I suffered from homesickness. Walking to work through the scrubby park, I would imagine scenarios involving Xavier, Gregory, Dominic and Jude, along with the others.
Petrina had suggested I could write to them via Tangentyere, where they signed for their pension cheques. After I’d written several letters without receiving a reply, I explained my communication difficulties to Steve Tucker, who stopped with us during the semester break, on his way to Zimbabwe. He promised that when he got back to Alice Springs he would arrange a pen and paper for them to correspond, then post any letters on to me. In fact, he drove them all to the college one September morning and sat with them until Petrina had completed her message. I was so tickled to receive their letter:
How are you both getting on there at Perth? I hope you are still thinking of me and Xavier. We are still all right here at Whitegate. But we got a letter from you. But we are still talking of you. Also Little Lisa Marie is Big Girl now. But children from Whitegate is going to Catholic Convent School, Alice Springs. God bless you and Elaine.
Love from Xavier Neil and Petrina Johnson. See yous soon mate!
FOR SOME REASON, Perth had numerous colour theorists and researchers. My new colleagues asked me about my preferred colour theory. I knew of Goethe’s colour sphere made in the early 1800s, but apart from that I did not have one. Most students in art school had copied Johannes Itten’s simplified version devised at the famous Bauhaus design school. Michael Wilcox, author of Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green, was introduced to me by his wife, who attended my classes. He came and spoke to the students about his colour-mixing discoveries. He was intrigued by the colours in my paintings and asked for my reactions to what was then the draft of his book. I found his practical colour mixing advice to be exemplary.
That year, there was an international conference at the University of Western Australia focusing on colour, vision and light. I attended some of the lectures and got hold of the papers for later reference. I was interested in pursuing the luminosity of desert light. There was no art theory I knew that gave a direct pointer to such experience. The French and Australian landscape artists of the last decades of the nineteenth century had painted outside in order to achieve the fresh and transitory effects of sunlight. They used complementary opposite colours, say violets against oranges, which give a vibrancy that those colours in isolation would not possess. However, none of the Impressionists had to contend with the brilliance of desert light, or the deep colours found in shadows.
As spokesmen for their societ
y, Courbet, Manet and Seurat became my enduring heroes. Their paintings depicted mundane life, contemporary man interacting with his environment. Their messy brush strokes conveyed the hurly-burly tempo of the increasingly mechanised cities. Until this time, the human figure had been deployed in art to tell grand biblical, mythological or historic stories.
The paintings I made in Perth employed some complementary colour harmony theories. And they made use of the dot, for which Seurat had been both credited for introducing to European art, and critically lampooned in the popular press. I felt these small atoms of paint had the potential to evoke a shimmering atmosphere. And, contrary to tonal brushing, their application would slow down the eye, keep it engaged for longer on the surface.
At the commencement of the 1986 academic year, an American friend enrolled in an architecture course in Raleigh, North Carolina, that was devised by Christopher Alexander. He posted his notes to me, titled ‘Inner Light’. There were a number of colour laws that Alexander had refined over many years of practical research. These were insights into the proportion of large areas of colour set in combination with small zones of purer, up-tempo hues. As he saw it, the proportion of one colour to another contributed to inner light. This idea of colour boundaries and hairline transitions was news to me. Once they were on notice, however, I looked for them in artworks I came across and developed them in my own. These were wonderful revelations.
An American artist I had never heard of, Willard Midgette, was featured in the magazine pages of Art in America. I came across him while eagerly catching up on back copies, looking for Peter Schjeldahl’s contributions. He was an American painter who had recently died. Briefly, in the seventies, he had been commissioned to paint a suite of four large realist works of contemporary Navajo Indians for the US bicentennial. I loved them. It was wonderful to see a realist painter documenting contemporary Navajo in social settings that neither idealised nor demeaned these people.
Once I had amassed a significant body of work, I ventured into the commercial galleries of Perth. I was told the paintings were very attractive, but would have more appeal if the (Aboriginal) figures were eradicated. I wrote to Peter Schjeldahl about this critique and enclosed transparencies of the works to show what I had done. He replied in a subsequent letter:
I like all the pictures and most especially the Stone slingers, which looks to be a masterpiece. It’s beautiful and narratively funny, shocking, and eloquent, a permanent image. The figures are wonderful. The great thing about the stoners is the way you get inside their kid pleasure in stoning. I can feel how much fun it is for them, even as the disturbing implications of their violence sink in. I’m appalled by the racist response in Perth, but I’m also (is this perverse?) happy for you. You’re onto something big, some live raw edge, and that’s more than half the battle toward making great art. Bear down hard, Rod, even if it scares you. Make the bastards squirm. With their yelps to guide you, you’ll find your way in the dark. You will also have great fun.
As my work had never been a mainstream event, Schjeldahl’s remark ‘make the bastards squirm’ has forever sounded like a mantra during subsequent bouts of self-doubt. Through his letters and columns, over the years, I have shared his exhilaration and despair with art. Few writers gave so generously with confidence to let their nerves have words.
AS ELAINE’S PREGNANCY PROGRESSED, we discussed marriage. At length we decided on a small service in the garden of one of my fellow lecturers.
Come December, we were ready to leave Perth and re-establish ourselves in Alice Springs. It was 44°C the day we left. At dusk, we stopped for supper on the council lawns of Coolgardie. It was strangely soothing to overhear some Aboriginal ladies in the park, next to the town hall.
‘That dog my uncle, you bastard. You don’t be hit him like that.’
That night we camped by the road, not far beyond Coolgardie. The vast sky was sprayed with stars. We hadn’t slept under them since travelling the same road west in January. What a release! A soft breeze protected us as we were watched over by clouds and cared for by grasses.
We were headed for Melbourne to spend Christmas there, before returning to the Centre. Onwards ever east, the bitumen rippled under the heat, barely concealing the residual corrugations. We did the rounds of family and friends, and also gathered together a few baby items, the due date by this time being only a few weeks away. I dropped Elaine at her girlfriend’s flat and drove solo to Alice Springs. She travelled the remaining distance by plane.
The upside of these long road trips was that they helped me to put the year into review, and such reflections balanced out the vigilance required at the wheel. Though getting back to work and renewing friendships at Whitegate featured in my thoughts, my greatest speculation was the unknown responsibility of parenthood. I could not even envision the multifarious needs of a helpless infant. Would the baby compound our relationship? In Perth, after becoming pregnant, Elaine had voiced some dissatisfaction with our relationship, saying that monogamy didn’t suit her. I had just got over the shock of her admission that she’d fallen for a guy during her trip to England. I hoped that the reality of raising a child would prevail and change her attitude to monogamy.
Just after Pimba, the battery broke from its cradle and the terminals grazed the bonnet, shorting the car’s electrical system. This was only a two-hour delay though – nothing compared to other trips. The car skidded over the gravel, sunk through deceptive scabs of clay into loose dust, and sidled at weird angles through the thicker sand. The car and I were one, joined in a kind of auto-rodeo of pot-holed alliance.
As usual, on the stretch near the Mintupayi turn-off, north of Marla Bore, I could see in the distance an early model car by the side of the road. It was a section where thousands of bits of dissected rubber offal lay on the verges. The car was slung low, crammed with human freight. It was clearly destined for one of the communities west of the highway in the Pitjantjatjara homelands. The man sensed from my ambling advance that I intended to help.
‘You got water?’ he asked. ‘Radiator be empty.’
I started filling their radiator from my plastic, four-litre jerry can. It gulped it all. The driver stood motionless at my side. I could hear a second hissing somewhere on the engine block, distinct from the fuss of the contracting radiator metal. I beckoned the bloke to join me at the driver’s side of the car. Bending further under the bonnet, we could see rusty water draining from the port of a missing welsh plug. I refrained from offering the contents of my last water container.
The other eight passengers stayed in the car, which offered them the only shade in the visible distance. I wandered to the back of the vehicle and noticed two flat tyres. I tried to imagine what had led to what and how the situation could be retrieved. There were no legendary bush mechanics aboard, apparently. But fancy depending on me for mechanical advice.
‘You got tea bag?’ the driver asked.
I rummaged through my esky. The bloke got under the car and caught the heated water running from the block in his pannikin. Then he dropped the tea bag in. He was not at all flustered when I shrugged off.
One outback myth had it that Aboriginal people used their broken vehicles as decoys to abduct or harm whitefellas. Another was that the first thing tossed out of their cars was the spare tyre, and after that the jack to make way for extra passengers. It is true that the cars were stacked to the gunwales, but the resources were far too scarce to withhold them from circulation.
I DROVE LONG AND HARD and arrived in Alice the day after Elaine’s plane landed. We rented a small house in Eastside, coincidently not very far from my old flat. The same day, we drove to Whitegate and received a warm and teary greeting. The women gossiped about relationship comings and goings. Mercia insisted that Elaine sit next to her ‘woman’s way’. We traded stories of travel and experience in Perth for tales of the camp and were hungry for their news.
In ou
r absence the town had been subjected to massive rebuilding. Yeperenye, the Aboriginal-owned shopping complex, had been erected and Woolworths had relocated there, vacating a space that would house twin cinemas. The mall had been closed to through traffic, effectively killing the north-eastern area of the central business district. Another huge shopping complex had opened off the mall. It was supervised constantly by uniformed employees, often mistaken by local Aborigines for the police. There was a sail straddling the transept of the mall, the likely congregation point for pedestrians, and a circular raised platform for concerts and meetings, but mostly used to sit on.
Concerned resident whitefellas protested about the destruction of public spaces and rebuilding that had happened without any public consultation. Many locals avoided the northern complex for a year or so, also in protest.
It took a few weeks for Elaine and I to reorientate ourselves. We wondered how it had felt for the Arrernte to witness the despoliation of their homeland, country that had remained intact for centuries.
One day we came across a completely befuddled old gentleman stranded in the Yeperenye complex.
‘Scuse me, I Harts Range man. Please, I from country. I can’t get out this buildin’.’
He had been wandering around, unaware how the electronic doors operated, and was suffering from the air-conditioning.
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for the house visits from Whitegate families to resume. And, to my surprise and pleasure, while we’d been away the bitumen had been extended as far as camp, reducing the regular belting of my Subaru by half.
In our living room, Jude looked through the slides taken of all my paintings made in Perth. He pulled me aside from the huddle one afternoon and whispered that my painting called History Rolling was ‘dangerous’ for other Aboriginal tribes to see, because they might think Arrernte people still did magic things. For this painting, I had Arranye standing mid-point, some other Johnson men closer to the viewer and, at the far right, some young men in a ceremonial dance formation. The images of young men in dance concerned Jude.