by Rod Moss
THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, Joseph Johnson junior died. He was about thirty. The Hayes men reckoned he had pneumonia. But he was in perfect health at the funeral when we commiserated. Others said his drink had been poisoned. Bartholomew Johnson, gaunt and grave during his vigil over Arranye’s decline, died soon after from a brain clot. He was twenty-nine. In the same week, Christopher Neil, aged thirty-one, died at Amoonguna. And Jude soon followed with pneumonia. Such was the ceaseless, speculative flux of Arrernte lives.
A KNOCK AT THE DOOR. It’s the Whitegate kids. Not mine. I’ve just said goodbye to them. At the airport Raffi was tense and silent, his eyes already swollen, though he hadn’t cried. Ronja, if possible, talked faster than usual. My wrists feel cool. A knot rotates in my chest. It heats in tears as they wander through the departure lounge to the tarmac. Their bodies are small against the 747 as the hostess ushers them up the gangway back into the big bird’s lungs. The world that we stepped through together has been reduced to telephone contact, mostly attenuated, and often mistimed. They are tired, or I have visitors. Our excitements pass each other down the line. I imagine them in the shallow valleys near home stooping to wonder over the amethyst and mint-coloured agates. I imagine them calling the dog, small voices fluttering across the ridges. The garden is scattered with mud villas Ronja has built.
The Hayes boys ask where my kids are. I don’t know how many times I have to answer this question each time Raffi and Ronja leave. New South Wales is conceptually beyond them. This time Raffi and Ronja have asked for photos of the kids and the dog to pass around school.
Harry and Adrian play the guitar and the mandolin, posturing like rock stars. Without my kids to play with, they’re bored within half an hour.
‘Rod, can we get lift to Whitegate?’ asks Harry.
I feel heavy and need to let other lives into mine.
I arc the car towards camp. Julie Hayes approaches and asks if I’d help them to get some wood. We drop by home to collect the trailer, then take the track towards Emily Creek. There are some dead ironwoods standing on the burred plain. I swing from their lower limbs and crack them to the ground.
‘Your “father” still with us, you know. Them stories he tell the kids at bedtime. We hear his voice in the hill round Whitegate,’ says Julie, as we snap the limbs to trailer-length.
‘I feel him too,’ I reply. ‘He comes to talk to me when I’m sleeping.’
14A cursory visit to the Alice Springs hospital would tell about the state of Aboriginal health and mortality. Its emergency department treated about 30,000 people annually. Darwin, with three times the population, treated 38,000 people. Needless to say, the Aboriginal representation, as with the jails, was disproportionately high.Back
AFTERWORDS
ARRANYE AND ME
RECORDING STORIES
THOUGH FULL OF ANTICIPATION, I had been lonely when I came to Alice Springs. The Whitegate mob befriended me and the passions of these relationships came to attract me more than my job. From them arose an understanding of some of my assumptions about Indigenous Australians, during the course of which I made paintings.
So much of these people’s lives impinged on me and was absorbed. Claims on my attention were presented so vigorously, yet if I wasn’t able to comply, the claimant drifted away undeterred. So many arrangements made to give lifts from camp to camp on the morrow. So many times I came for the scheduled pick-up to discover the person had embraced an earlier opportunity as it presented. The same capacity for spontaneous improvisation is expressed in a deeply honed sense of the precariousness of life.
These days there is far more traffic at Whitegate with car ownership on the increase. So while there isn’t the previous strong reliance on my vehicle, it is still regular enough, and rocketing fuel costs haven’t helped any of us. More recently, though no landline exists for emergencies, many of the younger residents have mobile phones – and, indeed, iPods.
Though the Aboriginal art boom hasn’t waned as expected, it has had little impact at Whitegate. Some adults have been encouraged into the market, given the astonishing appetite for desert dot paintings. There is a little production overlap through connections to the Keringke arts group at Santa Teresa, but this is hardly a significant or steady source of income.
What and who shapes life in camp and life at my place remain different. My distance from relatives seems strange to Adrian and Xavier. that I have remained at the same address astonishes them. The Catholic Church has a purchase on their lives as none of the great religions do on mine. I do not endure poverty, daily discrimination and social bigotry.
I am not told in so many invisible and visible ways that the ways of my culture, in my own country, are inappropriate and a failure; that my cultural practice, my reality, is inferior and irrelevant. Nor am I at the mercy of government agencies managing and determining my life, producing such dependency and despair that I resort to drugs or decide to terminate my life. The present unwillingness of the Federal Government to allow Tangentyere a say in managing affordable housing, rather than the Northern Territory government’s housing department, retards the development of responsibility by aspirant Indigenous home owners. Those who choose not to cave in to these abject conditions seem heroic.
I have been caught, at times, in the crossfire of family disputes, treading carefully so as not to favour one side over another. In such stressed circumstances, after all, I do have the safety of retreat to my own home. Domestically, until recently I partnered Lareena Groves and we have a beautiful daughter, Anjou. They have moved to the mid north coast of New South Wales. Raffi still lives with his mum on the south coast and is thrilled to have entered into an apprenticeship in flatboard plastering. Ronja, singer-songwriter, film-maker and aspirant school teacher, currently lives with me. All my family of origin survive, as do my painter friends in Melbourne.
Hopefully these pages convey the importance of Arranye in my life. But it would be misleading to present him with singular import. My experience has been that when you are embraced by an Aboriginal family, it is the whole family that you embrace. Individuals have come in and out of prominence in my life but not at the expense of the family as a whole. It has been – and continues to be – a strange but gratifying experience, which I hope my words have conveyed.
What has happened to all this mob? David Johnson got cancer in the throat and lungs and received chemotherapy in Adelaide. He took his subsequent hair regrowth as an indication he was healthy enough to resume smoking and passed away two years later. Joseph Hayes was run over and killed by a car at Amoonguna during an argument. Mary and Jamesy Johnson passed away. Eric Neil died soon after rolling into his fire. Then Jude followed ‘through the gap’, wasting away in hospital after a bout of pneumonia. Devon Neil was hospitalised in Adelaide after a shovel had been smashed through his skull during a fight in Port Augusta. He managed to survive and return home, take up employment and keep straight. His father, Bernard, however, died soon after. A few years later, Devon decided to cease the daily medication for his headaches and passed away in Darwin. Rosita Ryder and Jennifer Johnson died in their early forties. Brothers Nijas and Louis Ryder have both passed away. Big Rose Johnson, Jude’s sister, didn’t heed advice about mixing alcohol with medication and destroyed her stomach.
With so many Johnsons passing away, the Hayes admitted them back to Whitegate. Few Johnsons took up the invitation. Old Magdaline Johnson received a belated message from the Queen and the Governor General a year after her hundredth birthday in 2006. She occasionally camped at Whitegate with her daughter Eva Hayes. As I write, she is confined to the Old Timers’ Home just south of Heavitree Gap. When Myra Hayes’s husband died she vacated camp for most of 2003 but returned early in 2008.
With Tangentyere support, the Hayes men constructed a horse-yard and bough shelter at Antulye outstation. There were plans to muster some horses from Santa Teresa and break them into quiet tourist nags
. Lawrence went interstate to do a leatherwork course, making hat bands and belts, with an eye on the market place. Antulye could provide a neat tourist venture, with boomerang throwing, selling tea and damper, wood and leather artefacts, and story-telling about the immediate location. All these initiatives occurred in the late 1990s but nothing has come of any of them. More recently, some of the younger men have been invited by the Central Land Council to train as rangers in their homelands, an enterprise that has some momentum.
Though the land claim hearings established for the Whitegate families their legal rights to occupy the estate on which their camp exists, wishes for better housing have not materialised as leasehold status still eludes them. Without that security of tenure, they cannot access government funding for housing and infrastructure.
Sadly, one of the young Webb men, in a fit of pique, recently torched the improvised shelter of Whitegate’s church just a few months after its consecration. No one has moved to repair the roof or even admonish the man for his behaviour. Several months later he killed a Warlpiri man on the town footbridge and was famously tried by a tribal spearing at Yuendumu in tandem with several years in Big House – an example of two-ways law enforcement. It is questionable, under the current Federal Government Emergency Intervention, whether such dual punishments will be tolerated.
In the early years of the new century, Whitegate started its own school and named it Irrkerlantye/Brown Falcon after the ridge bordering camp. For several years the college, now Charles Darwin University, and Tangentyere backed the project in the old Santa Teresa town buildings at the southern end of town. The college retreated from its share of costs and Irrkerlantye was left to make regular, time-consuming submissions to a variety of funding sources, mostly Indigenous departments. Because all ages, including parents, were involved, the kids were receiving something close to continuous education for the first time. Their prior attendance at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart School in Alice Springs never achieved such continuity. However, like most institutionally dependent projects that lead back to government funding, Irrkerlantye’s existence hung in the balance of the Northern Territory government’s policy. By 2007 the school had ceased as such, becoming a training centre for the adults while the kids were dispatched to a mainstream school. It must be said that, although the parents and staff anxiously fought for survival, after transitional stress the kids seem happier now and are achieving well in a local public primary school where they have maintained their group integrity as a learning unit within the school. Irrkerlantye continues as an art-producing centre, famous for its dotted crosses, a true expression of the families’ devout Catholicism.
The bi-lingual literacy programs that have grown with the Indigenous language dictionaries are not held in much esteem by governments. Even the Institute of Aboriginal Development hierarchy has cast doubts over the continuity of dictionary work. Children are no longer being taken from their mothers, but their mother tongues might have a diminished place in formal education.
It is easy to present the camp life around town as dysfunctional: just take a photo of litter, dogs and snotty-nosed kids. So it is vital to note the Aboriginal-inspired initiatives as a counterbalance. The Central Australian Aboriginal Alcohol Program Unit (CAAAPU) has operated now for well over a decade; it is voluntary for some, mandatory for Correctional Services’ clientele who have served for drink-related crimes. The Arlwekere/Alukura women’s camp has offered a service for pregnant and young mums. The Tangentyere nursery has a great track record providing town and distant communities with native plants and cultivation expertise, as well as a landscaping business. Not least is the wonderful Akeyulerre/healing place at the foot of Billygoat Hill. Senior Arrernte women have created a vibrant place where traditional healing practices occur – stories, dancing and singing included. Aggie Abbott tells me Arranye continues to serve as inspiration for the place and we’ll get some of my photos of him enlarged to grace the building’s walls.
Tangentyere has strived to bridge the gaping hole between a contemporary cash economy and Arrernte values, and its resolve and inventiveness to make compromises between the cultures has not eased. Unlike many well-intentioned non-Indigenous individuals and organisations, Tangentyere doesn’t assume silent cultural sovereignty and superiority. It accords with Arrernte reality and is in sympathy with its complexity and pragmatism. It adamantly resists governmental coercion to relinquish hard-won leasehold of the camps to government control. In the push to assimilate them into the larger urban community, Whitegate residents, like many campers, wish to retain their independent extended family group. As one of the two camps of the eighteen in Tangentyere’s membership that don’t enjoy leasehold, they are acutely vulnerable.
Further, Tangentyere, like most Aboriginal organisations in town, constantly has to defend itself against allegations of nepotism. The state of life in the camps continues to raise questions about its effectiveness in delivering quality outcomes to its constituents. Even granted the preference for house occupation numbers in excess of that intended for three-and four-bedroom houses, the impact of urban drift from the bush has immeasurably exacerbated the crisis of housing shortage in suburbia and the camps. The recent decade, referred to declamatorily as ‘The Howard Years’, drip fed Tangentyere’s housing program – the building, the rejigging and the maintenance – miserly to the extent of one to two houses per annum.
In attempting to address a wide range of needs, are Tangentyere’s resources being prioritised? Despite the ruthlessness and suddenness of the 2007 Emergency Intervention, and the protestations regarding the quarantining of pensions, all current data indicate that children are benefiting from improved nutrition and their school attendances are up. How does this gain stack up against systemic racial discrimination, the one clear response that Whitegate residents have confided to me?
What stories would Arranye be telling today? Who would be listening? In twenty years, we are told, half the Territory’s population will be Indigenous. The demography of Alice Springs indicates that during this decade school-aged Indigenous kids will outnumber the non-Indigenous. This will be a huge challenge given the current low retention rates in the educational system and the poor scholastic achievements. The Larapinta Valley is straining to hold its people together – this strange brew of whitefella and blackfella with its complex ruptures. How do we begin to understand the ambiguities and transmuted traditions transpiring in this deeply creased, cupped palm of country?
Rod Moss
Alice Springs
January 2010
PAINTINGS
ARRANYE AND ME IN
FRONT OF PUSHING
UP RIVER AT
THE ARALUEN ARTS
CENTRE, 1994
PRIOR TO LIVING AND WORKING in Alice Springs I was an exhibiting artist, showing in Melbourne and Canberra. In coming to the Centre, I encountered an alien culture and predicated my pictorial strategies by trying to mobilise each image with full awareness of the absolute otherness – me the artmaker, who had no religion, and the Indigenous subjects, who had no art that didn’t exude a spiritual view. In their paintings the people of the desert cultures don’t attend to mimetic imagery, either of themselves or their social conditions. In fact their art, which centres on the painter’s Dreaming heritage, masks contemporary Aboriginal life and their lowly political status. This, in part, I sought to redress by making the people identifiable and by avoiding abstraction to the extent of relying on photography as a representational tool.
Arranye had opened my first retrospective at Araluen in 1994, commenting on how my work served a ‘welcome line’ to the Arrernte and their country. This was corroborated during the 1998 retrospective when Kemarre Turner made the opening speech and had consulted Arranye. Their conversation was overheard and Kemarre’s words were translated by Jenny Green, who thought I’d appreciate hearing them.
‘Rod’s paintings aren’t anything special. Only ordinary life. Pe
ople going about business. Rod sees us as people, not just black people, but as people like he is a white person. Just our skin is different. We are all still living in sheds and he helps us, thinks properly about us. People will think about you. People will think about you people at Irrkerlantye, still dancing and doing anthepe ceremonies. Town mob learn this from looking at the paintings. That’s why you take Rod to watch. They might believe that these things are not still continuing. But they are at Whitegate, not just like bush communities. Community mob takes photos at anthepe, the dances women do at initiation ceremonies. But we’ve got Rod with the picture in his head. Young people will see that their culture is still alive in the paintings, showing other people how people live at Whitegate, not houses like at Charles Creek. We are the forgiveness people. White Australians will see from the paintings that Aboriginal people still live in humpies and from soakages, and hunting on foot. So whitefellas will understand from seeing the paintings.’
The staged quality of the compositions in my paintings reflects the willing participation of the people depicted. To intensify the dialogue between Settler culture and the First Australians, I’ve resorted to older Western realist art to suggest that the West’s colonial attitudes have historical footprints from which there is no retreat. The paintings are a mix of realism and fantasy operating under a regime of photographic source material. My insistence on photography as a tool is a distant echo of the camera’s advance into the Central deserts shortly after the import of Christianity in the late nineteenth century.
Painting the families is my way of coping, of digesting issues of difference. An endemic political correctness has swept across the continent since the mid-1990s and the silence between cultures seems greater than ever. My paintings work towards filling this void and, hopefully, transmit something of the truth and terror of the situation, even inspiring the idea of justice.