Andrew McMillan 1957-2012

Chips Mackinolty has released the following statement on the loss of one of the Territory’s great writers:

Respected Northern Territory writer Andrew McMillan, 54, died this evening at his home in Darwin. He was with friends.

“Andrew was one of the Territory’s great eccentrics—but also one of its best contemporary writers,” said Mr Mackinolty.

“He came to the Territory chasing music as a journalist, which led to the influential book Strict Rules which covered the Warumpi Band/Midnight Oil tour of the Territory and never looked back as a writer.

“He followed this with Death in Dili, Catalina Dreaming and An Intruders Guide to East Arnhemland—the latter led to his being awarded NT Writer of the Year in 2009.

“He was also the leader of the band, Darwin’s Fourth Estate, a notorious collection of journalists and real musicians. The band’s last performance was held nearly a year ago, to celebrate a Living Wake for Andrew.

“He was working till the end, writing, performing and producing a CD with his latest band, The Rattling Mudguards, as well as finalising an anthology of his writings. Both will be released posthumously.

“At his wish, Andrew will be buried near Larrimah, followed by a wake at the Railway Clubon dates to be announced.

“Andrew made it known that he is deeply grateful for support over the last year given to him by the Palliative Care staff at RDH.”

I’ve sung McMillan’s praises many times since I began writing this blog.  My first encounter with his work came in the days after I discovered the Warumpi Band for the first time: while searching for the scarce video of the Blackfella/Whitefella tour, I stumbled across a reference to Strict Rules, which, happily, was easy to purchase a copy of.  McMillan’s style of reportage puzzled me at first.  It was idiosyncratic, personal, mystifying and then suddenly rewarding.

An Intruder’s Guide to East Arnhem Land remains, for me, the best book about the history of the region I’ve read, and it was a delight when I heard that Niblock Publishing was reprinting it, along with Strict Rules, a couple of years ago.  After finishing it, I was a confirmed member of the Andrew McMillan fan club, and sought out Catalina Dreaming, his history of the Australian flying boats of the Second World War.  It’s the only book of military history I think I’ve ever read, and it was gripping, illuminating, and fun, all at the same time.

My last encounter with McMillan’s prose was the text he prepared for Tiwi Footy: Yiloga in 2008, an essay that I suspect is one of the few works apart from the Bible that’s been translated into the Tiwi language.

I’ve returned to McMillan’s books time and time again, for pleasure and for reference to the wealth of information they contain.  In this moment of sadness at our loss of a brilliant man, I find comfort in knowing that his words will remain close to me, quite literally within reach as I type now, for the rest of my days.

Rip Rock: It’s Not About Hip-Hop

Earlier this week I was thinking about breaking the string of book reviews I’ve posted lately with something different when CAAMA came to the rescue by posting an old music video by my favorite post-apocalyptic, no-nonsense, mean-as-nails and sweetly lyrical band, NoKTuRNL.  Admittedly, there isn’t another band in that exact category.  But that’s one of the reasons that now, many years later, I still find myself loading their music up on the iPod to carry me to and from work on a pretty regular basis.

NoKTuRNL came out of Alice Springs in 1996, formed around the nucleus of frontman Craig T. and guitarist DaMieN.  Two years later they won Band of the Year at the Deadlys, a year before they even signed a recording contract, much less released a record.  They had made some spectacular television appearances, including a live broadcast from the Stompen Ground Festival in Broome and a pre-election-day interview and clip that featured them burning the Australian Flag and taking on Pauline Hanson’s One Nation movement.

They repeated their win two years later in 2000.  In February of that year they released their first EP Neva Mend, with a title song that was a manifesto of menace in the face of hatred and a declaration of artistic and musical independence in its lyrics and its musical stylings, a marriage of death metal and rap defiance.  The video (nominated for a Deadly itself) was scary even before 9/11 transformed our visions of tall buildings and smoke-filled streets and skies.

Their second EP, Unveiled, appeared in October 2000 and featured the track for  the video that CAAMA posted this week, “Same Old Song.”  Looping synth-strings, almost soulish strands, played off against an insistent thumping beat that gave the guys a platform for their lyrics.  The song is an anthem of modern misery, jumping line by line from racism to war, from violence to mental illness, from vulnerability to (once again) defiance: a manifesto of music’s power for the band’s members to create and sustain strength and sanity in the face of a cruel and insane world collapsing into ecological disaster.  It’s a lot to pack into three and a half minutes, but it doesn’t seem forced.

It’s no use runnin – Tectonic plates are worn
A child earthquake victim from the rubble torn
A radiation release to find a nuclear dawn!

It’s not about Hip Hop
This is the Hard Nok
We don’t Shit Pop
We’re here to Rip Rock

Amidst all the terror and destruction, NoKTuRNL is trying to create a sort of beauty; the imagery of the video again ought to be terrifying but somehow I’m left more awed by the beauty of it, by the way the imagery gets woven into a hallucinatory and kaleidoscopic collection of television raster lines, trippy stop motion animation, and performance clips. It sounds grim, but there’s hope buried in the bluster.

The single “Haterz” came out in 2001 and the band went onto win the Deadly again in 2003 although it wasn’t until 2005 that Shock released NoKTuRNL’s first album, Time Flies.  A compilation CD, Unveiled, brought together tracks from the earlier EPs with some previously unreleased material including tunes like “New Era” that moves from thumping, shouting rhythms reminiscent of “Neva Mend” to smooth but insistent patterns marked by ringing guitars and spectral backing voices; another track, “Peace of Me,” proffers Middle Eastern melodies emanating from synthesized keyboards.  It’s all pretty amazing stuff, but perhaps to be expected from a band that casually cites Frank Zappa, King Crimson, Elton John, and KISS among its influences.

Time Flies is available from iTunes and is downloadable from Amazon as well.  The EPs and the compilation Unveiled are harder if not impossible to find.  The band’s website offers both, along with a limited edition demo and the CD singles of “Neva Mend” and “Haterz.”  The links for directly ordering these titles from the “Nok Shop” don’t seem to be working, but there’s an email address under “ContaKt” that stood me in good stead a couple of years ago.  While you’re there, check out some more videos in the “Music” section: they’re all a blast.

Sorry Business

A couple of months ago I journeyed through the realms of childhood with Ute Eickelkamp’s delightful Growing Up in Central Australia (Berhahn Books, 2011).  Shortly afterwards, browsing nearby library stacks, I came across a book that took me to the opposite end of life’s spectrum: Mortality, Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia, edited by Katie Glaskin, Myrna Tonkinson, Yasmine Musharbash and Victoria Burbank (Ashgate Publishing, 2008).  The eleven essays, along with a substantial introduction by the editors and an eloquent afterword by Frances and Howard Morphy, span the continent from the Torres Strait and Cape York to the Kimberley and from the central deserts to the outback of New South Wales.

Compelling despite the grim subject matter, the book documents and reflects on the place of funeral practices in contemporary Indigenous society, what they mean today, and how they are being affected by the plague of early deaths that has beset these societies in recent years.  It also documents the paradoxes inherent in contemporary practice, proof of the process of adjustment to the effects of colonization and the disruption of traditional practices that has followed in its wake.

Too many funerals is a theme that runs through many, if not all, of these essays.  Too much death, and too much dying in ways that are becoming increasingly heart-rending.  And yet, in an odd way, the process of burying the dead has become a means of breathing life back into the society, or affirming values and connections.  That may be small solace in the end, but it offers a bare hope at the bottom of this Pandora’s box of ills.

Ritual almost always provides this sort of social glue, and certainly ritual is central to many aspects of traditional Indigenous culture.  It not only attends major life passages like birth and death, but it marks stages in the growth of individuals between these poles, especially in the form of initiation ceremonies that demarcate youth from maturity.  But the rituals of birth are gender-segregated.  The prevalence of initiation ceremonies, though they have a place for both sexes, is decreasing as traditional patterns of settlement and migration change, as early death robs the society of senior individuals with the capacity and knowledge to conduct the rituals, and as young people are distracted and distanced from the old ways by the lures of technology and alcohol alike.

In this changing landscape, the gathering of extended kin for funeral ceremonies has in many cases become the chief opportunity for some kind of ritual performance.  These ceremonies, however they are constructed in modern times, allow for the assertion of an Aboriginal identity and for the renewal of social ties among the affected individuals.  They allow for the creation of a sense of continuity within the community and with the past in the face of drastic changes, not the least of which is the simple fact of staggering mortality statistics.

Another theme that runs through many of these essays is that of conflict, perhaps surprising in its opposition to the previous notion–that funerals offer an occasion for communities to bond.  Here again, dislocation plays a role as people move away from their traditional lands and as relaxation or refusal of traditional patterns of “right marriage”–compliance with the strictures imposed by skin groups–confuse allegiance with country.  Relatives vie for the right to determine where the deceased will be interred.  This phenomenon may not be entirely new: it is documented, for example, in Howard Morphy’s Journey to the Crocodile’s Nest (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1984), but in that book the emphasis seems to be more on negotiation among disparate legitimately constituted demands than on outright conflict.

The other source of potential conflict is the tension between traditional practices and those determined by either Christian institutions or by agencies of the state that seek to effect compliance with medical and hygienic principles.  The evidence offered in several of these essays, though, suggests that there has been a reasonable degree of accommodation reached on this score in recent decades with funeral ceremonies now sometimes incorporating elements of Christian services; on other occasions a Christian minister will lead funeral rites after other rituals have been completed.

Apart from these overarching themes, Mortality, Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia offers a wealth of specific detail about how communities and individuals deal with death in a wide variety of cultural contexts.  Yasmine Musharbash’s lead-off article, “‘Sorry Business is Yapa Way’” for instance, is a classic ethnographic description of mortuary ritual practice among the Warlpiri.  At a different end of the spectrum “A Life in Words: History and Society in Sabai Islands Tombstones” by Richard Davis details the changing ways in which grave markers in the Torres Strait region have evolved over time since “the coming of the light” with Christian missionaries.  The details recorded in texts engraved on these tombstones speak not only of the individual’s life and works but of the changing modes of sociality and value in the society at large.

Other essays look at the process of dying at a very individual level.  Among the best of these is Katie Glaskin’s “A Personal Reflection on a Saltwater Man and the Cumulative Effects of Loss” is a moving testament to one man’s sorrow in the face of the loss of relatives–sometimes to outright death, but sometimes in more wrenching circumstances of unexplained disappearance, a loss that in its very indeterminacy is harder to bear and creates prolonged mourning, unresolvable through the sparse comfort of funeral rites.  The chief subject of her essay, a Bardi man she refers to as “B,” endured repeated losses of these sorts, which most likely influenced his own decline and may have hastened his death.  Somewhat ironically, at the last, in a Perth hospital far from his saltwater home, the ministrations of the medical staff restored his spirits and helped his death to occur with a degree of acceptance he had been unable to achieve in his experience of the deaths of close relatives in years prior.

Craig Elliott’s “Social Death and Disenfranchised Grief: An Alyawarr Case Study” looks at death through a dual lens.  Chronicling the life and death of one of the plaintiffs in the Gunner-Cubillo case that argued the federal government’s liability in the matter of the Stolen Generations, Elliott examines how child removal constituted a peculiar sort of death-in-life for Kwenentyay Gunner and complicated his return to the Alyawarr community as a adult, the double grieving his relatives endured, at his “social death” by removal from the community, and his final passing.  This study is followed by Gaynor Macdonald’s “‘Promise Me You’ll Come to My Funeral’: Putting a Value on Wiradjuri Life Through Death” in which the author’s advance commitment to being present at her friend Sarah’s funeral not only assuages Sarah’s feeling of isolation and loneliness, but is a symbolic marker of value attached to her life by a white person in the face of an overwhelming sense of devaluation by the larger culture.

Each of this volume’s essays is affecting in its own way, offering keen observations on how individuals and communities respond to death, sometimes, in the case of the former, how a person confronts and prepares for his own end.  From these detailed analyses, a further theme emerges, one that is movingly expressed in the final words offered by Frances and Howard Morphy in their afterword, “Demography and Destiny.”  Although they speak of their own experience among the Yolngu, their lessons are generally applicable to all the cases described in this book.

In Yolngu society there is a deep personal involvement in the process of the death of others and a strong sense of community in the rituals that follow.  There is no uncertainty as to how to respond to a death, or about how to approach the people who are closest kin to the dead person, though there may be anger at those thought to have contributed to the death and disagreement over the form that the burial will take.  Yet those disagreements are themselves a means of bringing tension into the open so that resolution can be achieved before the burial takes place.  It is the responsibility of kin to support the close family and to bring the society back to normal, to repair any breaches in the social fabric caused by the death and to return the living to everyday life, satisfied that sufficient has been done to uphold the memory of the deceased and to attend to the fate of the soul (pp. 212-213).

The Morphys’ contribution reminds us of the immediacy and closeness of death in Indigenous society, occurring as it often does in the very midst of family, unmediated by the more impersonal structures that Western society has developed, be they hospitals or undertakers, that remove much of the exigencies of the process from the closest of kin.  In doing so, the essays of Mortality, Mourning and Mortuary Practices in Indigenous Australia illuminate not only the work of death among the societies of Aboriginal lands, but in our own as well.

The World of Art Books

Making a selection  of the best books illustrating the recent history of Australian Aboriginal art proved even harder than choosing among the many superb anthropological studies of Indigenous culture: this short list could easily have been twice as long.  In the end I opted mostly for catalogues from major exhibitions that could give the flavor of the incredible diversity and the history of the genre, even if that meant ignoring superb monographs like Emily Kngwarreye: Paintings by Jennifer Isaacs (Craftsman House, 1998) or  Scott Cane’s almost metaphysical investigation Pila Nguru: the Spinifex People (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002).  With that caveat, here’s my list, presented this time in chronological order by date of publication.

I suppose I have to say that Geoffrey Bardon started it all with Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert (Rigby, 1979), which he later altered and expanded into Papunya Tula: art of the Western Desert (McPhee Gribble, 1991).  This is the foundation story of acrylic painting in the desert, the tale of the birth of a movement.  Intensely personal and dramatic, it is a story of discovery and heartbreak, of connections made and missed.  The biographies of the artists are sometimes more the story of Bardon’s relationships with them, but that fact does not diminish their appeal.  But it is well to remember that this is Bardon’s story as much as anyone else.

Dreamings: the art of Aboriginal Australia, edited by Peter Sutton (Braziller/Asia Society, 1988) is the catalogue of the exhibition sent to America to celebrate the Australian bicentenary.  Many of us on this side of the Big Pond were introduced to Aboriginal art by this exhibition; for me it was a literally life-changing event, as I think I’ve said more than once before.  Although the majority of works included in the exhibition were early barks and desert paintings from the 1980s, there is an attempt to demonstrate the real diversity of artistic achievement, and given that Peter Sutton was in charge of the catalog, one of its delights is the inclusion of sculptures from Aurukun that, along with the toas from the Lake Eyre region in the early 20th century, gave a glimpse of  realms that were strange and wonderful and completely unexpected.  The essays are almost more significant that the photographs of the art works and for a long time comprised the most significant explication of Indigenous art for audiences outside of Australia.

Bernhard Lüthi curated a truly amazing survey of Aboriginal art for Europeans audiences with Aratjara: art of the first Australians: traditional and contemporary works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (DuMont Buchverlag, 1993).  It covers much of the same ground that Sutton traversed in Dreamings, but added so much more.  There are numerous photographs of rock art that make connections to the barks of the Top End, and there is a healthy representation of work from artists of urban backgrounds.  The essays are briefer than those in the Sutton volume, but also more far reaching in their coverage, and the illustrations are copious and glorious.  If Dreamings opened my eyes, Aratjara was revelatory of a brilliance that I’d only had hints of.  The English edition was scarce for many years, but lately has come to be regularly available on the internet markets; this book ought to be in every serious collector’s library.

The Eye of the Storm: eight contemporary Indigenous Australian Artists (National Gallery of  Australia, 1996) is a slim volume that had a huge impact on my appreciation of  contemporary Aboriginal art, as it introduced me to many of the artists included in it: George Milpurrurru, John Mawurndjul, Brian Nyinawanga, Fiona Foley, Ken Thaiday, and Roy Wiggan.  With such richness on display, the inclusion of Rover Thomas and Emily Kngwarreye seemed superfluous, almost old hat.  I don’t think that I had paid much attention to Indigenous sculpture, if that term can be used to describe Nyinawanga’s bone bundles and Wiggan’s ilma, until I saw this catalogue.  But once I had, I was hooked.

Saltwater: Yirrkala bark paintings of sea country (Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, 1999) is still, to my knowledge, the only substantial catalogue devoted solely to Yirrkala bark paintings apart from the recent Yalangbara: art of the Djang’kawu (Australian National Museum, 2010).  This is a serious omission in the exhibition agenda that ought to be corrected without delay.  That said, Saltwater documents the ongoing struggle of the Yolngu to reclaim their rights in country as much as it presents the masterful paintings of generations of important artists.  In this respect, it foregrounds the political implications of bark painting in a tradition that goes back to the Yirrkala Church Panels and the Bark Petition.  And the work is beautiful.

Beyond the Pale: contemporary Indigenous art: 2000 Biennal of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, by Brenda Croft (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2000) was another revelation for me, this time of the work of urban artists and photographers (Michael Riley, Darren Siwes) in particular.  It opened up the beauties of bark painting, especially work from Maningrida that had begun flowering into what I might call abstraction.  Before I saw this catalog I had mostly been interested in desert acrylic painting, though I had begun to learn a bit about the art of the Kimberley and the Tiwi Islands.  Beyond the Pale took my interest in entirely new directions.

Hetti Perkins and Hannah Fink produced Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000) in time for the  Sydney Olympics and the 30th anniversary of the founding of the contemporary acrylic painting movement and filled the catalog with gorgeous reproductions of important artworks and intelligent, multi-faceted essays on the art, artists, and history of the company.  I’ve written quite a bit in recent weeks about Papunya Tula’s history and will note here that while this was not the first major retrospective of the company’s work, this catalog is certainly still the most comprehensive and downright gorgeous compilation of the work to be published to date.  The essays, ranging from an interview with Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula, who died the year the exhibition was mounted, through aspects of history, geography, economics, and aesthetics, are delights, one and all.

Story Place: Indigenous art of Cape York and the rainforest by Lindy Allen (Queensland Art Gallery, 2003) signaled the entry of art from Queensland’s Far North into the marketplace in a major way, building on community operations as diverse as Hopevale and Lockhart River while including neglected artists like Joe Rootsey,  and even non-traditional forms like Danie Mellor’s earthenware sculptures.  I suspect that Story Place had a huge impact on the fortunes of Queensland artists and inspired the renaissance of painting on Mornington Island and the growth of other art centres around the state.  It certainly brought the artists of Aurukun back to the public eye and refreshed my own appreciation for work dimly remembered from Dreamings.

<<rarrk>> John Mawurndjul: journey through time in northern Australia (Schwabe/Crawford House, 2005) is the sole artist’s monograph that I’ve chosen for this list, but I believe that the exception is justified for a number of reasons.  The first is the astonishing fact of an Aboriginal artist being given a retrospective in Europe–and with an exhibition that brought bark painting out of the shadows of ethnography and under consideration as fine art.  For a while, it seemed as though Mawurndjul’s work was everywhere you turned, helped in part by his direct participation in the creation of work for the Australian Indigenous Art Commission at the Musée du quai Branly the following year.  In addition, Mawurndjul’s eloquent and challenging assertions of his stature as a creative artist, so well captured in this volume, stand out as a nearly unprecedented manifesto to the Western art world.  And finally, there is the body of work itself: more than two decades of masterful creation, adaptation, and growth that changed the practice of painting on bark in ways whose influence is still being felt today.

One Sun One Moon: Aboriginal art in Australia (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007), curated by Hetti Perkins and Margie West, almost rivals Aratjara in its breadth, but it reflects the significant change in the perception of “an Aboriginal high art” (to use Fred Myers’ phrase) over the intervening fifteen years.  One Sun One Moon clearly invokes the accomplishments of a mature, modern art movement with scarcely a glance back towards the traditions of ceremony and ritual.  Of all the titles I have chosen here, this is the one that provides the widest scope for considering the achievements of Indigenous artists.  I would be hard pressed to recommend a single volume that packs more diversity into its pages, leading me to suggest that if you could own only one book on Aboriginal art, this might well be the one.

That same year, Brenda Croft curated Culture Warriors: national Indigenous art triennial (National Gallery of Australia, 2007) to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the NGA and to celebrate once again the achievements of artists working outside the realm of traditional iconography and expression.  Giving a nod to that tradition in the works of five “old masters” (Arthur Pambegan, Jr, D. R. Nakamarra, Gulumbu Yunupingu, Wamud Namok, and Philip Gudthaykudthay), Culture Warriors focuses its attention on the production of art-school trained urban practitioners with a strong political bent (Vernon Ah Kee, Gordon Hookey, Christian Thompson, Richard Bell, and Daniel Boyd, among others) and on other artists whose work stands outside the mainstream in form: Treanha Hamm, Dennis Nona, H. J. Wedge.  Almost twenty years after Dreamings introduced Aboriginal art to much of the world outside Australia, Croft seemed to set out to redefine the category, and did so brilliantly.

Nici Cumpston and Barry Patton’s Desert Country (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2010) would be notable if only for its expansive inclusion of new works from the APY and Ngaanyatjara Lands, but it is much more than that.  It is a comprehensive survey, starting with the Hermmansburg watercolorists, traversing Papunya Tula, Ikuntji, Watiyawanu, Warmun, Balgo, Utopia, the Spinifex/Maralinga cluster, and the Western Desert Mob, before ending in the emergent APY lands.  There is a beautiful two-page map of a slice of Australia from the Josephine Bonaparte Gulf to the Great Australian Bight, liberally annotated not just with the locations of art centres, but with place-names significant to many of the artists and paintings.  Since the show was drawn from outstanding but under-exhibited collection of AGSA, many of the works included here, while representative, come fresh to the eye.

And finally, there is the great effort of cultural reclamation, as well as a great art show, Yiwarra Kuju: the Canning Stock Route (National Museum of Australia, 2010).  The exhibition was conceived as a project that would record the impact of the intrusion of pastoralists through the heart of Western Australia and the rift that it caused in the land and the people, but told from the Aboriginal perspective.  As part of the process of reclaiming that history, Indigenous people were brought back to country and during a six-week excursion along the length of the Stock Route, artists produced 127 stunning canvases documenting their connections to the land.  Yiwarra Kuju stands as one of the best examples of how art functions in relation to larger cultural issues, and the catalog is a first-class example of both art history and personal history and how the two are inextricably intertwined.

New Year, Old Books

A few years ago, a friend suggested that I post a list of the best books for aspiring students of Aboriginal art and culture to gather for their personal libraries.  At the time I thought it was an impossible request to fill.  As librarians like to joke, so many books, so little time.  And how to choose?

Well, the recent spate of year-end lists has inspired me, along with a few days of holiday vacation given over to sorting through the piles of books in my office, making sure I’ve catalogued them, and trying to squeeze them into the vanishing inches of shelf-space left in the house.  And so I have made an attempt to select a few titles out of the hundreds I’ve amassed over the years to present here.  I’ll begin with cultural studies–mostly anthropological in nature, sometimes shading over into art–that have been touchstones for me.  Next time, I’ll delve into the world of art more specifically to select titles that I treasure.  In both cases, there will be serious omissions, I’m sure, but there is not world enough or time to do justice to the vast literature.

The top of the list must be reserved for Fred Myers’ Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: sentiment, place, and politics among Western Desert Aborigines (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986).  Myers’ study of the Pintupi, based on fieldwork done in the 1970s, asserts the psychological primacy of the twinned poles of autonomy and relatedness in desert Aboriginal culture.  I suspect that it is the most-cited work on Australian Aboriginal culture ever written; it seems that very few books or articles written in the last twenty-five years do not refer to it or have not been affected by it.  Myers’ Painting Culture: the making of an Aboriginal high art (Duke University Press, 2002) may not have been as influential, but to me it is the quintessential study of the genesis of the modern painting movement, a spectacular blend of art history, anthropology, and personal observation that has no peer.

Howard Morphy’s scholarship on the art and culture of the Yolngu represents to me the other half of the great equation: if Myers is the consummate scholar of the deserts, Morphy is unrivaled in studies of the Top End.  Ancestral Connections: art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 1991) has been described to me as “inventing Yolngu art” with only slight exaggeration, and Morphy’s description of the dynamics of “inside” and “outside” knowledge and the use of bir’yun (brilliance) in Yolngu art are as fundamental to an appreciation of the Yolngu as Myers’ concept of autonomy and relatedness are to the Pintupi.  Morphy’s Journey to the Crocodile’s Nest: an accompanying monography to the film Madarrpa Funeral at Gurka’wuy (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1984) unpacks Ian Dunlop’s 1979 documentary in ways that astonish me still.  His recent Becoming Art: exploring cross-cultural categories (UNSW Press, 2008) is broader in focus and likewise essential reading.

W. E. H. Stanner’s  White Man Got No Dreaming: essays 1938-1973 (Australian National University Press, 1979) was a Grail of sorts for me for a long time.  Out of print for decades, it was another book that almost everyone cited but was hard to put my hands on.  But I persisted in the quest and when an original hardback in nearly pristine condition arrived one day, I sat down to be mesmerized by Stanner’s erudition, intelligence, and eloquence.  The people Stanner wrote about were vividly human, not subjects of study or objects of curiosity.  I learned great chunks of history from this book but most importantly, I learned sympathy and a sort of humility; Stanner has been a guiding and tutelary spirit.  The essays have recently been re-issued under the title The Dreaming and Other Essays (Black Inc., 2009).

Jennifer Deger’s Shimmering Screens: making media in an Aboriginal community (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) is the first great ethnography of the 21st century.  Chronicling years of work in the community of Gapuwiyak, Deger has written a book that is also a rare mixture of intelligence and empathy.  She and her brother Bangana Wunungmurra collaborated on a film that, unlike Ian Dunlop’s work in Yirrkala in the 1970s, does not capture or record ritual but embodies it.  If that seems like a subtle distinction, falling into the arms of this book will render it quite clear.   It is sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking and always illuminating about the ways in which Yolngu see the world.

Luke Taylor’s Seeing the Inside: bark painting in Western Arnhem Land (Clarendon Press, 1996) is as definitive about Kunwinjku painting as Morphy’s books are about Yolngu art.  Written well before the global enthusiasm for the work of John Mawurndjul catapulted the arts of Maningrida and, to a lesser extent, Injalak to fame, it is essential to understanding not only the contemporary output of those art centres, but the rock art traditions upon which they are based.

Wanderings in Wild Australia (Macmillan, 1928, 2v.) is credited to Baldwin Spencer on its title pages, but is actually a distillation of earlier works Spencer co-authored with Frank J. Gillen.  Gillen’s corrspondence to his partner in exploration and research, published as My Dear Spencer: the letters of F. J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer (Hyland House, 1997), reveals the depth of Gillen’s contributions to their work and provides an affecting insight into the author’s aspirations, dreams, and disappointments.  Like Across Australia (Macmillan, 1912, 2v.), Wanderings is intended as a popularization of the researches recorded in the pair’s earlier publications; both succeed admirably in combining a sense of page-turning adventure with detailed information about the lives of Aboriginal people in contact with whites at the turn of the twentieth century.

Another annal of early contact in the desert is contained in Donald Thomson’s thrilling Bindibu Country (Thomas Nelson, 1975).  Although Thomson is writing about events that happened more than half a century after Spencer and Gillen roamed the deserts, and nearly twice that long after the travels of the nineteenth-century explorers, there is no lack of drama and excitement in these pages.  Thomson traveled with one of the first Welfare Patrols led by Jeremy Long and E. C. Evans to seek out “uncontacted” natives in 1957; I can’t help but wonder if some of the men Thomson met eventually might have wound up in Papunya and taken up painting.  Whether they did or not, the portrait of the desert Pintupi that Thomson creates is spellbinding.  I have to thank David Nash, though, for pointing me to a “corrective” vision of these expeditions published by Evans and Long years later, “Aborigines of western central Australia,” Geographical Journal, v. 13, no. 3, September 1965.

Returning to the North, I found Lloyd Warner’s classic A Black Civilization: a social study of an Aboriginal tribe (Harper and Bros., 1937) utterly, almost absurdly, engrossing.  I say absurdly, because there are pages and chapters devoted to charts of kinship organization and similar kinds of technical exposition that ought to be dreary reading, but manage to be fascinating as well as sometimes puzzling, and always challenging.  Warner is not Stanner’s equal in style or eloquence, but his appreciation for the people with whom he engages is as real and therefore as fascinating.  The second edition (1958) adds an engrossing appendix entitled “Mahkarolla and Murngin Society” (“Murngin” being the term Warner used for Yolngu).  Mahkarolla was Warner’s chief informant, and this chapter constitutes a short biography of the man in his culture.  Later editions, beginning in 1964, omit substantial chunks of essential material; caveat emptor.

Basil Sansom’s  The Camp at Wallaby Cross: Aboriginal fringe dwellers in Darwin (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1980) made a huge impression on me: it revealed to me Aboriginal sociality in ways that no-one else had ever addressed.  Although it is based on research that is now more than thirty years old, this study of the “long-grass people” still seems starkly relevant in many ways.  Its discussions of violence in domestic circumstances–and its elucidation of what “domestic circumstances” mean to Aboriginal people–or its explication of patterns of migration and group affiliation ought to be required reading for anyone who takes a position in government that affects the quality of life for Indigenous people.

Every one of Gillian Cowlishaw’s books is a candidate for inclusion here, starting with Blackfellas, Whitefellas, and the Hidden Injuries of Race (Blackwell, 2004).  Cowlishaw investigates race relations: how blackfellas and whitefellas see each other and  themselves in relation to each other. She also works in locations that few other anthropologists have penetrated (or published on) to the same degree:  in this volume Bourke, NSW, but also around Mainorou Station in country east of Katherine, NT (Rednecks, Eggheads, and Blackfellas: a study of racial power and intimacy in Australia, Allen & Unwin, 1999) and in the outer west Sydney suburbs (The City’s Outback, UNSW Press, 2009).

In the essays that comprise Reports from a Wild Country: ethics for decolonisation (UNSW Press, 2004), Deborah Bird Rose tackles a wide array of topics ranging across race relations, Aboriginal concepts of time, tourism, geography, ecology, and the horrors of colonial history.  Rose has an uncanny knack for exposing the variance in world views that inform black and white society and she writes comedy and tragedy with equal facility.  Reports from a Wild Country is truly illuminating: light bulbs will be going on in your head every few pages.

Nancy Williams explores the questions of contact and cross-cultural adjustment among the Yolngu in two relatively short but powerful studies, The Yolngu and Their Land: a system of land tenure and the fight for its recognition (Stanford University Press, 1986) and Two Laws: managing disputes in a contemporary Aboriginal community (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Stuies, 1987).  The former is broadly historical in scope, using the Yirrkala Land Rights case as a means of exposing not only the principles of Yolngu land tenure, but European notions of property and property law as well, demonstrating how they are fundamentally in opposition to one another, much to the loss of the Yolngu.  The latter title is more focused on aspects of daily life as seen through the lens of conflict, negotiation, and resolution.  Once again, the seemingly irreconcilable values of Yolngu and Balanda struggle to find ground on which co-existence can be forged.

Anthropological Literature

The story begins with lost luggage, but in many ways is about baggage that can’t be lost.

A few weeks ago in a post on Savage Minds, the anthropology blog, Ryan listed the books he plans to take with him to his fieldwork site and asked for comments and suggestions.  There were a number of responses, and several people suggested some good novels to take along in addition to (or instead of) texts on methodology.  Among the novels was Susanna Kaysen’s Far Afield (Vintage Books, 1990).  It is the story of Jonathan Brand, a Harvard graduate student in anthropology and his fieldwork in the Faroe Islands.  Claire described it as “a brilliant novel that is the best account of anthropological fieldwork I’ve ever read, including ethnographies.”  Given that I’ve done no fieldwork, but have sat around many a table listening to anthropologist friends describe their experiences throughout communities in Australia (admittedly not quite the same environments as the Faroes), I thought I should give it a try.  I’m glad I did.

The novel opens in Reykjavík, where Jonathan’s carefully packed luggage has gone astray.  It never will be found, and thus Jonathan arrives in the Faroes with little more than the money the airline has paid him in compensation.  It turns out to be a tidy sum that allows him to outfit himself with Faroese sweaters and boots and pay a year’s rent on a small house on the island of Sandoy, where Jonathan spends his fieldwork year.

Cut adrift from everything that is familiar to him, Jonathan falls into a fugue state of sorts, spending his first weeks doing almost nothing.  Surprisingly, he finds himself enjoying his new, aimless life and can’t even muster a sense of guilt at not doing any anthropology.  He struggles with his incomplete mastery of the language, with the equally unfamiliar and often repulsive food (rotten lamb and salty fish heads), and with the locals’ behavior towards him, which varies from utter indifference to apparent hostility to unwanted matchmaking.

His funk persists, along with his acceptance of it, until the morning that his toilet won’t flush.  His one new friend, a shopkeeper named Sigurd, explains via drawings and dictionary consultations, that Jonathan’s septic tank is full.  He will need to borrow a shovel and a wheelbarrow, dig out the accumulated shit, and dump it off the island’s cliffs into the sea.  As if this weren’t bad enough, his neighbors crowd around to watch him–though not to help.  Things get tense.

“In America, you hire people to do this, hah,” said Jón Hendrik in perfect English.

“In America, we have a sewage system,” Jonathan spat out in perfect Faroese.  He’d been looking up words in his dictionaries (English-Danish, Danish-Faroese) the night before.

“Now you are here,” Jón Hendrik said.

“Vælkomin til Føroyar,” Jonathan said, resuming his shoveling.

This remark, made in a bad temper, was a big hit.  Jón Hendrik laughed and stamped his foot on the ground in delight.  Jens Símun’s multicolored eyes watered with tears, Petur slapped his thigh, and the unknown man  had to lean on Petur for stability while he chortled.  Jonathan was so surprised that he stopped working and stared at them.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“You are beginning to understand our country,” said Jón Hendrik.

Jonathan spends two days shoveling shit, and by the end of his ordeal, he has made friends and been accepted into the community.  This starts a pattern that persists throughout the book.  Jonathan begins to spend his time wandering around the community with his notebook, observing, conversing, and making copious records of daily life.  The Faroese are delighted to find him at work at last, and accept his role as investigator and chronicler with good-natured openness.

But it is in the participation in the work of the island, be that herding sheep or slaughtering whales, or even dancing drunkenly through the long night following the beaching and butchering of the whales, that Jonathan loses himself and forgets the anxieties that have been bred into him by his professor-parents and his academic training.  When not engaged in active labor, Jonathan tends to revert to his neurotic and neurasthenic American ego.  But when he chases sheep across miles of meadows, his immersion in the country takes him to the sorts of altered states where he can easily believe that he is wrestling for possession of a lamb with a huldumađur–a “gray man,” one of a race of people who live in the rocks, all gray, with gray clothes and gray boats, and seen only out of the corner of one’s eye, if at all.

It’s not clear that Jonathan ever comes to a real comprehension of the Faroese, despite his integration into the island’s society.  In most novels, we expect the hero to learn, to change and grow, to come out the other end transformed.  Far Afield frustrates that impulse.  Jonathan remains, through a series of hilarious, somber, and touching picaresque episodes, both apart from and of the Faroese temper.  The Faroese, in turn, sometimes seem to be more anthropologists than the anthropologist.

The novel ends as Jonathan departs the Islands on his flight home, and as he soars above them, he experiences a moment that might be revelation, accomplishment, or understanding.

But poised in the moment before it was all reduced to an an illustration, a topography, only hinted at by light and shadow, he felt the hills, bays, and fjords, with their wave-embroidered outlines, the very rise and fall of the fields, in the rise and fall of his pulse.  And his footsteps on that country–though they went round and round in circles–were each precious, each tread known to him and, annealed by memory, visible at this and greater distances.

Like the loss of his luggage that opens the novel, this moment of illumination seals it off.  There is no before-and-after to this story, and that narrative structure seems most fitting.  For Jonathan, the moments on the island–shoveling shit, herding sheep, slaughtering whales, dancing drunkenly–when there is no before nor after, only the moment of experience, are the moments that have made his life in the islands visible.  I don’t think this is a stance of anti-intellectualism on Kaysen’s part; more, perhaps, it suggests that as Americans we are too prone to analysis and second-guessing that prevents us from seeing and engaging.  To know the other, she suggests, we must be released from ourselves.

That may be a fine bit of romantic balderdash in the end, but it strikes me as having a kernel of wisdom.  For when I look at Indigenous art, I find that I must be ever wary of the impulse to compare styles and techniques to the painters of contemporary America whose experiments with minimalism, abstraction, and fields of color gave me the critical and aesthetic pleasures that allowed me to be open to Aboriginal art in the first place.  I don’t come to this art unencumbered.  Of course not.  But I want my eye to absorb desert painting and Top End weaving on their own terms as much as possible.  Perhaps this desire to look at Indigenous art for its essence is just more Western thinking, more phenomenology.  But I hope I can do greater justice to the inspirations of a Pintupi or a Yolngu painter if I can keep the concerns of Western art at a remove.

Tjilpi

I want to conclude my trilogy of posts about the artists of Papunya Tula on a personal note, by paying homage to a man whose work has resided in my heart for almost the entire span of my interest and involvement in Aboriginal art, Willy Tjungurrayi.

Willy was born around 1930 at a place called Patjantja, which lies southwest of Kaakuratinja (Lake MacDonald), which itself lies southwest of Walungurru (Kintore).  His father was Pulpalpulpalnga Tjapaltjarri, whose other sons, by different women, were Willy’s older brother Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi and younger sibling George Ward Tjungurrayi.  He grew up on the western side of Kaakuratinja; his first contact with white men reportedly came on one of Jeremy Long’s welfare patrols in the area.  In 1956, Charlie Wartuma Tjungurrayi, Pulpalpulpanga’s brother, led a large party of Pintupi into Haasts Bluff with Willy among them.  Willy moved to Papunya in 1959 with the rest of the Haasts Bluff community, eventually relocating in the 1970s to Yayayi.

In 1974 Willy was a member of the party of men, including his brother Yala Yala, John Tjakamarra, and George Yapa Tjangala, who traveled west to Kulkuta and Yawalyurru, a journey that is partially chronicled in Dick Kimber’s biographical sketches in the catalog for Tjukurrtjanu.  Two years later, in 1976, Willy began painting for Papunya Tula, and according to the official curriculum vitae compiled by the company, began participating in group shows in 1983.  His first solo exhibition took place in 2000 at William Mora and was followed two years later by a second solo show at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi.  In the past decade he has spent much time in Alice Springs, but returned to live in Kintore in 2011. ¹

My own first encounter with Indigenous Australian art took place at the Asia Society in New York City in November of 1988, on the occasion of the Dreamings exhibition there.  To be honest, my memories of the show are impressionistic at best; I remember being stunned by the vitality of the art, the color, the abstract beauty of the desert works, the spooky intimations of art from the north.  But no single painting remains imprinted in my mind.

Two years later, I arrived in Sydney for the first time as a tourist, and although I’m sure the Opera House was the first site I visited, it didn’t take me long to make my way to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and, on arrival, straight to the Yiribana Gallery on the lower level.  There I saw a painting whose image has never deserted me in more than twenty years; I can even recall its placement in the gallery precisely.  The painting was Willy Tjungurrayi Tingari Story from 1986 (inset above), a massive 240 x 360 cm in span ².  I’m sure that at the time I first encountered it, I did not understand the way that Pintupi painters were using massed, radiating, concentric circles whose black and white forms pulsated against a muted but still dynamic ochre background to deliver the power of the ancestral Dreamings straight to the optic nerves.

But my lack of understanding didn’t much matter.  I was transfixed by the majesty of this painting, the way it radiated energy, the speed with which incident moved across its surface network of long lines, the illusion of three dimensionality as sections pushed their way into the room, straight at me, or bent the frame outwards in places and bent the design inwards in others.  Like many of the large-scale masterpieces of its time, Tingari Story was created under the guidance of a single artist, but with assistance from others, in this case the great John Tjakamarra, one of the company’s founders, and Simon Tjakamarra, whose large Tingari paintings of the period were powerful but simplified and schematized interpretations of the motifs developed in Willy’s work.

Leaving the Gallery, I bought a small postcard reproduction of the painting to take home with me, and for years afterward it hung by my desk at work.  In 1998, I found a painting depicting a Snake Dreaming at Patjantja, Willy’s birthplace, in Christopher Hodges’ Utopia Gallery to hang on the wall of my office at home.  A few years later I became entranced by Willy’s simple, sinuous sandhill paintings, the first major shift in his style since he began working.  But I was dismayed to learn that many of these paintings were being produced in Alice Springs.  It was there that I met Willy briefly in one of the saddest and most disheartening encounters of my pursuit of understanding this complex and brilliant art.

And so it was with great delight that I first heard the news that Willy had returned to Kintore earlier this year and was painting there for the company again.  He’s a regular at the studio most mornings, where he sits and paints with the other tjilpi (old men) including his brother Yala Yala’s son Morris Gibson Tjapaltjarri and Charlie Wartuma’s son Hilary Tjapaltjarri.  The thought of the three of them together, a reunion of sorts, a circling back for Willy to the connections of his youth, made me smile.  The smiles turned to wonder when I saw one of Willy’s new works on the wall.  Painted in June of this year, the picture shows the rockhole site at Lintjinya, west of Kaakuratinja in the country where Willy grew up, and where the Tingari men camped and held ceremonies on their way eastward towards the lake.

Willy Tjungurrayi, Untitled (Rockhole site of Lintjinya), 2011, 61 x 55 cm

It may be that I am more attached to this little work than to any of the many other paintings of Willy’s that I’ve seen over the years, and explaining that attachment is going to take me back into the realm of the impressionistic and the personal.  This will be less a real interpretation of the work than a story about feeling.

My first reaction to the painting was elation just at the sight of it on the walls of Papunya Tula’s gallery and the realization that Willy had returned to Kintore from Alice Springs.  When I saw him in Alice six years ago, he looked tired; he moved slowly; his eyes bothered him.  I couldn’t be sure what kind of care he was receiving and what he was doing in return for bed and board.  It was, as I said, a disheartening experience, and I was glad to think of him now resting in the courtyard of the PTA studio in Kintore in the morning sunlight, surrounded by old friends.

My second reaction was one of pleasure at the vitality of the work, the energy swirling around the large central roundel.  There were echoes of the great Tingari Story in the torque of the outer set of interconnected lines, the bending left at the center of the painting.  And in its black and white simplicity, it recalled aspects of ceremonial painting–both on bodies and on cave walls–that I had never before seen in Willy’s work.

This simplicity and power, and the echoes of cave paintings, brough to mind another painter who has recently undergone an amazing renaissance in a similar return to a sort of “first principles”: Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula.  Both men seem to have found fresh inspiration to animate these old circle-and-line motifs.  Their compositions appear uncomplicated, and yet both men’s designs have the tendency to leap off the plane of the canvas into the viewer’s space, pushing and pulsing, pulling back, never in stasis.  As I put my face closer to the canvas to inspect its details, I saw that in Willy’s execution, some of this spin came from tiny trails of paint that attached to his dotting.  You could see the motion of his arm as he swung his brush from paint-pot to canvas leaving minuscule traces of movement circling across the support.  And like Yungut, Willy has adopted a technique of intentionally blurring the dots in certain parts of the canvas.  I don’t know exactly how the two men achieve the effect.  In another studio I might think they had taken a palette knife to the dots and scraped them along the surface; perhaps they are just using the blunt end of the paintbrush to achieve the effect.  In an odd way, these variations in technique recall the way in which different hands infilling the background of Tingari Story add depth and incident to the painting’s negative space.

As I stepped back to admire the new painting from a distance again, another shadowy memory began to awaken.  I was thinking about old men.  There’s no denying that the precision of Willy’s younger hand is gone from this painting.  Dots blur unintentionally as well as intentionally; dribbles and smudges of paint reveal a certain shakiness in the motion of the artist’s hand on parts of the canvas.  In the lower left corner of the painting, some of the underpainted black circles have been intentionally obscured, in part or in whole, by white over-dotting, almost as if some ghostly drift of sand were being blown over the edges of the image, submerging the detail.  My initial joy at discovering this tiny gem was suddenly alloyed with the realization that this is an old man’s painting.  The return to country was undoubtedly a good thing in preference to continued residence in Alice, but might it also be a indicator of the artist’s awareness that his last days were approaching.

Yala Yala Gibbs, Old Man Dreaming, 1974

The whiteness of the canvas and the sense of a halting but centrifugal motion in the work made me think of a painting by Willy’s brother Yala Yala  that has haunted me since I first saw it reproduced in the catalog for the Genesis and Genius show many years ago (p. 52).  Entitled Old Man Dreaming, it was made on composition board in 1974 and relates to the story of an old man who has been left behind, too weak to travel any farther with his relatives, in a rudimentary bough shelter.  As he lies there, a huge whirlwind blows up and scatters the branches of the wurley.  The black and ochre lines show the pattern of the remnants of the shelter in the sky³.  As a metaphor for death, the breaking up of the shelter is not hard to read.  Once I returned home and looked up the image again, I saw that the two compositions are, of course, quite different.  But somewhere, if only in my head, there’s a link between Willy’s painting and Yala Yala’s story from nearly forty years ago.  In the whirling whiteness, I see intimations of mortality.

I thought again of Willy painting out at Kintore with his brother’s son Morris Gibson nearby, and with Hilary Tjapaltjarri, the son of the man who grew Willy up, Charlie Tjungurrayi.  Just to make all these connections that much spookier, at the Papunya Tula booth in the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair a week later, I saw a gorgeous new painting by Hilary in which he had reverted to a composition featuring straight lines, rather than his more customary arcs, connecting the circles, all against a background of white dots.  The spirit of Yala Yala, Papunya Tula’s premier painter in white, seems to be hovering around all of these works.

A few weeks ago, when I first began contemplating the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Papunya Tula Artists and the celebration of that event in the Tjukurrtjanu exhibition, I found myself thinking most of all about the continuity in the midst of change that has characterized the company during its existence.  Quite independently, I had been considering, for several months now, writing about this lovely little work of Willy’s that has moved me so deeply since I first saw it.  I hadn’t quite realized that my affection for his paintings has been one of the threads that has anchored my own continuing involvement with Papunya Tula over the decades.  Nor had I given thought to the many artistic and biographical links between the early days of the Pintupi’s encounters with white Australia and this little white painting that now hangs, instead of a postcard, in my office.  But when I put all these strands together, I once again realized what extraordinary tales there are to tell about these artists of the Western Desert.

¹ Biographical details have been compiled from personal communications with Papunya Tula staff, Papunya Tula documentation, Yiribana: an introduction to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collection, the Art Gallery of New South Wales by Margo Neale (AGNSW, 1994), Vivien Johnson’s Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists (IAD Press, 2008), and Johnson’s Aboriginal Artists of the Western Desert: a biographical dictionary (Craftsman House, 1994).

²  Tingari Story is beautifully illustrated in Neale (op. cit., p.71), in Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius (AGNSW, 2001, pp. 96-97), and in Johnson (op. cit.,  p. 151).

³ This interpretation of Yala Yala’s painting is drawn from the annotation in Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, p. 289.

Tjukurrtjanu: Reconstructing Papunya History

Old Walter Tjampitjinpa, Snake and Bush Tucker Story, 1972

I missed forty years by about forty days and forty nights: that’s how long before the opening of Tjukurrtjanu: origins of Western Desert art at the National Gallery of Victoria that I left Australia to return to the United States earlier this year.  Luckily, I’ve been able to sample some of its delights virtually through a wonderful little video that features curators Judith Ryan and Philip Batty.  The video hints at the richness of the exhibition, not just in the paintings of twenty veterans of the first eighteen months of acrylic painting at Papunya, but also in the shields, woomeras, incised pearl shells, other artifacts, and photographs now on display at the NGV.  Even better, there is the sumptuous catalog that reproduces much of the exhibition’s wealth and features, among other delights, outstanding essays by Ryan and Batty as well as Fred Myers and John Kean.

The early paintings from Papunya that are the progenitors of the major modern movement of Aboriginal art (as opposed to the tradition that was ongoing even in 1971) are, as Batty puts it, merely the tip of the iceberg.  The selections in the show nearly all date from 1971 or 1972; the artists represented are perhaps fewer than half of the men who painted for the market in that period.  And of course, there has been enormous growth in the overall catalog of Papunya Tula Artists, itself representing only a fraction of the art produced in the last forty years by painters from the desert.  The desert renaissance itself is only a single slice of the magisterial variety and vitality of the movement that it spawned.  But one of the achievements of this exhibition is to hold those magical moments in the early 1970s in balance.  While implicitly looking ahead to what followed the blaze of creativity at Papunya, the exhibition also strives to uncover the traditions and experiments that led up to the creation of works that would change the course of art history in Australia.

Philip Batty, in his essay “Anxious objects: searching for the origins of the early Papunya paintings,” takes us into the world of artifact, not just of the painting as physical object, but of the many ways in which what we would call artistic creativity or the aesthetic sensibility manifested itself in ritual objects.  These include the incised pearl shells that were traded down into the western deserts from the northwest coast as well as “native curios,” the carvings of animals or the painted shields and spear throwers that were created for the burgeoning tourist market in Central Australia during the post-war decades.

Exposing the connections between these artifacts and the works we have come to think of as the founding documents of “Aboriginal art” is, of course, good art history, and the creation of art history in our western sense is one of the goals of Tjukurrtjanu.  As I suggested last week, much of the published work of recent years has had the effect (and sometimes the explicit goal) of demythologizing the origin myths of desert art and in particular of documenting the riches that have often (and long) been hidden in Geoffrey Bardon’s shadow.  For many of us who were raised on that myth, there is something almost sad about the de-centering of Bardon in the narrative.  He was a grand figure, self-created to be sure, but one who helped to set the unknown, semi-anonymous Aboriginal artist in the tradition of western romanticism.  Both Bardon and the artists whose work he brought to market were portrayed as struggling in a physical and cultural environment that was largely indifferent to them and often bitterly hostile.  Whether he meant to or not, Bardon in creating these mythologies, made the unfamiliar and alien Indigenous traditions heirs to a line of artists that stretched from John Keats to Jackson Pollock.  Doing so undoubtedly contributed to the eventual acceptance and success of the movement, but also, like the emphasis on the “stories” that accompanied the paintings, obscured much in an already obscure field.

Batty’s reconstruction of history sweeps aside some of this mythologizing, but it also adds to the cultural history of these objects.  He places them in a new context.   In doing so he is also able to show how the artists, both before and after 1971, were active agents in the intercultural endeavor that these paintings and artifacts are a physical manifestation and reminder of.  He reminds us that they are products of the meeting of two lifeworlds and are generated by innovations undertaken by the artists not merely in response to the invasion of their traditions by a modernizing Europeanism.

The early paintings were not, therefore, produced as an act of defiance against white dominance.  Nor were they bound by an internal cultural logic entirely closed to outsiders.  Rather, they were the product of a cultural environment shaped both by Europeans and Aboriginal people, where adaptation and invention were  just as important as the maintenance of tradition (p. 62).

Demythologizing is not necessarily the same as demystifying, and this is a theme that informs Fred Myers’ contribution to the catalog for Tjukurrtjanu.  For over a decade now, Myers has been building his own art history of the early Papunya works, most extensively and spectacularly in the chapter of Painting Culture: the making of an Aboriginal high art (Duke University Press, 2002) devoted to a stylistic analysis of the work of Anatjari Tjakamarra and Uta Uta Tjangala [1].  In “Intrigue of the archive, enigma of the object” Myers builds on those earlier analyses and extends them to consider other painters with whom he worked closely in the 1970s, including his friends Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi and Freddy West Tjakamarra.

But Myers has a larger objective here, and one that also relates to Bardon’s work in the early days.  He wants to explore the unknown and the unknowable, and here too he engages in an attempt to sweep aside some of the accepted stories through an incisive look at the objects themselves.  It has become well known in recent years that Bardon’s records of the Dreaming stories that he recorded and the attributions of places and sometimes even artists that attach to these early works can not always be accepted as gospel.  Bardon’s lack of language and the sheer distance between his world and that of the artists may have on occasion resulted in questionable documentation.  Sales records from the early 1970s have been re-examined; attributions in catalogs and auctions have sometimes been at odds with one another or with those early records.  Myers urges us both to look at the evidence of the works themselves–of style and composition, of links to physical aspects of the countries to which these works may refer–to test the knowledge that has been handed down, but also to admit that there are limits to what we can truly and definitively state about them.

Nevertheless, the art historian can try to advance our knowledge and understanding, and doing so requires a kind of hermeneutics in which the individual object is placed in context and seen as a point in a series of creative actions, surrounded by the apparatus of ethnographic knowledge, provenance, and other documentation.

We cannot know what an artist like Uta Uta was making in any one image unless we have secure knowledge about an oeuvre of work.  Work in the archive, ethnographic or otherwise, is a necessary precursor to understanding and fuller appreciation. Being there is not enough.  One needs the distance of the series, to look backwards and forwards, to understand what has been done (p. 40).

In his concern for coming to comprehend the work of an individual artist–both at the level of the individual work of art and as the accomplishment of a career or a lifetime–Myers seems to me to have articulated a central intention of Tjukurrtjanu as an exhibition: the way in which a movement is constructed out of the works of individual artists.  (I’m reminded of the title, if not necessarily the argument, of one of T. S. Eliot’s most influential essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”)  In their essays, both John Kean and Judith Ryan attempt to delineate the idiosyncrasies and contributions of particular men, to make them stand out from the category of “Papunya Tula Artists.”  Kean looks especially at the contribution of the Anmatyerr artists, especially Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, and the Tjapaltjarri brothers Tim Leura and Clifford Possum, while Ryan looks more closely at the Pintupi/Luritja men, including Timmy Payungka Tjapangati, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Charlie Wartuma Tjungurrayi, and Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula.

From what I can gather of the installation at the NGV, this focus on the works of individual artists, in series as Myers would say, informs the presentation of the paintings, and it is certainly mirrored in the organization of the plates in the catalog under the heading of the “Founding Artists of Papunya Tula” and in the organization of the extensive checklist of the exhibition that concludes the catalog.  Arranged alphabetically by skin name, from Anatjari Tjakamarra to Nosepeg Tjupurrula, the plates allow us to examine each artist’s output in turn and to marvel at both the variety and the consistency of each man’s achievements in the space of perhaps a year.

But this section of the catalog also contains one of the great surprises and absolute delights of Tjukurrtjanu as well.  I will confess that on the first several passes through this massive (312 pages) volume, I skipped over the biographical essays in my eagerness to examine the artworks.  It was only after digesting the longer essays that introduce the exhibition as a whole that I went back and began to read the profiles of the individual artists.

What a joy!  What delights are held in these two- and three-page histories of the twenty painters.  Many of these entries were written by Dick Kimber and recount his journeys back to the men’s countries with them during the 1970s.  I have once shaken Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra’s hand, and have spent much time watching, on film, Anatjari Tjakamarra lead Fred Myers out to the rim of Pintupi homelands near Ilpili in the Ehrenburg Ranges.  But I am not sure I have ever gained quite the sense of these men as individuals, as personalities, that I have been granted by the words of Kimber in company with Batty, Luke Scholes, John Kean, and Paul Sweeney.  Their words reveal the silent authority of John Tjakamarra; the mourning of Shorty Lungkarta, in advanced stages of cancer on his last trip to his father’s country at Walukirritjinya; Tutuma Tjapangati’s self-assurance in a whitefella’s world that he little understood; and Timmy Payungka’s irrepressible love of the hunt.

In terms of an exploration of art history, cultural history, aesthetics, and biography, the catalog for Tjukurrtjanu (and I am sure the exhibition itself) offers scope for extensive study and reflection.  It is a shame, therefore, that the quality of the binding of this scholarly masterpiece is not up to the standards of every other aspect of its production.  Although the signatures are securely sewn and the text block itself seems strong, the poor quality of the glue that attaches them to the spine combined with the inflexibility of the spine itself has left the book’s cover attached to the text block by two sheets of paper, back and front.  After little more than a month’s careful use, it is already a fragile artifact, a worrisome state for a librarian to ponder, especially since there is no hardcover edition published.  I wish that the endurance of the Papunya painting tradition were reflected in this most recent testimonial to it.

[1] A early version of Myers’ chapter was published as “Aesthetic Function and Practice: a local art history of Pintupi painting” in Art from the Land: dialogues with the Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Australian Aboriginal art, edited by Howard Morphy and Margo Boles (University of Virginia Press, 1999).

Don’t Forget, Darwin, Christmas is Coming Soon!

Papunya, Forty Years On

40 years ago at Papunya: Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Yam Travelling in Sandhills, 1971

It has been forty years since senior men at Papunya joined forces with Geoffrey Bardon to begin marketing paintings in acrylic, based on traditional designs and iconography, to art collectors, locals, and tourists passing through Alice Springs.  Bardon’s sponsorship of the new commercial scheme  was not, of course, the start of an Aboriginal art industry.  That had been underway for decades in locations stretching from Hermannsburg to Yirrkala.  But the mythology of Aboriginal art production has always featured as an essential element the concept of continuity.  If I had a nickel for every time the phrase “the world’s oldest continuous artistic tradition” has been breathed, published, or transmitted across the internet, I could buy a lot of great Aboriginal art.

What makes 1971 a significant marker in the history of this mythos of continuity is the establishment of an Aboriginal owned collective dedicated to the production of works for a commercial market that achieved commercial success and recognition for its aesthetics as much as for its reproduction of cultural imagery and knowledge.  The quick establishment of Papunya Tula Artists set a new model for the production of Indigenous art that opened new arenas of discussion, new opportunities for economic growth, and new horizons of intercultural engagement.  The adoption of Western materials and marketing strategies combined with a powerful Indigenous aesthetic has not been seen before in quite the same way, either at Hermannsburg or at Yirrkala, or at places in between.  Papunya Tula Artists proved to be a hardy desert blossom that has come to exemplify continuity of purpose and achievement amidst the shifting fortunes of Indigenous art production in the four decades since its inception.

The reasons for the emergence of Papunya Tula are many.  Bardon, of course, has long been recognized as a tutelary spirit, in part through his own mythologizing publications and films.  But the roots of its efflorescence go far deeper than Bardon’s fortuitous arrival on the scene.  The droughts of the 1950s, the testing of rocket-powered weapons across central and western Australia, and the increased accessibility of the western deserts brought new contact between European Australia and formerly isolated groups like the Pintupi.  An expanding interest in the lot of the Indigenous, spurred by the social revolutions of the 1960s and the 1967 Referendum in particular, played its part.  The equal wages award that collapsed Indigenous participation in the cattle industry left men with senior ritual status abandoned in government settlements.  Even the arts industries themselves contributed: Albert Namatjira changed attitudes about the Aboriginal production of art among both whites and blacks, including in the latter case, some of the men who would spur the painting activity at Papunya.  Bardon claimed that the misery of the Papunya settlement itself provoked an emotional eruption that found expression in the act of painting as a symbolic reunification with lost country.  And the larrikin act of Kaapa Tjampitjinpa in putting forth one of his paintings for the Caltex Award in 1971 and the judges’ audacious decision to share the prize with him was a minor revolution in its own right.

I am not going to rehearse the origin myths here; they are too well known to need repetition.  What I do want to celebrate in the unusual continuity that is found in the story.  Although Bardon was gone from Papunya in less than two years, the company prospered through its first decade–modestly, no doubt–as one after another in a series of dedicated and creative individuals worked to keep the young company’s wares in the marketplace.  Peter Fannin, Dick Kimber, Janet Wilson, John Kean, and Andrew Crocker successively kept the art commercially viable, and Crocker was perhaps the first to aggressively pursue the reconceptualization of the work as “fine art” worthy of the whitefella’s apparatus of museum acquisitions and one-man shows.  That first decade of persistence culminated in the establishment of Kintore, taking the Pintupi back to their homelands, with Kiwirrkura being set up two years later.   After Crocker’s untimely death came the incredible twenty-year tenure, with minor interruptions, of Daphne Williams, in company with Fay Bell and Janis Stanton.  Since Daphne’s final retirement, Paul Sweeney has managed the company’s affairs and expansion for another ten years.  A record of commitment this steady is unparalleled amongst Indigenous art centres.

But of far greater significance was the continuity of effort by the painters themselves.  There is a famous and often reproduced photographs of Bardon standing outside the Papunya painting shed with a dozen of the artists who were among the thirty or so to incorporate Papunya Tula Artists.  (See Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, AGSNW, 2001, p. 246 for the best reproduction and identification of the twelve men.)  What astonished me when I saw that photograph in the catalog ten years ago was how many of those men were still actively painting for the company, or had been until just a few  years earlier when several of them, including Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Timmy Payungka Tjapangati, and Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, passed away.

For the past decade, a growing recognition of the story–the mythos–of Papunya Tula and  its place in the national imaginary has been flowering in all sorts of ways.  The economic boom of the 1990s boosted the art market in general, and the clever machinations of Sotheby’s in establishing a secondary market for Indigenous works and especially for the early boards of Papunya Tula Artists illuminated a narrative that was ripe for exploitation on the centenary of Federation and the happy coincidence of the arrival of the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000.  A thousand desert dots blossomed.

Ten years ago, then, a great wave of retrospective exhibitions and publications began to swell.  The harbinger of this movement was Twenty-five years and beyond : Papunya Tula painting, the 1999 exhibition curated by Doreen Mellor and Vincent Megaw at the Flinders University Art Museum in Adelaide.  The following year brought Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius at the Art Gallery of New South Wales; its catalog was a gorgeous and astonishing record of the company’s achievement devoted in equal parts to documenting, as its subtitle proclaimed, both the genesis of the company and the genius of its practitioners in 150 pages of full color plates.  The reproductions of the artworks were supplemented by an equally astonishing set of essays authored by Paul Sweeney, Hetti Perkins, Hannah Fink, Vivien Johnson, Geoffrey Bardon, Dick Kimber, John Kean, Daphne Williams, Fred Myers, Paul Carter, and Marcia Langton.

Since then, the celebration of the achievements of Papunya Tula Artists has steadily continued.  Fred Myers published Painting Culture: the making of an Aboriginal high art (Duke University Press, 2002), which remains in my mind the single best history and analysis of the movement.  Vivien Johnson’s Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2003) with a catalog that set the standard for artist’s monographs in the field.  Geoffrey and James Bardon’s Papunya: a place made after the story (Miegunyah Press, 2004) is virtually a catalog raisonné of the early days of the company, a documentary counterpart to the more subjective memoirs Bardon published in 1979 and 1991.

The National Museum of Australia mounted Papunya Painting: out of the desert in 2007, with another fine catalog edited by Vivien Johnson.  The same year, Johnson produced the long-awaited biographical reference work, Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists (IAD Press).  Organized in a loosely chronological fashion, rather than in the more customary alphabetical ordering of such works, Johnson’s book resurrects the reputations of many of the minor contributors to the Papunya Tula story and provides a historical perspective on the men and women of the company.  To complete her trifecta, Johnson published Once Upon a Time in Papunya (University of New South Wales Press/New South Books) in 2010.  Begun as an attempt to trace the stylistic evolution of the art produced in the first years of Papnuya Tula Artists, the book wades into Johnson’s personal history of researching the early output of the company and the problems she encountered in attempting to scrutinize the content of many paintings whose significance and public status has once more come into dispute.

The collection of early Papunya paintings amassed by Americans John and Barbara Wilkerson debuted at Cornell University’s Johnson Museum in 2009 and was published by Cornell University Press as Icons of the Western Desert: early Aboriginal paintings from Papunya.  It was this exhibition that once more brought the controversial nature of some of the early boards, with their explicit detailing of sacred ceremonies and regalia, into a critical spotlight.  Plans to tour the exhibition in Australia were scrapped; the most  disputed paintings were removed from the body of the catalog, presented in a detached supplement to the American edition, and eliminated entirely from the Australian version.  When company artists D. R. Nakamarra and Yukultji Napangati traveled to New York City for the opening of Icons at the Grey Gallery, a special gallery below the main space was dedicated to these “dangerous” paintings and kept them sequestered from the ladies’ sight.

These monographic publications by no means exhaust the list of scholarship and promotion that have surrounded the activities of Papunya Tula Artists.  A search for the term “Papunya Tula” in the Trove database of the National Library of Australia turns up 131 articles in journals, magazines, and newspapers, along with 99 books, a couple dozen resources in miscellaneous other formats, and 200 archived websites.  During the market boom in the early years of this century, Papunya Tula increased the number of galleries it worked with interstate, and many of those galleries took to issuing small catalogs of their exhibitions.  There is now a wealth of information and documentation available (not even taking into consideration the reproductions of work that have appeared in numerous auction catalogs in the last fifteen years) that I could not even have imagined when I examined the few books and pamphlets that graced the front room of the Papunya Tula shop on Todd Street during my first visit there nearly twenty years ago.

These were some of the thoughts that ran through my mind in the days while I was waiting for the catalog from Tjukurrtjanu, the National Gallery of Victoria’s spectacular new anniversary show focused on the first year of the company’s activities.  The exhibition opened on September 30 and runs through February 12 of next year before traveling to the Musée du quai Branly in Paris for a run scheduled for October 9, 2012 to January 27, 2013.  I am happy to report that the new publication  is a delight in many ways and opens up new vistas for our understanding of the accomplishments and promise of the company and for our understanding of a seminal force in this great new modern art movement.  I will return to Tjukurrtjanu soon with further reflections on this most amazing body of work.