A World of Pain

I’ve loved mystery and crime novels since I was old enough to pull the Agatha Christie paperbacks from my mother’s bookshelves and lose myself in their exotic worlds of country homes and criminal passions.  My tastes have changed (I’d like to say matured) over the years, my interests have broadened, but I’m still a sucker for a good whodunit.  So when I saw that the winner of the 2009 David Unaipon Prize, Nicole Watson’s The Boundary (University of Queensland Press, 2011) revolved around a series of murders in the wake of a Native Title decision, I knew I was in for a good time.

The “boundary” refers literally to Boundary Street in Brisbane, just west of the Southbank entertainment district and the Queensland Art Gallery.  Historically, this was the boundary across which Aboriginal people were forbidden to move after the evening curfew.  Today it remains an area of significance to the local Indigenous people, with Musgrave Park home to the Jagera Arts Centre and site of a former bora ground, and the park, thinly disguised as Meston Park, is a key locale in the novel.  But the boundary is a metaphysical one as well where Indigenous beliefs come into conflict with non-Indigenous values–and that sets the stage for the opening drama of The Boundary.

In classic crime novel style, the book opens with a murder.  The victim is Bruce Brosnan, the judge who just hours earlier handed down a decision defeating the Native Title claim by the Corrowa (i.e. Karilpa) people who had hoped to save Meston Park from being gobbled up by a developer (the aptly named Coconunt Holdings) for the purpose of building a luxury high-rise.

But we don’t know this on the first page: all we know is that there is a dead man in a well-appointed kitchen, skull broken, surrounded by a circle of feathers.

Two detectives are examining the scene.  One points out a painting on the wall to the other.  Higgins asks Matthews if he knows who the painting is by.  Matthews doesn’t; Higgins tells him it’s the work of Emily Kngwarreye.  The medical examiner arrives, and then Watson takes us into a flashback that begins to reveal the backstory, as a young lawyer named Miranda sits in the Brosnan’s courtroom waiting for the judgement in the Native Title case to be handed down.

Watson’s style in these opening pages, and indeed through much of the novel, is cinematic.  By that I mean that she doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining what she is showing us.  She doesn’t, for instance, offer the information here that Detective Jason Matthews is of Aboriginal descent, or that Andrew Higgins, who recognizes the Kngwarreye on the wall, is a racist whitefella.  As more characters are introduced, we don’t immediately learn of the connections among them, the family relationships, the histories they share.  These get teased out by the action of the novel itself.  Motivations become clear as characters interact and reveal themselves to one another.  Watson doesn’t step in and signpost the story for us.

On first reading the opening chapters, I felt disoriented, and actually took to making notes about names and families to try to sort out the action.  Usually, I’d be a bit annoyed by a writer of genre fiction who made me work that hard to follow the plot: this is, after all, supposed to be a lark, a bit of relaxation for the reader, something to pass the time with at the beach, or perhaps on a rainy day wrapped in a doona.

But The Boundary isn’t a lark: it’s a world of pain.  There is the obvious pain that the community feels at the impending loss of the only land in the city of Brisbane that still feel they hold some purchase on.  There is the pain of separation: the key witness who might have swayed the judgement is discredited because the records of her ancestry have been lost in time following her removal to the mission orphanage at Manoah decades ago.  There is the pain of other skulls cracked by policemen in the confrontations that take place as the mob tries to stay planted in Meston Park.  And there will be more murders to follow.

But more than that, there is the pain that forms the core of almost every major character in the novel.  Miranda, the young Indigenous lawyer with a future before her, struggles with alcoholism.  Lesley, the Premier’s Senior Indigenous Adviser, is a compulsive gambler.  Dick Payne, the murderer’s second victim, a Pearson-esque lawyer aiming to break the hold of welfare on his people, is a compulsive womanizer; he drives his wife Sherene into adultery as well.  Jason, the detective we met on the opening page of the novel, is unsure of his heritage, and unsure how to act on it; his partner Higgins appears to be being eaten alive by his own hatred and misery.  Aunty Ethel’s bitterness has opened the door to madness.

What I’ve called Watson’s “cinematic” narrative strategy–perhaps “dramatic” would do as well–a showing rather than a telling–forces us to work out the characters’ stories for ourselves.  In a way, she is less interested in the plot, in whodunit, than in the life stories and the psychological tolls exacted on these people and how they respond to them.  That curiosity about the human condition, about the pain the world inflicts on people and how they respond to it, coupled with a narrative technique that is bold and demanding, lifts The Boundary above the conventions of genre fiction and makes it clear why Nicole Watson won the David Unaipon Award.

Colin

It was with deep sadness that I learned that Colin Laverty passed away on Saturday, February 9.

Although I only met Colin and Liz for the first time in 2005, the influence of their collecting had made itself felt on me long before.  I’m not sure when I first saw works from their outstanding collection of contemporary art, but the moment that it registered for me was probably in 2001 when I saw several paintings by John Mawurndjul that were on display in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.  I’d never really appreciated bark painting before that.  I’d cut my teeth, as many do, on the brilliant acrylics of the desert; bark painting still seemed somehow vaguely ethnographic, the stuff of tourist tea-towel imagery of x-ray animals.  To encounter the modernist sensibility of the Laverty collection was to suddenly comprehend the depth of accomplishment as well as tradition in the art of the far north.

In 2005 we decided to detour to Broome on the way to Darwin for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.  We checked into our hotel where a message from Short St gallerist Emily Rohr awaited us.  ”Barbie on the beach at 4!  Pick you up here!”  When Emily arrived at our hotel that afternoon and we piled into her troopie, she said, “You know Colin and Liz, don’t you?  They’ll be with us tonight.”

The evening was sheer magic, circled around a cook fire grilling sausages and the fish that Colin and the other boys had caught that afternoon, nearly being capsized when a whale breached within meters of their boat.  As the night grew darker, we settled in to swap tales of mutual friends and mutual interests.  We’d just attended our first auction at Sotheby’s a few weeks before, where we’d bid unsuccessfully on a lovely early painting by Lucy Yukenbari–losing out, we discover, to Colin and Liz.  (You can see the painting in question near the right edge of the photo at the bottom of this post.)  The next day, at Emily’s bungalow, the Lavertys reappeared, with John Olsen in tow: a truly memorable afternoon.

Thereafter, it seemed like we traveled along parallel tracks.  We ran into the Lavertys in Darwin of course, and again in Sydney on our last day in Australia before heading back to the States.  The following year we saw them again at the opening of Dreaming Their Way at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, where Colin spoke at the opening ceremonies.  The year after that, setting out with Nana Booker for a tour of remote art centres, I discovered to my delight that Nana had arranged tea with Colin and Liz at their home one afternoon, and not only did I get my first glimpse of their astounding collection in situ, I received an unexpected and highly flattering invitation to contribute an essay to their forthcoming book, Beyond Sacred: recent paintings from Australia’s remote Aboriginal communities: the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty.  

The years have flowed on, more meetings, more conversations, many good times.  Colin was indefatigable in his efforts to see Aboriginal art recognized as contemporary art of the highest quality, a vision that is reflected in their collection, where modern masters from the desert and the north hung side by side with paintings by other Australian abstract painters like Ildiko Kovacs, Aida Tomescu, and Ken Whisson.

No matter where we met, we were always greeted with a warm smile and open arms.  When I think back on conversations I’ve had with Colin over the years, I remember most of all a sly chuckle escalating into a laugh, a smile spreading over his face as he reached the conclusion of the story, or the argument, that he had been building slowly, surely, with warmth and humor.

Last week he was still engaged with preparations for the forthcoming auction of selected works from their collection by Bonham’s in Sydney on March 24 at the Museum of Contemporary Art.  True to his beliefs, the selection of work includes the finest Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists practicing in Australia over the last two or three decades.  I’m glad to know he carried on his grand mission until the very end.  I wish he could have seen it through, and my heart goes out to Liz in this time of sorrow.  We lost a great friend.

Today’s Australian has a brief notice of his passing and his achievements.

Larrakirtj: Encyclopedia of the Yolngu

On our first trip to Australia in 1990, still largely ignorant of Aboriginal art (despite the trip being inspired in large part by the Dreamings exhibition seen at the Asia Society in New York CIty two years earlier), we hit many of the tourist highspots: Sydney Harbour, the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, the NGV in Melbourne.  And Canberra.  Well, we wanted to see Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles at the National Gallery, and we did.  But what formed a much stronger and more lasting impression on that visit was the Aboriginal Memorial, the collection of 200 burial poles from Central Arnhem Land commissioned for the bicentenary to memorialize the 200 years of colonization and the continued vitality of Aboriginal culture in the face of a promise of death and extinction.  It was powerful, dramatic, and apart from the Yiribana Gallery in Sydney, the largest collection of Indigenous art that we were to see on the entire trip.

In addition to everything else the creation of the Aboriginal Memorial achieved, it sparked a renaissance of the manufacture of full-sized funeral poles for the art market.  Earlier attempts to translate this Indigenous ritual idiom into fine art had foundered on the difficulties inherent in the form: a two-meter log, even hollowed out, is heavy and hard to transport from a remote community to a city gallery or to a collector’s home, and the resistance to exhibiting and collecting what were essentially coffins is understandable.  But the Memorial changed all that, and among the Yolngu surrounding the center at Yirrkala, the new medium began to thrive.

Early in this century the media magnate Kerry Stokes began to assemble a collection of these poles from eastern Arnhem Land, known in Yolngu matha as larrakitj.  The first group of them were exhibited at the Garma Festival in 2001.  By the end of the decade, there were over 100 larrakitj collected together for their first public display at the Art Gallery of Western Australia during the 2009 Perth International Arts Festival.  In 2010, the collection was included in the 17th Sydney Biennale.  It has now been published in an expansive, indeed encyclopedic, volume, Larrakitj: Kerry Stokes Collection (Australian Capital Equity Pty, Ltd, 2011, distributed by Fremantle Press), overseen by Anne-Marie Brody.

The book opens with a short statement by Gawirrin Gumana on “Larrakitj and the Law in the Past,” which is as concise and elegant and introduction to the subject as you could ask for.  Anne-Marie Brody’s introduction follows, providing some historical background and the story of Stokes’ collection as it grew over the course of a decade.

Next up is a series of essays led off by Howard Morphy’s “Larrakitj — Death and the Celebration of Life.”  Every bit of writing that comes from Morphy’s pen is a diamond, well polished, multi-faceted, and of surpassing value, and this one is no exception.  If you knew nothing of Yolngu culture before opening this book, you would be well-versed by the time you finished reading Morphy’s treatment here.  If you were already well read or experienced, his insights would burnish your knowledge.  He begins with a brief exposition of Yolngu mortuary rituals and the understanding of the spirit life that underlies them before briefly recapitulating the story that lies behind his monograph Journey to the Crocodile’s Nest (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1984).  This account of a funeral not only provides the context for the creation of larrakitj, it helps to explain the interrelatedness of art and ceremony that is essential to understanding the place of these artifacts in Yolngu society.  He follows with a consideration of the aesthetics of larrakitj, again brilliantly illustrated by a close reading of a pole created by Galuma Maymurru.  (One of the illustrations for this section of the essay is a photograph of the painting on the larrakitj rendered two-dimensionally; it looks exactly like a bark painting.)

Three short meditations by Will Stubbs reflect on the importance of water and kinship in the Yolngu life cycle; on ceremony; and on the Yirrkala Church Panels.  Like Morphy’s essays these three pieces offer valuable insights for novice and initiate alike; no one has quite Stubbs’s flair for relating the seemingly exotic and esoteric aspects of Yolngu culture to the commonplaces of Western thought.  On a visit I once made to Yirrkala, Stubbs challenged me to think of my life without numbers; that, he said, would be like the Yolngu trying to live without the rules of kinship.  Here he focuses instead on the “stunted” quality of our own meagre grasp of patrilineal descent rules that barely can accommodate the concept of cousins to illuminate the richness of Yolngu thought on the subject.

Brody picks up from Stubbs’s explication of the cultural significance of the Church Panels to provide a brief, well illustrated guide to the content of the paintings themselves.  This lays important groundwork for the documentation of the Stokes Collection’s artworks that is to follow in the next section of the book, and is worth careful attention for that reason alone.  Andrew Blake’s contribution, “Of Hollowness and Substance,” gets physical: it describes the ways in which the trees that will be transformed into larrakitj are identified, harvested, prepared, and ultimately painted.  At the essay’s conclusion, a series of eight photographs offers an in-process documentation of the painting of a pole by Marrnyulla Mununggurr from bare wood to finished artwork.

The essays conclude with Yolngu voices forming bookends to Gawirrin’s opening statement.  There are two stories from his father retold by Djambawa Marawili, a “declaration” of law by Dula Ngurruwuthun, and a brief excerpt from “The Gathering of the Clouds” by Dhalulu Ganambarr that is a personal testament of identity.

What follows is an extended section that documents the artworks themselves–and this is where the encyclopedic nature of the project reveals itself.  The works are arranged by clan and by artist, with moiety and homeland specified for each.  Sometimes an artist appears under more than one clan, if he had painted both his father’s and mother’s designs.  Full-page photographs of the larrakitj, sometimes with a detailed close-up of part of the design, are accompanied by a few columns of text.

On first looking through the book, I flipped through these pages quickly, occasionally pausing at a familiar image, like Djirrira Wunungmurra’s buyku designs or a Manggalili clan yingapungapu inscribed on the middle of a pole.  Sometimes a particularly striking graphic representation, of a skeletal form perhaps, would seize my eye; or I would be struck by a novel element in the carving of the top of a pole: a fish’s jaw or fins, or a curling, abstract crown.

On my second approach to this section of the book, I paused at the first entry, from the Dhudi-Djapu clan, a striking pole by Dhukal Wirrpanda that included two disarticulated human skeletons in the top two-thirds of the design, and a trio of concentric circles painted to emphasize protrusions from the smooth circumference of the log on its lower third.  Curious to learn a few details, I began to read the annotation (all of which are provided by the inexhaustible Howard Morphy).  The story belongs to the Dhuwa moiety and tells of the deaths of two turtle hunters who were overwhelmed by a great wave while out at sea.  I was intrigued, in part because the story held echoes of a Yirritja Manggalili clan story that I knew well from the paintings of Naminapu Maumuru-White.

When I turned the page, the next pole, which told a different Dhudi-Djapu story, was the work of Galuma Maymuru, whose father’s brother was Naminapu’s father.  But the story told of the great shark Mäṉa, who was harpooned in the bay and tore up the land as he drove inward, dragging the harpoon’s rope behind him in his agony.  This story, in turn, resonated with a Djapu shark story that I had learned from a bark painting by Marrnyulla Munungurr, although that Djapu clan story centered on the shark breaking through a woven trap in a river.  In just a few pages, I was already snared myself, in a web of stories, correspondences, and echoes.  I was hooked, and read through each annotation in the next 150 pages.  The experience was like absorbing an encyclopedic atlas, story and country weaving together, reflecting backwards and forwards, ultimately dizzying–I’m sure I’ve retained little detail–but a thrilling ride nonetheless.

The book’s copious back matter heaps up more jewels.  Each of the 41 artists is profiled by means of a short biographical sketch, a photographic portrait, and an exhibition checklist.  A list of works follows, which serves as an index to the individual larrkitj.  There is a glossary and pronunciation guide.  Finally, there is a lengthy list of “further reading” comprising books, essays, newspaper and journal articles, exhibition catalogues, and multimedia.  This last includes Morphy’s 2006 CD-ROM The Art of Narritjin Maymuru; several of the titles from The Yirrkala Film Project; the short documentaries Dhakiyarr v. the King (2004) and  The Pilot’s Funeral (2005), both of which contain segments illustrating the creation of larrakitj; and finally, much to my surprise and delight, a citation to this blog!

The last element which must be mentioned, for it is like the sap that binds together the ochres and clay and stories is the spectacular nature photography by Peter Eve (who also executed the portraits of the artists).  These stunning portraits of the country show us the rocks that are the bones of the ancestors, the waters that infuse life through the country and bind the clans together, the mists that transform the forests.  They are themselves documents of beauty and joy, of the life of the land that is ever present, even in the face of death.

Papunya Tula, Alice Springs

The catalog for Unique Perspectives: Papunya Tula Artists and the Alice Springs Community (Araluen Arts Centre; Papunya Tula Artists, 2012) is deceptively slim in size, a mere 96 pages that is, however, packed with vivid color and equally vivid memories.  The exhibition, curated by Araluen’s Stephen Williamson, celebrates not simply forty years of the premier Aboriginal art cooperative, but the entwined history of Papunya Tula Artists and the town of Alice Springs.  From the earliest days at Pat Hogan’s Stuart Art Gallery, located across from where the Araluen now stands, when paintings completed with supplies sourced by Geoffrey Bardon from Iris Harvey’s Arunta Bookshop and Art Supplies on Todd Street were first sold, to the present, when the annual November Pintupi painting show at the modern white-walled gallery on the Todd Mall draws art lovers from across the country and the globe, Papunya Tula and Alice Springs have built a relationship unlike any other in the history of Australian art.

The first two-thirds of the catalog is given over to full-color (often full-page) reproductions of the approximately eighty paintings on board and canvas that have been drawn from private collections in Alice Springs and from the holdings of local galleries, including Araluen, to document the ways in which the local community has embraced not only the art works but the artists of the company as well.  Although the distribution of paintings tilts towards the past fifteen years, every decade of the company’s history is represented here.

There are exquisite works from the 70s, including Shorty Lungkarta’s large, mossy-colored canvas from 1974, Tingari Men Suffer from Thirst and Mick Namarari’s ravishingly colored and sinuously composed 1972 Children’s Dreaming with Many Body Paint Variations from the Papunya Community School Collection (now held by Araluen). The 80s are variously represented by classic Tingari circle-and-line compositions from the likes of Anatjari Tjampitjinpa, Hilary Tjapangati, and Timmy Payungka.  Late efflorescences in the careers of Pinta Pinta Tjapanangka and Yala Yala Gibbs jostle through the 90s against the emergence of women painters Walangkura Napanangka and Makinti Napanangka.  Small works by often overlooked masters Yumpululu Tjungurrayi and Pegleg Tjampitjinpa are delightful surprises from this decade as well.  The era since the turn of the century is most generously documented here, with stunning examples from the too-brief career of Martin Tjampitjinpa, heroic abstractions by Warlimpirringa Tjapaltjarri and Patrick Tjunugrrayi, and the resurgence of the powerful visions of Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula.  There have been many retrospectives and anthologies of Papunya Tula painting, but few have been as consistently satisfying in the quality of work chosen as Unique Perspectives.  This fact is a testament to Stephen Williamson’s superb curatorial eye, but also, again, to the depth of engagement and discernment the residents of Alice Springs bring to their relationship with the company.

That engagement is the subject of Williamson’s “Celebrating the Unique,” which introduces the essays that comprise the final third of the catalog.  Each essay is a matter of mere pages, but in them the history of the company is laid out with an intimacy and an immediacy that is too rare in the annals of contemporary writing about Aboriginal art.  Kieran Finanne, who has written consistently and sympathetically about the company and its Alice-based exhibitions in the Alice Springs News for many years now, describes a women’s dance in the midst of the Todd Mall on the occasion of the 2010 November exhibition, and hangs from that story a brief review of the gallery’s impact on the town.  John Kean, who managed the company in the late 70s, follows with a complementary history of its fortunes over the course of forty years.

Dick Kimber offers “Some Early Memories of Papunya Tula Artists,” fleshing out Kean’s narrative by charting the difficulties that the company faced when sales were slow and interest was low and “Aboriginal art” was largely defined as the work of Namatjira’s descendants and the Hermmansburg School of watercolorists.   Kimber is especially good at detailing the important contributions of Bob Edwards to the company’s fiscal survival and Peter Fannin’s heroic efforts to bring under control the inventory of unsold paintings that had accumulated out at Papunya.

Of course, for those familiar with the history of Papunya Tula Artists, the phrase “heroic efforts” conjures nothing more quickly than the contributions through more than a quarter of a century of Daphne Williams.  Beginning as an accountant for the Alice-based Centre for Aboriginal Artists and Craftsmen in the mid-70s, Daphne moved out to Papunya in 1979 before taking over from Andrew Crocker as the company’s manager in 1981.  For much of the following decade she spent weeks at a time traveling out west to Walungurru, Kiwirrkura, and other outstations to replenish paint and canvas before returning to Alice with finished art works.  (Kean tells a wonderful story of how she slept in her swag in the tray of her ute while out in the communities and how, one night, a joyrider made the mistake of stealing the truck with Daphne on board.)  She modestly recounts her unstinting efforts to bring solvency to the company here in an interview with Sarita Quinlivan, remembering along the way the opening of the Todd Street store in 1987, her warm, familial relationship with Timmy Payungka, the soft-spoken generous Yala Yala, the cheeky exploits of Uta Uta, Kaapa, and Shorty, as well as the personal support she received from important figures like Charlie Perkins and Marcia Langton.

Daphne’s successor, Paul Sweeney, contributes his own assessment of the “love at first sight” that has bound town and company together over the years.  Former field officer Luke Scholes brings the essays to a close with a surprisingly frank and emotional reflection on his personal investment in the company and their country.  Scholes’s essay is in some way the perfect summation of the stories revealed in Unique Perspective‘s pages demonstrating as it does that the relationships that have been founded, grown, matured, and transformed over the years are the essence of Papunya Tula’s history.

The volume closes with a checklist of works in the exhibition that provides the brief explications of the paintings’ stories familiar to anyone who has perused PTA documentation over the years, and with brief biographies of all the painters whose works are included in the catalog.

***

Although many of the stories recounted in the pages of this catalog were familiar to me, I came away with some feelings of surprise by the end, perhaps no more so than the realization that I have watched over half the company’s history unfold since the day in 1990 when I stood with my face pressed against the glass of the shop at 78 Todd Street.  I’d arrived in Alice on New Year’s Eve not realizing that galleries closed for several weeks at the Christmas holiday, a mistake I repeated three years later; on the second occasion, however, a fax to the office brought Fay Bell down to open up for us and gave us the chance to buy our first Papunya Tula Artists’ painting, a magnificent Rain Dreaming by Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra.  On our next visit we met Daphne Williams (along with Janis Stanton) for the first time, and on the trip after that Daphne introduced us to Long Jack.  Ten years after that first aborted visit, Daphne opened the back room to us and we spent almost our entire stay in Alice unrolling canvases, discovering the riches of women’s painting, while Daphne commended Benny Tjapaltjarri and Pegleg to our growing awareness.  That was to be our last visit to the old shop, which I had no idea until now had only opened three years before we flew in for the first time.  By the time we returned, the new gallery in the Todd Mall had opened, and Paul Sweeney had come in from the field and taken the reins; it was on that visit that we met Sarita and Luke for the first time.  The struggling enterprise that Daphne had guided for decades was the model of Aboriginal art centres, the success of the Western Desert Dialysis Appeal was about to be replicated in the cause of funding the swimming pool, and the new studio at Kintore was already an architect’s maquette.  Soon to follow were the commission to Ningura Napurrula for an installation at the Musée du quai Branly, the Pintupi show at Hamilton’s in London, where demand for the work was so great that the distribution of paintings among customers was decided in part by lot, the string of continuing successes at the Telstra awards, the new studio at Kiwirrkura.

Forty years is an eternity in terms of art movements in the west.  Encapsulating as it does the history of Aboriginal art’s emergence onto the national and international scene, the history of Papunya Tula Artists is in some ways truly the history of the last great art movement of the twentieth century, not to mention the success story so far of the twenty-first.  Unique Perspectives, even though focused not on these larger stories but rather on the place of the company in the little town that made it happen, is a brilliant testimony to the dynamic vitality of the artists and their supporters, casting into high relief the achievements of the company through time.

Unique Perspectives is on view at the Araluen Galleries through April 16, 2013.

No Mere Survival

From over here in America, I usually have a hard time finding an appropriate subject with which to mark Survival Day.  But this year, I’ve just finished watching Redfern Now, the first dramatic series to emerge from the ABC’s Indigenous Department.  With perfect timing, this weekend the show’s Facebook page announced that a second season has been commissioned and scripting is underway.   My only compunction in choosing to review this great programming in honor of Survival Day is that “survival,” though fundamental, is too simple a concept to grasp what is presented in these six episodes.  One needs to cluster many other words around that idea to catch the full flavor of the stories: there is pride, devotion, honor, foolishness, dignity, determination, forgiveness, and duty captured in these stories of ordinary lives.

Redfern Now comes to us from Blackfella Films, the partnership between Rachel Perkins and Darren Dale, so the degree of excellence it achieves should be no surprise to anyone who has seen First Australians, Mabo, Bran Nue Dae,  The Tall Man, Warwick Thornton’s short films Payback and Mimi, or Beck Cole’s Flat.  The stars could hardly shine brighter: Deborah Mailman (Mabo, The Sapphires), Leah Purcell (Jindabyne, Lantana), Dean Daley-Jones (Toomelah, Mad Bastards), Miranda Tapsell (The Sapphires), Jimi Bani (Mabo, The Straits), Shari Sebbens (The Sapphires), Wayne Blair (director of The Sapphires) and Kelton Pell (Cloudstreet, The Circuit) top the list.  Purcell and Blair each directed one of the episodes; Rachel Perkins and Catriona Mackenzie handled the directorial chores for two more each.  Several of the episodes center on the lives of teenagers in the suburb, and if we are to see more of actors Aaron McGrath, Rhimi Johnson Page, and Shari Sebbens, we can be assured that the future of Indigenous cinema is a bright one.

And yet, despite all this talent, what nailed me to the heart in each week’s episode was the storytelling.  On seeing the first episode, “Family,” a friend commented, “No saints, no villains.”  Kelton Pell’s character in episode three, “Raymond,” is a man in whom pride and vanity are so intermingled that no-one, not friends not family and certainly not Raymond, can tell them apart.  The story here has an O. Henryesque twist that resolves its central mystery; it is satisfying and logical from a narrative perspective, and utterly heartbreaking at the same time.

The fourth episode, “Stand Up,” probably comes closest to painting its characters as either saint or villains.  The plot revolves around a young boy, Joel (Aaron McGrath), who jeopardizes his scholarship at an elite Sydney college by refusing to stand up for the daily singing of “Advance, Australia Fair.”  The school’s principal comes closest to heartless evil in the series when she expels the boy; his remaining Aboriginal classmates are the heroes whose solidarity results in his re-instatement.  But these kids are surrounded by adults whose motivations and strategies for survival are shot through with ambiguity.  Joel’s initial lack of participation in singing the anthem stems from simply not knowing the words; it is his father who casts the awkward silence for him as a political statement.  Eddie is a man who struggles to find something meaningful to offer his child, a man whose pride is barely intact, but finds hope, however misguided, in his son’s potential.  The poetry teacher counsels cooperation, but ultimately stands silent at the head of the assembly; the Indigenous counselor advises sly protest, but is co-opted by his role and offers no support to the struggling boy.  The story may have a conventionally happy ending, but there are echoes of defeat rumbling like the breaking of surf on the shore heard from a long distance.

By and large, each episode is self-contained in terms of plot, although a few characters–and the Block itself–re-appear in one or more episodes.  The most consistent presence in the series is that of policeman Aaron Davis (Wayne Blair), who steps onto center stage in the final episode, “Pretty Boy Blue,” after being a minor but indispensable player in the earlier stories as the representative of law and social order.  The story draws its inspiration, surprisingly, from the Cameron Doomadgee tragedy on Palm Island: a drunken, abusive youth (Lenny, played with full-on nastiness by Luke Carroll) taunts the police on the streets; some hours later, he is brought into the station, roughed up in a fight with parties unknown.  In his anger and intoxication, he lashes out again at Aaron’s soft spot by suggesting that he has slept with Aaron’s daughter.  Aaron resists the urge to bash the boy, but decides to punish the “tough guy” by not calling an ambulance to investigate the obvious pain that Lenny is experiencing.  In an eerie replay of the Palm Island watchhouse tapes, we see Lenny roll on the floor in agony and die when the ambos have been called too late.

Aaron is prevented from explaining himself and his role in the disaster by the ongoing status of the police investigation into a death in custody; he is similarly prevented from defending himself by his debilitating sense of grief and responsibility.  It’s an extraordinarily difficult hour to watch, turning on its head as it does all our easy expectations and judgements about black and white and wrong and right, all our conditioned responses to Chris Hurley and Cameron Doomadgee.  It’s a fine example of a risk that only a blackfella film (or Blackfella Films) could undertake.

I couldn’t predict how it was going to turn out; previous episodes had been sentimentally resolved and unsentimentally unresolved, so there wasn’t a pattern or a predictability to rely on.  In the end, I felt like I got more than I bargained for.

For one thing, one of the only avenues for anything approaching redemption that appeared open to Aaron was to use his skills as a copper to find whoever had gotten into the fight with Lenny that led to his fatal injuries.  Nothing could have surprised me more than the answer to that mystery when it turned out that the assailant was Danny, whom we’d last seen at the end of episode 2, where as the hero of the story he was happily in love, forgiven his transgressions, and apparently on the road to a brighter future.  The surprise was handled matter-of-factly: he was identified as a person of interest, chased down, and arrested.  End of story: no moralizing, no chest-beating, no further information about his fate.  Rather than tying up a loose end, the writers were raveling one.

The conclusion to Aaron’s own story was equally surprising.  Finally he must walk down the block to Aunty Mona’s–Lenny’s mother–to confront his responsibility.  He has not only been at least indirectly responsible for Lenny’s death, he has lied about its particulars to his mother, covering up the torment the boy suffered at the end.  He comes to own up to Aunty Mona’s accusations, to confess his role and his guilt, but he doesn’t receive absolution.  Aunty Mona slaps him hard, and Nathan punches him to the floor when he rises from his seat.  Then comes Aunty Mona’s final judgment, which is both surprising and inevitable.  ”Get up,” she tells him, “Our mob needs you.”

Aaron stands and walks out of her home past the sullen, silent, suspicious stares of the community members gathered around the house of grief.  In the street his daughter waits for him with his granddaughter in her arms, and again there is that mixture of surprise and inevitability.  And this is the final word for Redfern Now: that community and family must endure, and that nothing, no misfortune, no trauma, no fear nor desire, can alter that truth.

I can hardly wait for Season Two.

Riches of the Canning Stock Route

The depth, the wealth, the variety of the material contained in Ngurra Kuju Walyja / One Country One People: stories from the Canning Stock Route (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) are such that I’m almost at a loss to begin describing it all.  A single essay from this 411-page behemoth filled with fine print and even finer photographs has already inspired me to write an entire post that sampled just a few of the dozens of videos that were created and have been published as part of the documenting of the Canning Stock Route Project.  An entire museum show with a large and splendid catalog was published in 2010; this book is an attempt to record much of what had to be left out of that earlier publication.  It’s altogether staggering.  Absorbing.  Thrilling.  Encyclopedic.

Perhaps the best way to start then, is just to begin at the beginning.  Multiple endpapers reproduce Alfred Canning’s exquisite map of the stock route from the early twentieth century.  A full-page photograph by Tim Acker follows: deep red, identified as “track in the sand,” its subject and agency shrouded: is this track made by a snake or a person?  What does it depict?  The country, in grains of sand.  This portrait is followed by another, of the artist Charlie Wallabi dwarfed as he strides below cliffs near Kaningarra; by a close-up portrait of cheeky old Helicopter Tjungurrayi, another of Annette Williams holding a double handful of bright-green bush tomatoes in front of her flowered frock.  Country.

Part One of the book opens with nearly 150 pages of brilliant color photographs, of country and of paintings of country, accompanied by short statements from the traditional owners of the countries traversed by the stock route.  These are stories to savor, to absorb without hurrying.  They are a sedate, lingering introduction to the shape of the land and its people, a slow, drifting fall into another world.  They are also a largely visual documentation of the Canning Stock Route Project with its tracing of families cut asunder and country transformed, now reunited and stitched together once more, traditions revived, given new shape, and transformed again.

The second half of Part One is a series of essays about the Project itself.  Carly Davenport offers an overview; Mags Webster discusses the mentoring of a new generation of Indigenous curators over the course of the Project.  Tim Acker and John Carty provide reflections on the business of art and the requirements of art history in the context of the CSR work, while Monique LaFontaine covers the varieties of documentary filmmaking that were undertaken to record the return of these people, often after generations, to their traditional lands.  Michael Pickering and Susan Freeman talk about the creation of the Yiwarra Kuju exhibition for the National Museum of Australia, and LaFontaine weighs in a second time with a discussion of Indigenous intellectual and cultural property rights.

Part Two opens with another extended photographic and oral history tracing the actual route of the 52 wells that were charted by Alfred Canning.  Well by well, from No. 1, North Pool, at the southern terminus to Nyarna near Billiluna and the Balgo Mission at the northern end, the stories associated with each well or soak hole are rehearsed.  There are historic photographs of the white explorers and their Indigenous guides, or of families living in the vicinity of the wells around 1929 when, after decades of disuse following Canning’s original survey, the route was reopened to the cattle trade.  There are numerous reproductions of paintings of the country.  A portrait of young Tjungurrayi and his auntie Kupunyina show them about to board the helicopter that would give the boy the name that has stuck with him since 1957.  Portraits of old men and old women accompany their reminiscences and family stories of first contact throughout the twentieth century; other photographs show the dilapidated state of the wooden or iron constructions that Canning’s teams left behind at every stage of the way.

To this point, experiencing this book has been a bit like meditating on a large, high-resolution map of a spiral galaxy.  One cannot help but be struck by the beauty of the overall image, by the complexity and age of its constituent elements, be dazzled by the glowing brilliance of the whole.  The last section of the book is formed by a series of histories of the Canning Stock Route, and as I relaxed into this final stretch I felt as though my mind’s eye were traveling out into the spiral arms of the galaxy, giving me the chance to examine isolated star stories: still very much part of the whole, of the matter of the larger entity, but now more idiosyncratic, personal, a bit detached.

Emblematic, perhaps, is Bob Tonkinson’s account of several days spent out in Martu country on his first trip out to meet people who had had limited contact with whitefellas. The time was late November 1963, and when the Native Welfare patrol officers who had accompanied Tonkinson to their remote camp left to bring a group of Martu in to the Jigalong Mission to reunite with relatives, the young anthropologist stayed behind to document the daily lives of those who were remaining, for the moment, out in the desert. Awaking late on the night of November 22, he pondered the immensity of the skyscape spread out above him; seeking companionship in that celestial loneliness, he turned on his shortwave radio and heard the news of US President Kennedy’s assassination, and felt intensely both “extreme isolation and  … cultural connectedness.”  Tonkinson’s memoir forms a nice counterpoint to Peter Johnson and Sue Davenport’s channeling of Martu contact stories (they are two of the authors of Cleared Out, a history of the encounters around the Percival Lakes during the rocket testing of the 1950s).  The Martu stories also tell of cultural connectedness amidst extreme isolation, and contrast their conception of a world created by the intersection of ngurra and walyja.  And speaking of family, there is another contribution by James Canning, a distant descendant of Alfred’s.

Other essays stretch back in time to before Alfred Canning’s days.  Peter Veth and Jo McDonald offer a fascinating look at rock art in the region, while Kim Akerman explores the material culture of the country: shields, sandals, and woomeras.  Daniel Vachon’s “A Fold in the Fabric of Another Country” takes a broader view of water resources in the Western Desert than simply the line of wells we associated with the CSR, beautifully illustrated with reproductions of paintings.  Paintings were never far from my mind while reading Kim Mahood’s essay on Paruku, the subject of some of the greatest of Boxer Milner’s work.  Mahood and Bill Fox offer a fascinating conversation on cross-cultural depictions of the Canning in ink and acrylic; Veth and McDonald return to close the volume with a consideration of the demands of land management in an era of increasing tourism.

The Canning Stock Route Project is unprecedented in scale and scope, certainly in the domain of Aboriginal art history, and in using art to unlock so many other layers of history, geography, social relations, ecology, and law.  The only undertaking I can compare it to is The Yirrkala Film Project, in which the clans of eastern Arnhem Land enlisted Ian Dunlop’s support (in advance of the fact) to document how the bauxite mine at Nhulunbuy would transform their story.  Both projects took years to achieve, both involved blending Indigenous and non-Indigneous technologies and knowledge to investigate the implications of contact and colonization, and both resulted in a trove of documentation that simultaneously preserves and explicates culture.  The art of the desert has long been overdue for this kind of exploration, and Ngurra Kuju Walyja, along with Yiwarra Kuju and the Acker and Carty’s closely related Ngaanyatjarra: Art from the Lands stand as  landmarks publications that constitute national treasure.

Eleanor Hogan’s “Alice Springs”

In 2010 Newsouth Books began publishing its City Series of monographs about major Australian cities.  Apart from Perth and Darwin, the capital cities have been covered to date.  Each volume combines personal memoir with a bit of history, anecdote and meditation.  Among those I’ve read to date, Delia Falconer’s Sydney (2010) is a city of historical layers and perpetual change that reflects not just a transition from primeval wilderness to colonial outpost and beyond, but the emergence of a modern, world-class, and self-conscious capital from the provincial neighborhoods of Falconer’s youth.  Sophie Cunningham’s Melbourne (2011) is a city of enclaves, of suburbs with their unique subcultures experienced in the course of the author’s journey through life.

Eleanor Hogan’s Alice Springs (2012) is a bit of a different beast.  For one thing, Hogan is not a native of the city she describes, nor has she lived the majority of her life there or been wholly shaped by her experience of Alice.  Of course, in some respects, this makes her typical of many residents, past and present, of the town.  And yet to the extent that any of the titles in this series are written for outsiders (like myself), the portrait of the city she presents accords more to the experience that a visitor is likely to come away with, even a visitor (like myself) with multiple sojourns over decades of time.  This fact has led to some criticism of Hogan’s perspective, especially from that cadre of white Australian town residents who were born or bred there.

On the other hand, as a government bureaucrat employed in the town’s Indigenous services sector beginning in 2003, Hogan obtained a more nuanced view of life as lived by the other dominant cultural bloc in the area: the black Australian residents, long-term or temporary, whose lives circle around this Centralian outpost.  In this respect, too, Hogan is an outsider: although confronted with evidence of the stresses in the lives of the Indigenous citizens on a daily basis, she remains apart.  She has keen insights, but she remains puzzled and unsure.  In the opening pages of the book, she describes the area surrounding her new office “in a converted butcher’s shopfront near the Gap.”

It’s more down-to-earth than where I was before, in the public service offices near the Mall in the central business district — perhaps almost a little too down-to-earth at times. Now and again there are splashes of broken glass across the path, including for a while the label of a vodka bottle crushed into the pavement.  Sometimes there are trails of blood, tracing out stories of fights and assaults.  And once a man lying in the middle of the road, a cordial bottle beside him filled with what looked like port.

Although in the pages that follow Hogan introduces us to individuals with particular life-stories and trajectories, they can be as nearly anonymous as that man lying in the road, and often what she records are traces, evidence from which stories can only be inferred, not known.  At the outset, she gives us the impression that there are really two cities here, each only barely discernible to the other, following parallel paths through history.

Even the most vivid encounters remain mysterious, with motivations and aspirations unguessable.  Towards the end of Chapter 3, Hogan recounts a story of how, heavy with a cold or flu, she emerges from the Gap Road Smart Mart to encounter an old lady (“I say ‘old’, but she might be only a few years older than me, mid- to late-forties”) who cadges a lift from her.  They head off toward an unspecified destination; “I’ll show you,” the lady says.  The old lady dozes off as they drive up Gap Road towards the CBD.  Upon reaching the centre of town, she rouses herself and directs Hogan left along Larapinta Drive.  They  travel westward, out towards Mt Gillen, and finally turn off into the suburb of Larapinta.  Apparently aimless wanderings up and down the streets ensue, along with requests to Hogan to buy beer and cigarettes.  Hogan is feeling sicker by the minute; the old lady has her own respiratory ailments.  After they circle around for a while, the old lady recognizes a block of flats.  They park.

We get out of the car, and she goes to a flat at the rear of the block.  A couple of skinny, bushy-haired women come out.  They give me a cursory glance, and start talking in language.  A man sits in the darkness of the flat behind them.  I don’t feel unsafe, but I don’t feel part of the picture.

I go back to the car and get the lady’s bags out, and give them to her.

‘Wait, she says. ‘Wait.’

…  I’m not sure I want to stay around.  I don’t have the patience for this, and I’m feeling crook. … I walk back to my car, jump in and drive off.  No one appears to see me go or tries to stop me.  I drive back towards my unit in the Gap area, passing the Smart Mart on my way.  The place is dark and shuttered as I go past.  …  The next day the smoky smell of cooked kangaroo gradually dissipates from my car.

Stories of such encounters fill the book, most but not all of them with the Indigenous people Hogan works with.  Her judgement that “I don’t feel part of the picture” resonates in many of them.  There is the thriving lesbian community, the Pine Gap families, the athletes who come to compete in the Master Games.  (They last inspire Hogan to take up an ambitious program of desert cycling.)  There are few single men.  There are transient government workers, carpetbaggers, and the dedicated traditional owners who form the nucleus of the Lhere Artepe Aboriginal Corporation striving to integrate their community into the economic life of the town and the region.  There are repeated legal encounters, courtroom sagas of violence and sorrow.  Hogan offers acute portraits of all she encounters, and if her composite of the life of Alice Springs is incomplete it is no less authentic that the views of the capital cities that can be had in the other volumes of this series.

If there is a striking difference between Hogan’s account of life in Alice Springs and, say, Falconer’s story of Sydney, it is in the relative absence of historical narrative.  This book is a portrait, above all, of Alice Springs in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and although she looks backwards from time to time, she most definitely does not dwell in the past and the past does not inform the present in the way that Falconer and Cunningham imbue their modern cities with guiding spirits from days gone.

After seven years in Alice, Hogan left to take up work in Melbourne.  she adjusted quickly to the urban life again, but with a heightened sense of the contrasts between her new first-world surroundings and the strangeness and the hardships of life in the Centre.  She was reminded of her stay in Alice as much by the presence of Aboriginal art work in urban offices as by the absence of Opel unleaded fuel.  Most of all, she was struck by the way in which the Centre, and especially the lives of its Aboriginal people, is so much an intellectual construct, “internal and notional” is how she describes it, among her left-leaning, sophisticated city friends.  Reflecting on the NTER, she concludes her penultimate chapter is these words:

The media attention given to remote Indigenous issues, including the Intervention, is often sporadic and sensationalistic, the intermittent ‘Aboriginal reality show’ which Marcia Langton describes.  I don’t think the level of dysfunction and marginalisation Indigenous people often face in Central Australia is well understood; neither is the lack of access to services and resources that many urban Australians take for granted.  Living in a place, perhaps fittingly in the country’s dead centre, where people in extreme need pass you every day in the street brought that home to me.  Returning to Melbourne, I feared forgetting much.

It has been over two decades now since I first traveled to Australia and set down in Sydney, Melbourne, and Alice Springs.  Reading these three treatises from Newsouth Books on those cities, I felt like I encountered more stories that were new to me about Sydney and Melbourne, grasped more about the history of the place and the breadth of experience they encompass.  But I came away from Hogan’s story of Alice Springs feeling that I understood the fabric of its life better, more fully, for the time I had spent in its pages.  Hogan’s Alice Springs is a paradoxical book: an outsider’s story that nonetheless pierces deeply the body of the town it describes, a somewhat ahistorical view that resonates with timelessness.  In the end, though, it is a rich tapestry and should become a classic of Outback literature that readers will turn to in decades to come as a touchstone story of an Australian frontier.