Sat - July 4, 2009
Doom and Survival
I
was
totally unprepared for Vivienne Cleven's second novel, Her Sister's Eye (University of Queensland
Press, 2002).
Cleven's first novel, Bitin' Back (UQP, 2001), was a genial farce. In describing it so, I do not wish to denigrate its inventiveness, much less to downplay to the fundamental seriousness of its concern for the difficulties that beset Indigenous people--indeed, any of us--in molding an identity in the modern world. But Cleven's profound message lay under a cladding of outrageous humor and startling language that made the novel slip past your defenses in a spirit of delightful diversion.
Her Sister's Eye is another matter. Cleven is still as serious as a heart attack, but the lightness of tone has vanished. The language is as startling in its originality, its idiosyncratic flavor, and its metaphor, but the crack of laughter has been replaced by the crack of a whip. I hesitate to wander down the path of hyperbole, but this book brought to mind the world of William Faulkner's novels more often than anything else. The dense narrative, the temporal dislocations, the shifting points of view, and the bending of language to the experience of whichever character holds the stage of consciousness at any given moment left me slack-mouthed in surprise over and over again.
Set in a rural river town called Mundra, Her Sister's Eye is the story of families in collision, of catastrophes of all sorts, and above all the injuries that those collisions inflict. At the book's heart are two sisters, hinged together despite all their differences. Murilla Salte is a large, dark, serious, no-nonsense, pragmatic pillar of strength and determination who occupies a pivotal space between black and white in the town. Her younger sister Sofie is white-haired at the age of twenty-eight, but her mind is that of a child, capable of intense emotional attachments but bereft of any logic except that driven by those emotions.
The dynastic Drysdale family dominates the whitefella population of the town, or at least it did in years gone by. Now though, the family matriarch, Caroline, is an old woman, house-bound, cared for by Murilla, living more in her mind than in the family homestead. She incarnates the novel's multi-layered, shifting chronology. She also incarnates Faulkner's famous aphorism, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." She struggles with insults paid out years ago, and in response, Sofie's innocent loyalty to her, "the old one," is one of the major drivers of the novel's action. Sofie tends to the cares of Caroline's mind, as Murilla tends to her physical needs. And whereas Murilla tries to prevent Caroline from paying heeds to remembered insults, Sofie cannot help but to feel them herself. She reacts instinctively, not quite understanding what has gone wrong, but sure of her need to pay back when Caroline is incapable of vengeance.
Archie Corella is another linchpin of mystery and temporal dislocation, wandering in and out of the town and the lives of its citizens, always on the fringes, hard to locate both in space and time. Arriving in the first chapter seeking work, he is referred to the Drysdales, and briefly takes up as a gardener for them. He has a deep and somewhat mysterious bond of spiritual kinship with Sofie and a more pragmatic if embattled one with Murilla. His horrible physical disfigurement is an objective correlative of sorts with Sofie's damaged psyche. For certain, both of them are somehow bound to the river that runs through the town and as a focal point through the book's narrative.
The minor characters in the novel, the Drysdale men, the "Red Rose" ladies of the town, social matriarchs against whom Caroline and Sofie rage, bring a bit of Cleven's caustic wit into play. But they are all so toxic in themselves that it is hard to really laugh at them.
The weakest strand in the novel is embodied in the characters of Doris and Nana. Doris wants to understand the history of the town; old Nana is reluctant at first to reveal it, but eventually gives in and recounts large slabs of the backstory that begins to explain who the main characters really are, and how their histories are the history of the town's hatreds and misery. These sections of the novel struck me as slightly false. They are like the speeches offered at the beginning of a Shakespearean play that set the scene and name the players, but that lack the drama and the presentation or action (rather than bald retelling) that should form the core of the action. However, having deployed this narrative intrusion to unlock some of the secrets of the past, Cleven lets the action play itself out in a satisfying and truly dramatic conclusion.
Her Sister's Eye is a story of doom (or fate) and survival: the two sides of the human condition. The Drysdales and the Red Rose ladies are trapped in a mean, harsh environment, dusty on the one hand, dominated by the dangerous and implacable waters of the river on the other. They live on the land, in the country, without truly inhabiting it. The Indigenous people, the Saltes, the Gees, Doris and Nana, are denizens: they belong in this land, but their proper place has been usurped. They cling to their country, but like Murilla's ramshackle home, they are in constant danger of being bulldozed out of the way. Ultimately their fundamental connection allows them to survive, and like Sofie's mysterious ability to navigate the hazards of the river, to hold their own, however miserably, in the face of danger and brutality.
I would have said that Bitin' Back established Vivienne Cleven as a major force to be reckoned with in contemporary Australian, Aboriginal, and Queenslander fiction. But I would have been wrong by half. Her Sister's Eye takes Cleven straight to the top.
was
totally unprepared for Vivienne Cleven's second novel, Her Sister's Eye (University of Queensland
Press, 2002).Cleven's first novel, Bitin' Back (UQP, 2001), was a genial farce. In describing it so, I do not wish to denigrate its inventiveness, much less to downplay to the fundamental seriousness of its concern for the difficulties that beset Indigenous people--indeed, any of us--in molding an identity in the modern world. But Cleven's profound message lay under a cladding of outrageous humor and startling language that made the novel slip past your defenses in a spirit of delightful diversion.
Her Sister's Eye is another matter. Cleven is still as serious as a heart attack, but the lightness of tone has vanished. The language is as startling in its originality, its idiosyncratic flavor, and its metaphor, but the crack of laughter has been replaced by the crack of a whip. I hesitate to wander down the path of hyperbole, but this book brought to mind the world of William Faulkner's novels more often than anything else. The dense narrative, the temporal dislocations, the shifting points of view, and the bending of language to the experience of whichever character holds the stage of consciousness at any given moment left me slack-mouthed in surprise over and over again.
Set in a rural river town called Mundra, Her Sister's Eye is the story of families in collision, of catastrophes of all sorts, and above all the injuries that those collisions inflict. At the book's heart are two sisters, hinged together despite all their differences. Murilla Salte is a large, dark, serious, no-nonsense, pragmatic pillar of strength and determination who occupies a pivotal space between black and white in the town. Her younger sister Sofie is white-haired at the age of twenty-eight, but her mind is that of a child, capable of intense emotional attachments but bereft of any logic except that driven by those emotions.
The dynastic Drysdale family dominates the whitefella population of the town, or at least it did in years gone by. Now though, the family matriarch, Caroline, is an old woman, house-bound, cared for by Murilla, living more in her mind than in the family homestead. She incarnates the novel's multi-layered, shifting chronology. She also incarnates Faulkner's famous aphorism, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." She struggles with insults paid out years ago, and in response, Sofie's innocent loyalty to her, "the old one," is one of the major drivers of the novel's action. Sofie tends to the cares of Caroline's mind, as Murilla tends to her physical needs. And whereas Murilla tries to prevent Caroline from paying heeds to remembered insults, Sofie cannot help but to feel them herself. She reacts instinctively, not quite understanding what has gone wrong, but sure of her need to pay back when Caroline is incapable of vengeance.
Archie Corella is another linchpin of mystery and temporal dislocation, wandering in and out of the town and the lives of its citizens, always on the fringes, hard to locate both in space and time. Arriving in the first chapter seeking work, he is referred to the Drysdales, and briefly takes up as a gardener for them. He has a deep and somewhat mysterious bond of spiritual kinship with Sofie and a more pragmatic if embattled one with Murilla. His horrible physical disfigurement is an objective correlative of sorts with Sofie's damaged psyche. For certain, both of them are somehow bound to the river that runs through the town and as a focal point through the book's narrative.
The minor characters in the novel, the Drysdale men, the "Red Rose" ladies of the town, social matriarchs against whom Caroline and Sofie rage, bring a bit of Cleven's caustic wit into play. But they are all so toxic in themselves that it is hard to really laugh at them.
The weakest strand in the novel is embodied in the characters of Doris and Nana. Doris wants to understand the history of the town; old Nana is reluctant at first to reveal it, but eventually gives in and recounts large slabs of the backstory that begins to explain who the main characters really are, and how their histories are the history of the town's hatreds and misery. These sections of the novel struck me as slightly false. They are like the speeches offered at the beginning of a Shakespearean play that set the scene and name the players, but that lack the drama and the presentation or action (rather than bald retelling) that should form the core of the action. However, having deployed this narrative intrusion to unlock some of the secrets of the past, Cleven lets the action play itself out in a satisfying and truly dramatic conclusion.
Her Sister's Eye is a story of doom (or fate) and survival: the two sides of the human condition. The Drysdales and the Red Rose ladies are trapped in a mean, harsh environment, dusty on the one hand, dominated by the dangerous and implacable waters of the river on the other. They live on the land, in the country, without truly inhabiting it. The Indigenous people, the Saltes, the Gees, Doris and Nana, are denizens: they belong in this land, but their proper place has been usurped. They cling to their country, but like Murilla's ramshackle home, they are in constant danger of being bulldozed out of the way. Ultimately their fundamental connection allows them to survive, and like Sofie's mysterious ability to navigate the hazards of the river, to hold their own, however miserably, in the face of danger and brutality.
I would have said that Bitin' Back established Vivienne Cleven as a major force to be reckoned with in contemporary Australian, Aboriginal, and Queenslander fiction. But I would have been wrong by half. Her Sister's Eye takes Cleven straight to the top.
Posted at 11:00 AM
Sun - June 28, 2009
Neil Young at Glastonbury
No, you haven't wandered into the wrong
blog.
Neil Young has been one of my guitar heroes since I was in my teens and he was in Buffalo Springfield. So I was tickled to find this photograph from his performance earlier in the week at Britain's Glastonbury Festival. Check out Neil's shirt: it looks as if it's spent almost as much time on the road as the master himself has. (Photo from the Guardian by Luke MacGregor/Reuters.)
Neil Young has been one of my guitar heroes since I was in my teens and he was in Buffalo Springfield. So I was tickled to find this photograph from his performance earlier in the week at Britain's Glastonbury Festival. Check out Neil's shirt: it looks as if it's spent almost as much time on the road as the master himself has. (Photo from the Guardian by Luke MacGregor/Reuters.)
Posted at 12:02 PM
Manikay at Gikal'
Here's a new video just up from ididjaustralia , purveyors of videos, music,
books and more about the yidaki, showing excerpts from an evening of song
and dance at the Gikal' outstation. Lots of interesting details, from the
texture of the instrument to the cues the musicians share with one
another.
Posted at 11:40 AM
Boxer
"That Sturt Creek country is crying for that
boss...." Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, c.
1934-2009
(thanks, Dianna.)
 |
 |
(thanks, Dianna.)
Posted at 08:49 AM
Sun - June 21, 2009
Nakamarra's Abstraction: Continuity and Change
I remember visiting Papunya Tula Artists' Todd
Street shop late in 1998, a few months after Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri passed
away. Namarari was among the first of PTA's artists whose work I came to
recognize and love: the bold swirls of Bandicoot Dreamings, the subtle
variations of the dotted fields of Kangaroo or Marsupial Mouse Dreamings, the
broad, bold stripes of Rain Dreamings. I was hoping that I might find something
to add to our collection at this last moment, though I knew the odds were
long.
Daphne Williams was hesitant when I asked. Yes, she said, I have a couple of small canvases, but I can only show them to you very quickly, in the back room. She explained that Mick's widow was still in town, and Daphne feared upsetting her should she wander into the shop and see the paintings again.
When we returned to PTA in 2001, Daphne remembered the incident, and our interest. This time, she suggested, we might want to look at some new canvases that Mick's widow, Elizabeth Marks Nakamarra, had painted; she also had a small Mouse Dreaming their daughter Angelina had recently completed. I remember that last work as being a gem-like haze of pointillist dots and to this day I regret passing over it, as Angelina's artistic career proved short-lived, and we never saw another of her works.
But that day sparked an enduring interest on my part in Nakamarra's work, in no small part because the paintings that we saw that day, while quite different from those of her late husband, showed her, like Mick, to be an artist willing to experiment with a variety of styles. Like many of the widows or daughters of the great old painting men of Papunya Tula, Nakamarra did not take up painting her husband's Dreamings. Instead, she began producing works that were focused on her own country, in her case Kalipinpa, just north of Sandy Blight Junction and Kintore.
Kalipinpa
is the site of a major Rain Dreaming, most famously depicted in the masterpieces
of Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula. In the Tingari story, groups of ancestral men
and women gathered at the rockhole at Kalipinpa, where they danced and sang the
stories associated with the area before continuing on to the west and the
country around the great salt lake at Wilkinkarra, or Lake
Mackay.
One of the paintings that Daphne showed us that day was done in the classic style in which the Kintore women worked at that time, with a heavy impasto of white acrylic on a black field marking out a bush tucker story: the women collecting kampurarrpa, or bush raisins near the main rockhole of Kalipinpa. It was in some ways an unusually naturalistic work, with a clearly recognizable branch of honey grevillea in the upper-right corner and large black bush raisins set around the central waterhole and its surrounding sandhills. It was a lovely example of the style of work being painted in the early years of the women's painting movement out of Kintore but, I thought, nothing more. (My thanks to Papunya Tula Artists for permission to reproduce the images included here.)
Another painting in the lot that Daphne shared with us that day was quite another story, however.
Well, not another story in the sense that it, too, was a Kalipinpa Rain Dreaming showing the great lightning storm and the ensuing floods that swept across the country, swirling over the sandhills and filling the rockholes. But the iconography of this painting was most unusual, the composition extraordinarily dynamic. It shared a quality of naturalism with the black-and-white composition, though. These were works that required no great leap of comprehension, no tutelage in the traditional iconography of Pintupi painting to decipher the world being depicted.
There is no need to precisely identify any graphic element in this composition to grasp its story. The jagged lines at the center certainly look like lightning bolts; they also call to mind the rough and broken channels that floods have eroded through the terrain around Kintore. The red circles suggest rockholes, but also, perhaps, unripe bush raisins. There is a suggestion of a creek bed in the unusual pale, sandy, dove-pink color of the ground behind those jagged lines and circles. The rest of the design, however, is far more ambiguous: it all reads as water in a hilly landscape, but I can't say that one element is the rush of water, another is the representation of a sandhill. Nonetheless, the painting succeeds brilliantly at capturing the rush of floodwaters through the countryside. There is an exquisite balance, to my eye, between Pintupi and Western conventions of depicting landscapes. The painting captures the violence and the turbulence of the storm. This, I thought, was a striking and original new direction in Pintupi painting.
As the decade of the 'Naughts progressed, other styles came to the fore. One of the major new directions in painting from Kintore and Kiwirkurra was the adoption of a vividly optical sense of design, a visual trickery that recalled the Op Art paintings of Sixties artists like Bridget Riley, filtered, of course, through a Western Desert sensibility. The emergence of bold new styles from painters like George Ward Tjungurrayi, a dramatic minimalism in the works of Warlimprringa Tjapaltjarri, and the sinuous mature works of Charlie Tjapangati all partook of this visual vibrancy. Elizabeth Marks Nakamarra joined in this experimentation, producing works with a complexity of surface like this canvas from 2003.
Nakamarra retains a looseness of hand in this work, a quirkiness of drawing that produces incidents to interest the eye beyond an illusionist's tricks. The regularity of right angles in three corners of the work gives way to a looser composition in the upper-right corner of the work as shown here (I've rotated the canvas 90 degrees to allow for a fuller, more detailed presentation of the design in the confined space of a browser window). Just right of center a gentle curve intrudes into the maze; at the upper left a pair of concentric rectangles emerge to float semi-detached above the rest of the design.
More recently, Nakamarra has tightened up her line and begun to experiment with the effects of color on her geometry.
Indeed, I could say that in this 2008 work she has begun drawing with color, fashioning depth and direction by varying shades of yellow-orange that are set against an dull gray line that nonetheless sings with a pearlescent quality. (This ability to manipulate the eye's perception of this neutral gray that sits in the background of many such paintings is a device employed frequently by several Papunya Tula artists and one that never fails to surprise me when I discover that some brilliant sky-blue line or a vivid white accent turns out on close inspection to be more the color of a battleship more than anything else.)
Moreover, the illusion of stair-step depth is this painting will not maintain itself in my eye. Nakamarra breaks up the pattern on the right-hand side, flattening out the appearance of depth. Once the Escheresque spell of illusion is broken, my eye starts to focus on the larger pattern created by the darker and lighter blocks of orange stripes; field and ground destabilize and suddenly the entire surface of the canvas appears to be in flux, heaving, flowing, stopping, and then starting up again.
As I was pondering this painting's ability to create such visual turbulence, I was suddenly reminded that it, like the previous two works I've reproduced here, depicts the Rain Dreaming at Kalipinpa. Lining the photographs of the three paintings up side by side, I was struck by how much they resemble one another.
In each painting, with a little imagination and if you know the story, you can see how Nakamarra brilliantly suggests the flashing
lightning
and the cascading water of the storm. Over the years she has experimented by
increasing the level of abstraction in her representation of the Dreaming and
the countryside. She continues her experiments with color as well. From the
very first she understood the power of monochromatic design; at the same time
she has worked with color choices that vary subtly from the classic
red-yellow-black-and-white Pintupi palette to achieve bold and dramatic effects
that nonetheless remain true to the colors of her country (seen in this snippet
at right from Google Maps of a landscape of rocky gullies just north of
Kintore).
I am fascinated by the way in which Nakamarra's career has illustrated many of the points of tension between traditional and western ways of image making. Some critics of Aboriginal methods complain that most painters paint the same painting over and over again and dismiss the argument that many western artists, working in series, do the same. Nakamarra manages to have it both ways, remaining faithful to the core of the Dreaming and to a traditional palette, working variations on both drawing and painting, and skillfully deploying imagery drawn from both traditional and western models (the roundel and curve, as well as the abstracted line) to expand her visual vocabulary. It is in this mode of innovation within tradition, of refashioning the customary while remaining true to it, that I find her closest kinship with the late great artist to whom she was married.
All images reproduced with the generous permission of Papunya Tula Artists.
Daphne Williams was hesitant when I asked. Yes, she said, I have a couple of small canvases, but I can only show them to you very quickly, in the back room. She explained that Mick's widow was still in town, and Daphne feared upsetting her should she wander into the shop and see the paintings again.
When we returned to PTA in 2001, Daphne remembered the incident, and our interest. This time, she suggested, we might want to look at some new canvases that Mick's widow, Elizabeth Marks Nakamarra, had painted; she also had a small Mouse Dreaming their daughter Angelina had recently completed. I remember that last work as being a gem-like haze of pointillist dots and to this day I regret passing over it, as Angelina's artistic career proved short-lived, and we never saw another of her works.
But that day sparked an enduring interest on my part in Nakamarra's work, in no small part because the paintings that we saw that day, while quite different from those of her late husband, showed her, like Mick, to be an artist willing to experiment with a variety of styles. Like many of the widows or daughters of the great old painting men of Papunya Tula, Nakamarra did not take up painting her husband's Dreamings. Instead, she began producing works that were focused on her own country, in her case Kalipinpa, just north of Sandy Blight Junction and Kintore.
Kalipinpa
is the site of a major Rain Dreaming, most famously depicted in the masterpieces
of Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula. In the Tingari story, groups of ancestral men
and women gathered at the rockhole at Kalipinpa, where they danced and sang the
stories associated with the area before continuing on to the west and the
country around the great salt lake at Wilkinkarra, or Lake
Mackay.One of the paintings that Daphne showed us that day was done in the classic style in which the Kintore women worked at that time, with a heavy impasto of white acrylic on a black field marking out a bush tucker story: the women collecting kampurarrpa, or bush raisins near the main rockhole of Kalipinpa. It was in some ways an unusually naturalistic work, with a clearly recognizable branch of honey grevillea in the upper-right corner and large black bush raisins set around the central waterhole and its surrounding sandhills. It was a lovely example of the style of work being painted in the early years of the women's painting movement out of Kintore but, I thought, nothing more. (My thanks to Papunya Tula Artists for permission to reproduce the images included here.)
Another painting in the lot that Daphne shared with us that day was quite another story, however.
Well, not another story in the sense that it, too, was a Kalipinpa Rain Dreaming showing the great lightning storm and the ensuing floods that swept across the country, swirling over the sandhills and filling the rockholes. But the iconography of this painting was most unusual, the composition extraordinarily dynamic. It shared a quality of naturalism with the black-and-white composition, though. These were works that required no great leap of comprehension, no tutelage in the traditional iconography of Pintupi painting to decipher the world being depicted.
There is no need to precisely identify any graphic element in this composition to grasp its story. The jagged lines at the center certainly look like lightning bolts; they also call to mind the rough and broken channels that floods have eroded through the terrain around Kintore. The red circles suggest rockholes, but also, perhaps, unripe bush raisins. There is a suggestion of a creek bed in the unusual pale, sandy, dove-pink color of the ground behind those jagged lines and circles. The rest of the design, however, is far more ambiguous: it all reads as water in a hilly landscape, but I can't say that one element is the rush of water, another is the representation of a sandhill. Nonetheless, the painting succeeds brilliantly at capturing the rush of floodwaters through the countryside. There is an exquisite balance, to my eye, between Pintupi and Western conventions of depicting landscapes. The painting captures the violence and the turbulence of the storm. This, I thought, was a striking and original new direction in Pintupi painting.
As the decade of the 'Naughts progressed, other styles came to the fore. One of the major new directions in painting from Kintore and Kiwirkurra was the adoption of a vividly optical sense of design, a visual trickery that recalled the Op Art paintings of Sixties artists like Bridget Riley, filtered, of course, through a Western Desert sensibility. The emergence of bold new styles from painters like George Ward Tjungurrayi, a dramatic minimalism in the works of Warlimprringa Tjapaltjarri, and the sinuous mature works of Charlie Tjapangati all partook of this visual vibrancy. Elizabeth Marks Nakamarra joined in this experimentation, producing works with a complexity of surface like this canvas from 2003.
Nakamarra retains a looseness of hand in this work, a quirkiness of drawing that produces incidents to interest the eye beyond an illusionist's tricks. The regularity of right angles in three corners of the work gives way to a looser composition in the upper-right corner of the work as shown here (I've rotated the canvas 90 degrees to allow for a fuller, more detailed presentation of the design in the confined space of a browser window). Just right of center a gentle curve intrudes into the maze; at the upper left a pair of concentric rectangles emerge to float semi-detached above the rest of the design.
More recently, Nakamarra has tightened up her line and begun to experiment with the effects of color on her geometry.
Indeed, I could say that in this 2008 work she has begun drawing with color, fashioning depth and direction by varying shades of yellow-orange that are set against an dull gray line that nonetheless sings with a pearlescent quality. (This ability to manipulate the eye's perception of this neutral gray that sits in the background of many such paintings is a device employed frequently by several Papunya Tula artists and one that never fails to surprise me when I discover that some brilliant sky-blue line or a vivid white accent turns out on close inspection to be more the color of a battleship more than anything else.)
Moreover, the illusion of stair-step depth is this painting will not maintain itself in my eye. Nakamarra breaks up the pattern on the right-hand side, flattening out the appearance of depth. Once the Escheresque spell of illusion is broken, my eye starts to focus on the larger pattern created by the darker and lighter blocks of orange stripes; field and ground destabilize and suddenly the entire surface of the canvas appears to be in flux, heaving, flowing, stopping, and then starting up again.
As I was pondering this painting's ability to create such visual turbulence, I was suddenly reminded that it, like the previous two works I've reproduced here, depicts the Rain Dreaming at Kalipinpa. Lining the photographs of the three paintings up side by side, I was struck by how much they resemble one another.
 |
 |
 |
In each painting, with a little imagination and if you know the story, you can see how Nakamarra brilliantly suggests the flashing
lightning
and the cascading water of the storm. Over the years she has experimented by
increasing the level of abstraction in her representation of the Dreaming and
the countryside. She continues her experiments with color as well. From the
very first she understood the power of monochromatic design; at the same time
she has worked with color choices that vary subtly from the classic
red-yellow-black-and-white Pintupi palette to achieve bold and dramatic effects
that nonetheless remain true to the colors of her country (seen in this snippet
at right from Google Maps of a landscape of rocky gullies just north of
Kintore).I am fascinated by the way in which Nakamarra's career has illustrated many of the points of tension between traditional and western ways of image making. Some critics of Aboriginal methods complain that most painters paint the same painting over and over again and dismiss the argument that many western artists, working in series, do the same. Nakamarra manages to have it both ways, remaining faithful to the core of the Dreaming and to a traditional palette, working variations on both drawing and painting, and skillfully deploying imagery drawn from both traditional and western models (the roundel and curve, as well as the abstracted line) to expand her visual vocabulary. It is in this mode of innovation within tradition, of refashioning the customary while remaining true to it, that I find her closest kinship with the late great artist to whom she was married.
All images reproduced with the generous permission of Papunya Tula Artists.
Posted at 11:05 AM
Sun - June 7, 2009
Stolen, Again (and Again)
I've been continuing to work my way through the
The
Macquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal Literature at a slow pace,
and am continually delighted by what I'm finding there. The early emphasis on
documentary history has given way, towards the middle of the twentieth century,
to hefty doses of "literature" in the sense of fiction, poetry, and drama. I
continue, also, to be amazed by the variety of styles, genres and subgenres, and
the mixture of the sweet and the useful found in these literary
explorations.
While
I was reading Gillian Cowlishaw's The City's Outback, I came to an excerpt
from a novel in the Anthology that resonated powerfully with the stories
of removal and family disruption Cowlishaw was reproducing, and decided to
pursue the novel and read it in its entirety. The work in question was Monica
Clare's Karobran: the story of an Aboriginal girl,
originally published in 1978, a few years after the author's death, and
reprinted in 2008 by the Alternative Publishing Cooperative
Limited.
Clare was born in 1924 to an Aboriginal father and an English mother, and was sent with her younger brother from her home country in Queensland to Sydney at the age of six following her mother's death. The children spent a short but apparently idyllic time on a farm near Spencer in New South Wales before being separated from one another and sent to government homes. Later in life Clare became active in Aboriginal politics, working especially hard to improve housing conditions and with her husband, Les Clare, in Labor circles.
Karobran was unfinished at the time of Clare's death in 1973. She had brought the manuscript to the offices of FCAATSI, where a team of sympathetic editors later picked it and made final revisions. Like many first novels, Karobran is heavily autobiographical and draws on the first half of the author's life, from childhood through early adult independence. It is narrated in the third person, but always strictly from the point of view of Isabelle, who is seven years old in the opening chapter. The story begins the day of her mother's death and the confusion and fear she experiences. This incident sets up not only the pervasive sense of loss that will haunt Isabelle's life throughout the novel, but also her fierce loyalty to the remnants of her family, her father Dave, and her younger brother Morris.
It also adumbrates the plight of workers, particularly Aboriginal workers, during the years of the Great Depression as Dave sets off with the children in search of work. In the later chapters of the novel, when she is separated from first her father and later her brother, the sense of community that Isabelle finds in the struggles of working folk will sustain her and drive her forward in life, just as the hope that she can connect again with her family does.
Isabelle finds another early and tantalizing sense of community when the family is briefly taken in to the hospitable circle of an Aboriginal camp. But the stay there is brief as Dave sets off again looking for work. Sadly, their journey takes them next into the orbit of Tom Wall, a cruel, racist drunkard. Mrs Wall is barely able to defend herself, let alone the children, and at the end of this episode, the Welfare comes to take the children away as Dave goes off in search of a livelihood once more.
What follows next is the most idyllic chapter of the young girl's life (and the section of the book that is excerpted in the Anthology). Isabelle and Morris are sent to live with the Manbury's on a farm in New South Wales, and these kindly people provide the children not just a home, but a sense of connection to a countryside that stays with Isabelle long after the state intervenes once again and removes the children to an institutional home.
Although brother and sister maintain a loose connection in the city, the bond between them attenuates too. Isabelle leaves the home and finds work; she also finds a sympathetic white man named Bill who leads her into an awareness of larger issues of social justice, and more importantly, finally leads her out west to be reunited with members of a displaced Aboriginal community. There she finally achieves a spiritual reconnection with her father's people. She finds a measure of peace, although it is one that is permanently tinged with the unforgettable loss of her father and brother.
Karobran is a remarkable novel. Less than one hundred pages long, told in simple, clear prose, it nonetheless illuminates history in remarkable ways. It is a story of removal and loss, of the Stolen Generation embodied in a single life. It is likewise a novel of a distinct social consciousness, the story of labor in the Depression, of rural New South Wales, of the removal of whole communities from the country that had sustained them for generations. With its focused point of view, it never becomes didactic. It is a journey of discovery and wonder as much as it is a tale of loss told without a trace of self-pity. Isabelle, in her quiet and understated way, is one of the great heroines of Australian literature.
While
I was reading Gillian Cowlishaw's The City's Outback, I came to an excerpt
from a novel in the Anthology that resonated powerfully with the stories
of removal and family disruption Cowlishaw was reproducing, and decided to
pursue the novel and read it in its entirety. The work in question was Monica
Clare's Karobran: the story of an Aboriginal girl,
originally published in 1978, a few years after the author's death, and
reprinted in 2008 by the Alternative Publishing Cooperative
Limited.Clare was born in 1924 to an Aboriginal father and an English mother, and was sent with her younger brother from her home country in Queensland to Sydney at the age of six following her mother's death. The children spent a short but apparently idyllic time on a farm near Spencer in New South Wales before being separated from one another and sent to government homes. Later in life Clare became active in Aboriginal politics, working especially hard to improve housing conditions and with her husband, Les Clare, in Labor circles.
Karobran was unfinished at the time of Clare's death in 1973. She had brought the manuscript to the offices of FCAATSI, where a team of sympathetic editors later picked it and made final revisions. Like many first novels, Karobran is heavily autobiographical and draws on the first half of the author's life, from childhood through early adult independence. It is narrated in the third person, but always strictly from the point of view of Isabelle, who is seven years old in the opening chapter. The story begins the day of her mother's death and the confusion and fear she experiences. This incident sets up not only the pervasive sense of loss that will haunt Isabelle's life throughout the novel, but also her fierce loyalty to the remnants of her family, her father Dave, and her younger brother Morris.
It also adumbrates the plight of workers, particularly Aboriginal workers, during the years of the Great Depression as Dave sets off with the children in search of work. In the later chapters of the novel, when she is separated from first her father and later her brother, the sense of community that Isabelle finds in the struggles of working folk will sustain her and drive her forward in life, just as the hope that she can connect again with her family does.
Isabelle finds another early and tantalizing sense of community when the family is briefly taken in to the hospitable circle of an Aboriginal camp. But the stay there is brief as Dave sets off again looking for work. Sadly, their journey takes them next into the orbit of Tom Wall, a cruel, racist drunkard. Mrs Wall is barely able to defend herself, let alone the children, and at the end of this episode, the Welfare comes to take the children away as Dave goes off in search of a livelihood once more.
What follows next is the most idyllic chapter of the young girl's life (and the section of the book that is excerpted in the Anthology). Isabelle and Morris are sent to live with the Manbury's on a farm in New South Wales, and these kindly people provide the children not just a home, but a sense of connection to a countryside that stays with Isabelle long after the state intervenes once again and removes the children to an institutional home.
Although brother and sister maintain a loose connection in the city, the bond between them attenuates too. Isabelle leaves the home and finds work; she also finds a sympathetic white man named Bill who leads her into an awareness of larger issues of social justice, and more importantly, finally leads her out west to be reunited with members of a displaced Aboriginal community. There she finally achieves a spiritual reconnection with her father's people. She finds a measure of peace, although it is one that is permanently tinged with the unforgettable loss of her father and brother.
Karobran is a remarkable novel. Less than one hundred pages long, told in simple, clear prose, it nonetheless illuminates history in remarkable ways. It is a story of removal and loss, of the Stolen Generation embodied in a single life. It is likewise a novel of a distinct social consciousness, the story of labor in the Depression, of rural New South Wales, of the removal of whole communities from the country that had sustained them for generations. With its focused point of view, it never becomes didactic. It is a journey of discovery and wonder as much as it is a tale of loss told without a trace of self-pity. Isabelle, in her quiet and understated way, is one of the great heroines of Australian literature.
Posted at 12:30 PM
Sun - May 31, 2009
The Voice of the Homelands
During the latter half of 2007, listening to the
debates about the Intervention, I often wondered (sometimes aloud) where the
voice of the Aboriginal people was. Plenty of people spoke on behalf of
Aboriginal communities, and on both sides of any issue. But with a few
exceptions, people like Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton or Tom Calma and
Larrissa Behrendt, Aboriginal voices were unheard. There was certainly little
published from inside the communities that were to be most affected by the
policies of the Northern Territory Emergency
Response.
Now, two years later, history seems to be cycling back around on itself with the announcement from Jenny Macklin's ministry of plans to consolidate "outstations" into "real towns." (The Indigneous people who were ostensibly consulted in the run-up to the policy's development expressed their preference for the term "homelands" as more indicative of the true nature of their relationship to the places they have chosen to live, but that idea was passed over, too.)
This time, however, there are Indigenous voices that can be heard speaking directly from the homelands, thanks in part to the growing sophistication of their inhabitants with media, especially video that goes out to the world via YouTube. The Yolngu have been leaders in this area for a long time now, as the success of the Mulka Project indicates, but also as documented in studies like Jennifer Deger's exemplary Shimmering Screens: making media in an Aboriginal community (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
A few months ago, a series of interviews called "Listen and Accept Our Voice!" ("Buthurru Wetjurra ga Marranga Nganapurrunggu Rirrakay!") was published on YouTube that offers the chance to hear what some people from the MataMata Homelands have to say about the government's programs. "We created this video because the Government never listens to Yolngu voices," they said. "They create laws and policies aimed at Yolngu people without listening to what we think and feel." YolnguVideo says that these short films were
Don Dhakaliny Burarrwangga and Batumbil speak out in response to simple questions: what's different about Yolngu and Balanda law? What's the best life for Yolngu? What does the Government do that is bad for Yolngu people? What does the Government do that is good for Yolngu people? Listen to what they have to say.
Yolngu Message: Interview One
Yolngu Message: Interview Two; Part 1/3
Yolngu Message: Interview Two; Part 2/3
Yolngu Message: Interview Two; Part 3/3
My thanks to Wamut at that mununga linguist for alerting me to these video posts.
For more good reading on the Territory Government's scheme to empty the homelands, check out Bob Gosford's recent posts at The Northern Myth on "Growth Towns," the Tiwi Land Council, and the "Working Future."
Now, two years later, history seems to be cycling back around on itself with the announcement from Jenny Macklin's ministry of plans to consolidate "outstations" into "real towns." (The Indigneous people who were ostensibly consulted in the run-up to the policy's development expressed their preference for the term "homelands" as more indicative of the true nature of their relationship to the places they have chosen to live, but that idea was passed over, too.)
This time, however, there are Indigenous voices that can be heard speaking directly from the homelands, thanks in part to the growing sophistication of their inhabitants with media, especially video that goes out to the world via YouTube. The Yolngu have been leaders in this area for a long time now, as the success of the Mulka Project indicates, but also as documented in studies like Jennifer Deger's exemplary Shimmering Screens: making media in an Aboriginal community (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
A few months ago, a series of interviews called "Listen and Accept Our Voice!" ("Buthurru Wetjurra ga Marranga Nganapurrunggu Rirrakay!") was published on YouTube that offers the chance to hear what some people from the MataMata Homelands have to say about the government's programs. "We created this video because the Government never listens to Yolngu voices," they said. "They create laws and policies aimed at Yolngu people without listening to what we think and feel." YolnguVideo says that these short films were
Created in response to the Northern Territory and Federal Government's continued attempts to close down Indigenous Homeland communities.
Yolngu and other Indigenous people have been living on their Homelands since before Settlement. Since missionary days they have asserted their desire to remain on their own traditional country. Most people thought this right was enshrined in the Land Rights Act (NT).
However, current and recent Government policies have been effectively coercing Yolngu and other Indigenous people off their country. These measures include rolling back basic services to Homelands, and closing schools while simultaneously linking school attendance to parental social service payments.
To read about the latest Government attacks on Homeland life see: http://www.action.nt.gov.au/outstations/
Don Dhakaliny Burarrwangga and Batumbil speak out in response to simple questions: what's different about Yolngu and Balanda law? What's the best life for Yolngu? What does the Government do that is bad for Yolngu people? What does the Government do that is good for Yolngu people? Listen to what they have to say.
Yolngu Message: Interview One
Yolngu Message: Interview Two; Part 1/3
Yolngu Message: Interview Two; Part 2/3
Yolngu Message: Interview Two; Part 3/3
My thanks to Wamut at that mununga linguist for alerting me to these video posts.
For more good reading on the Territory Government's scheme to empty the homelands, check out Bob Gosford's recent posts at The Northern Myth on "Growth Towns," the Tiwi Land Council, and the "Working Future."
Posted at 10:20 AM
Sun - May 24, 2009
City Life
With
The
City's Outback (UNSW Press, 2009), Gillian Cowlishaw has written a haunting
book. Not only will the stories she tells here remain with you long after you
have put it aside, the book is wraithlike in the way it seems to change shape
from chapter to chapter, page to page. And like any revenant worth it's name,
it can pack a hard and unsuspected punch quite at odds with its transparent
character. It works superbly at all of its many levels, as urban or suburban
documentary, as anthropological investigation, both of Aboriginal culture and of
race relations, as reflexive meditation on the practice of social science, or as
instruction manual on the rigors and challenges of
fieldwork.
None of this will come as a surprise to readers of Cowlishaw's earlier books; indeed, the subtitle of Rednecks, Eggheads, and Blackfellas, her study of life on a cattle station in the far north, at Bulman, just south of Arnhem Land, might serve equally well for The City's Outback: "a study of racial power and intimacy in Australia. The title of her more recent monograph, Blackfellas, Whitefellas, and the Hidden Injuries of Race (2004), is apt in the current context as well. The City's Outback proceeds from the latter work, in that it picks up the story of people and family she worked with in rural Bourke, NSW. Only now, her locus of investigation is the western suburbs of Sydney, in Mt. Druitt. Here there is a substantial Aboriginal population, many of them connected to families Cowlishaw knew in Bourke, but the concept of an Aboriginal "community" remains more elusive. It lacks the geographical or social coherence of an isolated township, or of an cohesive community within a larger one. And so, in addition to being a locus for studying a suburban Aboriginal culture, it becomes a ground for questioning the very concept of Aboriginal culture itself.
Not that Cowlishaw denies that there is such a thing as Aboriginal culture, rather she wants to look at it from a new vantage point. When culture is often aligned with tradition, when community is defined by distance, and when both of those critical elements are lacking in the western suburbs of Sydney, what does it mean to be Aboriginal, and how does that state of affairs influence the people themselves, the Australian state, and the interactions between them?
This is but one of the goals that Cowlishaw pursues in a book whose clear-cut prose and straightforward narrative structure disguises the complexity of its intellectual agenda. Cowlishaw also seeks to illuminate the nature of fieldwork in such circumstances and, by extension, to cast light on the intricacies and problems of the classic anthropological role of participant-observer. The fieldworker must abandon even the pretense of strict objectivity in developing social relationships with the people she is working with; at the same time she must subject her own methodology and involvement to a degree of scrutiny that can withstand the objective assessment of her own intellect and those of her peers.
Cowlishaw manages to do this without floundering in a mess of theory. She makes reference to the "reflexive" nature of anthropological study and writing that has dominated the discipline for the last twenty-five years, but does so only to put her inquiry into context. She assumes that the reader has a basic understanding of the issues (or can pursue them via references in the extensive and excellent bibliography). She manages, rather, to portray the dilemma of the fieldworker by foregrounding her own reactions to what she sees and hears, and allowing herself and her readers to examine the feelings of both sympathy and repugnance, of curiosity and boredom that she experiences in the course of her conversations in Mt Druitt.
Her fieldwork in that suburb consisted largely of interviewing the friends and relatives of her main informant, Frank Doolan, a man she knew from the period of her research in Bourke that she wrote about in Blackfellas, Whitefellas, and the Hidden Injuries of Race. Frank is an articulate, passionate man, keenly aware of injustice and equally aware of the mistrust that continues to founder the cause of meaningful dialogue between the races or the communities. The closing paragraph of The City's Outback sums up Frank's position with an art that it seems impossible to improve upon.
While Cowlishaw's research project involved, at Frank's urging, taping and transcribing the life stories of those he introduced her to, and returning those stories to their narrators as a means of assuring them that the stories had been heard and attended to, The City's Outback is not a compilation of those stories, a publication of them for our edification, or as the subjects of academic analysis. Or, at least, it is not those things alone. Cowlishaw acknowledges that far more work needs to be done to extract the full meaning, to conduct the extensive evaluation of what she has been told. But the stories themselves are powerful and among the most moving and startling episodes in the narrative that Cowlishaw weaves.
The overwhelming theme that emerges from these stories is the trauma of separation. Here is the story of the Stolen Generations written on a personal scale: Annie, for instance, who feels the sharpness of never having known her mother's love and thus finds herself ignorant of the ability to love her own children. She desperately wants Cowlishaw to arrange to have her imprisoned brother moved from Queensland to New South Wales where she can visit him, but cannot understand the love that such a desire demonstrates. She does not engage in blame, except possibly of herself: this is simply the life story she has been dealt. Tina's children were taken away from her and Tina herself is confounded by the bureaucracy, by her poverty, and perhaps most of all by her inability to reconnect with those she has lost, even when they come back to her in Sydney. Vera and Gary, teenaged parents, know that there are courses that the state runs to provide them with the skills to survive in modern society, but lack all context in which to make sense of those skills.
Through all these stories the themes of misery, violence, incomprehension, and anger rumble like thunder. Mutual incomprehension threatens to strangle these lives and even threatens to overwhelm Cowlishaw herself. She is repulsed by the casual acceptance of violence, and understands that repulsion to stem from the very alien nature of a culture that accepts mayhem as an inevitable component of daily life. Her informants see the police as enemies, incapable of any action that is not inherently antagonistic. Even Frank, who understands the role the police must play, and wants to encourage tolerance and respect, is ground down by the apparent endlessness of the cycle everyone seems to be trapped in. And Cowlishaw knows that to the citizens of Mt Druitt, she is a figure equally alien and incomprehensible, a white woman from the university, privileged, intermittent in her presence, governed by a code that has no meaning in their daily lives.
The disjuncture between those lives and government policy, between Annie's anguish over her self-perceived inability to love her children and the public's growing appreciation of the fate of the "Stolen Generations" is the predicament Cowlishaw wants ultimately to address.
Cowlishaw's encounters in Mt Druitt took place in 2000, in the days when the sting of Bringing Them Home was still fresh, and in the year when thousands marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Those were events that were acknowledged in Mt Druitt, but seem to have had little impact there. Cowlishaw is now writing in the shadow of the sex-and-violence media scandals that led to the Intervention in 2007, and in the shadow of the Intervention itself, again events that might cast a shadow in the suburbs without altering daily life. The City's Outback is a guidebook, not to the depressed enclaves of the city and their dysfunctions, but to the habits of thought that keep the lives that are lived there in eclipse.
Google Map showing the location of Mt Druit (upper left)
The
City's Outback (UNSW Press, 2009), Gillian Cowlishaw has written a haunting
book. Not only will the stories she tells here remain with you long after you
have put it aside, the book is wraithlike in the way it seems to change shape
from chapter to chapter, page to page. And like any revenant worth it's name,
it can pack a hard and unsuspected punch quite at odds with its transparent
character. It works superbly at all of its many levels, as urban or suburban
documentary, as anthropological investigation, both of Aboriginal culture and of
race relations, as reflexive meditation on the practice of social science, or as
instruction manual on the rigors and challenges of
fieldwork.None of this will come as a surprise to readers of Cowlishaw's earlier books; indeed, the subtitle of Rednecks, Eggheads, and Blackfellas, her study of life on a cattle station in the far north, at Bulman, just south of Arnhem Land, might serve equally well for The City's Outback: "a study of racial power and intimacy in Australia. The title of her more recent monograph, Blackfellas, Whitefellas, and the Hidden Injuries of Race (2004), is apt in the current context as well. The City's Outback proceeds from the latter work, in that it picks up the story of people and family she worked with in rural Bourke, NSW. Only now, her locus of investigation is the western suburbs of Sydney, in Mt. Druitt. Here there is a substantial Aboriginal population, many of them connected to families Cowlishaw knew in Bourke, but the concept of an Aboriginal "community" remains more elusive. It lacks the geographical or social coherence of an isolated township, or of an cohesive community within a larger one. And so, in addition to being a locus for studying a suburban Aboriginal culture, it becomes a ground for questioning the very concept of Aboriginal culture itself.
Not that Cowlishaw denies that there is such a thing as Aboriginal culture, rather she wants to look at it from a new vantage point. When culture is often aligned with tradition, when community is defined by distance, and when both of those critical elements are lacking in the western suburbs of Sydney, what does it mean to be Aboriginal, and how does that state of affairs influence the people themselves, the Australian state, and the interactions between them?
This is but one of the goals that Cowlishaw pursues in a book whose clear-cut prose and straightforward narrative structure disguises the complexity of its intellectual agenda. Cowlishaw also seeks to illuminate the nature of fieldwork in such circumstances and, by extension, to cast light on the intricacies and problems of the classic anthropological role of participant-observer. The fieldworker must abandon even the pretense of strict objectivity in developing social relationships with the people she is working with; at the same time she must subject her own methodology and involvement to a degree of scrutiny that can withstand the objective assessment of her own intellect and those of her peers.
Cowlishaw manages to do this without floundering in a mess of theory. She makes reference to the "reflexive" nature of anthropological study and writing that has dominated the discipline for the last twenty-five years, but does so only to put her inquiry into context. She assumes that the reader has a basic understanding of the issues (or can pursue them via references in the extensive and excellent bibliography). She manages, rather, to portray the dilemma of the fieldworker by foregrounding her own reactions to what she sees and hears, and allowing herself and her readers to examine the feelings of both sympathy and repugnance, of curiosity and boredom that she experiences in the course of her conversations in Mt Druitt.
Her fieldwork in that suburb consisted largely of interviewing the friends and relatives of her main informant, Frank Doolan, a man she knew from the period of her research in Bourke that she wrote about in Blackfellas, Whitefellas, and the Hidden Injuries of Race. Frank is an articulate, passionate man, keenly aware of injustice and equally aware of the mistrust that continues to founder the cause of meaningful dialogue between the races or the communities. The closing paragraph of The City's Outback sums up Frank's position with an art that it seems impossible to improve upon.
On Police Remembrance Day in November 2006 he walked into the police station in Dubbo and asked the nervous young officer at the desk for 'one of them ribbons' that are worn on this day to mourn officers who have died in the line of duty. He wore the chequered ribbon all day saying, 'If we want them to respect our pain and our rituals we have to show that we respect theirs' (p. 228).
While Cowlishaw's research project involved, at Frank's urging, taping and transcribing the life stories of those he introduced her to, and returning those stories to their narrators as a means of assuring them that the stories had been heard and attended to, The City's Outback is not a compilation of those stories, a publication of them for our edification, or as the subjects of academic analysis. Or, at least, it is not those things alone. Cowlishaw acknowledges that far more work needs to be done to extract the full meaning, to conduct the extensive evaluation of what she has been told. But the stories themselves are powerful and among the most moving and startling episodes in the narrative that Cowlishaw weaves.
The overwhelming theme that emerges from these stories is the trauma of separation. Here is the story of the Stolen Generations written on a personal scale: Annie, for instance, who feels the sharpness of never having known her mother's love and thus finds herself ignorant of the ability to love her own children. She desperately wants Cowlishaw to arrange to have her imprisoned brother moved from Queensland to New South Wales where she can visit him, but cannot understand the love that such a desire demonstrates. She does not engage in blame, except possibly of herself: this is simply the life story she has been dealt. Tina's children were taken away from her and Tina herself is confounded by the bureaucracy, by her poverty, and perhaps most of all by her inability to reconnect with those she has lost, even when they come back to her in Sydney. Vera and Gary, teenaged parents, know that there are courses that the state runs to provide them with the skills to survive in modern society, but lack all context in which to make sense of those skills.
Through all these stories the themes of misery, violence, incomprehension, and anger rumble like thunder. Mutual incomprehension threatens to strangle these lives and even threatens to overwhelm Cowlishaw herself. She is repulsed by the casual acceptance of violence, and understands that repulsion to stem from the very alien nature of a culture that accepts mayhem as an inevitable component of daily life. Her informants see the police as enemies, incapable of any action that is not inherently antagonistic. Even Frank, who understands the role the police must play, and wants to encourage tolerance and respect, is ground down by the apparent endlessness of the cycle everyone seems to be trapped in. And Cowlishaw knows that to the citizens of Mt Druitt, she is a figure equally alien and incomprehensible, a white woman from the university, privileged, intermittent in her presence, governed by a code that has no meaning in their daily lives.
The disjuncture between those lives and government policy, between Annie's anguish over her self-perceived inability to love her children and the public's growing appreciation of the fate of the "Stolen Generations" is the predicament Cowlishaw wants ultimately to address.
This fieldwork brought me to the heart of a dilemma that is not mine so much as that of the nation, the dilemma attendant upon being part of the hegemonic culture. The liberal impulse to solve problems through appeals to governments has led Aboriginal activist discourses into a trap. They have to identify specific social injustices linked to a specific set of grievances. We see that subaltern groups--immigrants, Aborigines, women, foreign-looking youth--have a subordinate position in the world and we take this to be immoral, unjust, ill-ordered, and lied about. Social scientists, whether or not they belong to such groups, put themselves on the subalterns' side, trying to find the real source of their problems ... which must have escaped others, particularly governments. But, if we bypass the spokespersons or representatives, who are the ones listened to because they speak the language of governments, and get close to these marginal people, their conditions become more complex and baffling. One reason is that some characteristic differences arouse distaste or pity. The ability to live with violence, to ignore contempt and to laugh at insult, or to display aggression towards elusive sources of injury, are disturbing to outsiders. But further, these problematic qualities that we want to explain as consequences of subordination, and therefore remediable, may be valued as elements of a normal environment, a familiar homely style of interaction, a habitus (pp. 213-214).
Cowlishaw's encounters in Mt Druitt took place in 2000, in the days when the sting of Bringing Them Home was still fresh, and in the year when thousands marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Those were events that were acknowledged in Mt Druitt, but seem to have had little impact there. Cowlishaw is now writing in the shadow of the sex-and-violence media scandals that led to the Intervention in 2007, and in the shadow of the Intervention itself, again events that might cast a shadow in the suburbs without altering daily life. The City's Outback is a guidebook, not to the depressed enclaves of the city and their dysfunctions, but to the habits of thought that keep the lives that are lived there in eclipse.
Google Map showing the location of Mt Druit (upper left)
Posted at 10:19 AM
Sat - May 16, 2009
Gone Troppo: Vultures in the Top End
The weather in Darwin is lovely this time of the
year. The late autumn days are warm and bright, but not suffocatingly hot the
way they can be at the start of the year; the humidity drops to an imperceptible
level. Harbor nights can be downright chilly. All the more surprising, then,
to read this week of a monsoonal vortex of controversy surrounding the
collection of Papunya boards held by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern
Territory (MAGNT), where events seem to have briefly gone
troppo.
Monday's Australian carried a report that Alison Anderson, who holds the portfolios for Art and for Indigenous Policy in the Territory, had "intervened to overturn government policy of researching and displaying several Papunya board paintings that contain sacred Aboriginal material" (Natasha Robinson, "Minister lashes 'culture vultures' of Aboriginal Art," The Australian, May 11, 2009).
MAGNT holds over two hundred masterpieces from the early days of the Central Desert experiments in acrylic painting that launched the modern Aboriginal fine art movement, although you might never know it given the paltry history of conservation and exhibition that has attended the collection. While a small number of these early boards contain depictions of highly sacred ritual actions and paraphernalia, the vast majority of them have lived on racks in the back rooms of the museum for most of the last fifty years, with only a handful every on display at a single time.
Worldwide attention was focused on this collection a little more than a year ago when a thief smashed a plate glass window in the small hours of the morning of April 1, 2008 and made off with seven of the works from a ground floor gallery. The paintings were recovered within hours, and the thief was apprehended.
But the incident focused minds on the sorry state, not only of security, but of conservation at the Museum, which is chronically and desperately underfunded. Painted on scraps of cast-off lumber or masonite and often mounted by gluing them onto rough, acidic, burlap-covered supports, these artworks are at risk even in the controlled environments of the Museum. They are poorly documented, lost wonders from a lost world, but described at the time by Nicolas Rothwell as "no doubt ... one of the glories of Australia's national heritage" ("Mysteries of our art of darkness," The Australian, April 5, 2008).
Then, last August, word began to circulate that something would be done, and finally, on the night of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, then Minister for the Arts and Indigenous Policy Marion Scrymgour announced a grant to the museum that would allow for professional curation and documentation of the boards in preparation for an international tour. I would guess that most everyone gathered on the lawn of the Museum that night felt like a winner.
Early Papunya boards have been the focus this year of one of the most extraordinary exhibitions of Aboriginal art mounted in recent times (which is saying a lot), Icons of the Desert: early Aboriginal paintings from Papunya. Included amongst the fifty paintings in this show are a number of works of a sensitive nature, but it is important to note that those involved in the mounting and publication of the exhibition have gone to extraordinary lengths to respect the concerns of men from the desert about the visibility of these images.
Some paintings were not reproduced in the catalog, but instead were included in a sealed insert available only in the United States. The catalog itself includes a lengthy essay by Centralian historian Dick Kimber describing the process by which he contacted relatives of the painters to determine the suitability of the works for exhibition and reproduction. It is worth noting that all this care was taken with paintings that had been offered at auction during the past decade. The works in question had been reproduced in auction catalogs (in print and on the web, and at least one of them, Clifford Possum's Emu Corroboree Man (1972), was widely reproduced in newspapers and on websites at the time of its most recent sale, in July 2005, when it sold for a record price for the artist.
And yet despite the problems of curation and documentation, despite a growing awareness among scholars and collectors that the Pintupi, long known for being culturally conservative and no doubt still remembering the stories of recrimination and payback that resulted from the exhibition of these early paintings in Yuendumu, Alice Springs, and Perth, have expressed new doubts about the continued display of these works, despite all this, Alison Anderson made an announcement this week that could have set back all of the progress that is being made towards honoring both the paintings and the culture that produced them.
Anderson made some startling accusations in announcing her plans to scrap the exhibition.
Luckily, Monday's reversal has itself already been reversed in a rather startling fashion. On Friday, several papers including the Brisbane Times and The Age (Lindsay Murdoch, "Treasures to finally see light," May 15, 2009) carried the latest installment. Now, the Territory will benefit from the government's largesse.
There is no mention in either of these stories about the conservation and documentation of the boards, but I sincerely hope that both matters will be well attended to before any exhibition of them opens. There are some very good and not so obvious reasons to do so.
At the heart of the controversy about exhibiting these works today, abroad or in Australia, is the issue of revelation and concealment. As the news stories note, the men who originally painted these boards may not have grasped how widely disseminated their images would become. Nor did they expect the angry reactions of other desert groups to the revelation of such sacred material. And although the Pintupi greeted the exhibition of their and their fathers' or grandfathers' paintings during Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius in 2001 with joy, attitudes have changed in the years since. As Friday's story notes, some of the elders, particularly Anderson's grandfather, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, are now reluctant to have the works publicly viewed. (See my post on Fred Myers' lecture at the Hood Museum in 2006 for details and references about this growing conservatism among the Pintupi.)
Of course, not all of these paintings contain such sensitive material. The irony, and the danger, is that without appropriate study and curation, especially now when there is a chance that the direct descendants of the painters can still be consulted, it may not be possible to determine which works should be properly restricted. Again, Rothwell reported on this aspect of the problem in his story on the April 2008 theft, noting that Vivien Johnson, who has spent an academic lifetime studying Papunya painting, "believe[s] paintings are being hung that show undisguised secret ceremonial designs against the wishes of their contemporary custodians."
It is for such reasons that Anderson's assertions that those who study Indigenous culture because they have none of their own, and that they want to steal the culture from its owners are not just offensive but ill-considered as well.
There is no doubt that the ethnographic study of Aboriginal people has not always benefited them, a point explored at some length by Aileen Moreton-Robinson in "How White Possession Moves: After the Word." This essay was an invited response to a collection of academic papers published in 2006, Moving Anthropology: Critical Indigenous Studies (Charles Darwin University Press). Moreton-Robinson points out that in carrying out such studies, academics may define indigeneity from within their own world view, misrepresenting it or setting limits on it that differ significantly from the point of view of Aboriginal people themselves. Yet even at her most critical, Moreton-Robinson suggests a need for "engagement from outside the confines of anthropology." I would suggest that the study of these early paintings offers an opportunity to open up such new perspectives.
Indeed, I hope that, as Minister for the Arts, Anderson does more that just bring the perspective of her family and her home community of Papunya to bear on the study of these paintings and calls on the knowledge of the communities of Kintore and Kiwirrkura to insure the broadest net is cast in seeking to understand these formative, pioneering paintings.
Such research, carefully shepherded by scholars of Vivien Johnson's character, can indeed prove the very opposite of what Anderson alleges. It can demonstrate how culture is fundamentally inalienable. It might be lost over time, but it can never be given away, nor taken away.
These paintings are expressions of ritual, and it would be well to remember that rituals were (and still are) a form of commerce in the deserts. The songs and stories of the "Balgo business" have been traded from the western coast all the way into the Centre, much like pearl shells with their incised meanders. Ritual business has value, and trading it establishes connections among "the many clans in this nation, not all of one law, but many laws" as Anderson was quoted saying in Monday's article in The Australian. Although her reference was explicitly to the varieties of Indigenous law and culture, it is equally apt in relation to Anglo-Australians as well. It is important to remember that when one group passed a ritual on to another, they did not lose the rights to that ritual; in fact, they enriched themselves in the exchange by gaining new rights to other rituals.
In painting stories associated with ritual business, the early artists at Papunya were asserting the value of their connection to the country they painted. By offering those paintings for sale, they looked to achieve an exchange of value. It may have been an unequal exchange in the end, and it may have been built on misunderstood premises, but it was engaged in enthusiastically and hopefully.
All that is not to say that the terms of exchange may not be renegotiated over time. Indeed, the Pintupi famously altered the terms of exchange under pressure from the Pitjantjatjara by restricting the display of the offending works and by ceasing to paint explicit renditions of ceremony and ceremonial objects. They also made retribution. And now, decades later, their knowledge and cooperation must be enlisted to elucidate the meanings of those early paintings, to determine which of the vaulted treasures need to be treated with proper respect for the secrets they embody.
An uneducated eye can not distinguish between secret and public images. Vivien Johnson's concerns demonstrate this fact, as does Kimber's essay in the Icons catalog. Indeed, some of Anderson's own paintings recently shown at the Karen Brown Gallery in Federation Square contain images that look like sacred ritual paraphernalia (see in particular the modified string cross in "Relatives: sequence of Rain Dreamings" and other motifs in "Sacred Women Dancing at a site in Desert Country"). Without study and documentation and exhibition, misunderstandings and misappropriation will only worsen.
The Papunya boards entered the marketplace nearly 40 years ago. It is impossible to unring that bell completely. Moreover, it should be recognized that much good has followed from that initial set of transactions. There is no doubt that the art market has enriched, not only buyers of the art, but some of its creators as well (although not equally). And these transactions have certainly elevated the general understanding and value of Aboriginal culture both within Australia and abroad. Properly directed conservation and exhibition will only serve to increase that value in both monetary and cultural terms. With regard to the question of the equality of the exchange, it is worth noting briefly that ignorance and disregard for those values contribute to carpetbagging and to unscrupulous dealers prizing their own financial gain over the concerns of the artists and their families.
Happily, cooler heads and cooler temperatures seemed to have prevailed against the tropical maelstrom. Some good may have emerged in the end, for it would surely be a boon to see MAGNT's treasure on display in the Territory and then in galleries across Australia and around the world. There is still time to step back and take a deep breath, to engage in meaningful and respectful dialogue about the future of the Papunya boards and the place of Aboriginal painting in a broader context. These discussions will inevitably be political. (I never fail to marvel at how Fred Myers nailed the key concepts of desert culture in the subtitle to Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self by describing his work as treating of "sentiment, place and politics among Western Desert Aborigines.") Political though they must be, they need not be partisan. The work is too important for that.
Monday's Australian carried a report that Alison Anderson, who holds the portfolios for Art and for Indigenous Policy in the Territory, had "intervened to overturn government policy of researching and displaying several Papunya board paintings that contain sacred Aboriginal material" (Natasha Robinson, "Minister lashes 'culture vultures' of Aboriginal Art," The Australian, May 11, 2009).
MAGNT holds over two hundred masterpieces from the early days of the Central Desert experiments in acrylic painting that launched the modern Aboriginal fine art movement, although you might never know it given the paltry history of conservation and exhibition that has attended the collection. While a small number of these early boards contain depictions of highly sacred ritual actions and paraphernalia, the vast majority of them have lived on racks in the back rooms of the museum for most of the last fifty years, with only a handful every on display at a single time.
Worldwide attention was focused on this collection a little more than a year ago when a thief smashed a plate glass window in the small hours of the morning of April 1, 2008 and made off with seven of the works from a ground floor gallery. The paintings were recovered within hours, and the thief was apprehended.
But the incident focused minds on the sorry state, not only of security, but of conservation at the Museum, which is chronically and desperately underfunded. Painted on scraps of cast-off lumber or masonite and often mounted by gluing them onto rough, acidic, burlap-covered supports, these artworks are at risk even in the controlled environments of the Museum. They are poorly documented, lost wonders from a lost world, but described at the time by Nicolas Rothwell as "no doubt ... one of the glories of Australia's national heritage" ("Mysteries of our art of darkness," The Australian, April 5, 2008).
Then, last August, word began to circulate that something would be done, and finally, on the night of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, then Minister for the Arts and Indigenous Policy Marion Scrymgour announced a grant to the museum that would allow for professional curation and documentation of the boards in preparation for an international tour. I would guess that most everyone gathered on the lawn of the Museum that night felt like a winner.
Early Papunya boards have been the focus this year of one of the most extraordinary exhibitions of Aboriginal art mounted in recent times (which is saying a lot), Icons of the Desert: early Aboriginal paintings from Papunya. Included amongst the fifty paintings in this show are a number of works of a sensitive nature, but it is important to note that those involved in the mounting and publication of the exhibition have gone to extraordinary lengths to respect the concerns of men from the desert about the visibility of these images.
Some paintings were not reproduced in the catalog, but instead were included in a sealed insert available only in the United States. The catalog itself includes a lengthy essay by Centralian historian Dick Kimber describing the process by which he contacted relatives of the painters to determine the suitability of the works for exhibition and reproduction. It is worth noting that all this care was taken with paintings that had been offered at auction during the past decade. The works in question had been reproduced in auction catalogs (in print and on the web, and at least one of them, Clifford Possum's Emu Corroboree Man (1972), was widely reproduced in newspapers and on websites at the time of its most recent sale, in July 2005, when it sold for a record price for the artist.
And yet despite the problems of curation and documentation, despite a growing awareness among scholars and collectors that the Pintupi, long known for being culturally conservative and no doubt still remembering the stories of recrimination and payback that resulted from the exhibition of these early paintings in Yuendumu, Alice Springs, and Perth, have expressed new doubts about the continued display of these works, despite all this, Alison Anderson made an announcement this week that could have set back all of the progress that is being made towards honoring both the paintings and the culture that produced them.
Anderson made some startling accusations in announcing her plans to scrap the exhibition.
The Northern Territory's most senior Aboriginal politician has launched a scathing attack on "culture vultures" who exploit sacred Aboriginal artworks and has vowed to halt a planned international exhibition of early Western Desert paintings.
...
Ms Anderson - who is soon to make new appointments to the museum's board from a shortlist that includes Aboriginal professor Marcia Langton and Darwin businesswoman Kathy Brown - lashed out at "culture vultures" intent on exploiting sensitive aspects of Aboriginal culture.
"Soon we'll just become people without identity and people without law and culture because everybody else knows about our law and culture," she said.
"These people (who study the sacred elements of Aboriginal art) are vultures - culture vultures," she said. "They're people who like to research other people's culture because they don't have one of their own.
Luckily, Monday's reversal has itself already been reversed in a rather startling fashion. On Friday, several papers including the Brisbane Times and The Age (Lindsay Murdoch, "Treasures to finally see light," May 15, 2009) carried the latest installment. Now, the Territory will benefit from the government's largesse.
A collection of priceless and culturally sensitive Aboriginal paintings that has languished unseen in vaults for almost 40 years will soon be exhibited in the Northern Territory.
But an ambitious plan to take the collection, known as the Papunya Tula Boards, on an international tour in 2012 has been scuppered by the territory's most senior indigenous politician, Alison Anderson.
"These priceless pieces should be first viewed in the country of their birth," Ms Anderson, the territory's Arts Minister, said.
She approved the local exhibition this week, following years of pressure from art lovers to resurrect the early 1970s desert paintings.
There is no mention in either of these stories about the conservation and documentation of the boards, but I sincerely hope that both matters will be well attended to before any exhibition of them opens. There are some very good and not so obvious reasons to do so.
At the heart of the controversy about exhibiting these works today, abroad or in Australia, is the issue of revelation and concealment. As the news stories note, the men who originally painted these boards may not have grasped how widely disseminated their images would become. Nor did they expect the angry reactions of other desert groups to the revelation of such sacred material. And although the Pintupi greeted the exhibition of their and their fathers' or grandfathers' paintings during Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius in 2001 with joy, attitudes have changed in the years since. As Friday's story notes, some of the elders, particularly Anderson's grandfather, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, are now reluctant to have the works publicly viewed. (See my post on Fred Myers' lecture at the Hood Museum in 2006 for details and references about this growing conservatism among the Pintupi.)
Of course, not all of these paintings contain such sensitive material. The irony, and the danger, is that without appropriate study and curation, especially now when there is a chance that the direct descendants of the painters can still be consulted, it may not be possible to determine which works should be properly restricted. Again, Rothwell reported on this aspect of the problem in his story on the April 2008 theft, noting that Vivien Johnson, who has spent an academic lifetime studying Papunya painting, "believe[s] paintings are being hung that show undisguised secret ceremonial designs against the wishes of their contemporary custodians."
It is for such reasons that Anderson's assertions that those who study Indigenous culture because they have none of their own, and that they want to steal the culture from its owners are not just offensive but ill-considered as well.
There is no doubt that the ethnographic study of Aboriginal people has not always benefited them, a point explored at some length by Aileen Moreton-Robinson in "How White Possession Moves: After the Word." This essay was an invited response to a collection of academic papers published in 2006, Moving Anthropology: Critical Indigenous Studies (Charles Darwin University Press). Moreton-Robinson points out that in carrying out such studies, academics may define indigeneity from within their own world view, misrepresenting it or setting limits on it that differ significantly from the point of view of Aboriginal people themselves. Yet even at her most critical, Moreton-Robinson suggests a need for "engagement from outside the confines of anthropology." I would suggest that the study of these early paintings offers an opportunity to open up such new perspectives.
Indeed, I hope that, as Minister for the Arts, Anderson does more that just bring the perspective of her family and her home community of Papunya to bear on the study of these paintings and calls on the knowledge of the communities of Kintore and Kiwirrkura to insure the broadest net is cast in seeking to understand these formative, pioneering paintings.
Such research, carefully shepherded by scholars of Vivien Johnson's character, can indeed prove the very opposite of what Anderson alleges. It can demonstrate how culture is fundamentally inalienable. It might be lost over time, but it can never be given away, nor taken away.
These paintings are expressions of ritual, and it would be well to remember that rituals were (and still are) a form of commerce in the deserts. The songs and stories of the "Balgo business" have been traded from the western coast all the way into the Centre, much like pearl shells with their incised meanders. Ritual business has value, and trading it establishes connections among "the many clans in this nation, not all of one law, but many laws" as Anderson was quoted saying in Monday's article in The Australian. Although her reference was explicitly to the varieties of Indigenous law and culture, it is equally apt in relation to Anglo-Australians as well. It is important to remember that when one group passed a ritual on to another, they did not lose the rights to that ritual; in fact, they enriched themselves in the exchange by gaining new rights to other rituals.
In painting stories associated with ritual business, the early artists at Papunya were asserting the value of their connection to the country they painted. By offering those paintings for sale, they looked to achieve an exchange of value. It may have been an unequal exchange in the end, and it may have been built on misunderstood premises, but it was engaged in enthusiastically and hopefully.
All that is not to say that the terms of exchange may not be renegotiated over time. Indeed, the Pintupi famously altered the terms of exchange under pressure from the Pitjantjatjara by restricting the display of the offending works and by ceasing to paint explicit renditions of ceremony and ceremonial objects. They also made retribution. And now, decades later, their knowledge and cooperation must be enlisted to elucidate the meanings of those early paintings, to determine which of the vaulted treasures need to be treated with proper respect for the secrets they embody.
An uneducated eye can not distinguish between secret and public images. Vivien Johnson's concerns demonstrate this fact, as does Kimber's essay in the Icons catalog. Indeed, some of Anderson's own paintings recently shown at the Karen Brown Gallery in Federation Square contain images that look like sacred ritual paraphernalia (see in particular the modified string cross in "Relatives: sequence of Rain Dreamings" and other motifs in "Sacred Women Dancing at a site in Desert Country"). Without study and documentation and exhibition, misunderstandings and misappropriation will only worsen.
The Papunya boards entered the marketplace nearly 40 years ago. It is impossible to unring that bell completely. Moreover, it should be recognized that much good has followed from that initial set of transactions. There is no doubt that the art market has enriched, not only buyers of the art, but some of its creators as well (although not equally). And these transactions have certainly elevated the general understanding and value of Aboriginal culture both within Australia and abroad. Properly directed conservation and exhibition will only serve to increase that value in both monetary and cultural terms. With regard to the question of the equality of the exchange, it is worth noting briefly that ignorance and disregard for those values contribute to carpetbagging and to unscrupulous dealers prizing their own financial gain over the concerns of the artists and their families.
Happily, cooler heads and cooler temperatures seemed to have prevailed against the tropical maelstrom. Some good may have emerged in the end, for it would surely be a boon to see MAGNT's treasure on display in the Territory and then in galleries across Australia and around the world. There is still time to step back and take a deep breath, to engage in meaningful and respectful dialogue about the future of the Papunya boards and the place of Aboriginal painting in a broader context. These discussions will inevitably be political. (I never fail to marvel at how Fred Myers nailed the key concepts of desert culture in the subtitle to Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self by describing his work as treating of "sentiment, place and politics among Western Desert Aborigines.") Political though they must be, they need not be partisan. The work is too important for that.
Posted at 12:00 PM
Sun - May 10, 2009
John Mawurndjul, Past and Present
It has been little more than a dozen years since
the name of John Mawurndjul was linked for the first time (to my knowledge) to
what were and perhaps remain the most famous names world-wide in Aboriginal art,
Emily Kam Kngwarray and Rover Thomas. The occasion was an exhibition whose
scope still staggers me, The Eye of the Storm: eight contemporary Indigenous
Australian artists, organized by the National Gallery of Australia
for display at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, India late in
1996 and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney the following year. (The five
other artists in the show were George Milpurrurru, Brian Nyinawanga, Fiona
Foley, Ken Thaiday, and Roy
Wiggan.)
Kngwarray had just passed away; indeed she is listed in the catalog as "Kwenentway" rather than as "Emily." Rover Thomas would die just thirteen months after the Sydney opening. Mawurndjul (b. 1952) was a relatively young man and all of the works in the exhibition were completed before he had turned forty. For years afterwards, Kngwarray and Thomas remained the touchstones of celebrity in the Indigenous art world, and even today, the media remains awash in stories that celebrate that fame, be in the shattering of auction records or allegations of fraud and forgery.
In the years since that exhibition, Mawurndjul's achievements and the accolades he has received for them have continued to mount, although he has never seemed to seize the public's imagination in quite the same ways as the two great oldies did. In 1999, Mawurndjul won the Bark Painting Award at the 16th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. In 2003 he received the prestigious Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, the first Indigenous artist to be so honored. He was among the stars of 2004's Crossing Country exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and in the same year was among eight artists included in the Australian Aboriginal Art Commission for the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris. In 2005 a major retrospective of his work, <<rarrk>> John Mawurndjul: journey through time in northern Australia opened at Basel's Museum Tinguely.
In
that
year and early in 2006 Mawurndjul spent several months in Europe, with some of
that time dedicated to painting a large column in the form of a lorrkon,
the ceremonial burial pole of the Kuninjku, which was the only original work of
art produced by the hand one of the eight painters for the administrative and
curatorial building at Quai Branly. He appeared on the cover of Time
magazine on May 15, 2006, and in the accompanying article ("A Parisian Romance") Michael Fitzgerald claimed
that "more than anyone else, John Mawurndjul has changed the face of bark
painting" and called the artist "the Michelangelo of
rarrk."
In November of 2006, the Drill Hall Gallery at the Australian National University mounted a major exhibition, Mumeka to Milmilngkan: innovation in Kurulk Art, featuring sixty-six works by the extended clan, descendants of Anchor Kulunba, over whom Mawurndjul now stands as the senior figure. The excellent catalog for this exhibition contains major essays by Jon Altman, Luke Taylor, and Apolline Kohen, in addition to a most useful genealogy that charts the family relationships among the dozen artists in the show.
The theme of innovation that is central to Mumeka to Milmilngkan is itself centered on Mawurndjul. In particular, Luke Taylor's essay explores the stylistic experiments that Mawurndjul began thirty years ago, building on the work of Yirawala and Marralwanga to create new ways of encoding ancestral power in the shimmer of the rarrk's cross-hatchings. Kohen traces the growth of the younger generation, the grandchildren of Kulunba, and especially the emergence of strong painters among Kuninjku women. Innovating in this instance as well, Mawurndjul was central to the development of women's painting, with his wife, Kay Lindjuwanga, and his younger brother James Iyuna's wife, Melba Gundjarrwanga, among the first to take up a brush and gain recognition.
Now Drill Hall has returned to honor the master once more in the new exhibition, John Mawurndjul Survey 1979-2009, which celebrates three decades of creativity and gathers together, in addition to his paintings on bark, a significant corpus of the etchings Mawurndjul executed between 2004 and 2007. (The exhibition opened on April 16, 2009 and will be on view in Canberra through May 24.)
Kohen, Altman, and Taylor have once again teamed up to produce useful and informative essays for the catalog. Kohen provides a brief history of Mawurndjul's experimentation with etching, following on a similar piece by her father, Jean Kohen, published in the <<rarrk>> catalog. (The elder Kohen is himself a printmaker and was instrumental in introducing the technique at Maningrida.) Altman and Taylor have collaborated on "Articulating Differences: John Mawurndjul and the creation of a distinct identity through art." Brief as it is, this essay is an exemplary critique of Mawurndjul's style and subjects, especially good in its interpretations of the later, more abstract works. Taylor offers a guide to understanding the imagery (for example, the white bars that have often appeared in the bark paintings of late reference specific landforms such a rocky cliffs) and the representations of the networks of billabongs whose shimmering skeins project the djang of Mawurndjul's homelands.
Examples of Mawurndjul's latest magical variations on the waters of Milmilngkan will be on view in a solo show at Annandale Galleries starting May 24 and can now be seen in preview at their website. The new works manifest serenity and grace; the frenetic fracturing of the picture plain that characterized his output a decade ago has given way to a gentle line that lofts across the surface of the bark in stately rhythms. The broad white bars and the large circles that denote waterholes are moments of stasis in these paintings. The power of the country is immanent; the transcendence and vigor of work like the Mardayin Ceremony (2003) that adorns the ceiling of the Quai Branly is now muted.
The Annandale website, by including links to half a dozen earlier exhibitions, both solo and group shows, acts almost as a minor retrospective in its own right, letting us chart the changes in Mawurndjul's style over the years in which his accomplishments have multiplied along with his fame.
That fame can only further increase with the long-awaited publication by the Aboriginal Studies Press of Between Indigenous Australia and Europe: John Mawurndjul, edited by Claus Volkenandt and Christian Kaufmann. Altman, Kohen, and Taylor are joined by scholars Australian and European in providing a baker's dozen of essays, which sprang from an international symposium held in Basel in 2005 on the occasion of the opening of the Mawurndjul retrospective there. (Many of the authors also contributed to the catalog of that exhibition.) I'm looking forward to settling down to what promises to be a challenging and rewarding read.
In fact, challenging and rewarding are good adjectives to describe Mawurndjul's art itself. And perhaps that is why he is not quite the household name in Australia that Emily and Rover are. Mawurndjul's work is beautiful, but not decorative, strong but not bold or stark. And to some extent bark paintings still suffer from a perception that they belong to the past, that their physical qualities--bark and ochre--distance them from both fine art and contemporary art, and that those qualities make them a curatorial problem not easily embraced by the average collector. (I'll admit that central air and heating do make it easier to consider owning paintings that are especially susceptible to fluctuations in temperature and humidity.)
Thinking it over, I am struck by how Mawurndjul's art, in a unique way, does stand between Australia and Europe, and how Mawurndjul himself seems to relish having a foot planted in each world. In a statement he made in preparation for the Crossing Country exhibition and reprinted in the catalog for that show, he stresses the variety of ways in which he has altered the traditions from which his art has emerged. "Any bark you see in Maningrida, mine will be changed from that," he said (Crossing Country, p. 137). The exhibition's subtitle was "the alchemy of Western Arnhem Land art" and Mawurndjul reinforced that theme while at the same time distancing himself from the European tradition. Speaking of his travels abroad he said, "I go all over showing my paintings and they all look at me, photograph me. We all join together. They look at me and see I am very different to those white people. But through some kind of magic, I am a chemist man. The number one chemist man, yes" (ibid.)
Last week, in reviewing a new collection of essays on W. E. H. Stanner, I remarked on Stanner's insight into the concepts of continuity and change in Aboriginal culture. I'm struck again by how relevant those ideas are to Mawurndjul's work. If you look at the broad sweep of his career, it is easy to discern the metamorphoses from early depictions of wallabies and echidnas through the complex tangles of his portraits of Ngalyod, from the similarly intricate depictions of billabongs to the serene abstractions of the twenty-first century. And yet take any single painting out of the chronological line-up and it is difficult to guess with much precision what period of his career it belongs to. The magnificent Buluwana now in the collection of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (cat. no. 17 from the new Drill Hall show) looks far earlier than 2000; the 1997 Mardayin Ceremony - theme IV (cat. no 13) would not look terribly out of place in the upcoming Annandale show. Apolline Kohen notes that during the 2004 etching workshop in Maningrida, "Mawurndjul made two prints ... which reacquainted him with figuration" (John Mawurndjul Survey 1979 - 2009, p. 28).
Poised between tradition and innovation, concealment and revelation, Milmilngkan and Paris, figuration and abstraction, stasis and change, John Mawurndjul is at once the most representative of Aboriginal artists and the most individual.
Etchings by John Mawurndjul
Kngwarray had just passed away; indeed she is listed in the catalog as "Kwenentway" rather than as "Emily." Rover Thomas would die just thirteen months after the Sydney opening. Mawurndjul (b. 1952) was a relatively young man and all of the works in the exhibition were completed before he had turned forty. For years afterwards, Kngwarray and Thomas remained the touchstones of celebrity in the Indigenous art world, and even today, the media remains awash in stories that celebrate that fame, be in the shattering of auction records or allegations of fraud and forgery.
In the years since that exhibition, Mawurndjul's achievements and the accolades he has received for them have continued to mount, although he has never seemed to seize the public's imagination in quite the same ways as the two great oldies did. In 1999, Mawurndjul won the Bark Painting Award at the 16th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. In 2003 he received the prestigious Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, the first Indigenous artist to be so honored. He was among the stars of 2004's Crossing Country exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and in the same year was among eight artists included in the Australian Aboriginal Art Commission for the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris. In 2005 a major retrospective of his work, <<rarrk>> John Mawurndjul: journey through time in northern Australia opened at Basel's Museum Tinguely.
In
that
year and early in 2006 Mawurndjul spent several months in Europe, with some of
that time dedicated to painting a large column in the form of a lorrkon,
the ceremonial burial pole of the Kuninjku, which was the only original work of
art produced by the hand one of the eight painters for the administrative and
curatorial building at Quai Branly. He appeared on the cover of Time
magazine on May 15, 2006, and in the accompanying article ("A Parisian Romance") Michael Fitzgerald claimed
that "more than anyone else, John Mawurndjul has changed the face of bark
painting" and called the artist "the Michelangelo of
rarrk."In November of 2006, the Drill Hall Gallery at the Australian National University mounted a major exhibition, Mumeka to Milmilngkan: innovation in Kurulk Art, featuring sixty-six works by the extended clan, descendants of Anchor Kulunba, over whom Mawurndjul now stands as the senior figure. The excellent catalog for this exhibition contains major essays by Jon Altman, Luke Taylor, and Apolline Kohen, in addition to a most useful genealogy that charts the family relationships among the dozen artists in the show.
The theme of innovation that is central to Mumeka to Milmilngkan is itself centered on Mawurndjul. In particular, Luke Taylor's essay explores the stylistic experiments that Mawurndjul began thirty years ago, building on the work of Yirawala and Marralwanga to create new ways of encoding ancestral power in the shimmer of the rarrk's cross-hatchings. Kohen traces the growth of the younger generation, the grandchildren of Kulunba, and especially the emergence of strong painters among Kuninjku women. Innovating in this instance as well, Mawurndjul was central to the development of women's painting, with his wife, Kay Lindjuwanga, and his younger brother James Iyuna's wife, Melba Gundjarrwanga, among the first to take up a brush and gain recognition.
Now Drill Hall has returned to honor the master once more in the new exhibition, John Mawurndjul Survey 1979-2009, which celebrates three decades of creativity and gathers together, in addition to his paintings on bark, a significant corpus of the etchings Mawurndjul executed between 2004 and 2007. (The exhibition opened on April 16, 2009 and will be on view in Canberra through May 24.)
Kohen, Altman, and Taylor have once again teamed up to produce useful and informative essays for the catalog. Kohen provides a brief history of Mawurndjul's experimentation with etching, following on a similar piece by her father, Jean Kohen, published in the <<rarrk>> catalog. (The elder Kohen is himself a printmaker and was instrumental in introducing the technique at Maningrida.) Altman and Taylor have collaborated on "Articulating Differences: John Mawurndjul and the creation of a distinct identity through art." Brief as it is, this essay is an exemplary critique of Mawurndjul's style and subjects, especially good in its interpretations of the later, more abstract works. Taylor offers a guide to understanding the imagery (for example, the white bars that have often appeared in the bark paintings of late reference specific landforms such a rocky cliffs) and the representations of the networks of billabongs whose shimmering skeins project the djang of Mawurndjul's homelands.
Examples of Mawurndjul's latest magical variations on the waters of Milmilngkan will be on view in a solo show at Annandale Galleries starting May 24 and can now be seen in preview at their website. The new works manifest serenity and grace; the frenetic fracturing of the picture plain that characterized his output a decade ago has given way to a gentle line that lofts across the surface of the bark in stately rhythms. The broad white bars and the large circles that denote waterholes are moments of stasis in these paintings. The power of the country is immanent; the transcendence and vigor of work like the Mardayin Ceremony (2003) that adorns the ceiling of the Quai Branly is now muted.
 |
 |
The Annandale website, by including links to half a dozen earlier exhibitions, both solo and group shows, acts almost as a minor retrospective in its own right, letting us chart the changes in Mawurndjul's style over the years in which his accomplishments have multiplied along with his fame.
That fame can only further increase with the long-awaited publication by the Aboriginal Studies Press of Between Indigenous Australia and Europe: John Mawurndjul, edited by Claus Volkenandt and Christian Kaufmann. Altman, Kohen, and Taylor are joined by scholars Australian and European in providing a baker's dozen of essays, which sprang from an international symposium held in Basel in 2005 on the occasion of the opening of the Mawurndjul retrospective there. (Many of the authors also contributed to the catalog of that exhibition.) I'm looking forward to settling down to what promises to be a challenging and rewarding read.
In fact, challenging and rewarding are good adjectives to describe Mawurndjul's art itself. And perhaps that is why he is not quite the household name in Australia that Emily and Rover are. Mawurndjul's work is beautiful, but not decorative, strong but not bold or stark. And to some extent bark paintings still suffer from a perception that they belong to the past, that their physical qualities--bark and ochre--distance them from both fine art and contemporary art, and that those qualities make them a curatorial problem not easily embraced by the average collector. (I'll admit that central air and heating do make it easier to consider owning paintings that are especially susceptible to fluctuations in temperature and humidity.)
Thinking it over, I am struck by how Mawurndjul's art, in a unique way, does stand between Australia and Europe, and how Mawurndjul himself seems to relish having a foot planted in each world. In a statement he made in preparation for the Crossing Country exhibition and reprinted in the catalog for that show, he stresses the variety of ways in which he has altered the traditions from which his art has emerged. "Any bark you see in Maningrida, mine will be changed from that," he said (Crossing Country, p. 137). The exhibition's subtitle was "the alchemy of Western Arnhem Land art" and Mawurndjul reinforced that theme while at the same time distancing himself from the European tradition. Speaking of his travels abroad he said, "I go all over showing my paintings and they all look at me, photograph me. We all join together. They look at me and see I am very different to those white people. But through some kind of magic, I am a chemist man. The number one chemist man, yes" (ibid.)
Last week, in reviewing a new collection of essays on W. E. H. Stanner, I remarked on Stanner's insight into the concepts of continuity and change in Aboriginal culture. I'm struck again by how relevant those ideas are to Mawurndjul's work. If you look at the broad sweep of his career, it is easy to discern the metamorphoses from early depictions of wallabies and echidnas through the complex tangles of his portraits of Ngalyod, from the similarly intricate depictions of billabongs to the serene abstractions of the twenty-first century. And yet take any single painting out of the chronological line-up and it is difficult to guess with much precision what period of his career it belongs to. The magnificent Buluwana now in the collection of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (cat. no. 17 from the new Drill Hall show) looks far earlier than 2000; the 1997 Mardayin Ceremony - theme IV (cat. no 13) would not look terribly out of place in the upcoming Annandale show. Apolline Kohen notes that during the 2004 etching workshop in Maningrida, "Mawurndjul made two prints ... which reacquainted him with figuration" (John Mawurndjul Survey 1979 - 2009, p. 28).
Poised between tradition and innovation, concealment and revelation, Milmilngkan and Paris, figuration and abstraction, stasis and change, John Mawurndjul is at once the most representative of Aboriginal artists and the most individual.
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Posted at 01:05 PM
Sun - May 3, 2009
A Stanner Retrospective
In over a decade of intensive reading on
Aboriginal art and culture, I have encountered a handful of books that have
suddenly opened up vast new terrains of knowledge and understanding for me.
Fred Myers' Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: settlement, place and
politics among Western Desert Aborigines (Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1986) was the first and most fundamental of these for its insights into
social organization and custom. Tim Rowse's White Flour, White Power: from rations to citizenship in
Central Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2002) revealed the
territory of contact history to me; Gillian Cowlishaw's Blackfellas, Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of
Race (Blackwell, 2004) did the same for race relations; Deborah
Bird Rose's Reports from a Wild Country: ethics for
decolonisation (UNSW Press, 2004) brought questions of colonialism
and the environment to my consideration. (Truth, reading those last three in
the space of a year was among the significant inspirations for starting this
blog.) But no single book has knocked me on my ear quite the way that W. E. H.
Stanner's White Man Got No Dreaming: essays 1938-1973
(Australian National University Press, 1979) did. In part this was because of
the sheer breadth of its subject matter; in part it was because of the
extraordinary degree of sympathy Stanner evinced for the Aboriginal people and
his uncanny ability to present the humanity, the aspirations and despair of
Indigenous Australians. I remain convinced to this day that no one could read
these essays and remain unmoved by
them.
I had earlier read the famous ABC Boyer lectures, After the Dreaming (ABC Books, 1968), which was the only one of Stanner's works still in print a decade ago, and been bowled over by the manner in which he placed Aboriginal affairs in the context of the broader Australian state. I had scavenged articles published over the years in Oceania and puzzled over On Aboriginal Religion (University of Sydney, 1966). But during the summer in which I finally put my hands on a copy of White Man Got No Dreaming and immersed myself in Stanner's reflections on the Dreaming, on social change in the Daly River region, on the vast implications of the Yirrkala Land Rights Case, on justice and injustice in Aboriginal Australia, I felt myself emerging from a chrysalis of platitude and commonplace into a bright and altered vision that nothing has since quite equaled.
It is now thirty years since the publication of White Man Got No Dreaming, and time has clearly come for an assessment of Stanner's contributions. Black Inc. Agenda has recently brought out The Dreaming and Other Essays, which I presume reprints the earlier collection; I haven't seen a copy of it yet and the few reviews I've read have left it unclear what points of overlap exist between the two books. But whatever it contains, that new publication will bring Stanner's elegant prose back into the limelight. Indeed, it is the eloquence of Stanner's voice as much as the piercing quality of his insights that make him worth reading.
But there
is
even more rejoicing to be had in the appearance of a superb collection of
critical essays on Stanner's life and work, An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal
Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008), edited by Melinda
Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett. My appetite for a book of this sort had been
whetted a few years back when I read Inga Clenndinen's
"The Power to Frustrate Good Intentions: or, the revenge of the Aborigines,"
published in the journal Common Knowledge (vol. 11, no. 3, 2005, pp.
410-431), in which she examined Stanner's famous biographical essay on
"Durmugam: a Nangiomeri." After having spent many years in a somewhat solitary
communion with Stanner's thought, I found having another's perspective on a
familiar piece of his writing both surprising and invigorating.
How much richer, then, to have fifteen of the finest writers on Aboriginal issues address Stanner's legacy in this current volume. The table of contents lists a vertiable who's who of the finest scholars writing today. In addition to the estimable editors, contributors to An Appreciation of Difference include Geoffrey Gray, John Mulvaney, Barrie Dexter, Peter Sutton, Ian Keen, Howard Morphy, Alberto Furlan, Nicolas Peterson, Nancy Williams, John Taylor, Ann Curthoys, Tim Rowse, and Jon Altman! One could construct an entire semester's university seminar on contemporary scholarship in Aboriginal studies from the newly republished essays, On Aboriginal Religion, and the essays in this volume.
A particular strength of this collection is the variety of approaches that the authors bring to Stanner's life and work. Following the editors' excellent introductory essay, the first section of the book treats largely with the varied aspects of Stanner's career: his multiple assignments during the Second World War, his post-war appointment to the London-based East African Institute of Social Research, his role in the founding of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies, his tenure at the Australian National University, and his work with Nugget Coombs and Barrie Dexter on the Council for Aboriginal Affairs.
What emerges from these essays on Stanner's career in "Diverse Fields" is the picture of a complicated man, the details of whose life surprised me, as my chief impressions of him had been formed from his writings. To begin with, I hadn't realized how little he had published over the course of this varied career, and how much of his work remains in manuscript form and as raw notes. The combination of rigorous attention to his civil career and responsibilities was partially the cause for this restricted output; equally, it seems, his high personal standards for his writing kept his work in progress perpetually in progress. The grace of his prose in print no doubt stems from that will to perfection.
The portrait of Stanner painted here also reveals a man of a surprisingly conservative political bent. A soldier who felt his highest distinction might be "a chance to be of some use to my country," a servant of almost Victorian rectitude whose impeccable grooming might give a clue to his moral probity, the Stanner we meet in these pages seems to be an unlikely candidate to champion the rights of a people largely regarded as primitive and uncivilized. And yet, perhaps that sense of decorum and that high moral character is not so surprising after all, for it bespeaks a set of principles that the environment of thoughtless prejudice that often surrounded him could not compromise.
The second part of the collection is entitled "In Pursuit of Transcendent Value" and offers the most engaging and diverse set of essays in An Appreciation of Difference. It begins with a pair of essays by editors Beckett and Hinkson that examine some of Stanner's fieldwork, focusing on his encounter with Durmugam and his explorations of rock art sites along the Fitzmaurice River. Beckett's offering, incisevely subtitled "Stanner's Durmugam," suggests, as Clendinnen's early piece on the subject did, how much of Stanner's own personality is reflected in his portrait of the man from Daly River. Similarly, Hinkson's tale of the grueling quest for the discovery of rock art reveals Stanner's almost single-minded devotion to and absorption in the task; he pushes himself and his guides relentlessly and almost cruelly, absorbed as he is by the mystery he seeks to unveil.
Peter Sutton and Ian Keen next seek to deconstruct the mind that took the raw materials of these early fieldwork investigations and produced from them the startling insights on On Aboriginal Religion. When I first read the essays that comprise that small monograph, I was awed by their ingenuity, by the synthetic mind that could discern a universal theme of sacrifice, a theme that resonated with Christian tradition, in the rituals of the Murrin-patha people. I was also slightly uneasy with the parallels, for although Stanner argued convincingly against the degrading characterization of such rituals as magic and superstition that had been the legacy of early scholars like Sir James Frazier, I felt that there might be too much of the author and too little of the Aboriginal in his exposition. Sutton and Keen probe these matters sensitively and demonstrate how Stanner's conclusions were indeed an attempt to move beyond his own intellectual tradition and expose the intellect and the spirit behind Aboriginal practice: surely the most important contribution of this (or any) phase of Stanner's work.
The last two essays in this section, by Howard Morphy and Alberto Furlan, move beyond Stanner's writings to examine, respectively, Yolngu mortuary rituals and contemporary song-writing in Wadeye in light of Stanner's work. These original essays demonstrate in themselves the profound impact that Stanner's "appreciation of difference" have had on scholars who followed him, and provide exemplary proof of the importance of his intuitions and perceptions.
The importance of land and of people's connections to it, in a variety of ways, is the thread that unites the essays in the third portion of An Appreciation of Difference. The essays of White Man Got No Dreaming are arranged in chronological order, and most of those that follow the publication of After the Dreaming build to a crescendo around the theme of land and land rights: "Industrial Justice in the Never-Never;" "No, no Sir James: Polyphemus, not Goliath;" "The Yirrkala Land Case: Dress-rehearsal;" "Fictions, Nettles and Freedoms." The essays in this current critical collection gathered under the rubric "Land and People," like those in the previous section, try to tease out some of the apparent contradictions between Stanner's attitudes and methods and the conclusions presented in his writings. In particular, Nancy Williams' essay on Stanner and the Yirrkala case illuminates a major and most important principle: "Stanner's appreciation of Aborigines as intelligent and rational individuals" (p. 211). In all aspects of his analysis, whether or land tenure, social organization, or religious belief, that appreciation is at the core of Stanner's thinking and his achievement.
The concluding section of the book treats of Stanner as "A Public Intellectual" and focuses on the philosophy revealed by After the Dreaming. Ann Curthoys looks, somewhat defensively, at Stanner's assessments of historians in the Boyer Lectures. Tim Rowse reads the lectures to illuminate Stanner as social critic, and Jon Altman mines them for their impact of Stanner's later career in Indigenous policy, primarily during the Whitlam era and beyond. Altman examines the implications of Stanner's career in light of contemporary controversies leading up to and following the Howard government's intervention into the Northern Territory, which is certainly the most devastating turn of events in the Territory since the excision of land for the Nabalco lease, the event that shaped the final decades of Stanner's life.
One of the most important of the essays collected in White Man Got No Dreaming was the 1958 Presidential Address to Section F (Anthropology) of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, entitled "Continuity and Change among the Aborigines." In this essay, Stanner wrote of a fundamental contrast between the white man's teleological orientation and that of the black man "whose 'future' differentiates itself only as a kind of extended present, whose principle is to be continuously at one with the past" (Stanner, 1979, p. 58)--a theme that Deborah Bird Rose developed brilliantly in Reports from a Wild State. But more importantly, Stanner strove to demonstrate how the nineteenth-century vision of "primitives" and "tradition" as static entities was flawed, and how in fact Aboriginal society is characterized by both continuity and change. The achievement of the authors who have contributed to An Appreciation of Difference is to demonstrate how the principles of continuity and change apply equally to the life and work of this great public intellectual, W. E. H. Stanner, himself.
Postscript: Thanks to David Nash for pointing me to information on the Symposium to mark the centenary of the birth of W. E. H. Stanner, held at the Australian National University in 2005, which led to this book. My only regret now is the discovery that there are a few papers from that Symposium that didn't make it into the pages of this volume!
I had earlier read the famous ABC Boyer lectures, After the Dreaming (ABC Books, 1968), which was the only one of Stanner's works still in print a decade ago, and been bowled over by the manner in which he placed Aboriginal affairs in the context of the broader Australian state. I had scavenged articles published over the years in Oceania and puzzled over On Aboriginal Religion (University of Sydney, 1966). But during the summer in which I finally put my hands on a copy of White Man Got No Dreaming and immersed myself in Stanner's reflections on the Dreaming, on social change in the Daly River region, on the vast implications of the Yirrkala Land Rights Case, on justice and injustice in Aboriginal Australia, I felt myself emerging from a chrysalis of platitude and commonplace into a bright and altered vision that nothing has since quite equaled.
It is now thirty years since the publication of White Man Got No Dreaming, and time has clearly come for an assessment of Stanner's contributions. Black Inc. Agenda has recently brought out The Dreaming and Other Essays, which I presume reprints the earlier collection; I haven't seen a copy of it yet and the few reviews I've read have left it unclear what points of overlap exist between the two books. But whatever it contains, that new publication will bring Stanner's elegant prose back into the limelight. Indeed, it is the eloquence of Stanner's voice as much as the piercing quality of his insights that make him worth reading.
But there
is
even more rejoicing to be had in the appearance of a superb collection of
critical essays on Stanner's life and work, An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal
Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008), edited by Melinda
Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett. My appetite for a book of this sort had been
whetted a few years back when I read Inga Clenndinen's
"The Power to Frustrate Good Intentions: or, the revenge of the Aborigines,"
published in the journal Common Knowledge (vol. 11, no. 3, 2005, pp.
410-431), in which she examined Stanner's famous biographical essay on
"Durmugam: a Nangiomeri." After having spent many years in a somewhat solitary
communion with Stanner's thought, I found having another's perspective on a
familiar piece of his writing both surprising and invigorating.
How much richer, then, to have fifteen of the finest writers on Aboriginal issues address Stanner's legacy in this current volume. The table of contents lists a vertiable who's who of the finest scholars writing today. In addition to the estimable editors, contributors to An Appreciation of Difference include Geoffrey Gray, John Mulvaney, Barrie Dexter, Peter Sutton, Ian Keen, Howard Morphy, Alberto Furlan, Nicolas Peterson, Nancy Williams, John Taylor, Ann Curthoys, Tim Rowse, and Jon Altman! One could construct an entire semester's university seminar on contemporary scholarship in Aboriginal studies from the newly republished essays, On Aboriginal Religion, and the essays in this volume.
A particular strength of this collection is the variety of approaches that the authors bring to Stanner's life and work. Following the editors' excellent introductory essay, the first section of the book treats largely with the varied aspects of Stanner's career: his multiple assignments during the Second World War, his post-war appointment to the London-based East African Institute of Social Research, his role in the founding of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies, his tenure at the Australian National University, and his work with Nugget Coombs and Barrie Dexter on the Council for Aboriginal Affairs.
What emerges from these essays on Stanner's career in "Diverse Fields" is the picture of a complicated man, the details of whose life surprised me, as my chief impressions of him had been formed from his writings. To begin with, I hadn't realized how little he had published over the course of this varied career, and how much of his work remains in manuscript form and as raw notes. The combination of rigorous attention to his civil career and responsibilities was partially the cause for this restricted output; equally, it seems, his high personal standards for his writing kept his work in progress perpetually in progress. The grace of his prose in print no doubt stems from that will to perfection.
The portrait of Stanner painted here also reveals a man of a surprisingly conservative political bent. A soldier who felt his highest distinction might be "a chance to be of some use to my country," a servant of almost Victorian rectitude whose impeccable grooming might give a clue to his moral probity, the Stanner we meet in these pages seems to be an unlikely candidate to champion the rights of a people largely regarded as primitive and uncivilized. And yet, perhaps that sense of decorum and that high moral character is not so surprising after all, for it bespeaks a set of principles that the environment of thoughtless prejudice that often surrounded him could not compromise.
The second part of the collection is entitled "In Pursuit of Transcendent Value" and offers the most engaging and diverse set of essays in An Appreciation of Difference. It begins with a pair of essays by editors Beckett and Hinkson that examine some of Stanner's fieldwork, focusing on his encounter with Durmugam and his explorations of rock art sites along the Fitzmaurice River. Beckett's offering, incisevely subtitled "Stanner's Durmugam," suggests, as Clendinnen's early piece on the subject did, how much of Stanner's own personality is reflected in his portrait of the man from Daly River. Similarly, Hinkson's tale of the grueling quest for the discovery of rock art reveals Stanner's almost single-minded devotion to and absorption in the task; he pushes himself and his guides relentlessly and almost cruelly, absorbed as he is by the mystery he seeks to unveil.
Peter Sutton and Ian Keen next seek to deconstruct the mind that took the raw materials of these early fieldwork investigations and produced from them the startling insights on On Aboriginal Religion. When I first read the essays that comprise that small monograph, I was awed by their ingenuity, by the synthetic mind that could discern a universal theme of sacrifice, a theme that resonated with Christian tradition, in the rituals of the Murrin-patha people. I was also slightly uneasy with the parallels, for although Stanner argued convincingly against the degrading characterization of such rituals as magic and superstition that had been the legacy of early scholars like Sir James Frazier, I felt that there might be too much of the author and too little of the Aboriginal in his exposition. Sutton and Keen probe these matters sensitively and demonstrate how Stanner's conclusions were indeed an attempt to move beyond his own intellectual tradition and expose the intellect and the spirit behind Aboriginal practice: surely the most important contribution of this (or any) phase of Stanner's work.
The last two essays in this section, by Howard Morphy and Alberto Furlan, move beyond Stanner's writings to examine, respectively, Yolngu mortuary rituals and contemporary song-writing in Wadeye in light of Stanner's work. These original essays demonstrate in themselves the profound impact that Stanner's "appreciation of difference" have had on scholars who followed him, and provide exemplary proof of the importance of his intuitions and perceptions.
The importance of land and of people's connections to it, in a variety of ways, is the thread that unites the essays in the third portion of An Appreciation of Difference. The essays of White Man Got No Dreaming are arranged in chronological order, and most of those that follow the publication of After the Dreaming build to a crescendo around the theme of land and land rights: "Industrial Justice in the Never-Never;" "No, no Sir James: Polyphemus, not Goliath;" "The Yirrkala Land Case: Dress-rehearsal;" "Fictions, Nettles and Freedoms." The essays in this current critical collection gathered under the rubric "Land and People," like those in the previous section, try to tease out some of the apparent contradictions between Stanner's attitudes and methods and the conclusions presented in his writings. In particular, Nancy Williams' essay on Stanner and the Yirrkala case illuminates a major and most important principle: "Stanner's appreciation of Aborigines as intelligent and rational individuals" (p. 211). In all aspects of his analysis, whether or land tenure, social organization, or religious belief, that appreciation is at the core of Stanner's thinking and his achievement.
The concluding section of the book treats of Stanner as "A Public Intellectual" and focuses on the philosophy revealed by After the Dreaming. Ann Curthoys looks, somewhat defensively, at Stanner's assessments of historians in the Boyer Lectures. Tim Rowse reads the lectures to illuminate Stanner as social critic, and Jon Altman mines them for their impact of Stanner's later career in Indigenous policy, primarily during the Whitlam era and beyond. Altman examines the implications of Stanner's career in light of contemporary controversies leading up to and following the Howard government's intervention into the Northern Territory, which is certainly the most devastating turn of events in the Territory since the excision of land for the Nabalco lease, the event that shaped the final decades of Stanner's life.
One of the most important of the essays collected in White Man Got No Dreaming was the 1958 Presidential Address to Section F (Anthropology) of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, entitled "Continuity and Change among the Aborigines." In this essay, Stanner wrote of a fundamental contrast between the white man's teleological orientation and that of the black man "whose 'future' differentiates itself only as a kind of extended present, whose principle is to be continuously at one with the past" (Stanner, 1979, p. 58)--a theme that Deborah Bird Rose developed brilliantly in Reports from a Wild State. But more importantly, Stanner strove to demonstrate how the nineteenth-century vision of "primitives" and "tradition" as static entities was flawed, and how in fact Aboriginal society is characterized by both continuity and change. The achievement of the authors who have contributed to An Appreciation of Difference is to demonstrate how the principles of continuity and change apply equally to the life and work of this great public intellectual, W. E. H. Stanner, himself.
Postscript: Thanks to David Nash for pointing me to information on the Symposium to mark the centenary of the birth of W. E. H. Stanner, held at the Australian National University in 2005, which led to this book. My only regret now is the discovery that there are a few papers from that Symposium that didn't make it into the pages of this volume!
Posted at 12:40 PM
Sun - April 26, 2009
Blak Arts
In recent weeks I've been following a number of
distinct threads relating to Indigenous performing arts in Australia. The
status of Indigenous actors on Australian television was the subject of a recent
article in The Age ("A pale limitation," March 29, 2009) featuring
the man who has perhaps had the most success in breaking through the barriers of
race and type-casting in recent years, Aaron Pederson. Pederson had a small
role in the miniseries Heartland, itself a groundbreaking 1993 television
event that starred Ernie Dingo and Cate Blanchett. He went on to become a
mainstay of the series Water Rats, Wildside, and City
Homicide. He has received critical acclaim for the film My Brother
Vinnie as well as for his role as the embattled lawyer discovering his
Aboriginal roots in The Circuit. But according to The Age,
Pederson is "acutely aware of being a lone figure." But Pederson's success and
his recognition is almost an anomaly among Indigenous actors on the small
screen, especially in his ability to go beyond the typecasting that has dogged
David Gulpilil and, to a lesser extent, Ernie
Dingo.
Outside the world of the visual arts, the visibility of Indigenous artists in Australia often barely clears the horizon. A recent publication in the series Platform Papers: Quarterly Essays on the Performing Arts addresses this issue squarely. Hilary Glow and Katya Johanson interviewed eighteen prominent artists working in dance and theatre to produce 'Your Genre is Black': Indigenous Performing Arts and Policy (Currency House, Platform Papers no. 19, 2009). This slim volume serves as an overview of the history and the current state of Indigenous performing arts, looking at the challenges practitioners face in both the community and mainstream worlds.
Most recently, ABC Radio's Awaye! broadcast an interview this weekend with Wesley Enoch on the question of whether there is a need for an National Indigenous Theatre Company (NITC), which was also the subject of a story in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 24, 2009, "No more fading to black."
As soon as the subject of Enoch's call for the creation of a National Indigenous Theatre Company enters the conversation, the word "controversy" follows almost immediately. The Morning Herald quoted Sam Cook of Yirra Yaakin as saying "If Wesley wants his own theatre company, why doesn't he be honest and say so, instead of professing it to be something else? It looks to me like this is Wesley's grab for power." Enoch, perhaps stung by such remarks, commented on Awaye! that the opposition to the idea of NITC is "amazing" and countercharged that some people (naming no names) would rather abstain from the discussion than build a positive proposal and enter into a focused and productive debate.
There
are
certainly grounds aplenty for such a debate. The picture that Glow and Johanson
paint in 'Your Genre is Black' is one of contradictions. Much Indigenous
dance and theatre arises from and serves the needs of individual, small
communities, and as such, reflects local priorities. While community
organizations provide the outlet for much creativity, they also have a limited
reach. Such groups can serve as a focal point for pride in the performers'
heritage, but at the same time restrict the chances to communicate that pride to
others. The potential to create change and to energize awareness may flourish,
but it runs the risk of
suffocating.
Local companies are sometimes driven by the dreams and talents of an individual or a small group for whom the work of theatre satisfies a profound creative impulse. But without significant funding and without the ability to move beyond a restricted horizon, what becomes of these individuals? How can their creativity be nourished, their growth as artists be assured? Too often, it seems, they burn out from the pressure. Or the talent stagnates for want of encouragement, training, and opportunity for growth. There may be no real careers for such individuals.
Similarly, artistry thrives when it is challenged and critiqued. And yet constructive criticism and the growth it engenders may be blunted by a sort of political correctness that dares not apply rigorous standards to Indigenous theatre. Community standards and mainstream standards may differ widely, and the artist who tries to serve both may end up failing both.
The most convincing argument in favor of the NITC that Enoch (photo, right, by Quentin Jones) put forth in the Awaye! interview was the need to preserve the canon of Indigenous theatrical
works,
not simply on printed pages but as living theatrical performances. A corollary
argument was the need to provide such works with broad exposure by allowing them
the opportunity to tour both nationally and internationally. Indeed, the two
arguments are mutually reinforcing. How long, Enoch asks, has it been since
audiences saw a live performance of Jimmy Chi's Bran Nue Dae, or Jack Davis's trilogy
The First-Born (No Sugar, The
Dreamers, and Barungin) or Bob Merritt's The Cake Man? A more recent production like
Tony Briggs's The Sapphires (which Enoch directed) wowed
audiences at the Victorian State Theatre and at the Belvoir Street Theatre in
Sydney almost five years ago, won praise and awards, and is only now making its
way to Perth for a revival at the Black Swan State Theatre
Company.
Enoch acknowledges the role and importance of the state theatre companies, and insists that a successful national company would need to work in concert with them, rather than in competition. To those who claim that an NITC would pauperize the state companies, he replies that the funding sources would be different, with 80% of the money coming from the Commonwealth rather than the states (though he admits there are no promises on this score). More importantly, he notes, it is a truism that no enterprise gets more money to do what it is already doing. In order to augment the total bucket of resources available for Indigenous theatre in Australia, it is necessary to dream of new enterprises and expanded horizons. This could include raising funds from private philanthropic sources.
Additionally, a national company might be truly national in the manner in which the National Theatre of Scotland operates: rather than settling itself in one location, the Scottish company sets up shop wherever there is promise, a new initiative to be developed and nurtured. A National Indigenous Theatre Company wouldn't have to exist in Canberra, and the fear that Canberra would suck the life out of regional theatre must be met head on.
Both Enoch and Glow and Johanson point out that money for the regional and community operations is becoming scarce; Glow and Johanson are particularly good in documenting the troubled financial history of Indigenous theatre and the current threats to existing models. Enoch would argue that the NITC could lift all boats by bringing new interest as well as new resources into play.
A national theatre directed at large, ambitious projects should generate pride and enthusiasm at the local level. Ideally, it would enrich the possibility for theatre that is responsive to local needs, whether that be cultural survival, rehabilitation programs in prisons, or a nurturing of nascent talent. Enoch also proposes that the national company been overseen by four bodies: a council of elders entrusted to oversee cultural protocols; a committee of directors charged with making the machinery of management operate efficiently; a council of artists to direct programming; and a "council of champions" who who undertake fund-raising activities.
'Your Genre is Black' is clearly if not quite overtly sympathetic to Enoch's position, but Glow and Johanson are scrupulous in presenting the arguments that support continued development and funding for state and community based theatrical companies. It is an excellent introduction to the issues, and a good history lesson that helps to put Enoch's zeal into perspective. In the end, I found myself swayed by Enoch's argument on Awaye! much more than I was by Glow and Johanson's book--which is not to criticize the latter. Enoch speaks with a genuine ardor for his cause, with a visionary enthusiasm that made me wonder if his critics were seeing a tall poppy rather than a prophet.
Enoch is right at least in saying that it is important for the debate to continue out in the open. And Glow and Johanson have furnished an important and cogent reference that will be indispensable to those who wish to take part in that debate.
Outside the world of the visual arts, the visibility of Indigenous artists in Australia often barely clears the horizon. A recent publication in the series Platform Papers: Quarterly Essays on the Performing Arts addresses this issue squarely. Hilary Glow and Katya Johanson interviewed eighteen prominent artists working in dance and theatre to produce 'Your Genre is Black': Indigenous Performing Arts and Policy (Currency House, Platform Papers no. 19, 2009). This slim volume serves as an overview of the history and the current state of Indigenous performing arts, looking at the challenges practitioners face in both the community and mainstream worlds.
Most recently, ABC Radio's Awaye! broadcast an interview this weekend with Wesley Enoch on the question of whether there is a need for an National Indigenous Theatre Company (NITC), which was also the subject of a story in the Sydney Morning Herald on March 24, 2009, "No more fading to black."
As soon as the subject of Enoch's call for the creation of a National Indigenous Theatre Company enters the conversation, the word "controversy" follows almost immediately. The Morning Herald quoted Sam Cook of Yirra Yaakin as saying "If Wesley wants his own theatre company, why doesn't he be honest and say so, instead of professing it to be something else? It looks to me like this is Wesley's grab for power." Enoch, perhaps stung by such remarks, commented on Awaye! that the opposition to the idea of NITC is "amazing" and countercharged that some people (naming no names) would rather abstain from the discussion than build a positive proposal and enter into a focused and productive debate.
There
are
certainly grounds aplenty for such a debate. The picture that Glow and Johanson
paint in 'Your Genre is Black' is one of contradictions. Much Indigenous
dance and theatre arises from and serves the needs of individual, small
communities, and as such, reflects local priorities. While community
organizations provide the outlet for much creativity, they also have a limited
reach. Such groups can serve as a focal point for pride in the performers'
heritage, but at the same time restrict the chances to communicate that pride to
others. The potential to create change and to energize awareness may flourish,
but it runs the risk of
suffocating.Local companies are sometimes driven by the dreams and talents of an individual or a small group for whom the work of theatre satisfies a profound creative impulse. But without significant funding and without the ability to move beyond a restricted horizon, what becomes of these individuals? How can their creativity be nourished, their growth as artists be assured? Too often, it seems, they burn out from the pressure. Or the talent stagnates for want of encouragement, training, and opportunity for growth. There may be no real careers for such individuals.
Similarly, artistry thrives when it is challenged and critiqued. And yet constructive criticism and the growth it engenders may be blunted by a sort of political correctness that dares not apply rigorous standards to Indigenous theatre. Community standards and mainstream standards may differ widely, and the artist who tries to serve both may end up failing both.
The most convincing argument in favor of the NITC that Enoch (photo, right, by Quentin Jones) put forth in the Awaye! interview was the need to preserve the canon of Indigenous theatrical
works,
not simply on printed pages but as living theatrical performances. A corollary
argument was the need to provide such works with broad exposure by allowing them
the opportunity to tour both nationally and internationally. Indeed, the two
arguments are mutually reinforcing. How long, Enoch asks, has it been since
audiences saw a live performance of Jimmy Chi's Bran Nue Dae, or Jack Davis's trilogy
The First-Born (No Sugar, The
Dreamers, and Barungin) or Bob Merritt's The Cake Man? A more recent production like
Tony Briggs's The Sapphires (which Enoch directed) wowed
audiences at the Victorian State Theatre and at the Belvoir Street Theatre in
Sydney almost five years ago, won praise and awards, and is only now making its
way to Perth for a revival at the Black Swan State Theatre
Company.Enoch acknowledges the role and importance of the state theatre companies, and insists that a successful national company would need to work in concert with them, rather than in competition. To those who claim that an NITC would pauperize the state companies, he replies that the funding sources would be different, with 80% of the money coming from the Commonwealth rather than the states (though he admits there are no promises on this score). More importantly, he notes, it is a truism that no enterprise gets more money to do what it is already doing. In order to augment the total bucket of resources available for Indigenous theatre in Australia, it is necessary to dream of new enterprises and expanded horizons. This could include raising funds from private philanthropic sources.
Additionally, a national company might be truly national in the manner in which the National Theatre of Scotland operates: rather than settling itself in one location, the Scottish company sets up shop wherever there is promise, a new initiative to be developed and nurtured. A National Indigenous Theatre Company wouldn't have to exist in Canberra, and the fear that Canberra would suck the life out of regional theatre must be met head on.
Both Enoch and Glow and Johanson point out that money for the regional and community operations is becoming scarce; Glow and Johanson are particularly good in documenting the troubled financial history of Indigenous theatre and the current threats to existing models. Enoch would argue that the NITC could lift all boats by bringing new interest as well as new resources into play.
A national theatre directed at large, ambitious projects should generate pride and enthusiasm at the local level. Ideally, it would enrich the possibility for theatre that is responsive to local needs, whether that be cultural survival, rehabilitation programs in prisons, or a nurturing of nascent talent. Enoch also proposes that the national company been overseen by four bodies: a council of elders entrusted to oversee cultural protocols; a committee of directors charged with making the machinery of management operate efficiently; a council of artists to direct programming; and a "council of champions" who who undertake fund-raising activities.
'Your Genre is Black' is clearly if not quite overtly sympathetic to Enoch's position, but Glow and Johanson are scrupulous in presenting the arguments that support continued development and funding for state and community based theatrical companies. It is an excellent introduction to the issues, and a good history lesson that helps to put Enoch's zeal into perspective. In the end, I found myself swayed by Enoch's argument on Awaye! much more than I was by Glow and Johanson's book--which is not to criticize the latter. Enoch speaks with a genuine ardor for his cause, with a visionary enthusiasm that made me wonder if his critics were seeing a tall poppy rather than a prophet.
Enoch is right at least in saying that it is important for the debate to continue out in the open. And Glow and Johanson have furnished an important and cogent reference that will be indispensable to those who wish to take part in that debate.
***
The question of audience is central to much of 'Your Genre is Black' : is Indigenous theatre primarily meant for Indigenous audiences? And if so, what happens if it tries to move into the mainstream? These thoughts were much in my mind when I stumbled, entirely coincidentally, into a realm of literature where I almost never venture: the Young Adult Novel.
A recent feature story ("Culture not colour," April 3, 2009) from the BBC Radio featured Nukunu writer Jared Thomas, characterizing his fictions as describing "a world where white can be black, and black can be into hip hop, cricket and country & western, as well as ceremony and ancient 'dreaming' stories." Thomas is a lecturer in Aboriginal Studies at the Unaipon School of the University of South Australia. His theatrical CV includes Flash Red Ford, which toured to Uganda and Kenya, and Love, Land and Money at the Adelaide Fringe Festival.
Intrigued, I did a little research on Thomas, and was able to put my hands on a copy of his debut novel, Sweet Guy (IAD Press, 2005).
It
is in many ways a conventional coming-of-age story about an eighteen year old
boy from a broken home who surfs with his best mate until he goes off to
university. There he struggles a bit with his studies, has a doomed love
affair, and tries to sort out his past (a stormy relationship with his father)
and his future (including true love and forgiveness).
Sweet Guy struck me as "Australian": there's too much sex and beer and a bit of ganja for it to make it past the bulwarks of moral rectitude in the USA (irony intended). But it didn't strike me as "Aboriginal." While Flash Red Ford addressed racism in land-owning and Thomas's work in progress Calypso Summers deals directly with a youth trying to connect to his cultural roots in the Aboriginal country north of Adelaide, Sweet Guy is almost "raceless." Michael, the narrator-protagonist, might equally well be white or Indigenous, and I suspect that this is a deliberate piece of artistry on Thomas's part. Although the story itself looks none too original from my perspective on the far side of fifty, the book's notable strength is that Australian boys of either white or Indigenous ancestry can probably connect with it and identify with Michael. It manages to sidestep the question of whether Aboriginal literature should or must address either the community or the mainstream.
(In a footnote to this footnote, I would mention that I was able to borrow this book from the G. R. Little Library at Elizabeth City State University, one of the historically black colleges in my home state of North Carolina, serves the poor seaboard of the state, and which is also located near some of the best surfing on the east coast of the United States.)
An underlying point is that there need not be a distinction--a necessary distinction--in the arts between Anglo and Indigenous culture. There is, as T. S. Eliot phrased it, tradition and the individual talent. They come together in the work of art, as has been amply demonstrated in the visual arts over the past quarter century and more. In his BBC interview, Thomas talks about the thrill and pride of being an Indigenous Australian watching the quintessentially Anglo sport of cricket being championed by black West Indians. Artists who can address both sides of the current cultural divide, bringing the concerns and issues of the one to the audiences of the other, stand a chance to advance the cause of reconciliation.
Posted at 12:16 PM
Sun - April 12, 2009
Stranger Among the Martu
Maureen Helen's memoir, Other People's Country: a woman's journey from suburbia to
life as a remote area nurse (ABC Books, 2008) tells the story of
a woman who, in late middle age, leaves an empty nest in Perth to undertake
service in the remote Western Australia settlement of Jigalong. Like Mary Ellen
Jordan's Balanda: my year in Arnhem Land (Allen &
Unwin, 2005) and Paula Shaw's Seven Seasons in Aurukun: my unforgettable time at a
remote Aboriginal school (Allen & Unwin, 2009), Other
People's Country records the culture shock the author experienced, the
mixture of idealism and ignorance she brought to the job, and the victories and
defeats that come with immersion in an alien and unsignposted
culture.
These
must
be extraordinarily difficult books to write, and in Helen's case, she waited
fifteen years before attempting to sort out in prose the adventure she
experienced in 1990-91. What is remarkable is that the story is no less vivid
for being recollected in tranquility; indeed her prose is brilliant, affecting,
transparent. She has a genius for storytelling worthy of a novelist. Her
pacing is impeccable, her construction of the narrative skillful. She knows how
to use tiny details (for example, the small silver charm in the form of a snail
that she wears around her neck) to thematically unite incidents across the pages
of the book and across years of time. When she is tired and lonely, she speaks
of her desire to spend an evening alone with a novel for solace, and it is clear
that she has absorbed much of her craft that way. But the story rings true, and
she has a generosity of spirit that extends both to herself and to the Martu
people.
Helen spends roughly the first half of the book detailing the first few weeks in Jigalong, weeks she spent feeling frightened, abandoned, lacking in self-confidence, and almost always overwhelmed. Motivated by a yearning for adventure and a belief that she ought to put principles into practice, Helen had applied for a position at Coonanna, on the Nullarbor. The application was rejected, and months passed before she was unexpectedly offered work as a remote area nurse in Jigalong. Perhaps it was the surprise that led her to accept almost without reflection; it was certainly the abruptness of the decision that contributed to her bewilderment on arrival.
For once she is on the ground in Jigalong, she discovers that she has two days of orientation with the other nurse in the community before she is to be left alone to face the challenges of administering to the locals. The confusion and isolation increase when her colleague's planned two-week absence stretches into six. But after those first two weeks, the demands of the job overwhelm almost everything else, even (almost) the sense of being overwhelmed.
She manages to survive by enlisting help from every quarter. Joannie and PW, the Aboriginal nursing assistants, give her a grounding in the routines of the clinic. The telephone is a lifeline that connects her to medical advice in the nearest town of Newman and in Port Hedland, and sometimes to moral support from a friend back home in Perth. The Royal Flying Doctor Service comes through heroically time after time.
Perhaps most crucially, she learns how to hold her balance. She overcomes both her shyness and her sense of duty to make friends with others in the community and to relax with them, shoring up reserves of strength. She begins to learn slowly from the example of the Martu themselves, coming to understand that her notions of schedules and appointed times, of "must" rather than "can" do not serve her as well as being-in-the-moment.
And so the tribulations of her early days give way to a growing sense of ease; she begins to behave adventurously rather than seeking adventure. She beings to negotiate risk into opportunity and to recognize, if only very slightly, that the Martu operate on a different scale of values. Surprisingly, she becomes comfortable with that recognition, even as it foregrounds her lack of understanding of those values. She can accept uncertainty and unknowing.
Unknowing still generates moments of terror, though. As she grows more relaxed, she wanders--literally--further afield from her own backyard. Pursuing photographs of an expanse of Sturt's Desert Pea in bloom, she strays off the track. When she returns to find a group of women waiting for her at the clinic, she immediately recognizes that something is seriously wrong. She has strayed onto men's country. Her horror at the revelation of this transgression is compounded of equal parts of fear of retribution and anger at the slipshod orientation that failed to put into her hands the extant written instructions that would have prevented her mistake.
And so while she has grown comfortable giving rides in the ambulance to the Martu going to or from Newman, and has stiffened her courage to take part in a nocturnal kangaroo-hunting expedition, a note of danger has been sounded. And it is danger that permeates, in many forms, the final quarter of the story Helen has to tell.
Men's business is afoot, and in one way or another, it destabilizes the balance that Helen has begun to achieve. Her aides and closest friends among the Martu, Joannie and PW, must absent themselves from the clinic, compounding the isolation she experiences when Margaret, the other nurse, leaves again.
The men's business brings also more people in from the outstations. The very fact of these visitors' mobility complicates life in the settlement, for suddenly there is grog coming in from Newman, and escalating violence in its wake. The visitors are a rougher lot in other ways, less used to whitefella ways, and so they stretch the fragile new accommodation to Martu ways that Helen has begun to develop.
In the end, though, it is a medical emergency that provides the occasion of Helen's undoing, as a young mother presents at the clinic with a desperately iill new-born. Everything conspires to defeat Helen. A cyclone off the coast grounds the Flying Doctor. The baby's acute dehydration means that mother and child cannot be left alone for the night in the clinic. Helen reluctantly and in exhaustion brings them home to her tiny living quarters, but cannot bring herself to grant a further intrusion on her sense of privacy by allowing the young woman to have a friend sleep with her that night. When Helen realizes in the morning the cruelty of that decision, she is deeply distressed.
And her distress only deepens when mother and child disappear as Helen showers. Eventually, with the aid of one of her Martu neighbors, she is able to locate the baby and call in the Flying Doctor. But the mother has left Jigalong for sorry business at another camp. Helen comes to appreciate the awful choice the mother had to make: bound to attend the funeral, she was forced to leave her baby behind, for taking the infant along would have led to its certain death. In another paradox, Helen's moment of insight into the mother's dilemma illuminates the paucity of her understanding of her clients' lives and triggers her realization that it is time to leave Jigalong.
In a finely wrought epilogue, a mere three pages record an encounter with another young mother on a train in Perth a decade later in which Helen superbly knits up her story. This concluding parable of reconciliation once more demonstrates her storyteller's art, dramatizing rather than moralizing, summing up her lessons learned in a toddler's embrace.
Along the way, there are many other finely told tales. There are a couple of nights of terrifying violence full of shouts and spears played out over the soundtrack of screeching tires and the crash of bullbars against walls of community housing. There is an equally terrifying tale of two tiny girls, eighteen and thirty-six months old, caught in a web of the Welfare and Health Departments, foster homes in Newman, their mother's alcoholism, and the Jigalong elders who hope to raise the girls Martu web. The shocking paralysis of so many good intentions totally at odds with each other is a theater of the absurd, with a tragic denouement.
If Helen tries to draw an explicit moral from her time at Jigalong, it is this:
Other People's Country is a story suffused with courage and pity and perhaps even desperation. It is a most welcome addition to the literature that describes the ongoing contact and adjustment between black and white in remote Australia.
These
must
be extraordinarily difficult books to write, and in Helen's case, she waited
fifteen years before attempting to sort out in prose the adventure she
experienced in 1990-91. What is remarkable is that the story is no less vivid
for being recollected in tranquility; indeed her prose is brilliant, affecting,
transparent. She has a genius for storytelling worthy of a novelist. Her
pacing is impeccable, her construction of the narrative skillful. She knows how
to use tiny details (for example, the small silver charm in the form of a snail
that she wears around her neck) to thematically unite incidents across the pages
of the book and across years of time. When she is tired and lonely, she speaks
of her desire to spend an evening alone with a novel for solace, and it is clear
that she has absorbed much of her craft that way. But the story rings true, and
she has a generosity of spirit that extends both to herself and to the Martu
people.Helen spends roughly the first half of the book detailing the first few weeks in Jigalong, weeks she spent feeling frightened, abandoned, lacking in self-confidence, and almost always overwhelmed. Motivated by a yearning for adventure and a belief that she ought to put principles into practice, Helen had applied for a position at Coonanna, on the Nullarbor. The application was rejected, and months passed before she was unexpectedly offered work as a remote area nurse in Jigalong. Perhaps it was the surprise that led her to accept almost without reflection; it was certainly the abruptness of the decision that contributed to her bewilderment on arrival.
For once she is on the ground in Jigalong, she discovers that she has two days of orientation with the other nurse in the community before she is to be left alone to face the challenges of administering to the locals. The confusion and isolation increase when her colleague's planned two-week absence stretches into six. But after those first two weeks, the demands of the job overwhelm almost everything else, even (almost) the sense of being overwhelmed.
She manages to survive by enlisting help from every quarter. Joannie and PW, the Aboriginal nursing assistants, give her a grounding in the routines of the clinic. The telephone is a lifeline that connects her to medical advice in the nearest town of Newman and in Port Hedland, and sometimes to moral support from a friend back home in Perth. The Royal Flying Doctor Service comes through heroically time after time.
Perhaps most crucially, she learns how to hold her balance. She overcomes both her shyness and her sense of duty to make friends with others in the community and to relax with them, shoring up reserves of strength. She begins to learn slowly from the example of the Martu themselves, coming to understand that her notions of schedules and appointed times, of "must" rather than "can" do not serve her as well as being-in-the-moment.
And so the tribulations of her early days give way to a growing sense of ease; she begins to behave adventurously rather than seeking adventure. She beings to negotiate risk into opportunity and to recognize, if only very slightly, that the Martu operate on a different scale of values. Surprisingly, she becomes comfortable with that recognition, even as it foregrounds her lack of understanding of those values. She can accept uncertainty and unknowing.
Unknowing still generates moments of terror, though. As she grows more relaxed, she wanders--literally--further afield from her own backyard. Pursuing photographs of an expanse of Sturt's Desert Pea in bloom, she strays off the track. When she returns to find a group of women waiting for her at the clinic, she immediately recognizes that something is seriously wrong. She has strayed onto men's country. Her horror at the revelation of this transgression is compounded of equal parts of fear of retribution and anger at the slipshod orientation that failed to put into her hands the extant written instructions that would have prevented her mistake.
And so while she has grown comfortable giving rides in the ambulance to the Martu going to or from Newman, and has stiffened her courage to take part in a nocturnal kangaroo-hunting expedition, a note of danger has been sounded. And it is danger that permeates, in many forms, the final quarter of the story Helen has to tell.
Men's business is afoot, and in one way or another, it destabilizes the balance that Helen has begun to achieve. Her aides and closest friends among the Martu, Joannie and PW, must absent themselves from the clinic, compounding the isolation she experiences when Margaret, the other nurse, leaves again.
The men's business brings also more people in from the outstations. The very fact of these visitors' mobility complicates life in the settlement, for suddenly there is grog coming in from Newman, and escalating violence in its wake. The visitors are a rougher lot in other ways, less used to whitefella ways, and so they stretch the fragile new accommodation to Martu ways that Helen has begun to develop.
In the end, though, it is a medical emergency that provides the occasion of Helen's undoing, as a young mother presents at the clinic with a desperately iill new-born. Everything conspires to defeat Helen. A cyclone off the coast grounds the Flying Doctor. The baby's acute dehydration means that mother and child cannot be left alone for the night in the clinic. Helen reluctantly and in exhaustion brings them home to her tiny living quarters, but cannot bring herself to grant a further intrusion on her sense of privacy by allowing the young woman to have a friend sleep with her that night. When Helen realizes in the morning the cruelty of that decision, she is deeply distressed.
And her distress only deepens when mother and child disappear as Helen showers. Eventually, with the aid of one of her Martu neighbors, she is able to locate the baby and call in the Flying Doctor. But the mother has left Jigalong for sorry business at another camp. Helen comes to appreciate the awful choice the mother had to make: bound to attend the funeral, she was forced to leave her baby behind, for taking the infant along would have led to its certain death. In another paradox, Helen's moment of insight into the mother's dilemma illuminates the paucity of her understanding of her clients' lives and triggers her realization that it is time to leave Jigalong.
In a finely wrought epilogue, a mere three pages record an encounter with another young mother on a train in Perth a decade later in which Helen superbly knits up her story. This concluding parable of reconciliation once more demonstrates her storyteller's art, dramatizing rather than moralizing, summing up her lessons learned in a toddler's embrace.
Along the way, there are many other finely told tales. There are a couple of nights of terrifying violence full of shouts and spears played out over the soundtrack of screeching tires and the crash of bullbars against walls of community housing. There is an equally terrifying tale of two tiny girls, eighteen and thirty-six months old, caught in a web of the Welfare and Health Departments, foster homes in Newman, their mother's alcoholism, and the Jigalong elders who hope to raise the girls Martu web. The shocking paralysis of so many good intentions totally at odds with each other is a theater of the absurd, with a tragic denouement.
If Helen tries to draw an explicit moral from her time at Jigalong, it is this:
It will take many decades and enormous goodwill on both side to work out what the partnership between the Martu people and the wider Australian society should look like, but a good start would be the recognition of, and respect for, the vibrant culture which underpins the lives of the people, and an attempt at dialogue that seeks to understand the Martu viewpoint (p. 243).
Other People's Country is a story suffused with courage and pity and perhaps even desperation. It is a most welcome addition to the literature that describes the ongoing contact and adjustment between black and white in remote Australia.
Posted at 08:20 AM
Sun - April 5, 2009
Batik Brilliance
There is a paradox in the story of Indigenous
textile art, the most famous examples of which are undoubtedly the Utopia
batiks. As the market for painting by Aboriginal artists took off in the 1990s,
the Utopia batiks were rightly celebrated as the progenitors, not just of an
expansion of painting beyond the boundaries of Papunya Tula, but of the first
important Indigenous artworks produced by women. The rapid rise in the
reputations of the Petyarre sisters and their auntie, Emily Kam Kngwarray gave
further prominence to the importance of these woven
wonders.
And yet the batiks themselves, like much textile art, are notoriously fragile, their materials and colors both susceptible to degradation by exposure, to handling and to light. And so these exemplars of Indigenous women's creativity have all but disappeared from view in the State galleries that display countless other examples of native styles and testify to the subtle line between art and craft that such work foregrounds.
For
this reason alone Across the Desert: Aboriginal Batik from Central
Australia, the recent exhibition of batik mounted by Judith Ryan
at the NGV Australia, would be a cause for celebration. Similarly, although
numerous publications on batik and related textile arts have appeared over the
years, the catalog for this show is a resource to be
treasured for the beauty and extravagance of its documentation of the movement
in five desert communities.
Earlier publications have treated the story of batik in a variety of ways. Perhaps the earliest, mirroring the initial excitement generated by the emergence of women artists there, was Utopia: a picture story: the Robert Holmes a Court collection (Wakefield Press, 1990) by Anne Marie Brody. A large-format and most handsome volume, this book offered gorgeous photographs, not only of 88 batik works in all their glory, but also of the artists themselves, in expressive, dramatic black-and-white portraits. One of the great strengths of this collection is the evidence it provides of the breadth of artistic experimentation in the medium that women of Utopia (and one man, Lindsay Bird Mpetyane) undertook. There are transformations of bush tucker and women's ceremonial body paint, images familiar from the acrylic paintings that have become so popular in the years since this collection was assembled. But there are also surprises in store for batik lovers, most notably examples of the naive style of landscape painting that didn't re-emerge in women's painting until a decade later. Eileen Kngwarreye's ghostly blue, black, and white "Night Scene" and Edie Kemarre's ghost gums in an ochre-tinted desert scene entitled "Emu Dreaming" are arresting, startling, and beautiful.
The 1998 exhibition at the NGV, Raiki Wara: long cloth from Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait broadened the scope of the investigation considerably. Although the emphasis was once again on work from Utopia, the catalog offered insight into the seminal role played by Ernabella Arts in establishing a market for Indigenous women's production of textile arts. Raiki Wara also included batiks from other desert communities, notably Kintore and Yuendumu, and stretched its geographical coverage far to the north, presenting stunning works from as far away as the Torres Strait Islands.
Vividly reproduced in brilliant detail, the painted silks from Santa Teresa and the equally astonishing silks from Merrepen Arts on the Daly River fairly leap off the pages of the catalog. Among other revelations are the 1995 screenprints from Galiwin'ku with their images of marine life and ceremonial objects floating atop washes of color that seem to be composed of equal parts fire and water. Austere screenprinted patterns from the Tiwi Islands stand in counterpoint to Sydney artist Euphemia Bostock possum-skin cloak patterns, while Donna Brown's lush but soft silk painting contrasts with the lively, sharp desert examples of the art.
And finally, the decade's documentation drew to a close with the publication of Don't Ask for Stories: the women from Ernabella and their art (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1999). Founded in 1948, Ernabella is the oldest surviving desert art centre and this publication not only documents the early attempts at producing textile art as an income-generating scheme, but also presents the life stories of the artists and other members of the community in brief, bilingual texts. With the rise of acrylic painting, the demand for textile arts declined across the desert; the lower status and price for batik nearly finished off the industry in Ernabella as elsewhere. This is a situation much to be lamented. And so it is fitting that this latest NGV show, Across the Desert, resurrects the glory of batik, and never better than in its homage to the brilliance of Ernabella.
The catalog for Across the Desert, like all of the quality productions from the NGV, is a sumptuous record of the exhibition studded with high-gloss full-page photographs, a comprehensive illustrated listing of works in the exhibition, biographies of the creators, an introductory essay by Judith Ryan, and two short pieces on batik as couture. These alone would make a substantial contribution to the literature on Aboriginal batik production.
For me, the heart and soul of this catalog, though, are the five central essays with their exuberant photographic documentation of the work produced at art centres in five desert communities: Ernabella, Fregon, Utopia, Yuendumu, and Kintore. This geographical organization foregrounds the differences among the various "schools" of batik, and also allows us to see the work in the context of the later and in some cases more famous acrylic paintings that emerged from these art centres.
The Yuendumu works, for example, though not as brightly colorful as their acrylic counterparts, vibrate with familiar kurruwarri designs, tiny footprints and the signs of women with their digging sticks and coolamons. The dense designs in pink and mauve out of Kintore (including a stunner by Tjunkiya Napaltjarri) immediately recall the early paintings that emerged from the contemporaneous women's painting project that brought the Pintupi women to the attention of the art world for the first time in the mid-1990s and changed the course of art at Papunya Tula. But these Kintore works also reveal a debt to the women of Utopia in design as well as medium and remind us how significant Emily Kngwarray's influence was fifteen to twenty years ago. The Utopia batiks themselves have lost none of their glory in two decades.
But it is the work from Ernabella that is here revealed in all its stunning richness. Revisiting the earlier publications I mentioned above, partly out of disbelief that I had overlooked the genius of these long cloths until now, I saw that the Ernabella production has never been slighted. But to have it displayed as it is in Across the Desert, collected together on page after page, allowed me to appreciate the richness, the luxury, the radiance of these artworks for the first time. The designs themselves show the influence of the artists' Indonesian mentors, and hence of Islamic art, more than anything else in the exhibition. The complexity of drawing is further enhanced by the most dazzling color of all that is on show. (The catalog's cover illustration, reproduced above, is a detail of a 2007 batik from Ernabella by Tjunkaya Tapaya; it testifies not only to the Indonesian influence but to the continued vitality of batik production in Ernabella.)
If you are intrigued by the story of Indonesian influence on Aboriginal art in the realm of batik (stylistically quite different from the traces of Macassan culture among the Yolngu), look for the fascinating documentary The Golden Cord (Daedalus Films, 1996, distributed by Ronin Films). Directed by Hilary Furlong, who went on a few years later to work at Ernabella, The Golden Cord tells the story of a cultural exchange. Ten women from Utopia traveled to the Brahma Tirta Sari batik studio in Yogyakarta to learn the techniques of batik from Agus Ismoyo and his wife Nia Fliam. The two Java-based artists then paid a return visit to Utopia, in a heartwarming episode which shows the ladies delighting in the special qualities of their country as they return the hospitality they were shown in Indonesia. The film also documents the critical role that Jenny Green played in the development of batik at Utopia, a story that is curiously understated in Across the Desert.
The story of batik is of central importance to the history of the development of Aboriginal fine art in the late twentieth century. It was critical to the emergence of women as artists of equal stature in the desert; it launched the career of the most internationally famous of all Aboriginal artists, and it opened an appreciation of the importance of what was traditionally considered "craft work" in the Indigenous aesthetic. We can only be grateful to Judith Ryan and the NGV for reminding us of all this once more, and for once more giving audiences the opportunity to experience these jewels of the deserts.
And yet the batiks themselves, like much textile art, are notoriously fragile, their materials and colors both susceptible to degradation by exposure, to handling and to light. And so these exemplars of Indigenous women's creativity have all but disappeared from view in the State galleries that display countless other examples of native styles and testify to the subtle line between art and craft that such work foregrounds.
For
this reason alone Across the Desert: Aboriginal Batik from Central
Australia, the recent exhibition of batik mounted by Judith Ryan
at the NGV Australia, would be a cause for celebration. Similarly, although
numerous publications on batik and related textile arts have appeared over the
years, the catalog for this show is a resource to be
treasured for the beauty and extravagance of its documentation of the movement
in five desert communities.Earlier publications have treated the story of batik in a variety of ways. Perhaps the earliest, mirroring the initial excitement generated by the emergence of women artists there, was Utopia: a picture story: the Robert Holmes a Court collection (Wakefield Press, 1990) by Anne Marie Brody. A large-format and most handsome volume, this book offered gorgeous photographs, not only of 88 batik works in all their glory, but also of the artists themselves, in expressive, dramatic black-and-white portraits. One of the great strengths of this collection is the evidence it provides of the breadth of artistic experimentation in the medium that women of Utopia (and one man, Lindsay Bird Mpetyane) undertook. There are transformations of bush tucker and women's ceremonial body paint, images familiar from the acrylic paintings that have become so popular in the years since this collection was assembled. But there are also surprises in store for batik lovers, most notably examples of the naive style of landscape painting that didn't re-emerge in women's painting until a decade later. Eileen Kngwarreye's ghostly blue, black, and white "Night Scene" and Edie Kemarre's ghost gums in an ochre-tinted desert scene entitled "Emu Dreaming" are arresting, startling, and beautiful.
The 1998 exhibition at the NGV, Raiki Wara: long cloth from Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait broadened the scope of the investigation considerably. Although the emphasis was once again on work from Utopia, the catalog offered insight into the seminal role played by Ernabella Arts in establishing a market for Indigenous women's production of textile arts. Raiki Wara also included batiks from other desert communities, notably Kintore and Yuendumu, and stretched its geographical coverage far to the north, presenting stunning works from as far away as the Torres Strait Islands.
Vividly reproduced in brilliant detail, the painted silks from Santa Teresa and the equally astonishing silks from Merrepen Arts on the Daly River fairly leap off the pages of the catalog. Among other revelations are the 1995 screenprints from Galiwin'ku with their images of marine life and ceremonial objects floating atop washes of color that seem to be composed of equal parts fire and water. Austere screenprinted patterns from the Tiwi Islands stand in counterpoint to Sydney artist Euphemia Bostock possum-skin cloak patterns, while Donna Brown's lush but soft silk painting contrasts with the lively, sharp desert examples of the art.
And finally, the decade's documentation drew to a close with the publication of Don't Ask for Stories: the women from Ernabella and their art (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1999). Founded in 1948, Ernabella is the oldest surviving desert art centre and this publication not only documents the early attempts at producing textile art as an income-generating scheme, but also presents the life stories of the artists and other members of the community in brief, bilingual texts. With the rise of acrylic painting, the demand for textile arts declined across the desert; the lower status and price for batik nearly finished off the industry in Ernabella as elsewhere. This is a situation much to be lamented. And so it is fitting that this latest NGV show, Across the Desert, resurrects the glory of batik, and never better than in its homage to the brilliance of Ernabella.
The catalog for Across the Desert, like all of the quality productions from the NGV, is a sumptuous record of the exhibition studded with high-gloss full-page photographs, a comprehensive illustrated listing of works in the exhibition, biographies of the creators, an introductory essay by Judith Ryan, and two short pieces on batik as couture. These alone would make a substantial contribution to the literature on Aboriginal batik production.
For me, the heart and soul of this catalog, though, are the five central essays with their exuberant photographic documentation of the work produced at art centres in five desert communities: Ernabella, Fregon, Utopia, Yuendumu, and Kintore. This geographical organization foregrounds the differences among the various "schools" of batik, and also allows us to see the work in the context of the later and in some cases more famous acrylic paintings that emerged from these art centres.
The Yuendumu works, for example, though not as brightly colorful as their acrylic counterparts, vibrate with familiar kurruwarri designs, tiny footprints and the signs of women with their digging sticks and coolamons. The dense designs in pink and mauve out of Kintore (including a stunner by Tjunkiya Napaltjarri) immediately recall the early paintings that emerged from the contemporaneous women's painting project that brought the Pintupi women to the attention of the art world for the first time in the mid-1990s and changed the course of art at Papunya Tula. But these Kintore works also reveal a debt to the women of Utopia in design as well as medium and remind us how significant Emily Kngwarray's influence was fifteen to twenty years ago. The Utopia batiks themselves have lost none of their glory in two decades.
But it is the work from Ernabella that is here revealed in all its stunning richness. Revisiting the earlier publications I mentioned above, partly out of disbelief that I had overlooked the genius of these long cloths until now, I saw that the Ernabella production has never been slighted. But to have it displayed as it is in Across the Desert, collected together on page after page, allowed me to appreciate the richness, the luxury, the radiance of these artworks for the first time. The designs themselves show the influence of the artists' Indonesian mentors, and hence of Islamic art, more than anything else in the exhibition. The complexity of drawing is further enhanced by the most dazzling color of all that is on show. (The catalog's cover illustration, reproduced above, is a detail of a 2007 batik from Ernabella by Tjunkaya Tapaya; it testifies not only to the Indonesian influence but to the continued vitality of batik production in Ernabella.)
If you are intrigued by the story of Indonesian influence on Aboriginal art in the realm of batik (stylistically quite different from the traces of Macassan culture among the Yolngu), look for the fascinating documentary The Golden Cord (Daedalus Films, 1996, distributed by Ronin Films). Directed by Hilary Furlong, who went on a few years later to work at Ernabella, The Golden Cord tells the story of a cultural exchange. Ten women from Utopia traveled to the Brahma Tirta Sari batik studio in Yogyakarta to learn the techniques of batik from Agus Ismoyo and his wife Nia Fliam. The two Java-based artists then paid a return visit to Utopia, in a heartwarming episode which shows the ladies delighting in the special qualities of their country as they return the hospitality they were shown in Indonesia. The film also documents the critical role that Jenny Green played in the development of batik at Utopia, a story that is curiously understated in Across the Desert.
The story of batik is of central importance to the history of the development of Aboriginal fine art in the late twentieth century. It was critical to the emergence of women as artists of equal stature in the desert; it launched the career of the most internationally famous of all Aboriginal artists, and it opened an appreciation of the importance of what was traditionally considered "craft work" in the Indigenous aesthetic. We can only be grateful to Judith Ryan and the NGV for reminding us of all this once more, and for once more giving audiences the opportunity to experience these jewels of the deserts.
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Posted at 12:10 PM
Sun - March 29, 2009
Notes and Blogs
No essay this week, I confess, as I've happily
spent the last seven days entertaining my friend Walter, down from Boston for a
springtime visit, our first since we saw each other at the opening of Dreaming Their Way in Dartmouth two and a
half years ago. Our week ended with an invitation for me to give a talk on
Aboriginal art in nearby Siler City, North Carolina, a rural community with a
thriving arts district. The NC Arts Incubator sponsored a didjeridu-making
workshop Friday afternoon, followed by my talk to a group of about 20
Australophiles. The workshoppers gave me an impromptu "welcome to country"
serenade! Great fun for all. So instead of writing this weekend, I'll take
this opportunity to catch up on a few short notes that have been washing about
the shores of my desktop.
An excellent new paper by Jon Altman of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research is now available online. It is entitled "Beyond Closing the Gap: Valuing Diversity in Indigenous Australia." The paper was originally presented at the Centre for Public Policy's conference on "Values & Public Policy" in February of 2009; here is a brief abstract of its arguments, thanks to Australian Policy Online.
February also saw the publication of a six-part series at NewMatilda.com entitled "Two Week Intervention." Scott Mitchell, a journalist and student in Sydney, chonicled two weeks of living in Newtown under conditions designed to approximate those of Indigenous residents of one of Alice Springs' town camps.
While some of the "approximations" seem a bit far-fetched, I found the story fascinating most of all for the way in which Mitchell found himself in a variety of troubles stemming largely from a sudden dislocation of his accustomed habits of thinking and living. It was not simply a matter of having to change his way of living; rather he seemed to get into trouble with his new lifestyle by failing to adjust his way of thinking. Despite the very self-conscious nature of the experiment, Mitchell was tripped up often by falling into assumptions about how he could control his daily life, realizing only too late the consequences of mundane actions. The copious comments left on this short-term blog are as fascinating as Mitchell's own story.
Finally, I've been following another blog out of the Ngaanyatjara lands for a couple of months now. Robbo bills BitingTheDust as "a view of pharmacy and health from a very remote pharmacist," but sells himself quite short in doing so. While many of the earliest entries (BitingTheDust has been online since August 2008) focused on health issues in remote lands, there is much more in the way of content available here.
There's natural history, reminiscent of Bob Gosford's essays on birds and snakes in The Northern Myth. There are regular posts on Desert art, and a few here and there on music coming out of his part of the country (The Wilcannia Mob, for instance, or today's post of a new recording by Gosha Jackson and Basher Woods out of Mantamaru, "I Miss My Home"). And there are some brilliant photographic essays. The sequence documenting an approaching and then enveloping dust storm kept me riveted for a long time; I'm still bemused by the architectural wonder of the long-drop dunny at an abandoned homestead near the Strzelecki Creek.
Of late Robbo has added a new category to his blog: "Indigenous News Update." Sometimes he collects a half-dozen links to news stories on a general topic like politics or health; other times he ranges far and wide in a single post, from Indigneous Rugby Union on tour in Thailand and China, to Jimmy Little, to culture shock among Intervention workers.
No matter what subject he lands on in any given post, the perspective is always enlightening, often amusing, and definitely worth a look. Remember Clarke and Dawe on the Intervention? If not, check it out here along with a selection of the best of Crikey! on the subject.
An excellent new paper by Jon Altman of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research is now available online. It is entitled "Beyond Closing the Gap: Valuing Diversity in Indigenous Australia." The paper was originally presented at the Centre for Public Policy's conference on "Values & Public Policy" in February of 2009; here is a brief abstract of its arguments, thanks to Australian Policy Online.
In his Apology speech the Prime Minister attempted to balance the symbolic with the practical while emphasising that ‘business as usual’ is not working. Ultimately though, the 'Closing the Gap' approach is business as usual that fails to value Indigenous difference and fails to accommodate Indigenous aspirations in all their diversity. Unless we get beyond CTG, the next phase in Indigenous policy making and program investments is as ‘destined to fail’ as previous approaches.
This paper advocates for the pendulum to swing back, to accommodate and value diversity and difference rather than just statistical equality. In doing so, the author provides some reflexive comment as an academic on these policy swings. In 2005, Tim Rowse and Jon Altman wrote a piece on Indigenous policy that contrasted the contending approaches of economics and anthropology to Indigenous affairs policy: the first emphasising equality of socioeconomic outcomes, the second the facilitation of choice and self-determination. The former implies integration, the latter adherence to different and diverse life worlds. Over time, the author has used economics and official statistics to highlight socioeconomic disadvantage and neglect, while at the same time using anthropology to critique any approach that uses mainstream social indicators that only reflect the dominant society’s social norms. This paper will continue in the same vein using a dual disciplinary approach. However, without being over-reflexive, as an anthropologist of development he is clearly uncomfortable with the current dominance of the 'Closing the Gap' framework.
February also saw the publication of a six-part series at NewMatilda.com entitled "Two Week Intervention." Scott Mitchell, a journalist and student in Sydney, chonicled two weeks of living in Newtown under conditions designed to approximate those of Indigenous residents of one of Alice Springs' town camps.
His income will be $460 in total for the full fortnight, with $100 of that taken for rent, $30 for child support and another $30 for government repayments or fines.
Half of his fortnightly income will be quarantined with a local supermarket in Newtown and this cannot be spent on cigarettes, alcohol, porn or gambling.
A large sign will be placed on the front of his house that reads "Prescribed Area: No Liquor".
He is not allowed to drink alcohol (or use porn) within his local area (Newtown).
He is not allowed to catch the bus, only the train. This is because most Town Camps are not serviced by public transport, meaning residents have to walk a considerable distance to the nearest bus stop. Scott's residence is more than a kilometre from the nearest train station.
He is not allowed to use the internet at home, only in a net café, and has to use a public phone box to make calls.
While some of the "approximations" seem a bit far-fetched, I found the story fascinating most of all for the way in which Mitchell found himself in a variety of troubles stemming largely from a sudden dislocation of his accustomed habits of thinking and living. It was not simply a matter of having to change his way of living; rather he seemed to get into trouble with his new lifestyle by failing to adjust his way of thinking. Despite the very self-conscious nature of the experiment, Mitchell was tripped up often by falling into assumptions about how he could control his daily life, realizing only too late the consequences of mundane actions. The copious comments left on this short-term blog are as fascinating as Mitchell's own story.
Finally, I've been following another blog out of the Ngaanyatjara lands for a couple of months now. Robbo bills BitingTheDust as "a view of pharmacy and health from a very remote pharmacist," but sells himself quite short in doing so. While many of the earliest entries (BitingTheDust has been online since August 2008) focused on health issues in remote lands, there is much more in the way of content available here.
There's natural history, reminiscent of Bob Gosford's essays on birds and snakes in The Northern Myth. There are regular posts on Desert art, and a few here and there on music coming out of his part of the country (The Wilcannia Mob, for instance, or today's post of a new recording by Gosha Jackson and Basher Woods out of Mantamaru, "I Miss My Home"). And there are some brilliant photographic essays. The sequence documenting an approaching and then enveloping dust storm kept me riveted for a long time; I'm still bemused by the architectural wonder of the long-drop dunny at an abandoned homestead near the Strzelecki Creek.
Of late Robbo has added a new category to his blog: "Indigenous News Update." Sometimes he collects a half-dozen links to news stories on a general topic like politics or health; other times he ranges far and wide in a single post, from Indigneous Rugby Union on tour in Thailand and China, to Jimmy Little, to culture shock among Intervention workers.
No matter what subject he lands on in any given post, the perspective is always enlightening, often amusing, and definitely worth a look. Remember Clarke and Dawe on the Intervention? If not, check it out here along with a selection of the best of Crikey! on the subject.
Posted at 12:05 PM
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Readings, reviews, and reflections by an American observer of Australian Indigenous art, culture, politics, anthropology, music, and literature.
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Will Owen
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Will Owen
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Published On: Jul 04, 2009 11:02 AM
Published On: Jul 04, 2009 11:02 AM