Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American eye

Worrying for Kiwirrkura

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:10:25 -0400

Thinking about natural disasters in Australia, I am more likely to remember the Victorian bushfires or the massive dust storm that enveloped Sydney recently, to pick just two of this year's traumas. I am less apt to conjure floods. Even when I see the magnificent, brilliant canvases that Patrick Olodoodi Tjungurrayi has painted in recent years, examples of which won him the inaugural Western Australian Indigenous Art Award in 2008, I usually don't remember that this flamboyant style of painting for Tjungurrayi had its genesis in the aftermath of the severe flood that caused the evacuation of his home community of Kiwirrkura for nearly eighteen months in 2001-2002.

The story of the modern community of Kiwirrkura is intimately connected with the story of contemporary Aboriginal painting in many ways. The Pintupi painters who were at the forefront of the painting movement that began in Papunya in 1971 were among the last people to come in to that settlement in the 1960s, and among the first to leave after revenues from painting began to give them a degree of economic independence. In the wake of the Aboriginal Land Right Act (Northern Territory) 1976, the Pintupi moved further west towards their homelands, setting up first at Kintore in 1981. A small group continued the migration westward the following year establishing the settlement at Kiwirrkura.

In 1984, the famous group of nomads whose members included Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri and Yukultji Napangati emerged from their isolation to join the settlers at Kiwirrkura. Family ties to people living in Balgo made the tiny WA settlement a nexus for a variety of language groups, many of whom were already creating the styles of Western Desert acrylic painting. In the late 90s, Patrick Tjungurrayi's paintings still shared many of the austere qualities of Kintore art; after the evacuation of the Kiwirrkura community in the wake of the floods, Tjungurrayi spent nearly a year living with relatives in Balgo (Brandy Tjungurrayi is his brother), and the adaptation of the Balgo palette to his established style resulted in the works for which he is now celebrated.

The story of that flood has lately been retold in the context of remote area emergency management. The Kiwirrkura Flood Recovery Project has put together a variety of resources for both members of Indigenous communities and emergency workers to help both sides prepare for this kind of disaster in the future. These documents and videos offer a fascinating, brief introduction to the community while telling the story of the flood itself.

In 2000, heavier than usual rains in the area had significantly raised the water table and caused minor flooding that washed out roads leading to Kiwirrkura. Then during the period from March 3 to March 5 2001, torrential downpours flooded out the community itself. Residents gathered at the school to await assistance. A community that prides itself on being among the best hunters in the Western Desert region found itself without food.

Helicopters dropped supplies and soon managed to evacuate the residents, who numbered at the time about 170. The refugees overnighted at Kintore, but that small community lacked the capacity to take in such a large influx for any length of time. The next stop was the Norforce Army Base in Alice Springs. Again, this could only be a way station: accommodations were available for only four weeks. But more importantly, during those four weeks, some of the residents of dry Kiwirrkura began to run afoul of the grog.

Problems with the grog pursued the community members, already reeling from dislocation and disruption, when they were settled at Morapoi, near Kalgoorlie. What followed was a diaspora, as people scattered, many of them relocating several times to towns across Western Australia, including Newman, Broome, and ultimately, for many, Balgo and its outstations like Mulan.

Although rebuilding efforts at Kiwirrkura were underway by the end of March 2001, it wasn't until August of the following year that most of the people were reunited in a rebuilt Kiwirrkura. In the months that followed the re-establishment, residents worked with staff from Fire and Emergency Services Australia (FESA) to lay foundations for an appropriate response to future calamities. For FESA staff, this involved gaining an understanding not simply of the Aboriginal connection to country, but also to the way in which the Pintupi understood the activities of the ancestral serpents that brought the floods to the community.

The Kiwirrkura Flood Recovery Project website offers links to an excellent article, "Kiwirrkura: the flood in the desert," from the Australian Journal of Emergency Management (vol. 24, no.1, February 2009) as well as to a series of Fact Sheets that detail the history of the community, its place in art history, the story of Native Title recognition (awarded in October 2001 in the midst of the diaspora), as well as the flood and the response to it.

A short documentary (28 mins.) encapsulating the entire story has been posted in seven parts on YouTube.

The two paintings reproduced below offer a glimpse at the change in style Patrick Tjugurrayi's work underwent in part as a result of the flood and his displacement from Kiwirrkura to Balgo. The work on the left (courtesy of Papunya Tula Artists) dates from 1999; the one on the right was done at Balgo (courtesy Warlayirti Artists) in 2002. Interestingly, both paintings illustrate Rain Dreamings. The earlier work shows lightning (the sinuous, snaky lines) and heavy rains at Nyakin, west of Jupiter Well, where a group of Tingari men visited the Dreaming's owner who was camped there. On the right are designs associated with Mudoon, near where Tjungurrayi grew up: the two elongated rectangular shapes depict rain clouds, with a large rockhole in between them.

Deadly Vibes

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 11:40:00 -0400

I've been traveling this week and didn't have much time to put together an essay. Instead, in honor of the 2009 Deadly Awards that took place at the Sydney Opera House on September 15, I've mined YouTube once again for some videos to entertain you in my absence.

First up is a band that won the Deadly for the most promising talent in music this year, The Yabu Band. The blurb for this video notes that the Yabu Band, which hails originally from Kalgoorlie, is the work of two brothers, Delson and Boyd Stokes, who have been performing since they were five years old. "Yabu" means "rock" or "gold" in their Wongatha language. So try out some Desert Rock Reggae...not such a far cry from the Island style: "Gundalla We Dance."

The Last Kinection is on tour now and they should get a tremendous boost from winning the award for outstanding achievement in R&B and hip-hop. There's finally a decent video available of them performing "Still Call Australia Home." DJ Jay Tee's scratch overwhelms the lyrics on this phone-camera capture, but you'll find some mashups listed under "Related Videos" where you can hear the words better, though you'll miss the excitement of the performance.

The brother and sister team of Joel (Weno) and Naomi Wenitong that fronts the Kinection have had other gigs. DJ Nay, as she's now known, was half of the duo Shayaka, while Weno performed with Local Knowledge. Here's the latter with a great rip called "Blackfellas."

And here's Shakaya's breakout 2002 single, "Stop Calling Me."

While I'm looking backwards, let me give a shout to my favorite award winners from years past. NoKTuRNL doesn't like to be categorized as rap or hip-hop band; they call it rip-rock: "mixing melody with menace and a message. Three-time winners of Band of the Year at the Deadlys, NoKTuRNL can be brutal and lyrical, sometimes in the same song. Their first big hit was "Neva Mend," and I think it captures a kind of joyful nihilism whose very contradictions embody the off-balance and surprising qualities of their albums.

And finally, a nod to the big winner in music this year, for best single, album, and female artist, long-time hit-maker Jessica Mauboy with her latest, "Up/Down." It's replete with the big-time production values that showcase her international (it was filmed in Los Angeles) and crossover appeal. Frankly, I find it a lot more exciting that her winning single "Burn"; but maybe next year....

A full list of this years winners can be found online courtesy of SBS and World News Australia.

BLACKMANSKIN

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:09:06 -0400

It has been ten years since Vernon Ah Kee first exhibited (a solo show, no less), at Brisbane's Metro Arts Gallery. The Innisfail, Qld native has been active since then in the potent Brisbane Aboriginal art scene, along with fellow activist artists like Richard Bell and Gordon Hookey. Like Bell and Hookey, Ah Kee laces his work with political outrage and often relies on the power of text to generate its message. Unlike his fellow Queenslanders, though, Ah Kee rarely indulges in strident, over-the-top rhetoric, even when his texts seem to be almost shouting at the viewer in their wall-sized installations. For all his directness, Ah Kee is an artist of considerable subtlety whose message gains strength from its ambiguous positioning.

All of these insights are brilliantly explored in the new monograph, borninthisskin (Institute of Modern Art, 2009), which is one of the more insightful collections of art criticism I've had the pleasure to encounter lately. In addition to four short but punchy essays, and an interview with the uncommonly articulate artist himself, borninthisskin offers a superb retrospective look at Ah Kee's decade-long career to date. It even manages to do justice to his video work, especially the recent CantChant, which premiered in Brisbane in 2007 before being taken to the Venice Biennale in 2009.

In 2008, Ah Kee had two installations at the Sydney Biennale, although I was aware of only one of them before visiting Cockatoo Island. In fact, even after seeing them both, I came away unsure of what I'd witnessed.

In the advance press for the Biennale, I had read about the stunning new set of portrait drawings, What is an Aborigine? Executed in acrylic, charcoal, and crayon on six-by-eight foot canvases, these knockout compositions had drawn significant critical attention, and were hailed as a breakthrough for the artist. I suspect that much of the attention was generated by the surprise at seeing such exquisite formal drawings produced by an artist whose reputation had until then rested largely on more mechanically generated media of photography, video, and commercial lettering. And despite their size, they seemed far more intimate and personal that Ah Kee's political polemics; indeed, as portraits of his family, these were indeed both personal and intimate encounters.

But they were also inescapably political as well. One of the few works that was not a portrait, "I AM," ironically echoed Gordon Bennett's declaration in his 1990 "Self portrait (But I always wanted to be one of the good guys)." Ah Kee's work depicts a cluster of placards attached to long poles. On each is printed the name of a Queensland Aboriginal language group (Waanji, Yidindji) or a phrase ("Aboriginal all the time") that is partially obscured by a blank insert. (I suspect that these placards were inspired by the numbered "dog tags" that identified subjects in the photographs of Aboriginal people, including some of Ah Kee's own Queensland ancestors, taken by Norman Tindale in the early decades of the 20th century. Ah Kee performs a double erasure by leaving the number plates blank and then using them to partially obscure the language names as well.)

The installation gained another degree of power from its very location in the disused shipyard building on Cockatoo: these ghostly faces seemed somehow at home in this abandoned structure, and infinitely sad for being so. Some critics saw reproach in these oversized gazes, others determination, others gentleness.

Detail of the installation What is an Aborigine? at the Sydney Biennale, 2008
And finally, in what may or may not have been sheer serendipity, Ah Kee's drawings were placed in a room in Turbine Hall next to another installation by the Scottish-born artist Susan Phillipsz. Phillipsz's The Internationale, sung by the artist in a plaintive a capella style and broadcast from a single speaker mounted in the adjacent space, filtered in through the broken windows and open rafters to permeate the air around Ah Kee's portraits with melancholy and disappointment.

Ah Kee's other contribution to the Sydney Biennale was infinitely more perplexing. Acting on the principle that any large exhibition will ultimately prove exhausting, we set out to see what we most wanted to see first, and armed with the Biennale's guide map, we headed for the spot with Ah Kee's name inscribed. The vast, industrial site was confusing to navigate, and overwhelming with its rusted machinery dominating the skyline. Often I wondered if I were looking at an installation or a remnant of previous use. Eventually we came to an old, low building with a small sign, sitting aslant on a wooden stake and bearing Ah Kee's name. We stepped inside what turned out to be a toilet block: stinking, decrepit, battered. The walls were covered with repulsive graffiti and paeans to the metal band AC/DC. Ranks of disassembled toilet partitions leaned against the walls and signs instructed visitors "DO NOT USE." The room smelled like many visitors had ignored the injunction. We were puzzled: this wasn't the show of portraits we were looking for. We left, turned next door and encountered Mike Parr's equally repulsive video installation, then consulted our maps to see if we could correct our mistake.

What I didn't realize until I read the essays in borninthisskin was that the toilet block was indeed correctly identified as an installation by Ah Kee. He was not responsible for creating the graffiti, for the warning signs, for the broken plumbing. He had simply claimed the toilet block, as it was, as his own. In a bravura gesture that drew a line from Captain Cook through Marcel Duchamp, he re-inserted an Aboriginal presence and asserted an Aboriginal ownership to a small piece of geography that had been off limits, trespassed, forbidden to everyone for years. And I missed it: I saw it, and I didn't see it. Now, thanks to Blair French's perceptive essay, I understand what a brilliant conceptual move Ah Kee accomplished with this work, which he called "Born in this Skin."

These are the latest chapters in Ah Kee's fascinating history, and although I have begun at the end, borninthisskin offers in its essays an excellent overview of how Ah Kee's styles and preoccupations have emerged since 1999. In the best sense of art history, it surveys the artist's development and places it in both a personal and a social context. The authors, and indeed the artist, do not shy away from exploring influences as diverse as the fellow members of the proppaNOW collective to which Ah Kee belongs or the American type-text-and-image artist Barbara Kruger.

Robert Leonard offers a superb overview of Ah Kee's career; Anthony Gardner takes an in-depth look at Ah Kee's 30-second video work, whitefellanormal. Aileen Moreton-Robinson's impressionistic assessment of the urban heroism of CantChant gives just enough context to allow the eighteen pages of stills from the seven-minute video to speak eloquently for themselves.

It is the interplay of text and images in this book, as in Ah Kee's work, that makes it so thought-provoking and successful. The largely chronological presentation of the drawings allows the reader to follow the evolution of the artist's style as he moves from the sketchy realism of the works from 2004-2005 to the impressionistic and spooky images of the first unwritten series (2007), to the heroic portraiture of What is an Aborigine? and on to a more refined and more unsettling second series of unwritten drawings (both executed in 2008). Selections from the wall-text pieces are interspersed throughout the book and act both as illustrations of Ah Kee's oeuvre and as a kind of critical commentary in their own right.

Speakeasy (below), curated by Vernon Ah Kee and Aaron Seeto at the Asia-Australia Arts Centre in Sydney's Hay Street, is on until October 31. Featured artists include Ah Kee, Daniel Boyd, Fiona Foley, Gordon Hookey, and Ginger Riley. The photograph on the left below appears to be a manipulation of Tindale's portrait of Annie Ah Sam, Ah Kee's maternal great-grandmother.

Arrernte Stories

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 11:36:34 -0400

Kathleen Kemarre Wallace has been the defining artist of the community of Ltyentye Apurte (Santa Teresa) over the two decades that Keringke Artists has been the focus of Eastern Arrernte art production. Towards the end of the new book,
Listen deeply, let these stories in (IAD Press, 2009), she has co-authored with longtime Keringke art advisor Judy Lovell, she tells this story:

When my grandfather Atyelpe died in 1984, many people were very, very sad. The elders were very sad. They felt his death symbolized the end of our knowledge and our cultural practices. The changes to our culture and our way of life had been happening so fast and Atyelpe was one of the last who represented the old way, one who had held ancient knowledge from the ancestors. The family he left behind was deeply sad and some of them did not want to pass on our cultural knowledge anymore. They didn't want to teach me or other younger people about the old days, the culture, stories, song or dances. They wanted to forget what we had all lost. There was so much grieving, we were always in sadness thinking about the past (p. 158).

Luckily for the rest of us, Wallace was determined not to submit to that sadness. The severe drought of the early 60s forced her parents to seek their livelihood in Alice Springs, and they left Kathleen in the care of the nuns at the Santa Teresa mission. She knows she was not able to capture much of what her grandparents and her aunties knew about their country and their culture thereafter, but she was determined to maintain what she herself had learned as a young girl growing up in the bush. She pursued the knowledge of her elders, and committed herself to passing along the story of her land and her people to the younger generations. Listen Deeply is one manifestation of that will, and it is a profoundly rewarding experience.

At one level, the book is Wallace's autobiography, and like other Aboriginal autobiographies it is as much the story of the land as it is of the author's life. The narrative begins with the Arrernte people and the altyerre (the Arrernte word for what we call the Dreaming). Wallace tells in succeeding chapters of tyenge artweye akerte ("my family, my country") and apmeraltye ("people of one land") before closing in on Uyetye, the place where she herself was born. Two more chapters, on water and drought, intervene before what we Westerners would recognize as the autobiographical narrative begins.

Until this point, Wallace is a voice telling a story that moves easily between the altyerre, recent "history," and her country. With her arrival at the Mission in 1959, she begins to emerge as an individualized character for the first time, a shy young girl overwhelmed by the hard life of learning to speak English, to sew, to behave in a manner that often seems inappropriate and shocking. For example, the nuns' admonition to "look at me when I speak to you" was deeply shaming. "For me, to look at another person's eyes was wrong. We were taught by our elders to look away from another person's face because you could see their spirit in their eyes (p. 99)."

In the next few chapters, Wallace briefly tells of her growth to womanhood, her marriage, the many children she raised in Santa Teresa over the years, all fostered or adopted. Such personal details seem, however, less important than the altyerre stories they serve to introduce, as in the chapter "Growing up a big family," which concludes with a retelling of the story of tyangkertangkerte, the mother tree.

Similarly, Wallace never speaks about her art or her career as an artist, yet nearly every page of this splendidly produced book glows with reproductions of Wallace's artwork. And I must confess, this is one of the great joys of the book for me. I have long delighted in the work of Keringke Arts, and been frustrated by the lack of attention it generally has received.

The only other significant publication I am aware of is Keringke: contemporary Eastern Arrernte art (Jukurrpa Books/IAD Press, 1999). A worthy introduction to the art of Ltyentye Apurte, it nonetheless focuses on the early years of painting on silk and paper, and offers besides just a few examples of the brilliant ceramic works the company has produced for many years. Like the batik works made in the 1980s by countrymen farther north in Utopia, these silks and ceramics tended to pigeonhole and devalue Keringke as a producer of Aboriginal crafts. Truth, the artists of Keringke have never been shy about adopting unconventional supports for their painting: hatboxes, chairs, and guitars have all been adorned over the years with their brilliant acrylic stylings. Indeed, a browse of the galleries at Keringke Arts today shows that they are still exercising that inventiveness, with painted heads and hands recycled from mannequins on offer. The explosive primary color palette, the nearly but never quite symmetrical compositions, the guitars and the mannequins' hands that look like illustrations from a Hindu epic all lend an air of the psychedelic 60s to the company's productions.

If those associations have led many people to discount Keringke's work, it is a pity. Happily, Listen Deeply should help to provide a better-informed understanding of this art and lead to a critical re-assessment. All of the artwork included here is Wallace's, much of it done over the last five years: an astonishing and extravagant productivity. The works have been selected as illustrations of the stories Wallace tells. And while they inform the narratives, the narratives also open up subtleties of meaning in the artwork that are too often overlooked in the spangled designs. Wallace retrieves the art of Keringke from mere decoration, gives it depth and poignancy, and makes it sing.

To round out this collection of Arrernte culture, Wallace has included a CD that contains recordings of her telling seven of the altyerre stories included in the book. Each was recorded at the location where the Dreaming story took place. Wallace has a soft, gentle, and sweet voice that is wonderfully complemented by the natural sounds--mostly a variety of birdcalls that were serendipitously captured during the taping. There's an hour's listening here: the stories as recorded are much longer than the summary versions included in Arrernte and English in the printed part of the book. The locales at which these stories took place have been sumptuously photographed, and many times, in addition to Wallace herself, there are pictures of her grandchildren and other youngsters out in the country with her. It's easy to imagine them clustered around in the share of the ghost-gum women outside the cave at Uyetye, hearing the story of the cruel and selfish awele-awele woman, learning about family and sharing, learning the language of their ancestors, and the lie of the land. Load the CD's tracks on your iPod, tuck the book under your arm, stretch out in your favorite bush retreat on one of these gloriously sunny equinoctical afternoons, and see if I'm wrong.

Listen deeply, let these stories in is a jewel. Resplendent, moving, and fascinating, it is a perfect beginner's guide to Arrernte art and culture and a cultural document of unusual breadth at the same time, whether your interest lies in art, history, or linguistics. It is a delight to come across a book that offers you so many reasons to take it home with you, and promises so many varied hours of enjoyment.

The Irreconcilable Politics of Suffering

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:05:00 -0400

Almost ten years have passed since Peter Sutton delivered the inaugural Berndt Foundation Biennial Address at the University of Western Australia. In that speech he lamented the breakdown of well-being in remote Aboriginal communities and decried the policies of self-determination and welfare delivery that he believed had led to an intolerable status quo. Sutton, who had by that time spent nearly three decades studying, living, and working with the Wik people of Western Cape York, seems to have been energized by the repeated loss of friends and adopted family members in and around Aurukun to murder and suicide. Equally, the then-recent publication of Noel Pearson's Our Right to Take Responsibility (Noel Pearson and Associates, 2000) with its call to rejection of victimhood and government handouts provided inspiration for some of his arguments with politics as they played out in Cape York.

I first encountered Sutton's provocative thesis in its revised, published form as "The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Policy in Australia since the 1970s" in the journal Anthropological Forum (vol. 11, no. 2, 2001, pp. 125-173). I recall being doubly shocked by his article. It was the first extensive documentation I had seen of remote dysfunction; it was also the first blast at what I had thought until then as the unquestioned "liberal pieties" surrounding self-determination and the will to a renaissance of traditional Aboriginal culture and values.

It is primarily the latter theme, the failure of liberal ideals (signaled by the change in the subtitle from article to book) that Sutton focuses on in the monograph that has grown out of the 2001 article and a series of other speeches and writings he has delivered in the past decade. The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus (Melbourne University Press, 2009) can still shock, even after years of exposés in The Australian, the publication of Little Children are Sacred, and the Northern Territory Emergency Response. The new book is aptly described in the cover blurb by Marcia Langton as "incandescent, emotional, tragic and challenging."

I think Langton has caught the essence of Sutton's book in those four words. Most every review that I have read has brought out the intensely personal and emotional connection that fuels Sutton's despair and motivates him to seek a new answer, a "post-liberal" solution to the crisis in Aboriginal life. He marshals an impressive body of evidence for the failures both of successive governments and of Aboriginal communities. Many of his insights are keen, and if not original, still pertinent. He insists, for example, that during the last thirty years, governments implementing policies of self-determination have been far more interested in bureaucratic and fiscal accountability than they have in the quality of life on the ground (p. 49). He also unsparingly documents the history of and evidence for levels of violence in Aboriginal life that make those of us who hold liberal, Eurocentric values shudder (Chapter 4, "Violence, Ancient and Modern").

But time and again in the first half of the book, where he enlarges upon the evidence and themes he first presented in 2000-2001, Sutton's despair leads him into a sort of logical desperation. He speaks repeatedly of the "relatively benign" character of mission life at Aurukun prior to the liberalization of politics in the 1970s; I can only say that this seems quite at odds with evidence that has been put forth by others, including Nicolas Peterson in his summary of Donald Thompson's notes on life at the Aurukun Mission as presented in "A Biographical Sketch of Donald Thompson" in Donald Thompson in Arnhem Land (Miegunyah Press, revised edition, 2003):

For many years, indeed into the 1960s, Aurukun was controlled with a rod of iron by a superintendent of long standing. Under his regime and by his hand Aboriginal people were summarily punished by complete or partial head shaving, flogging, chaining, and imprisonment. The prison was a galvanized iron building, seven by twelve feet, divided into two compartments and containing as many a six adult prisoners at one time. For such a trivial offence as late delivery of the milk to the white staff's holiday camp on Archer Bay, miles from the mission, an Aboriginal man, Billy Blowhard, was threatened with goal. Worst of all, in Thomson's eyes, was the power of the superintendent to have people exiled for life to Palm Island simply on his own word, and without any trial (Peterson, p. 6).

Whatever the exact character of a place like Aurukun Mission, Sutton concedes that "the creation of holding and training institutions for Indigenous people under mission and government policies of the colonial era and afterwards ... was social engineering on a grand scale...." He goes on to agree "that it is unthinkable to argue for that kind of social engineering and intervention any more" (pp. 140-141).

And yet a mere two pages later he formulates in its baldest expression the solution to dysfunction that runs through much of The Politics of Suffering.

The evidence is heavily stacked against the rose-coloured expectation that Aboriginal people with a traditional orientation will simply adopt foreign causal theories, living conditions and health practices with alacrity, on the basis that they are good for their health. So it is not realistic to assume that the kind of cultural change I refer to here is going to occur quickly and simply as a result of education or persuasion of adults. The cycle of childhood socialisation needs to be re-geared if the specific behaviours to do with things like hygiene and sanitation, the legitimation of violence, the degree of priority placed on physical wellbeing itself, and openness to preventative health measures, are to change more quickly (Sutton, p. 143, emphasis added).

This is the logic of the missions: it is too late to affect the behavior of the adults and thus intervention in the lives of the children is the only hope. If Sutton is not arguing for "social engineering on a grand scale," he does not explain quite what exactly he is arguing for.

In the final chapters of The Politics of Suffering Sutton moves beyond the polemics of his early writings to take up a sort of anthropological and humanistic exploration of the two cultures and the disastrous results of their collision. He does not assign blame to colonial dispossession, government intervention, Aboriginal separatism, or passive dependence. Rather, Sutton argues persuasively that it is that collision of two very different views of the world, of the self, and of human relations that are the source and the fuel of the fire that is consuming Aboriginal Australia. In the chapters "Bodies Politic" and "Customs Not in Common" he examines the substantive differences between classical Aboriginal culture (admitting of significant variation between, for example, Yolngu and Pitjantjatjara) and the expectations of the modern European nation-state. I think it is fair to say that Sutton believes these differences to be fundamentally irreconcilable.

In his penultimate chapter, Sutton takes an unexpected turn to examine "Unusual Couples." Here he chronicles some of the extraordinary pairs of Aboriginal and European men and women whose names and writings (at least the Europeans' writings) are nearly synonomous with Australian anthropology in the twentieth century: Makarrwalla and Lloyd Warner in Arnhem Land, Bambegan and Ursula McConnel in the Wik country where Sutton later worked, Durmugam and Bill Stanner. Although it seems at first a strange digression into anthropological history, this chapter functions to further two critical points for Sutton.

The first of these points is that we will never know the exact nature of these extraordinary relationships, recorded as they were only from the anthropologist's point of view. Sutton even hesitates to use the word friendship to describe them. He goes on a series of interesting linguistic diversions to show that the concept of "friendship" may itself be entirely alien to the Aboriginal mind in which relationships are chiefly structured by concepts of kinship.

The second point is that the possibility for the remediation of culture clash is never better than it is in such intimate interconnections as these "unusual couples" achieved.

And thus, when Sutton returns in his final chapter, "On Feeling Reconciled," to the questions of politics that govern the suffering of his own Aboriginal relations, it is with a certain degree of pessimism about the possibility of political solutions. He concludes by offering a sort of personal salvation as an alternative to the political: it is only by establishing meaningful connections at the personal level between people who come from such disparate backgrounds that we can hope to work through the chaos and confusion that afflicts Aboriginal Australia.

For Sutton to emerge from two hundred pages of a critique of liberal idealism and "rose-coloured expectations" to such an idealistic, personal, and individual severing of his Gordian Knot was both surprising and inevitable. Surprising because I can't remember another voice in the many arguments about rights and responsibilities, strategies and solutions, to bring the discussion down to this intimate a level. Inevitable, perhaps because Sutton's arguments all stem from his very personal sense of loss, rage, or despair over the violence that has undone the lives of his friends and relations in Aurukun.

But politics is not about individual relationships, although they may be the foundations of life in the polis, the city. Politics works at the level of communities, and of cultures. And Sutton is right to recognize the perhaps irreconcilable differences between these two cultures. Like Tess Lea did in Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts, he zeroes in on the issue of repugnance: European repugnance at the place of violence in Aboriginal life, for example, and its converse, Aboriginal repugnance at the mutability of European laws on paper. Both attitudes are rooted in the respective culture's concept of what Europeans would call justice. If such a fundamental issue divides us, how can we achieve reconciliation, if reconciliation is ultimately about justice? Sadly, when Sutton recognizes the necessity of change, he presupposes the prerogatives of the modern nation state and sees no solution except that Aboriginal people change. In other words, he endorses the status quo.

Art of the Western Desert, New York

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 12:28:07 -0400

We traveled to New York City last weekend to attend the linked openings of Icons of the Western Desert at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University and Papunya Tula Artists' Nganana Tjungurringanyi Tjukurrpa Nintintjakitja (We Are Here Sharing Our Dreaming) just down the block at 80WSE.

John and Barbara Wilkerson were once more feted for sharing their collection of early Papunya boards with the rest of us, and the show, once again, looked marvelous. The hang this time was organized quite differently than it had been at Cornell, where consideration of history (recreating the sequence in which the paintings were originally made) and theme (comparing cave paintings, or setting the works of brothers Tim Leura and Clifford Possum side by side) directed the placement of the works in a large and very open space.

At the Grey, curator Lynn Gumpert and the "legendary" Fred Myers (as he's known around town) presented the paintings in a manner that is sure to appeal to the Manhattan gallery visitor, with plenty of white space on the walls between paintings and an eye for aesthetic correspondences. The main exhibition space also included two flat-screens showing films. One was the marvelous documentary by Ian Dunlop (in the still at the right Anatjari Tjakamarra is showing Fred Myers his country) that I first saw when Myers opened the Virtuosity exhibition at the Kluge-Ruhe Collection in April 2008, showing the painting camp at Yayayi Bore where he worked with many of the men whose works adorned the walls of the Grey. The second was a short film documenting the creation of the large ground painting by men from Papunya Tula Artists that was done at the Johnson Museum at Cornell at the opening of Icons there in February of this year.

One again, the presence of Papunya Tula Artists at the exhibition led to a fascinating manifestation of culture, though not a ground painting this time. On this trip Yukultji Napangati and D. R. Nakamarra came along. As the catalog of Icons of the Desert makes clear, there are paintings included in the show that should not be viewed by uninitiated Aboriginal men or Aboriginal women, and this posed a logistical problem for the Grey. They solved it quite nicely by giving these sacred works a small space of their own on the level below the main galleries. Visitors who descended to view them were also treated to a video of the film Mr Patterns about Geoff Bardon's days at Papunya when many of the paintings in Icons were made. Copies of the exhibition catalog, of Vivien Johnson's Lives of the Papunya Tula Artists, and other books documenting Pintupi art of the Western Desert were available for consultation as well.

On Thursday evening a crowd of about six hundred jammed the Grey Gallery for the opening of Icons. Provost David McLaughlin began with a brief welcome to all on the part of the University, followed by remarks by Australian Consul-General, Philip H. Scanlan. But the highlight of the short ceremony were the comments of Sonia Smallacombe (right, in red, in the foreground right Wilkerson, Scanlan, and Myers), a member of the Maramanidji people of the Daly River region and the United Nations' Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. She spoke eloquently herself on the eloquence of Aboriginal art, of the voice it represents for her people, and of her delight in hearing that voice acknowledged in New York. It was a rare pleasure--and a measure of one difference between Australian and the US--to hear her acknowledge the Lenape of the Six Nations, the indigenous custodians of the island of Mannahatta on whose ground we were standing.

The remainder of the evening, for me, was spent in the delightful business of reconnecting with old friends and the even more rewarding activity of making new ones.

Early on Friday we traveled back to Washington Square to drop in at 80WSE where PTA was busily engaged in hanging their show prior to Saturday's opening. It was a scene of memorable and thrilling activity as paintings were lined up against the walls and then hoisted into place by a hard working crew. Even though I'd seen a preview of the show's catalog, I wasn't really prepared for what PTA brought along with them.

In one of the two windowed rooms that fronted Washington Square itself, a large (six-by-eight foot) painting by Nakamarra dominated. Given the physical scope of the canvas, Nakamarra was able to literally expand her treatment of the creek and the sandhills at Marrapinti. Her trademark undulations threatened to almost spill off the canvas into the gallery space.

Across the entryway, in a smaller room the show's signature image by Johnny Yungut Tjupurrula (left) held a dialogue across the space with an explosive work by his wife, Walangkura Napanangka. Tjupurulla's painting, Tingari Men at Malparingya, was inspired when staff at PTA showed him images of some of the earliest works he had done for the company. The rawness of the drawing and the paint handling gave the image a propulsiveness that evoked the energy of a ceremonial dance and the flicker of firelight on painted bodies or cave walls. (If that last sentence seems a bit overloaded with imagery, then I've captured some of Tjupurrula's power.) Facing it, Napanangka's depiction of the story of Katungka Napanagka at Tjintjintjin echoed both the color scheme and the propulsion of Tjupurrula's image. In between them, a black-and-white masterpiece by Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Tingari Men at Murmur, seemed almost serene by comparison. But if you rested your eyes on it for more than a few minutes, the lines of the composition began to writhe; when I stepped out into the street for a moment to take in all three works at a glance, Tjapaltjarri's work looked almost as if it were being held in highly charged and dynamic stasis by the opposing energies of the other paintings in the room.

At the opposite end of the gallery, the back wall of one room was covered with a suite of works in the signature 107x28 cm size that PTA uses for small works. Ten paintings by accomplished Pintupi masters, men and women, showed off the varieties of style among the artists, and their brilliant but subtle mastery of color. In nearly forty years the artists of Papunya Tula have never strayed far from the traditional, spare palette of ceremonial design. Red shaded into yellow for some brilliant orange effects in Makinti Napanangka's works, indulged by a lilac streak; red pierced an otherwise black-and-white design by Ningura Napurrula in a fecund explosion. Despite being less than a foot wide, these canvases too pulsated with energy; sawtooth designs by Ray James Tjangala and Nyilyari Tjanpangati pushed at the frame as forcefully as Ronnie Tjampitjinpa's roundels or Nakamarra's serpentine meanders.

In the other rooms of the gallery the characteristic Papunya Tula panoply of inventiveness unfolded. Ronnie Tjampitjinpa's bold pearl shell meanders (left, with Andy Weislogel and Paul Sweeney) played counterpoint with George Tjungurrayi's austere lines of close-hued colors that gave up the subtleties of their designs even more gradually than Yukultji Napangati's sandhill mappings. Michael Reid's painting of designs associated with the rockhole at Tarkul brought a catch to my throat from across the room, so vividly did it evoke his father Timmy Payungka's Dreaming stories. Patrick Tjungurrayi's small canvases were less flamboyant that some of his large, prize-winning works of late but had the sheen of ceramic mosaics with their thick dottings in white and yellow against orange and red tracks.

The brilliance of the artwork held me captivated for most of the day on Saturday, as did long conversations with friends. I missed all the films that were on show farther downtown in a program organized by NYU's Faye Ginsburg and featuring the work of Indigenous directors Beck Cole and Warwick Thornton. (And we had to catch a flight home too early on Sunday to let us catch the special screening of Samson and Delilah at the Museum of Modern Art.)

Despite the jet lag, all the hard work of prepping the space, stretching the works, and hanging the show, the Papunya Tula mob were clearly having a grand old time. Julie Harvey's efforts on their behalf here in the States paid off handsomely as waves of the curious and the committed kept streaming in throughout the afternoon. The ladies themselves looked resplendent in their flash new gowns, acquired on a downtown shopping trip with Sarita Quinlivan the day before; Paul and Charmaine were unflappable as usual, and eleven-month old Lucinda was stealing hearts left and right. Despite the blustery winds and the sometimes heavy rains, spirits were high all around. Nor was the enthusiasm contained to the PTA crew: by the time I made a final circuit of the galleries shortly before six p.m., over two-thirds of the canvases sported red dots. Not a bad showing for opening day of art from the Western Desert in New York City.

Nganana Tjungurringanyi Tjukurrpa Nintintjakitja closes next Saturday, September 26, so there's just less than a week left to expierence its glories. Icons of the Desert will remain on at the Grey Gallery until December 5, and an extended program of lectures graces the fall calendar at NYU.

October 25, 2009: I have just learned that D. R. Nakamarra, whose presence graced the opening of Nganana Tjungurringanyi Tjukurrpa Nintintjakitja, passed away unexpectedly in recent days. We are all shocked. As a friend said, "What a fragile society that is."

Health Affairs

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 12:39:17 -0400

Tess Lea has written a book of frightening import and importance.

Despite its subtitle, Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous health in northern Australia (UNSW Press, 2009) is not so much a direct examination of the state of Indigenous health affairs in the Northern Territory as it is an ethnography of those who are charged with "ending Aboriginal disadvantage in the frontier north of Australia." Lea herself is the Director of the School for Social and Policy Research at Charles Darwin University, previously co-author Learning Lessons: an independent inquiry into Aboriginal education in the Northern Territory (1999) and co-editor Moving Anthropology: critical Indigenous studies (2006).

Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts is not another recitation of the parlous state of Indigenous health: that is almost an assumed premise. Rather, it is an attempt to understand how the government tries to cope with the task of organizing itself to address the issue, and how the people who make up the Territory Health Service (THS) cope with both the challenges and the stresses of the work. It examines how the structures and demands of the bureaucracy affect the people who work for it, how such structures influence solutions, and how the entire need to take action in itself generates what Lea describes as the self-replicating process of the need for further action.

And yet the book is not simply a treatise of criticism Lea never loses sight of the earnest dedication and the idealism of the people who sacrifice so much of themselves to the Territory Health Service and its mission. With years of involvement in social policy and as a practicing anthropologist who has turned her gaze not on the exotic other but on the very institutions she herself works for, Lea undertakes the nearly impossible challenge of understanding how her own culture operates in its confluence with Aboriginal society.

[It] would not have been enough for me to describe the faults of governmental policies. This is a book about the existence of the state with the self and the self within the state. My subject has not been the artifice of bureaucratic constructions but their social life, and how they are brought to life by social beings. This is art and artisanry, artifice and facticity, coalescing into powerful systems of cultural reproduction that come together in the orchestral work of upholding the developmental state. A sense of wonderment is called for, even if the cultural mastery at play here remains uncelebrated within anthropology, which only sees a non-fantastic rationality in need of correction (pp. 235-36).

For over a decade, Lea has been closely involved with THS, shadowing health workers on assignment in remote communities and in Health House, the Darwin central office and administrative soul of the organization. She has taken part in bush orientations in communities and on mudflats, often grueling exercises that test physical and emotion endurance. She has also participated in countless workshops aimed at defining problems, inventing solutions, and building esprit de corps amongst the workers.

It is especially in these workshops that a picture of the bureaucracy emerges that evokes my assessment of "frightening." It is frightening because it is so familiar and rings so true. But Lea's portrait reveals how the necessary structures of any bureaucracy inevitably turn back upon themselves and threaten to strangle their intended outcomes.

The workshops allow their participants to raise issues, to vent their emotions, to figure out what to do next. Participants in one workshop described early on in the book respond to their leader's call to verbalize their experiences; the leader (Bob) then summarizes their stories into bullet points on the communal whiteboard. One participant has this to say:

I feel frustrated being seen as a service deliverer, as a doctor first, there only to see sick people. All I see are people with pus, with sores. As a visitor I cannot spend time with people working on more chronic issues.

Bob writes:

>> inability to work up programs

And the trauma for [our] families is unreal. I take it out on my kids ... abuse them for being so privileged. I really coped very badly. I couldn't talk to my husband for at least the first hour after I got back. I would have to take myself out of the house, go for a walk, go to the gym, something .... It was so hard.

Bob writes:

>> lack of debriefing opportunities (pp. 89-91).

The requirements of reducing the complexity and chaos of everyday life to manageable bullet points, to the essence that can be captured and addressed by a program generic enough to be widely applicable, drains the life, the very reality out of the experience of these dedicated workers. Is it at all surprising then that programs born of such brainstorming sessions ultimately fall short of effective solutions to real world challenges? A few pages later Lea laments the way in which these exercises lead to "institutional self-perpetuation."

It is here, I want to argue, here within the selection of hardships to relate (in the well-proportioned anecdote and the emotions attested, in the sympathetic reception and the confirming responses of other), that the complex regulation of the 'romance of raw experience' is accomplished. It is here that the genesis of institutional self-perpetuation and its obscuring from itself can be located. The trick is to recognise the heavy-handed stamp of the ordinary in the extraordinary public health professional. And further to see that these constraints arise out of the close inspection and recuperation of failure.... (pp. 94-95).

In other words, the work of enunciating the further work that still needs to be done is itself an endpoint.... It is through talking that specially chosen words are bestowed with their magical ability to 'make a difference on the ground'. It is through talk work that professionals create shared grammars of both complaint and diagnosis in parades of collective analysis which are immersions in techniques for recuperating past failure into the need to do more of the same (p. 107)

The gap, the difference between Aboriginal lives and bureaucratic imagination is a theme that Lea sounds repeatedly. Those who routinely enjoy good health,whose bodies are not sending out distress signals hourly and daily, can find it hard to incorporate (in its literal sense of "bringing into the body") the experience of chronic disease, no matter how good their intentions. On the other side, those who are forever sick are not impressed by statistics and health information. For health professionals, the overwhelming data about Indigenous ill-health sound an alarm that the sickly themselves may not be able to hear.

It is the avalanche of catastrophe and opportunity that animates health statistics, and which convinces health professionals that a key requirement of betterment is that Aboriginal people know how sick they are through an appropriately alarming rendition of the statistics. ... Our own cultural fascinations are held to fascinate others, and not for the first time (pp. 132-33).

Ironically, attempts at cultural sensitivity can further widen the gap. Lea notes how rare it is for health workers to ever enter the homes of the people they seek to treat. Aboriginal visits to Visiting Officers' Quarters are often treated as intrusions to be quickly resolved. Instead the health officers meet with selected Aboriginal individuals, often those already most at ease with English and Western concepts of health and nutrition, in carefully selected, neutral, and largely whitefella physical spaces like clinics or community centres.

And then there is the episode of the "cursed store" in Numbulwar. Nutritionists were eager to restart a program of healthy eating habits that had been waylaid when the community stored was closed after it was put under a curse by one of the elders. A new store was under construction; the old store stood closed and increasingly dilapidated. The nutritionists carefully avoided probing the sensitive backstory; instead of focusing on the "issues of all-consuming importance in the micro-politics of Aboriginal communities" (p. 166), they focused on menus, food groups, and binders full of laminated photographs of healthy tucker. The health professionals were respecting the privacy of their clients and refusing to invade what they clearly saw as private space. They probably could not do otherwise, but they also lacked any understanding of the reasons why the first store had been cursed and abandoned, the electricity shut off, the food still rotting in the disabled freezers.

In this very respect for what Lea calls "the mystery of Aboriginal difference" lie the seeds of failure for those who wish to do things with Aboriginal people rather than for them, or worse, to them. The crippling legacy of colonialism overburdens bureaucrats whose hearts, in the best sense, bleed for their clients. And at the same time, the demands of the bureaucracy squeeze the life out of their experiences when it comes time to make policy.

Much has been made recently of the failures of the last thirty years, the failure of policies of self-determination and passive welfare, of the liberal bleeding-heart consensus, of policing and regulation. Those who decry the social engineering of those failures suppose that now that they have recognized the futility of these regimes, the better way will shortly emerge or is indeed already apparent. Lea implicitly suggests that perhaps the next solution, grounded as it inevitably will be in the logic of intervention, is likely to fail just as miserably.

Lea herself proposes no such solutions. Her aim here is to illuminate the logic we cannot see in the system that we are part of. She does not take sides; she critiques, but she does not condemn.

Amidst the intense factionalism about approach and political commitment, there is a tremendous standardisation in the logic which explains the need for our interventions, for our very positioning as concerned helpers. It is, as we have seen, such a readily ... generalisable logic that it can be inserted into any situation, with out the need for specific knowledge, of these particular people, their place, their contemporary context, specific histories or intimate local concerns (p.210)

It is a metaphysic which cannot for a moment entertain an order of socio-economic co-existence with Aboriginal people that excludes institutional intervention; a metaphysic which would ask, as pre-emptory response to even this critique, but what else would you have us do? For doing nothing has now become unimaginable (p. 212).

The special genius that Tess Lea brings to Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts is that, throughout, her focus is on "specific knowledge, of these particular people, their place, their contemporary context"; she looks clear-eyed at black and white, left and right. If abstraction is the enemy, the challenge is to construct ways of thinking that can function successfully in the structural and perhaps unavoidable straightjacket of institutional logic. In a pair of playful sub-heads to her final chapter, Lea acknowledges "I've met the state ... and she's an anthropologist." She exempts no-one, least of all herself, from the need to examine the issues unblinkered and focused on the concrete, the intimate, and the immediate.

Reflections on the Western Australian Indigenous Art Award

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:10:25 -0400

Having stayed at home this year, I don't have much of substance to say about the 26th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards that hasn't already been said elsewhere. I've never been terribly fond of winner Danie Mellor's style; personally it's too fuzzy and too cute for my taste. But I don't have much patience for the protests that break out every time someone like Mellor or Richard Bell wins the award, complete with suggestions that there ought maybe to be two awards so that we can recognize "traditional" artists every year and not lump "urban" artists in with the "Aboriginal" artists. And if you really have problems with a blue-eyed winner, I'm sure you can reach Andrew Bolt at the Herald Sun for companionship and commiseration.

Plus, I have to admit that my attention was distracted a little by the arrival in the mail of catalogues from the Art Gallery of Western Australia from the 2008 and 2009 Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards.

If NATSIAA began as "a few tinnies and a pissup," a party for the artists that has grown into an institution, perhaps the WA award had a loftier (if not necessarily worthier) genesis. Writing in the inaugural catalog essay in 2008, Susan Lowish of the University of Melbourne pondered the problem of establishing an Indigenous aesthetic. Echoing Eric Michaels' question of twenty years earlier, Lowish wonders how we distinguish good Aboriginal art from bad, how we incorporate the meaning invested in these works by the artists themselves into a set of judgements about their quality.

As Lowish points out, it is a vexed question, and never more so than in the context of an awards program, be it WA's, the NATSIAA, or the now sadly defunct Xstrata Emerging Indigenous Art Award. In the realm of ceremony from which much of this art emerges, anthropologists have frequently documented the exercise of critical judgement by the community directed at proper execution of designs, songs, and dances. The emotional reactions of contemporary artists confronted suddenly with works from past decades testify likewise to the evocative power of acrylic paintings. But what are the criteria by which these works should be judged? How do Indigenous perspectives differ from those schooled in Western aesthetics?

One way in which all the major awards have attempted to deal with this question in the context of determining winners is to invite submissions from artists and communities, so even at the very first pass, there is some assurance that the Aboriginal perspective on what is best in contemporary practice gets taken into account. Beyond that, the selection and judging panels have Indigenous artists and curators as members.

The WA award, like the Xstrata before it, and perhaps with this question of Indigenous aesthetic in mind, has opted to invite multiple submissions from each artist. In perusing the catalogs for the first two years of the competition, I was struck by how the artists have chosen to work this angle. Generally speaking, the 2008 entries were more consistent for each artist. Several of the urban-identified artists submitted works in series--Fiona Foley's twin series "Venus" and "Sea of Love," for instance. "Venus" is a set of photographs of Foley, shown from the knees down in a variety of enticing footwear; these photographs themselves hang on the walls behind the men whose portraits form the content of "Sea of Love." Shane Pickett's "Seasons" is a suite of six canvases that assert the ontology of Aboriginal time-keeping over the course of the year.

Even among the bush artists, there was a remarkable consistency, with Naata Nungurrayi and Patrick Tjungurrayi presenting variations on the same compositional themes; Sally Gabori offset her black-and-white constructions with large and simple fields of blue-green or intense pink, which Patrick Mung Mung's canvases might have been a series of still images extracted from a moving panorama of his country, each linked by color and form to the other.

In the second year, the artists' selections broadened out somewhat. True, Tony Albert's photographs are a deliberate series: in each he poses with a bicornual basket hanging down his back; in each the contents of the basket and his clothing change to fit in with a different environment, be that sporting arena, beach resort, fishing boat, or Queensland rainforest. Likewise Brian McKinnon's suite of graphical political posters gain much of their power when taken as a whole. But while Yinarupa Nangala's canvases all share a common structural strategy, Doreen Reid Nakamarra has chosen works that display the entire range of compositions she works in. Daniel Walbidi's paintings are stylistically consistent, but he varies the shapes and sizes of his canvases from near squares to greatly elongated rectangles. He experiments with variations in his palette; he organizes one composition radially, another in long parallel rows; he combines the two patterns in a third.

Dennis Nona went a step further, submitting sculptural work as well as etchings. Shane Pickett, the only repeat finalist in the two years, displayed his virtuosity in variations of color and composition this year. Christopher Pease offered examples of his historical deconstructions alongside his dense, abstract works in resin. In "King George Sound" Pease combined the two styles in one work and added Alice in Wonderland's Rabbit to the mix in a line drawing on the resinous background.

Lorraine Connelly-Northey submitted only one work (right), but its massive scale--nearly eight meters long and over three tall--allowed her to build in whole worlds of imagery: landscapes undulate over memories of desert shields as rainbow serpents transform themselves into rivers and fish traps, all built out of the discards and scraps of colonial fences and corrugated sheds rusting back into the primordial landscape.

But the more I lost myself in the rich displays offered by the two years' finalists, the farther I seemed to get from any hope of decoding that elusive Indigenous aesthetic. Apart from some vague notion that all of these works comment directly or indirectly on the interface between colonizers and colonized, on the adaptations of Aboriginal people to new economic and social structures, and on the preservation of aspects of traditional culture in the face of an onslaught of alien custom, I found little to ground a new theory on.

What, I wondered, would Timmy Cook make of Tiger Palpatja's canvases? There are some superficial formal similarities in composition, despite the differences between Cook's austere palette and Palpatja's iridescent colorings. How would a Tiwi artist respond to the serpents that dominate these Central Desert paintings? Would Cook read the animal in the upper left corner of Palpatja's red-and-black "Wanampi Tjukurpa" canvas as a long-necked tortoise?

Perhaps an "Indigenous aesthetic" is rightly a phantom, a figment; what would the word for it sound like in Aboriginese?

Instead, I am reminded of Howard Morphy's Becoming Art: exploring cross-cultural categories (Berg, 2007). In it he recalls an experience in which he and the great Yolngu painter Narritjin Maymuru tried to interpret Abelam art from New Guinea. In summarizing the story I wrote the following in my review of the book:

The Abelam have little to say about the content of their paintings and do not relate them to mythic stories or cultural histories in a way that corresponds to either Yolngu or Western methods of organizing either the thematic or iconographic elements of their art.

Any treatise that attempts to present an ethnographically alien style of (for instance) art always walks the fine line between the familiar and the strange. Too much of the former risks overemphasizing common humanity, too much of the latter, our diversity; too much of either inevitably does some violence to the complexity and the problems of extending understanding across the cultural divide.

Still, it is clear that the Art Gallery of Western Australia is serious about contributing to a dialogue that advances a broader understanding of what Aboriginal art means to those who make it. In doing so, they are also contributing to a coherent formal aesthetic which can be assimilated into Western modes of thought about the art. The fine catalogs that they have produced for the first two years of the Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards are valuable additions to our literature.

So too is the catalog documenting Yirrkala Artists Everywhen: bark paintings from the state art collection, an exhibition which was mounted at the Art Gallery early in 2009. It is a lovely piece of work, with excellent maps (always a plus in my evaluation), detailed illustrations, and most of all, a fine essay by Chad Creighton.

Creighton was the recipient of the Gallery's first Indigenous Curatorial Internship, a position he held while pursuing a degree at the Curtin Institute of Technology. His essay is a wonderful synthesis of his own research, insights gained from academic studies (Morphy figures prominently in the bibliography along with Stanner and many others), and work with the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Art Centre in Yirrkala. (Creighton helped to repatriate materials collected by Louis Allen to the community in the course of his work.)

The exhibition was the culmination of Creighton's three years at the Gallery, and he was fortunate in having a superb collection of early works to draw upon. Among the highlights presented in the catalog are the last three paintings completed by Mathaman Marika before his death, all documenting the story of Wuyal, the ancestral sugar-bag, and created to protest the development of the bauxite mine at the sacred Rirratjungu site of Nhulun. Creighton has done right by his material, meticulously documenting the works in the exhibition, blending Yolngu voices with those of scholars while developing his own--which may well prove to be an important voice among the next generation of Indigenous curators being launched through laudable efforts like this internship at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Perhaps the most delightful aspect of discovering these fine catalogs is that they are in some ways very modest productions. Although great care and no doubt some expense went into the production of these books, none of the three tops 50 pages. They prove that galleries can produce thoughtful contributions to the interpretation and documentation of Aboriginal art that don't need to be blockbusters to succeed. AGWA deserve to be commended for mounting such fine shows, and for sharing them with future scholars and art lovers alike.

The Western Desert in Painting, Film, and Lecture

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:51:21 -0400

There will be a wealth of lectures and films coming up in the next few months in New York City in association with the exhibition of Icons of the Desert: early Aboriginal paintings from Papunya at the Grey Gallery of New York University. A program of New Indigenous Cinema from Australia will kick things off on September 12 at the National Museum of the American Indian's NYC venue. Fred Myers will be giving a series of lectures illuminating the cultural context for Pintupi painting. Francesca Cubillo, late of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and now Senior Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Australia will be speaking on October 22. Roger Benjamin and Andy Weislogel, who mounted the exhibition for the first time at Cornell University's Johnson Museum of Art, round out the lecture series on the first weekend of November.

Full details can be found on the Grey's website, and in this program listing: IconsOfTheDesertPublicProgram.pdf

Below are just some highlights from the season. (Download the PDF above for more.)

It's a particularly rich moment for Aboriginal art in America. Culture Warriors, the inaugural Australian Indigenous Art Triennial curated in 2007 at the NGA by Brenda Croft opens at American University's Katzen Art Center in Washington DC the same weekend that Icons of the Desert debuts at the Grey Gallery. And a retrospective of the work of Richard Bell will be at Location1 on Greene Street in New York's Soho District from October 8 through November 21.

Desert & Metropolis: Papunya Tula Comes to New York

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 12:40:45 -0400

In little less than a month, Icons of the Desert: early Aboriginal paintings from Papunya returns to the east coast of America, where it will be on view at the Grey Gallery of New York University through the first week of December. There will be a host of events coinciding with the exhibition over the next four months, but none may prove as momentous as the premier exhibition of contemporary work by Papunya Tula Artists in New York City. Of course, works by the company have been on display here before, but the Big Apple has never yet seen the likes of Nganana Tjungurringanyi Tjukurrpa Nintintjakitja (We Are Here Sharing Our Dreaming) at 80 Washington Square East Galleries from September 12 through September 26. Only two short weeks to witness this miracle, so make your travel arrangements now!

When Icons of the Desert first opened at Cornell University in February 2009, Papunya Tula came over in the persons of three senior men from the company, Bobby West Tjupurrula, Joseph Jurra Tjapaltjarri, and Ray James Tjangala, who built a link between the present day company and the historic works of Icons by creating an enormous ground painting out of desert sand, vegetable down, and ochre in the gallery of Cornell's Johnson Museum. In doing so they demonstrated the living continuity of a tradition both aesthetic and spiritual that affirmed their solemn connection both to their country, in the materials they brought with them to make the painting, and to their Law, in the design of the Tingari story from Kiwirrkura that mirrored the works hung on the gallery walls.

This interweaving of past and present, of ancient tjukurrpa with contemporary acrylics, is of course part of the essence of contemporary Aboriginal art from Australia. Indeed, it is of the essence of tjukurrpa itself, W. E. H. Stanner's famous everywhen that characterizes the Dreaming not as an ancestral, creative past, but a spirit infused through and sustaining what we in the west think of discretely as past, present, and future.

If I think of present and future, for the moment, I am struck by how this opportunity to see a significant selection of contemporary painting from Papunya Tula--there are 45 canvases in this exhibition--offers an unparalleled opportunity for the future of Aboriginal art in America. Will "the most exciting field of contemporary Australian art ... be able to gain the trust of serious art buyers in countries like the United States," as Paul Sweeney wonders in his essay for the catalog now in preparation for this show?

It certainly seems that, for Papunya Tula, the moment is especially ripe. Just two days ago, Yinarupa Nangala took the General Painting Prize at the 26th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. (Yinarupa's brother is Ray James, who participated in the Cornell ground painting; she was married to the late Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi whose work is in included in Icons.) Doreen Reid Nakamarra, who won the General Painting award last year, was highly commended by the judges this year, and of course Makinti Napanangka, the grandest of grandes dames of Pintupi painting, was last year's overall winner at NATSIAA. All three women have significant work in the New York show.

Just three years ago, Papunya Tula mounted a smaller but no less stunning contemporary exhibition in another major world capital with the Pintupi show at Hamiltons Gallery in London, and collectors lined up four deep for the chance to purchase works by the likes of Makinti, Patrick Tjungurrayi, Naata Nungurrayi, and Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, all of whom will be also represented in New York.

Nganana Tjungurringanyi Tjukurrpa Nintintjakitja will bring to America other deep links to the past in the persons of Doreen Reid Nakamarra and Yukultji Napangati, traveling with the company to New York this time. Nakamarra was born in Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff) in the 1950s and attended school as a child in Papunya, where she saw the famous mural that began the Western Desert art movement that is being celebrated now. Ikuntji itself was the place where the first paintings were done in the mid-1990s by the women who are now mainstays of Papunya Tula Artists, and Nakamarra has been painting for Papunya Tula since 1996. Napangati, along with Warlimpirrnga, was part of the famous family group who walked out of the Western Desert into Kiwirrkura in 1984. She, like Nakamarra has painted for the company for a decade, although the two are seen as among the newest stars in a long line of masters.

An old master whose work will be seen in New York is Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, the only member of Bardon's group of "painting men" from 1971 still actively producing work for Papunya Tula Artists. Tjampitjinpa has recently undertaken a series of Water Dreamings from the country west of Kintore whose iconography evokes the meanders of pearl shells that were traded all the way from the northwest coast of Australia to the Central Deserts as rain making charms. And so, nearly forty years after the company came into existence, Tjampitjinpa electrifies its latest show with motifs drawn from a spiritual and aesthetic past that predates contact with Western culture. So too does Johnny Yungut, whose newest work calls forth memories of paintings created as part of ritual men's business on the walls of caves and the backs of initiates in the far reaches of the Western Desert.

Among the lesser known artists whose work will be on display in New York is the young Michael Reid Tjapanangka, son of the eminent Timmy Payungka Tjapangati, whose late works, kangaroo and goanna dreamings, conjure the country around Wilkinkarra (right) in black and white meanders. Family connections are thick on the ground here, for Tjapanangka was raised by Doreen Reid and her late husband, George Tjampu Tjapaltjarri and Timmy Payungka's works feature in Icons as well.

But fascinated as I am by the play of history and the resonance of the past in the present, I do not want to lose sight of the glorious quality that Nganana Tjungurringanyi promises to bring to America. The artists who are included, be they relative youngsters like Yukultji Napangati and Michel Reid or senior painters like Yungut and Makinti, are all painting at the absolute top of their form. There are enormous, expansive canvases comparable to those now on display at the 26th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in Darwin and delicate works in PTA's trademark 107 x 28 cm stretcher size. (According to Nicolas Rothwell's review of the Award show, all eight of the canvases PTA submitted this year made it through pre-selection to the finals, a testament to the power and sophistication of the company's art. In addition to artists mentioned above, this year's slate at the NATSIAA includes George Tjungurrayi, Nyilyari Tjapangati, and Walangkura Napanangka, all of whom will be represented in New York. See "Evolution of a Landscape," The Australian, August 17, 2009.)

There can be little doubt then that the artwork on display next month at 80 WSE Gallery will be dazzling in style and execution, as the show's signature piece by Naata Nungurrayi (left) demonstrates. Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri's vertiginous black and white optical patterns will astonish, as will Yukultji Napangati's finely crafted evocations of sandhills that call to mind Agnes Martin's grids, shimmering and melting gently in the furnace of the Australian desert. Many of the styles that PTA brings to the metropolis will seem instantly familiar to New York's eyes, but that is only part of the story.

For in the title of the exhibition, We are here sharing our Dreaming, these artists have made it clear that they are coming half way around the world to tell stories, to penetrate hearts and minds as well as markets. This may prove the more difficult task, for as cosmopolitan as New Yorkers can be, they can also be notoriously immune to the cultures that have historically flocked to their island. It is not easy for group shows of art from other countries to penetrate the insular mindset of the New York art scene. But I will be astonished if the sheer exuberance, delicacy, power, grace, and excitement of these works fails to ignite the imaginations of all who come to see them. For the art of Papunya Tula at its finest is, quite simply, unparalleled. It has the power to reach deep into our senses and our spirits; I trust that New York audiences will be up to the challenge.

Pulikatjara, the two sacred mountains at Walungurru within sight of the Papunya Tula studio

Social Archaeology and Aboriginal History

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 11:17:19 -0400

In the nineteenth century the Darwinian theory of evolution and the Victorian belief in progress combined to place the Australian Aborigines firmly at the bottom of a metaphysical ladder of human development in the minds of people around the world. Early twentieth century fascination with the "primitive"--think Picasso--helped to reinforce a sense that the outlying reaches of European empires were temporally as well as geographically distant from the "modern" world. Even ground-breaking and often sympathetic studies of Aboriginal culture like those of Baldwin and Spencer were rooted in attempts to discover the earliest forms of social culture: much of their work stemmed initially from a desire to prove that group marriage, a somewhat indiscriminate form of many-to-many relationships, not only preceded monogamy, but was still practiced or discernible among groups like the Dieri of the South Australian Desert.

The notion that primitive cultures were static and unchanging was essential to the hope that the study of Aboriginal Australians would reveal truths about the origins of man and society. Added to that was the nearly universally accepted notion that hunting and gathering as a modus vivendi was but a precursor to the "rise" of agriculture, and that agriculture was the first step toward civilization as we know it.

And finally, a pervasive and no less important myth was the notion that primitive, pre-agricultural man was largely at the mercy of the environment. Primitive social organization, culture, even survival were dominated by natural forces, and that any observed change in the prehistoric record--population increase or decrease, the invention of tool-kits, even art itself--was driven by humans' need to adapt to changes in climate on in the availability of food on the hoof or in the ground, changes over which humans themselves had no control.

Put all of this together and you have a portrait of primitive man, of which the Aboriginal Australian has long been regarded as the exemplar, as passive and helpless, forced to expend all his energy on the simple yet dominating task of mere survival.

Myths die hard. In scientific circles, a revolution in thought can take decades to gain acceptance within the academy, and decades form to work its way into the popular consciousness. Darwinian evolution itself is a prime example of this. Even today the misunderstanding that "man is descended from monkeys," as if my great-great.....great grandmother were a chimp, is widespread. Ironically, the persistence of the notion that my maternal forebear once lived exactly like an Aborigine persists as well, along with the notion that it is somehow a failure on the part of primitive peoples to evolve that keeps them "backward."

The notion that early man's existence and culture was merely a set of responses to changes in the physical environment in which he lived has been the subject of intense debate among Australian archaeologists for over three decades now; indeed, the debate has sometimes been so intense that the notion's general overthrow has gotten lost in the shuffle. Because thanks to the work of Harry Lourandos, most archaeologists and anthropologists world-wide now accept the premise that, for instance, economic factors could lead to changes in, for instance, tool-making that were once believed to have been stimulated solely by changes in weather patterns or sea levels.

And thanks to the Aboriginal Studies Press, we can now trace the history of Lourandos's ideas and their impact on the fields of anthropology and archaeology through the essays published in The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies (edited by Bruno David, Bryce Barker, and Ian J. McNiven, 2006).

In 1980 Lourandos published a seminal article in World Archaeology entitled "Change of Stability?: Hunter-Gatherers and Population in Temperate Australia" (vol. 11, no 3, February 1980, pp. 245-264) in which he suggested population increase in southwestern Victoria after 3000 years BP (before the present) resulted from the ability of semi-sedentary people's ability to more efficiently harness energy (in this case, food) by developing technologies (weirs) that allowed them to exploit the local eel population. He went further to suggest that the increased energy yields were comparable to those obtained by agriculturalists in New Guinea at around the same time. In doing so, he indicated that there were parallel paths of resource exploitation among "hunter-gatherers" and "farmers," where conventional wisdom has assumed that farming represents an "advance" over gathering. Over the next two decades Lourandos marshaled evidence from across Australia in support of this process, known as "intensification," culminating in the 1997 publication of his monograph Continent of Hunter Gatherers: new perspectives in Australian prehistory (Cambridge University Press).

The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies is divided into four major sections. The first of these is "The emergence of social archaeology in Australia." It functions as an introduction to the life and work of Lourandos, and includes an interview with him by the three editors of the volume, all archaeologists who have been profoundly influenced by Lourandos as well as having collaborated with him over the years. These three chapters provide a clear and comprehensible picture of the concepts and debates surrounding Lourandos's theories and make for a good introduction even to those who, like myself, knew nothing of the subject before opening the book.

Part 2, "Tyranny of text" examines the ways in which conventional modes of thought and, especially, writing construct our understandings of evidence. The authors here want in part to pay homage to the revolutionary quality of Lourandos's thought and to defend him against those who are still unwilling to acknowledge his contributions to reshaping archaeological theory and practice in the late years of the twentieth century. They also aim to document the ways in which some of the myth-making I outlined at the start of this essay continues to marginalize Aboriginal people's place in both Australian history and Australian society.

One of Lourandos's radical achievements was a great willingness to incorporate insights from ethnographic studies of recent Aboriginal societies into his explications of the archaeological record. As the authors of the essays in Part 2 acknowledge, every representation of the past is shaped and informed by the attitudes of the present, for good or ill. Lourandos scrupulously tried to enhance his interpretations of the physical record of Aboriginal societies in past millennia by means of inference not drawn solely from that record but also from recorded cultural practice. This use of anthropology in the service of archaeology, and the confluence of the two disciplines, is central to Part 3, "Anthropological approaches."

The five essays in this third section cover a broad range of styles and approaches, from Marcia Langton's "social and spiritual construction of water in Aboriginal societies," to John Bradley's examination of the development of technologies for exploiting the normally toxic fruit of cycad palms for food, through Franca Tamisari and James Wallace's exploration of the theme of the transformation of neutrally-conceived "space" to highly charged "place." In this last mentioned essay, the importance of the Dreaming is foregrounded, which brought back memories of the very first book I discussed in this blog four years ago. That was Landscapes, Rock Art, and the Dreaming: an archaeology of preunderstanding (Leicester University Press, 2002) by Bruno David, one of the editors of this festschrift for Harry Lourandos.

The essays of Part 4, "Late Holocene change," return the focus to strict archaeological studies ranging from excavations of burial sites in South Australia through Western Desert rock art (and language) on up to excavations of rock-shelters in the Torres Strait. I found these essays to be the most challenging in the collection, as I have little grounding in the vocabulary and methodology of archaeology and could easily lose the thread of an argument while searching for a concise definition of "Harris lines" and their significance in assessing diet and by extension climate. Once I grasped the convention of presenting raw data and only then following up with a discussion, I fared better; at first I felt hopelessly ignorant, but a little patience made these essays both comprehensible and rewarding.

There is a fifth part to the book, a single chapter under the rubric of "Extending the boundaries." Although many of the essays in the earlier parts of the book do indeed extend the boundaries of Lourandos's work into new areas of research, Barbara Bender's final chapter also extends the book's geographical reach by demonstrating the influence of Lourandos's approaches on the reconstruction of a Bronze-Age site in England's Cornwall. Bender's essay is part memoir, part post-modernist reflection on the field, and part research report. In many ways it unifies the investigative strategies and theoretical stances that have been exposed throughout the preceding essays in The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies, including a focus on the unexpected ways in which archaeology can affect and be affected by the lives of the descendants of those it studies.

In the end, such repercussions of how the past is reconstructed and the stories that we tell ourselves about our ancestors do indeed have significant impacts on modern societies. Sadly, in the case of Australia, the stories too often reinforce myths of Eurocentric sophistication and progress at the expense of Indigenous people. Ironically, the romanticizing twenty-first century eco-warrior/guardian movement that seeks to position the Australian Aborigine as uniquely in harmony with the natural world, environmentally aware and in balance, may in fact be unwittingly reiterating the primitivizing myth of an environmentally driven culture lacking in human agency. The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies opened my eyes to a field of scientific investigation about which I knew almost nothing; I had no memory of hearing Harry Lourandos's name before reading the opening chapter. But this book also opened my eyes to a new understanding of social responsibility in scientific investigation while at the same time educating me to some of the fundamentals of that science, all of which made for a most rewarding experience.

In Rotation

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 13:10:58 -0400

I find it hard to believe that a year ago I was wandering the streets of Sydney and starting to get psyched up for a trip north to the Darwin Festival and its Santos-sponsored opening concert on the Esplanade featuring one of my all-time favorite bands, Nabarlek. But to quote another of my perennial choices, NoKTuRNL, "Time Flies." This year's show has been moved to the Garden's Amphitheatre and features Troy Cassar-Daley, the Garrangali Band, The Neo, and Lorrae Coffin.

But what I wanted to share with you today goes back to Darwin in 2006, where B2M took the stage with Gurrumul. As always, I'm a little late discovering Aboriginal bands. B2M doesn't stand for "Boyz II Men" (although it might): officially it's short for "Bathurst 2 Melville" and it's the first Tiwi outfit to make it into regular rotation on my iPod.

The band's page at Skinnyfish Music, where you can pick up their debut, Live from the Monsoon Sessions Darwin, describes them as "6 young Indigenous men that sing about the issues facing all young people such as drugs, alcohol and suicide. Their music is an R ‘n’ B pop with a traditional kind of twist to it." You'd think that made for grim listening, but in truth the effect is quite the opposite. Their clean, sweet vocals and gentle mix of acoustic guitar and electric keyboards instill a sense of peace rather than strife, and reflect the band's penchant to accentuate the positive; they've just finished touring the Top End for the the Red Cross doing workshops on "youth diversionary activities in songwriting and performing." Their big hit to date is "Mahlia," which you can see them performing here on the Darwin Esplanade.

Mahlia

Borroloola's Sandridge Band is another outfit that does a lot of public service work with their music, and I've been returning to their page on MySpace a lot lately to sample the variety of styles that they put out with the ease and grace of true professionals. The first tune that grabbed me was "Domestic Violence," which I liked first not for its message but for the spooky way the guys spun from pop to disco to hard rock without letting you realize it. A similar mix of shimmering electronic keyboards and psychedelic guitar licks informs their exhortatory theme song, "Get up n dance" ("Get up an dance for us, cause we're the Sandridge band and we're playing for your people tonight").

And like any decent Australian band, they can mix politics and reggae with absolute ease: check out "Australia," from the Barunga Live 2006: Safe Tracks Home CD, or "Think about our Culture," the title track from their 2007 debut album. (If anyone knows where I can get my hands on a copy of this CD, please let me hear from you.) They also have done a series of road safety spots, like this Drink Driving ad you can watch on YouTube.

While I was browsing YouTube, I came across a number of videos featuring the Last Kinection , whose anthemic "Still Call Australia Home" might just be the masterpiece of Oz HipHop. (There's a cell-phone clip of this from a performance at the Red Rattler available, but the sound is abysmal, unfortunately.) The Kinection is working their way around the country now on their Propa Mad Deadly Tour (check the MySpace page for dates and venues). But back at YouTube, they've got a spooky, clever new video, "Balooraman," up in the last month that you should definitely check out. The track is from their album Nutches, which is available in the US from Amazon (!) and in Australia from sanity.com.au.

Understanding the Grog

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 11:24:10 -0400

Among scholars of Indigenous experiences with alcohol and researchers of the effects of substance abuse more generally, Dr Maggie Brady has no peer. Her studies of Aboriginal drinking and petrol sniffing extend back thirty years and form the most broad-ranging and comprehensive body of investigation and commentary by any single individual. She has looked at the social history of alcohol, examined the habits of non-drinkers and those who "gave away the grog," charted the ebb and flow of petrol sniffing in remote communities, written on the Indigenous alcohol problem from the perspective of actions undertaken by the Australian Government, and discussed the impact of programs sponsored by the United Nations. Perhaps the quickest way to obtain an overview of her prodigious output is a quick browse through Google Books.

Most recently, Brady has produced a series of six short booklets collectively known as First Taste: how Indigenous Australians learned about grog (Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation, 2008). At about twenty-five pages each, handsomely designed and beautifully illustrated, these pamphlets aim to dispel many of the myths about Aborigines and alcohol that have accumulated over the years. Brady's position is that these misconceptions have reinforced a too popular notion that Aboriginal people are victims of the grog, powerless in its grasp. The defeatist attitudes that are thus spawned among both people Aboriginal and white only do more harm in turn. Brady's intent in this series may be focused--to peel away just a few layers and instill the tiniest bit of hope--but perhaps, as we have all heard many times in other contexts, from little things big things grow.

The first book, "Aims and Ideas," sets out the agenda for the series and presages some of the mythbusting that is to follow.

Aboriginal people traditionally had no alcohol
Alcohol use started in 1788 at Botany Bay with the First Fleet
Outsiders always used alcohol to exploit Aboriginal people
Aboriginal people were the passive recipients of alcohol
Alcohol abuse is determined more by biology than by social and cultural environment

These ideas are explored in the remaining books of the series. "The First Taste of Alcohol" contains sections on indigenous fermentation along with two accounts--one a tale from a startling Aboriginal point of view--of encounters with alcohol in 1788. The story of alcohol prior to the arrival of Europeans is further developed in "Strong Spirits from SE Asia," which focuses primarily on the role of Makassan traders in bringing alcohol to Australian shores, but also looks at early alcohol use in the Torres Strait influenced by contact with the Philippines and Polynesia. "Learning to Drink form the English" first examines the culture of alcohol use in England prior to the departure of the First Fleet and then takes up the story of Bennelong and Bungaree before concluding with a survey of bush drinking in the Victorian goldfields.

I was fascinated by the fourth book in the series, "The story of the bottle," an examination of the impact of glass bottles on Indigneous material culture over two centuries: the "bottle" of its title being a literal, not a metaphorical, reference to the containers that alcohol arrived in. Brady examines the archaeological record that reveals how the concave bases of bottles were incorporated into the Aboriginal toolkit as axes and scrapers and square-faced gin bottles were flaked to form highly-prized spear points. She follows this with an engrossing look at the bottle in contemporary artistic expression, from its use as decoration on graves, to its incorporation and depiction in the works of artists like Joanne Currie and Joan Stokes, to the woven bottles of Ramingining, before concluding with a look at how depiction of alcohol use in European illustration has influenced attitudes towards Aborigines in a more general fashion.

The final book in the series, "Struggles Over Drinking Rights," looks at both sides of the issue, at attempts to win equality before the law as well as attempts to build an Indigenous temperance movement to battle the ills brought with the grog. In this chapter of her examination as in each of the preceding, Brady is at pains to be non-judgmental and to simply present facts and dispel misconceptions. These are educational materials, not polemics. Useful bibliographies supplement each essay, and the clear, simple language makes them appropriate to a wide variety of readers from young students to health workers in Indigenous communities.

The set is available from the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation for most reasonable prices: a single copy is free; additional sets cost only A$11.00 each.

While doing a little background research for this post I came across this wonderful video presentation, Maggie Brady: History and Culture in Indigenous Alcohol Use from the ABC. In it, Brady delivers a lecture based on First Taste at ANU's Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. You can download the program (from ABC's Fora.tv series) to your iPod as well as watch it online. Brady is joined in this presentation by Robin Room, who responds to Brady's remarks and examines the problems of alcohol abuse from a broader perspective of current government policy, initiatives, and culture change. Although the entire presentation is nearly an hour long, a "table of contents" feature allows you to view it in brief chapters of just a few minutes each.

Making Business Work

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:20:11 -0400

If you have the time or inclination to read only one book on Aboriginal affairs this year, I would strongly suggest that you pick up Kim Christen's Aboriginal Business: alliances in a remote Australian town (SAR Press, 2008/Aboriginal Studies Press, 2009).

Christen has been working with the Warumungu traditional owners around Tennant Creek for almost fifteen years now. She has helped them build the digital Mukurtu Archive of their history and culture, and was active in the planning and construction of the Nyinkka Nyunyu Cultural Centre. I was able to hear her lecture about both of these activities at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in April 2008, and at the time she impressed me with her energy, enthusiasm, and multi-leveled appreciation for the lives and work of her Warumungu friends.

In Aboriginal Business, she expands the scope of her investigations enormously, which is one reason to make this your top choice for this year's reading list. In addition to addressing the "culture work" of the archives and cultural centre and the story of the production of a commercial CD of Warumungu women's songs, Christen offers a history of settler-Indigenous relations and interactions in the Tennant Creek region, focusing especially on the time since it became the center of the last major gold rush in Australian history during the 1930s. Part of what makes this such a fascinating story is the nature of the settlements at Tennant Creek. Established during the building of the Overland Telegraph in the 1870s, it is relatively remote, 500 km north of Alice Springs and 1000 south of Darwin, with little in the way of European settlement nearby. In 2001, approximately a third of the town's population of 3,000 was Indigenous. Thus, it shares traits of a white settler town and a remote Aboriginal community, largely Warumungu but with a Warlpiri, Alyawarr, and Kaytetye presence as well.

Christen details the story of conflicting land claims on both sides and talks about the succession of "mobs" that have tried to manage them: miners, government bureaucrats, lawyers, and throughout, Aboriginal families. She looks at the roles the Central Land Council, ATSIC, the Giants Reef mining company, the Federal, Territory, and town governments, and the railway companies have played in Tennant Creek. Each of her six thematic chapters looks at a different aspect of Aboriginal business in the town: land claims; Aboriginal organizations; mining; railways; cultural transmission in an age of digital technology; and the Nyinkka Nyunyu Cultural Centre.

The unifying theme that runs throughout these varied enterprises is announced in the book's subtitle and treated in the first, preliminary chapter: the making of alliances. By focusing on the work, the business of negotiation, contestation, and compromise, Christen is able to chart a history of Warumungu agency in Tennant Creek, its ups and its downs, but above all its persistence. This is a story about how people engage with their country and with those others who have come to occupy it with them. In her portrait of the Warumungu, they are neither passive victims nor activists, but rather women and men engaged in the business of living, with all their aspirations, disappointments, conflicts, and solutions.

That is not to say that Christen does not fully acknowledge the disadvantage under which the Warumungu labor. In the early chapters of the book she skillfully weaves together two narratives. The first is of the original dispossession as first the Overland Telegraph and then the gold mines brought waves of outsiders to the Barkly, intent upon taking over the land and pushing aside the Indigenous populace. The second is the effects of government policy in the last thirty years, culminating in Howard's Intervention. The philosophy of the Howard Government, with its emphasis on "practical reconciliation" and the "mainstreaming" of Aboriginal affairs into a broader Australian nation, stands as a metaphor for the logic of whitefella business that operates to exclude Aboriginal participation and agency.

In contrast, and perhaps to a degree in consequence, "Aboriginal business" has come to focus on the work of forging alliances, of harnessing willing partners and forcing unwilling collaborators into arrangements that provide options and choice for the Warumungu and allow them to assert their own position in the management of their lives and their country.

The historical sweep of Christen's narrative shows how these strategies have changed over time, all the while remaining focused on retaining control. Christen deftly skewers the gazetting of country around Tennant Creek, describing how the map making and marking of early white settlers was irrelevant to the Warumungu who remained as ignorant of the "power" of such pronouncements as the settlers were of the marking of country by the Dreaming tracks of the Warumungu ancestors. She demonstrates how in later years the Warumungu exploited the resources of missions and cattle stations and made those settlements the locus of their own social interactions: how the business of alliance-making among Aboriginal families was made necassary by whitefella settlement and at the same time forced negotiations between Aboriginal and settler.

When the historical trends of dispossession stood a chance of reversal in the wake of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (ALRA) and the opening of legal negotiations in the 70s and 80s, the Warumungu developed new tactics for doing business with lawyers, pastoralists, and miners. Christen treats the effects of these changes with subtlety, noting, for example, how Aboriginal men may have chosen at times to say no to certain deals simply to exercise a long-denied prerogative, and at other times to impress upon potential partners the seriousness of taking care of country; they may also have said yes in order to open up economic opportunities. In her chapter on collaborations with mining companies, Christen describes the dynamic in the wake of the ALRA:

Mining has been, out of necessity, a joint venture; various parties negotiate deals, sign contracts, and share royalties. Aboriginal people rely on mining companies to run explorations, buy equipment, hire workers (Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal), and produce profits. Aboriginal consent, guaranteed by the ALRA, does not mean total control; it is a means to alter the parameters of engagement within the industry and shift some benefits back to Aboriginal individuals and communities. A large sign in the Tennant Creek branch of the CLC offices makes Aboriginal land-based opportunities clear:
EXPLORATION COMPANY WANTS TO LOOK AROUND YOUR COUNTRY? WHAT YOU CAN DO:
1) DO NOTHING
2) TRY TO BLOCK IT
3) MAKE AN AGREEMENT

The choices are not endless (p. 144, emphasis in the original).

The blunt set of options outlined by the CLC, with its pragmatic conclusion, "make an agreement," sums up the story of recent Warumungu history as presented in Aboriginal Business. The chapter on the completion of the Darwin-to-Alice leg of the transcontinental railway offers an example of ways in which alliances work two ways. Working with representatives from ADrail, Warumungu people helped to chart a course for the laying of track through their country and to identify resources (like gravel) that would be required by the rail company to complete the portions of the track that ran through country around Tennant Creek. These exploratory journeys also facilitated the Warumungu's ability to care for country by providing transportation out to country that would otherwise be difficult to visit while at the same time introducing that country to the railway's officers.

The naming of two locomotives the Purnu (which appropriately means "carrier") and the Aboriginal Stockman added the element of "symbolic" reconciliation to the practical business of building a railroad, thus acknowledging the importance of recognizing Indigenous history in a way that John Howard was at the time vociferously denying. The names, one in Warumungu and one in English, acknowledge pre- and post-contact history, and so comprehend both Dreaming tracks and track of cast steel.

The community of responsible Warumungu leaders brought their territorial knowledge to bear on this project in a way that married ancestral need with contemporary economic goals. ... Taking railway workers out to sites of significance and negotiating the benefits for their own communities, these Warumungu leaders situated country obligations in a new constellation of responsibility, in which railway officials and construction companies became secondary agents in the oversight and care of Aboriginal country. Defining aspects of their country for the railway companies meant inviting them to see the land and their partnerships differently. It also gave the Warumungu people a change to conduct their own country business (p. 181).

These are but a few examples drawn from the riches of Christen's book to illustrate the ways in which Tennant Creek's Aboriginal people conduct their business both within their own communities and with the larger Australian state. Through them, she effectively and marvelously obliterates the tension between continuity and change, between tradition and modernity. For the Warumungu, there is no choice between living in the past and living with the modern state; there is only the option of living.

Although Christen's work has been ongoing and this book itself been in preparation for several years now, its appearance at this moment seems particularly timely in the wake of the July 2 release of Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2009, which has been the subject of much media commentary this month. For example, Fred Chaney was quoted in The Australian recently as saying, "The really important thing is to get permanent gains, not to waste the money. Those permanent gains will be best obtained if the Aboriginal people are strongly involved ... and that takes time. ... I would like to see more attention being paid not to speed of action, but on the effectiveness of action ("Engage Aborigines to solve race problems, Rudd urged," July 11, 2009). Christen's book demonstrates the wisdom of following Chaney's advice. Just this week, Nicolas Rothwell praised the upsurge in local, grass-roots organizations that are wresting solutions from the welfare-era government bureaucracies ("The local road to recovery," The Australian, July 18, 2009). Christen's work shows rather how those old bureaucracies made possible new local solutions by providing a model for local organization; it also demonstrates that such local initiatives are anything but new.

Aboriginal Business offers welcome and timely insights into both historical issues and contemporary social concerns. Encompassing government, law, the arts, and industry, it likewise provides an appreciation of the sweep of concerns the Warumungu are acting upon. In her synthesis of the diachronic and the synchronic perspectives on life in this corner of the Barkly Tableland, Kim Christen offers an analysis that is at once timely and timeless.

For another look at Aboriginal Business in Tennant Creek, check out Christen's photos of the book launch there last Monday on Flickr.

Postscript: Kim has just written an eloquent, moving, and heartfelt post on the book launch and its effect on her and the people of Tennant Creek on her blog, Long Road . It says far more than I ever could about what this book truly means.

Roper River's Richness

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:15:33 -0400

As a school of art, painting from Ngukurr and the Roper River region south of Arnhem Land has never been easy to classify. The four-color dotted patterns of precise work from Papunya are immediately recognizable, as is the brighter and less precise palette of Yuendumu. The slurred dotting and equally brilliant colors of Balgo, the warm landscapes from Warmun, the shimmering brilliance of Maningrida all make for easy and immediate identification. But how do you concisely characterize the commonalities that exist in the work of Ginger Riley, Willie Gudabi, and Angelina George?

Cath Bowdler, the new director of the Wagga Wagga Gallery, has come as close as possible in the title of the new exhibition she has mounted there: Colour Country: art from Roper River. "Colour" is the immediate key, brilliant and spectrum-crossing, primary, fluorescent, multi-hued, tonal: you could exhaust an entire thesaurus of color terms in describing these works. And "country," likewise, in a sense that is immediately accessible even to audiences unfamiliar with the idioms of painting country that characterize much Indigenous art. This is landscape painting that is immediately recognizable as such, whether the style be seemingly naive, as in Gertie Huddleston's painting, or epic, in the recent work of Angelina George.

But this diversity of style and temperament is only one reason I have never really grasped the concept of a "Ngukurr School." Given the high profile of a number of the artists from this area, and the frequency with which their works appear in catalogs from Sotheby's, it is astonishing to learn that the six major painters whose work is the focus of Bowdler's new exhibition--Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, Willie Gudabi, Gertie Huddleston, Djambu Barra Barra, Amy Jirwulurr Johnson, and Angelina George--have appeared all together only once before in a public gallery exhibition. That was on the occasion of Ngundungunya: Art for Everyone, organized to accompany the major retrospective of Ginger Riley's work at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997. And as the extensive bibliography that Bowdler has compiled for her catalog shows, there has been a disappointing paucity of critical writing on these artists, individually and collectively, apart from the catalog of the Riley retrospective and the forthcoming catalogue raisonne being prepared now by Beverly Knight, a long-time champion of the community's output.

Happily, Bowdler has rectified both these omissions, gathering together 50 artworks for the Wagga Wagga show and writing a superb catalog (with supplementary contributions from Judith Ryan on Ginger Riley and Nicolas Rothwell on Angelina George) that reveals both the history and the achievements of this remarkable school of painters. The diversity of styles and subjects was the subject of Bowdler's recently completed doctoral thesis at the ANU; now in the catalog's scant 100 pages, superbly illustrated, she has managed to share the fruits of her years of research in a way that ought to effect an important and immediate re-evaluation of the work.

Bowdler begins her analysis with two chapters of history. The first is of the region itself and the disruptions and dislocations caused by white settlement. Maps and photographs hint at the extensive geographic diversity of the land, from the stone country hills, along the Roper's valley, and down to the Limmen Bight on the Gulf of Carpentaria. The paintings and the artists' biographies, taken up in later chapters, also speak of diversity, of tropical richness, hard cattleman's country, and humid sea plains.

The second history exercise chronicles the founding and growth of the art centre itself, from its early days as an outgrowth of the Ngukurr Adult Education Committee's work to its first headquarters in a disused hospital building known as Beat Street, and finally into a secure, comfortable facility that was formerly the town library. The enthusiasm and drive of the artists themselves is the thread running through these two decades of changes.

A chapter is then devoted to each of the six major artists, and these chapters are art criticism of the highest order. Blending biographical information with close examination of the imagery and iconography, Bowdler, Ryan, and Rothwell stretch our comprehension of the sources and achievements of each artist's career. We learn what makes each of them unique, but also what binds them together: the luminosity of Ginger Riley landscapes, the color-soaked totems of Djambu Barra Barra's Yolngu-inspired desire, and the friendship that existed between the two men anxious to find new forms of expression. We learn about early successes for the community, and a long fallow period when it seemed as if the new community's ambitions would founder.

Especially satisfying is Bowdler's brilliant exegesis of Djambu Barra Barra's work. The combination of bold graphic design, an almost psychedelic palette that revels in a unique, eccentric color sense, and the use of rarrk for infills and backgrounds makes Barra Barra a standout even in this crowd of individuals. Bowdler delineates and explains Barra Barra's connection to the traditions of Arnhem Land (he hails from Nilpidgi, northwest of Blue Mud Bay and well north of the Roper) and skillfully shows how his adoption of the intense color schemes characteristic of the Roper River artists transfigures the brilliance of the rarrk tradition in a way that no other artist has attempted.

Similarly, Bowdler study of influence reveals how Barra Barra's sensibility finds some continuity in the work of his wife Amy Johnson and equally how her own vision and creativity flourishes apart from his. The story of Willie Gudabi's mentoring of Gertie Huddleston and her own adaptation of his style through the lens of Christianity offers new insights into the work of each. Reading the chapters on these latter two artists, I found myself thinking alternately of the composition of the Yirrkala Church bark panels and the Baptistry Doors on the Florence Duomo--not that Bowdler mentions either, but her text is rich enough to have sparked new associations and dreamy (if not Dreaming) paths for me to wander down.

The exhibition and catalog conclude with an all too brief consideration of the art of "Ngukurr Now." Ginger, Willie and Djambu are all gone. Maureen Thompson now carries on the tradition of empaneled country-telling. Her daughter Faith Thompson Nelson re-interprets Ginger Riley's country on the one hand, and on the other draws upon father's Alyawarra heritage to paint fiery transformations of the traditions of Utopia in the Central Desert. Alan Joshua Junior's sculptures spirit sculptures keep alive the tradition of rarrk painting in the Roper; his paintings reveal a burgeoning talent whose future path is so full of possibilities as to be unpredictable. I wish there had been room for other new artists to be included in this show. (Gertie Huddleston's daughter Joyce is a particular favorite of mine: she lifts what might have been tiny swatches from a painting by Gertie and fills large canvases with them in rhythmic, colored bands representing treetops and ravines or the depths of a billabong.) Perhaps Bowdler will turn her attentions to the Roper's new generation of artists in a future exhibition. I, for one, would be very grateful.

In the meantime, Colour Country: art from Roper River is a feast worth settling down to. The show is on at the Wagga Wagga Gallery until August 2. Thereafter it will travel to the Flinders University Art Museum in Adelaide in December, open at Drill Hall in Canberra in February 2010, and close out its run at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory from the end of May through mid-July 2010.

If you plan to take advantage of the opportunity to see this important exhibition in any of its upcoming venues, I would urge you to acquire a copy of the catalog (A$30) in advance, as careful study of these essays and the superb reproductions of the works will vastly enrich your experience of viewing the paintings in person. Few catalogs offer such deep insight, which is reason enough to purchase it if you can not see the show sometime in the next twelve months. You can contact the Wagga Wagga Gallery or Cath Bowdler directly. (Please note that you'll have to edit the addresses the links provide: replace (at) with @ for it to work.)

Installation view of Colour Country at the Wagga Wagga Gallery.