The Dealer is the Devil Read online

  The son of a Manchester cotton mill manager who was a pillar of the Methodist church, Spencer excelled in science and was expected to study medicine after leaving Old Trafford. He changed course, however, and enrolled in the Manchester School of Art. By the time he arrived in Australia in 1888 to take up the foundation Chair of Biology at Melbourne University, he was a charismatic polymath who had abandoned conventional religion, Slightly built, at 34 years old, he had a broad Lancashire accent and sported a large moustache that would droop, or be trimmed, according to fashion,15 for the rest of his life.

  Six years after arriving in Australia, he joined the Horn Expedition to the Red Centre in 1894 as the zoologist and photographer. It was in Alice Springs that he met Frank Gillen, an extroverted postmaster with whom he shared a 20-year partnership that was to bring them both anthropological renown. Theirs was to become an enduring friendship that would result in the most intensive fieldwork on Central Australian clans ever attempted up to that time. Their publications in 1899 and 1904, and later in 1912, had a formative influence on contemporary theories of social evolution and interpretations of the origins of art and ceremony.

  Amongst the most important of their findings were huge ground paintings and ephemeral sculptures which had never been documented before. These ground constructions revealed a language of symbols also found on sacred stone and wooden tjuringa,16 which Spencer noted were buried and later retrieved from various important locations. They also recorded the bird’s down and ochrestained flower blossoms that were used as body adornments.

  Walter Baldwin Spencer. Taken in Alice Springs c. 1901.

  After his father died in 1901, Baldwin Spencer’s considerable inheritance enabled him to indulge even further in his passions for scientific exploration and acquiring art. He was by this time a scientist and administrator, anthropologist, and a connoisseur of fine art, and he counted many of Australia’s finest painters of the period amongst his friends. By all accounts a brilliant speaker, he famously packed out Melbourne’s Town Hall for a public lecture in 1902. Between 1894 and 1927, Spencer travelled to Uluru (Ayers Rock), around Alice Springs, Tennant Creek and later as far north as Borroloola on the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Tiwi Islands. In 1912, the year Frank Gillen died, he visited Oenpelli in Western Arnhem Land.

  Spencer retired in 1919, by which time all of his departmental colleagues were women. A loyal follower of the Carlton Football Club, he became the President of the Victorian Football League that same year, and served in this role until 1926. He continued to report on the welfare of Aboriginal people in Alice Springs and Hermannsburg, which he visited during 1923 and 1926. By this time he had sold his extensive personal art collection acquired through his many friends in artistic and literary circles. It included more than 30 paintings by Arthur Streeton as well as paintings by Hans Heysen, George Lambert, Tom Roberts and Norman Lindsay, from whom he had purchased more than 40 works. His commitment to Australia’s Aboriginal people resulted in an archive of more than 200 bark paintings, photographs, movies, wax cylinders, superb photographic negatives and extensive field notes. All are now housed in the National Museum of Victoria. They provide a unique insight into the undisturbed traditional life of desert people. Like the majority of his peers, he believed the Aboriginal people whom he studied were the survivors of an earlier stage of human social development that he expected would inevitably die out.

  Jim and Rene Davidson by contrast believed that Aboriginal culture was very much alive. They opened their Aboriginal and Pacific Art Gallery in 1961 more than 30 years after Spencer’s death, and donated many significant pieces to the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). Jim was made a life member of the NGV in 1991, honouring his service to Indigenous art.

  One passion I especially shared with Spencer and the Davidsons was a fascination with the art of the Tiwi. The Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville islands to the north of Darwin have a culture and art quite different to that of adjacent mainland clans. They are thought to be the last descendants of the first Aboriginal wave of migration to Australia, and their unique funeral poles and painted bark shelters were sighted by explorers as early as 1834. Before the Macassans introduced dugout canoes around 400 years ago, the Tiwi made their canoes from paperbark, which explains their relative isolation from mainland clans until that time. They also developed few tools, as shells and stone knives were used for cutting.

  The first traditional community I ever visited was Nguiu, now renamed Wurrumiyanga, in the Tiwi Islands. I had just hosted the very first Tiwi Designs exhibition in Sydney in 1982, which I held at the Hogarth Galleries, as my own ‘emporium’ was not yet large enough. Six young Tiwi men had come down for the opening and camped on my Bondi living-room floor. One of the men, Bede Tungutalum, made me his Tiwi ‘brother’, and invited me to visit his country. I took him up on the offer almost immediately. It proved an auspicious expedition, for on that first visit to the Tiwi I proposed to Anne on the beach at Cape Fourcroy, on the western tip of Bathurst Island. Later we snuggled up close in our double swag with her 10-year-old daughter Mandala, listening to the crocodiles splashing into the nearby stream. We became a family that night.

  My bond with the Tiwi grew markedly deeper a decade later, when Mandala fell in love with Gordon Pupangamirri whom she had first met on that trip. They celebrated their marriage in the church on Bathurst Island and Mandala lived at Nguiu for more than eight years. She became the Director of the Jinani Childcare Centre, for which she was awarded the Tidy Towns Northern Territory Citizen of the Year in 2003. Anne and I were understandably extremely proud of her. My grandchildren, John Abraham Kitchamana Tutawalli and Lincoln Bulamay Pupangamirri, are both Tiwi. Each year they return to the island for school holidays or to attend important events, such as the funerals of their grandfather and grandmother, John Baptist and Phillipa, who both passed away in recent years.

  Our family, 2005. Front row: Lincoln and John; back row: Anne, Mandala, me and Gordon.

  Famed Tiwi artist Declan Apuatimi, carving Pukumani pole, Bathurst Island, c. 1985.

  For funerals such as these, Pukumani poles17 were traditionally made to accompany elaborate and complex rituals that took place after a person’s death. Prior to European contact, and for some time thereafter, ironwood or bloodwood posts would be turned over open fires, successively burning sections which would be scraped away progressively with flaked stone axes and mussel shells. From these as many as 15 grave posts standing up to four metres in height were created for a single funeral.

  The colours used to decorate these posts and all other traditional Tiwi artefacts were white, yellow, red and black. The red was made by burning yellow ochre in a fire and the intensity of its colour varied according to the length of time it was heated. The carved form of the poles symbolised the transition from life to death. Sculpted elements and certain motifs had specific meanings and signified gender. For instance, distinctively projecting prongs at the top of a pole could alternatively represent the raised arms of a man, buffalo horns, ears, or the jaws of a crocodile. Painted designs contained additional meanings.

  During these ceremonies, the surviving relatives assumed obligations and restrictions determined by their closeness to the dead person. Members of the grieving family specified the number of poles required, and they paid their makers, usually distant male relatives, with tools, wives, prestige or money, during the final stage of the ceremony. The relatives examined these posts carefully during the ceremony to assess their quality and the correctness of their ‘story’ and the meanings conveyed.

  Tiwi craftsmen also made elaborate ceremonial spears that were quite unique to their culture. Male spears, referred to as Tunkalinta, had large barbs down one side only, while the female equivalent, Arawinikiri, had long barbs down both sides of the large spearhead. Early examples were carved using cockleshells and could take up to three months to complete.

  Ceremonial life largely revolved around the Pukumani mourning and funeral rites, and the Kurlama, yam
or harvest ceremony, during which bodies were adorned with armbands (Pamajini, Tapalingini or Jukuti), false beards, hair string belts, head feathers, bangles and neck ornaments or Tokayinga. Message sticks, or Purunkita, were used by the Tiwi as personal requests to fellow clansmen when asking for gifts or provisions, spreading news of social importance, or as invitations to others to perform ceremonies associated with Pukumani or Kurlama rituals.

  While the Tiwi did traditionally paint on the bark of their shelters and on bark used for decorative artefacts, painting on flat sheets of bark did not commence until after the 1940s. The same could be said of the bird carvings and other small figurative sculptures that most people associate with Tiwi sculpture today. Traditionally, paint was applied using a carved comb that was dipped into an ochre slurry, enabling artists to apply up to ten dots simultaneously onto skin, bark or sculpture.

  A visit to Jim and Rene Davidson’s unexceptional brick veneer house revealed a treasure trove of primitive art.

  My favourite room in the Davidson house contained their most precious Arnhem Land barks and carvings. While bark painting on shelters was known to exist as early as 1878, the earliest ‘classic’ collection was obtained by Baldwin Spencer during his expeditions to Oenpelli in Western Arnhem Land in 1914 and 1928. These paintings differed markedly from those collected in the same region just two decades later. By then, the Kunwinjku had displaced many of the ‘original’ Gaagudju inhabitants. The anthropologists Roland and Catherine Berndt and Charles Mountford, who visited North East Arnhem Land around the same time, speculated that the art here had been influenced by batik designs on cloth brought to the coast by Macassan traders (from the southwest corner of Sulawesi) as early as the 1600s.

  The first barks in the northeast were collected by the anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner in 1926–1929 at Milingimbi, and by the missionary Rev. Wilbur S. Chaseling between 1936 and 1939 at Yirrkala and Caledon Bay. Many missionaries actually encouraged the Aboriginal people to continue to practise their culture whilst acting as agents for change, and a number sent bark paintings and other cultural material to museums and collections in the south. Nevertheless, the production of bark paintings prior to the 1950s, when Davidson himself began collecting in earnest, doesn’t appear to have been great.

  Ceremonies in Central Arnhem Land could involve the creation of many works of art in different media, though most were ritually specific and ephemeral. Not all works have such a short life, however, and Jim Davidson, like a number of other dealers and collectors, would often be offered ‘ceremonial’ pieces. After I was criticised in the media for including several such items in one of my Lawson~Menzies auctions, Malcolm Davidson sent me a letter that his father had received from the missionary who had sent them to him from Croker Island in the 1960s. It recommended he purchase the accompanying ceremonial pieces, in order to ‘keep the skills inherent in their manufacture alive for future generations’.

  Munggurrawuy Yunupingu, Djulpan, the Constellation of Orion and the Pleiades, c. 1958. Natural earth pigment on stringybark, 157 x 61 cm.

  Today, hollow log coffins which are variously referred to as lorrokon, dupun and larrakitj18 are made for sale as sculptural objects in most Arnhem Land art centres. They were originally intended to last for years until the rain and ants eventually claimed them. Arnhem Land mortuary rites are far more elaborate than in the desert regions. During the final enactment, the log coffin rests on forked sticks and the bones of the deceased are cleaned and painted in red ochre, wrapped in paper bark, and deposited inside the receptacle. This is combined with the formation of large ground constructions and elaborate body painting. In the case of a person of the Dhuwa moiety, the bone coffin may represent a whale, swordfish, porpoise, shark, wild honey, snake, stone or tree, while a Yirritja person’s coffin can represent clouds, rain, wind or other emblematic designs.

  I have always loved small totemic sculptures. They are easy to pick up and enjoy. I have a large collection of pieces made by indigenous people from around the world. In Australia, pieces like this were very rare prior to the 1940s. They were principally made for mortuary ceremonies and secret sacred rituals in Arnhem Land, and it is easy to discern the stylistic resonance with Macassan carving.

  The Macassans visited and traded with the Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land during our wet season as early as the 17th century. There are accounts of regular visits by up to 60 praus,19 containing as many as 1,000 men and women, that would take 10–15 days to travel the 2,000-kilometre voyage to Australia in search of trepang20 and other products of the sea. In return for turtle and pearl shell, timber, labour and indeed sexual favours from the Aboriginals, they traded food, tobacco, pipes, alcohol, glass, cloth, axes and knives.

  In the late 19th century the Yolngu people of North East Arnhem Land adopted the Macassan dugout canoe. They also learned to make spear blades and knives out of steel during the yearly Macassan camps. These camps could last for up to six months while their catch was cured in smoke houses on the beach. During this time there was a cross-fertilisation of ceremonial activity, common remnants of which continue to be practised by both cultures today.

  Anyone who has ever tried to make a basket instantly recognises that Australian Aboriginal weavers elevated this craft into the realm of fine art. Coiled pandanus baskets may have been introduced by South Australian missionaries during the 1920s, but Aboriginal artisans in the north already made a wide variety of elaborately worked traditional baskets and dilly bags, fish traps and woven regalia from pandanus, bush string and cane. Dilly bags are generally decorated with alternating bands of dyed fibre, and occasionally painted with ochre designs of human figures and other creatures. Those for ceremonial use are often adorned with long feathered strings made with red cockatoo or parrot feathers. The individual weave and design is sacred, and associated with certain creator beings. The most prized bark painting in my home is a funeral scene by Jack Kala Kala. The clan leaders attending the ceremony are all represented by dilly bags. In other paintings, they represent creator beings.

  Jack Kala Kala, Mortuary Ceremony, 1987. Natural earth pigments on stringybark, 137 x 72 cm.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Although the drone of the Yidaki, or didgeridoo, has become conspicuous as Australia’s most emblematic musical sound, it was traditionally most common in Arnhem Land, where it is still used in ceremonies accompanied by clap sticks during singing and dancing.

  The greatest ‘didj’ player I’ve ever heard was Alan Dargin, who passed away at 40 years of age. A round-faced cheery lad whom I first met when he was a teenager, Alan oozed charisma. He was one of many Aboriginal kids who didn’t know much about their family or where they’d originally come from, who would regularly visit and spend time in Coo-ee Emporium. He had a winning smile, and must have picked up lessons in the didj from all over the place. But he was a natural: a jazz artist of the didj. He could make it talk, sing and sound like a train or a wild animal. In one day busking at Sydney’s Circular Quay he could rustle up $500. He owned the Quay in those days, and probably introduced Aboriginal culture to more tourists than anyone has ever done.

  The other great didj player of the time was the one-armed inventor of the didjeribone, Charlie McMahon.21 In 1984 the whole country got off on Charlie’s hypnotic didj beat album Terra Incognita.

  Though it’s since become something of a cliche, the didj remains a uniquely spellbinding instrument that has been adopted by musicians around the world. Audiences have been transported on its strains as the Sydney Symphony Orchestra plays works by Australia’s greatest contemporary composer, Peter Sculthorpe.

  The best didgeridoos have an elongated conical shape with a thinner mouthpiece fitted with wild beeswax. They can be plain or painted with elaborate clan and figurative designs, and ceremonial instruments may have feathered strings attached which dangle to the side. Few fine old examples survive, though thousands, if not tens of thousands, are made in Australia annually an
d sold through souvenir and gift shops. Unfortunately, their manufacture also keeps many foreign backpackers and white entrepreneurs employed in making a product that unwary tourists believe is genuinely Aboriginal-made and decorated.

  Looking at the sheer number of didgeridoos sold today, it is easy to forget that just 80 years ago the market for the entire gamut of Aboriginal material culture was tiny. Before the 1950s, there were only a few tribal dealers in Australia and overseas, and tribal artefacts were not particularly highly prized. They were collected by a small number of important museums and kept in the possession of a relatively few private individuals. Initially traded as curios, they were later desired as objects unsullied by ‘commodification’, simply because they had been used for the original purpose for which they had been made.

  This notion of ‘authenticity’ gained currency following the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. The underlying value judgements were established by philosophers such as Rousseau in the previous century during ‘The Enlightenment’. As the ‘noble savage’ was considered pure and unsullied, an object made for, and used in, a ceremony had a numinous presence.

  It therefore followed that an object made for the market could not be considered ‘genuine’. Innovation, the result of the impact of Western civilisation, rendered objects impure. From an ethnographic perspective, old art was good art, and new art was bad art.

  What Australian Aboriginal artists did next, however, was about to turn this paradigm completely on its head.

  The Developing Market

  In which the reader travels with the early anthropologists and adventurers. We meet the first Aboriginal art star and traverse the Central Desert, Arnhem Land, Queensland and Western Australia against a backdrop of repression and protectionism.