The Dealer is the Devil Page 12

  Right here, at the very genesis of the Aboriginal art movement, the experience of Mountford and Hilliard reveals a clear Indigenous preference for sharing cultural heritage with art advisers and assistants of the same gender: men working with male painters, women working with female. Although arts administrators rarely acknowledge this preference, it has clearly resulted in women’s art dominating some communities and vice versa over the subsequent 60 years. The art and craft centre at Ernabella was eventually incorporated in 1974, and with Win Hilliard at the helm it became the exclusive domain of women. After beginning with weaving shawls and hand-knotted floor rugs, the workshop graduated to metalwork, ceramics, batik silks, printed clothing, paintings and drawings (walka), some of which were printed as posters and postcards. These were exhibited at the Royal Melbourne Show in 1964 and, by 1975, Ernabella women had begun to study at the Royal Batik Institute in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. This seemingly odd and esoteric cultural connection was to yield the most unexpected outcome as the art movement spread to women further east.

  EARLY COLLECTORS

  The year I was born, 1948, was momentous in world affairs. George Orwell sent his manuscript of Nineteen Eighty Four to his London publisher, and Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male was published. Just as World War II ended, and the Cold War began, so too was the first monkey launched into space. Israel became a nation state, Gandhi went on a hunger strike and was later assassinated, and the Berlin Blockade began.

  At this time the Top End of Australia was still a wild frontier; a largely unmapped infinity of remote swamps, forests and estuaries infested with crocodiles, malaria and dengue fever. It was a land of intrigue, and an enigma to most Australians.

  One of Charles Mountford’s 16-mm documentaries filmed in the region caught the attention of Arthur Caldwell, the federal Minister for Information, later to become the leader of the federal Labor Party. Realising the potential for generating international publicity, Caldwell offered Mountford a position in his department and sent him on a lecture tour to promote Australia in the United States.

  Like Baldwin Spencer before him, Mountford was a brilliant public advocate and speaker. He had already spent 15 years in the field, and during 1946 and 1947 he travelled across the United States building an influential network of contacts. Mountford spoke out at Constitution Hall in Washington DC in front of more than 4,000 supporters of the National Geographic Society.11 Through film screenings and lectures, he introduced Aboriginal art and culture to audiences around the United States, and recorded every meeting, conversation and event in an extraordinary diary that exceeded 4,000 pages in length.12 During these tours the indefatigable Mountford began to put the building blocks into place for The American– Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land.

  Professor A.P. (Peter) Elkin, c. 1965.

  Mountford managed to float this expedition despite antagonistic and competing interests. He was aided by Caldwell and two vital American allies: Gilbert Grosvenor, President of the National Geographic Society, and Alexander Westmore, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Nevertheless, his leadership was strenuously opposed by a number of influential detractors in both America and Australia, not the least of whom was Professor Peter Elkin, whose dour and exacting academic style stood in stark contrast to Mountford’s untutored exuberance.

  By 1933, Elkin had managed to take almost total charge of anthropology in Australia, and he had a distinct dislike of the expeditionary model. He preferred to see researchers live for extended periods in the communities to which they made a lifelong commitment. As he put it, ‘careful angling across several seasons’ reaps far more meaningful insights than ‘an afternoon’s intensive trawling’.

  The project proceeded, however, and Mountford prevailed with Caldwell leading the negotiations. Grosvenor secured the seed funding required. Scientific support from Westmore ensured the commitment of the Australian ministries of the Interior, Air, Army and Health to provide transport, food and scientists to study Indigenous health and nutrition.

  Between February and November 1948, Charles Mountford led his team across Arnhem Land to three key Indigenous communities: Groote Eylandt, Yirrkala and Oenpelli. It was the largest and most comprehensive expedition ever undertaken in Australia, and officially comprised 17 men and women whose expertise ranged across a wide array of disciplines: biomedical research, anthropology, ornithology, entomology, ichthyology, botany and mammalogy, to name but a few. The bounty could hardly have been richer. Apart from the professional relationships forged, a tally of 13,500 plant specimens, 30,000 fish, 850 birds and 460 animals were collected. As if this weren’t sufficient, the material results also included several thousand Aboriginal implements and weapons, hundreds of photographs and drawings of cave paintings, several hundred bark paintings and 200 string figures. Each scientist wrote extensive field notes that became the basis of numerous scientific papers that were accompanied by countless photographs and ‘miles’ of colour film on Aboriginal life and natural history.

  Cinema had made the Arnhem Land expedition possible and it kept Mountford’s reputation alive throughout the 1950s. He later went on to document art in Arnhem Land during 1949, Yuendumu in 1951, and Melville Island in 1954. By gifting much of the material he collected to state galleries and museums he was able to exert great influence on their acquisition policies. Today the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition is remembered as the last of the truly great international expeditions. In 2009, the National Museum of Australia held a major symposium, Barks, Birds and Billabongs: Exploring the Legacy of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition. It was attended by academics and the few surviving members of the expedition.

  Elkin was just as passionate an advocate for Aboriginal advancement as Mountford. Unfortunately, even though Elkin was held in high esteem by many Aboriginal elders, his reputation was somewhat diminished as he grew older and Aboriginal activism increased. Despite a lifetime writing letters and articles in the popular press, and constantly speaking on the problem of prejudice, many saw his support for ‘assimilation’ as an embarrassing anachronism. In fact, what he felt was needed was adaptability on both sides. He was President of the Association for the Protection of Native Races from 1933–1962, and was for a time the Vice President of the Aborigines Protection Board of New South Wales, but it was his book Citizenship for the Aborigines, published in 1944, of which he was most proud.

  Mountford retired from the Commonwealth Public Service with an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1955. He entered St John’s College, Cambridge, and wrote a thesis on Aboriginal art while visiting museum collections throughout Europe. Because of his formidable donations, many state galleries and museums were able to exhibit Aboriginal art for the first time. If Baldwin Spencer was the first great Aboriginal art patron, then surely Charles Mountford could be said to have founded the contemporary Aboriginal art industry. He gifted his manuscripts and his collection of 13,000 photographs to the State Library of South Australia in 1973, and through his considerable influence Aboriginal art began to be appreciated more for its aesthetic power than its anthropological context. A large number of the crayon drawings he collected in Central Australia predated painting at Papunya by several decades. They were the first portable artworks to feature the concentric circles and iconography that would later become the basis of Western Desert art. At the age of 86, just prior to his death, he completed his magnum opus, Nomads of the Australian Desert (1976). The book, which contained images of restricted Aboriginal subjects, was judged politically incorrect, however, and withdrawn from sale soon after publication. Today, rare copies sell for more than $1,000 each.

  It was in Elkin’s office in 1940 that Ronald Berndt, then 24, met his wifeto-be, Catherine, a 22-year-old New Zealander. Inspired by Elkin, they both became ardent researchers and, following his advice, they decided to focus on the clans of North East Arnhem Land. The field of anthropology was so young and competitive at this time that when Charles Mountford realised the couple might b
eat him to Yirrkala he was reduced to tears. Beat him they did, however, and eventually North East Arnhem Land became their spiritual and intellectual home.

  In 1949, Ronald Berndt staged the first exhibition of bark paintings open to the general public at the David Jones Gallery in Sydney. It produced ripples of excitement throughout the art world, and was followed by the publication of Art in Arnhem Land (co-written with Elkin),13 which provided the first detailed explanation of the art in its social context.

  Within five years, Arnhem Land bark paintings were being sold in art shops in the United States of America and London for the first time. Charles Mountford noted with some satisfaction that better-class works were selling for prices that were ‘very high indeed’. Three years later, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) developed a program that sponsored exhibitions of Aboriginal bark paintings in Europe and America, as well as the collection of barks for international museums. The demand for good bark paintings appeared to far outweigh supply. Their content was carefully censored. Artists were encouraged to paint hunting scenes and depictions of human beings, and to omit repetitive clan designs, protuberant genitalia, and images related to love, magic or sorcery.14

  In 1955, Ronald and Catherine Berndt attained their doctorates at the London School of Economics, with the encouragement of leading anthropologists, including the controversial American academic Margaret Mead. They went on to establish the Anthropology Research Museum at the University of Western Australia, now known as the Berndt Museum of Anthropology.

  Such was the Berndts’ energy and commitment to the Aboriginal cause that they played leading roles in the establishment of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council, and a number of other advisory bodies. Their love of Arnhem Land and its people never dwindled, and together they spent their entire lives dedicated to writing and scholarship about Australian Aboriginal culture.

  Catherine and Roland Berndt in George Street, Sydney, c. 1940, before making North East Arnhem Land their spiritual home.

  One of the many people fascinated by Ronald Berndt’s 1949 Sydney exhibition was the orthopaedic surgeon Dr Stuart Scougall, who, during the early 1950s, made the first of many visits to Australia’s Far North to study Aboriginal physiology. Apparently, he was intrigued by the way Aboriginal people could stand for extended periods on one leg. One day, while plastering a broken limb, Scougall asked his young secretary of six years, Dorothy Bennett, if she could be ready to accompany him on a visit to Arnhem Land within a week. It promised to be a great adventure for a country girl whose academic studies had been cut short by the Depression. She had spent the better part of her teens at Mataranka in the Northern Territory, where her father was stationed during World War II. Given the stigma attached to Aboriginality at the time, few would have realised that her paternal grandmother was a full blood Aboriginal. Bennett was to become a central character in the development of the Aboriginal art industry over the next 40 years.

  On this expedition, the first of many she was to make with Scougall, Dorothy Bennett joined a team of nine, including three other women. Travelling by 4WD and combi van along boggy dirt roads and bush tracks, the trip was to cement her love of the outback, and her relationship with Aboriginal people. It was at Yirrkala that she met Mawalan Marika, the renowned leader of the Rirratjingu clan. He established a kinship relationship with her, which was to have repercussions for the rest of her life. She became his classificatory ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ to all his children. At Deaf Adder Creek, Dorothy saw paintings on the inside of bark slab shelters for the first time, and they sparked her interest in Aboriginal art. It took another two weeks to reach the edge of Arnhem Land, but the group could not get permission to visit Oenpelli from the local incumbents of the Church Missionary Society. The trip ended in Darwin, the town in which she was to spend much of the next 40 years. She described it then as

  a frontier town where people would camp freely on the esplanade, enjoy pink gins in the Hotel Darwin at 11 o’clock in the morning, and watch the hustle and bustle of Chinatown – another world altogether.15

  Stuart Scougall had become friends with the painter Tony Tuckson, who was assistant director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Tuckson and his wife, Margaret, were also excited by the bark paintings in the David Jones exhibition.16 They subsequently accompanied Scougall on his 1958 visits to Melville Island and Arnhem Land. In 1959, the artist Sali Herman joined them and began working on a series of paintings inspired by the Pukumani (mortuary ceremonies). Scougall purchased a spectacular group of carved and painted Pukamani poles that were installed by Tuckson near the entrance to the gallery soon after their return to Sydney. The installation is still on display not far from where it was originally placed.

  Everywhere she went, Dorothy Bennett travelled with a portable typewriter, documenting the pieces as they were collected, ‘typing in planes and trucks, sitting on rocks and logs and in tents’.17 The excitement being generated by Aboriginal art had begun to create a breed of collectors who had more in common with Indiana Jones than with the academics who had preceded them. In this new world, a slip of a girl like Dorothy discovered that she could escape the fate of most women of her era, and ‘mix it’ with the men, travelling through remote and challenging terrain.18 During this trip she began to record works by Enraeld Dulibinyana Munkara, Mani Luki and the bark painter Deaf Tommy Mungatopi. These artists had been creating what are now considered the finest, most highly collectable of all Tiwi carvings and bark paintings.

  As a result of these adventures, Tuckson assembled an exhibition of 119 individual Aboriginal bark paintings, carved figures, and sacred and secular objects, which toured Australian public galleries between 1960 and 1961. The exhibition inspired the publication Australian Aboriginal Art.19 In Roland Berndt’s introduction to the book he wrote:

  All Aboriginal art has meaning … behind every painting … lies a story of some sort … Unless we know something about this, we cannot pretend to understand it.20

  The exhibition included the first huge barks ever commissioned in North East Arnhem Land.

  In October 1961, Bennett organised an exhibition for the opening of the Qantas Sydney office with Stuart Scougall, and they later travelled together to a similar exhibition at the head office of Qantas in Tokyo. Bennett fell in love with Japan and lived there during the following year. Her sojourn was interrupted, however, by an urgent summons from Mawalan’s eldest son, Wandjuk Marika, who was locked into the first of many battles as the mining industry invaded his traditional homelands.

  No longer a secretary but an adventuress, Bennett returned to Australia determined to reshape her life.21 Her ensuing travels were to inspire magazine headlines such as ‘On safari with a rifle – she risked her life for her friend’ (her trusty dog), and ‘Secretary in the Stone Age’. The stories gained her the exposure she needed to buy the best works and hold exhibitions in the southern states. Living and working with Aboriginal people for eight to ten months each year, she crisscrossed the Top End in a Simca stationwagon donated by Chrysler, packed with camping gear, the bare food staples, and a .22 rifle. She braved crocodiles, flooded rivers, pits of snakes and boggy bush tracks throughout Arnhem Land, the Tiwi Islands, Groote Eylandt and Port Keats. In time, she formed alliances with a number of revered Indigenous leaders. Of these Bobby Barrdjaray Nganjmirra of the Kunwinjku people was to become the most constant.22

  In the early 1960s, Bennett sold a block of flats in Avalon, New South Wales, to finance her trips and art acquisition. The money enabled her to hold exhibitions around Australia and overseas, give lectures to clubs, societies and schools, and appear on radio and television. She insisted that she did it for love and not for profit, and that she returned all but her costs to the communities via the Department of Native Affairs. Nevertheless, in an article published in The Territorian magazine in 1963, the documentary filmmaker Cecil Holmes accused her of exploiting
the Aboriginals for profit.23 Due to Holmes’ influence at the time, the matter was discussed in the Northern Territory Legislative Council where Bennett tabled her accounts. In 1965, she sued Holmes and the NT News for defamation and, although the matter was settled out of court in her favour, such was Holmes’ influence that the retraction was printed in only 20 copies that never left the newspaper offices.

  With the escalating demand for cultural product, it became necessary to create a buffer between potential buyers and the Aboriginal artists in their communities. It is unlikely that the Aboriginal arts industry, as such, would ever have developed without a number of white intermediaries taking on administrative, gate-keeping and marketing roles. One of the very first of these was Douglas Tuffin, a lay missionary who spent 13 years at Yirrkala. He encouraged the artists to devise the split stick framing that prevented barks from warping and cracking. It was Tuffin, too, who introduced the sharp carving tools that enabled fine incising on ochred wooden surfaces. This technique was later adopted for the decoration of carved figures and totemic animals. While living in Yirrkala and Milingimbi, Tuffin worked with the missionaries Keith Thiele and Alan Fidock. Together they created the basic infrastructure for the orderly marketing of Aboriginal art that remains today’s dominant paradigm. Thiele also introduced the first authenticity labels on the back of paintings.