The Dealer is the Devil Read online

  The only other scratch on the historical record is the mention of stone sculptures made by Kalboori Youngi, an artist about whom little is known, except that Preston purchased several of her pieces. These she donated to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1948. Similar small sculptures were made by Youngi’s female relatives Linda Craigie and Nora Nathan on Springvale Station near Boulia as early as 1938. Youngi’s unusual sculptures were at one point acclaimed as works of genius, though no museum has ever brought them together for exhibition.45

  At the tip of tropical Far North Queensland, the Aurukun mission sits overlooking the delta of the Archer River, facing the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was presided over by the all-powerful Presbyterian superintendent William MacKenzie from 1923–1965. The son of Canadian missionaries, born in Vanuatu, MacKenzie was a contradictory character who underwent initiation as well as learning the local language. But he actively isolated the Wik and Kugu inhabitants from the people living along the coast. The remaining clans did not settle at Aurukun, Weipa and Edward River missions until the late 1940s during World War II. While MacKenzie worked hard to improve health services and lower infant mortality, he also resorted to controversial methods of discipline, which included chaining wife-beaters to trees to pacify them. Donald Thomson, arriving by packhorse in 1927, was so incensed by MacKenzie’s methods that he complained to the authorities. This only resulted in Thomson being banned from the mission, and he never returned to Queensland again.

  The first female anthropologist to visit Aurukun suffered a similar fate after criticising the mission for breaking down family life. Ursula McConnel was a strikingly gifted, intellectual feminist who devoted her life to creating significant collections of artefacts and drawings from the Far North from 1927 onward. After falling out with MacKenzie, she went on to collect in Yarrabah, south of Cairns. Her most important discoveries found their way into the South Australian Museum, the Museum of Victoria, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Queensland and the Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra.

  During World War II, children at the mission schools were encouraged to make art. This attracted the interest of the artist and educator Frances Derham during her five-week stay in Aurukun. Her collection, now housed in the National Gallery of Australia, includes works by the young Arthur Pambagan Jnr, later to become the most revered Aurukun elder of our time. Concurrently, the mission at Weipa entered a watercolour into an art competition run by The Sunday Mail; 13-year-old Gloria Fletcher won the prize. She is now far better known as the great Thainkuith elder, Thancoupie.

  Under the supervision of the mission carpenter Jock Henderson, sculptors at Aurukun began to innovate throughout the 1950s and 1960s. They incorporated a variety of materials including resin, beeswax, horsehair, leather, bark, glass beads and plastic buttons into their carvings. Crocodiles, turtles, sharks and human figures generally had attached or inlaid limbs, teeth, breasts, fins and eyeballs. They also carved snakes, spears, boomerangs and artefacts from the local timbers. As this artistic tradition developed, Aurukun’s sculptors gained more respect and notoriety, especially following important re-enactments of ceremonies, which were organised by MacKenzie and performed in 1958 and 1962. MacKenzie also arranged for these spectacular dances to be filmed for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies by Ian Dunlop, Fred McCarthy and Peter Hilton. It was a brilliant public relations exercise for Aurukun culture, winning friends in Canberra, and allowing MacKenzie to retire with the ceremonial traditions recorded for posterity.

  Queensland missions and government reserves continued to be strictly controlled throughout the 1960s, and Aboriginal people still had almost no personal rights whatsoever. Individual enterprise was forbidden, and artefacts were sent from the mission to the Director of Native Affairs for sale, or sold through reserve and mission shops, without any individual payment. The collection used in Dunlop’s film, Dancers at Aurukun (1962) for instance, was sent to the Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra as a gift.

  ‘It is not the mission’s policy to pay the natives directly for work of this kind,’ 46 MacKenzie explained at the time. ‘I feel that if the institute wishes to reward the mission for its assistance then it could make a payment of £100 for the collection of images.’

  Even today, the struggle to enable Aboriginal people to engage in enterprise continues. Financial autonomy has become a central aim of activists such as Noel Pearson, the Cape York Aboriginal lawyer, academic and land rights activist. It may seem hard to believe, but at the end of the first decade of the 21st century Aurukun artists still had to ‘clock on’ at the Wik and Kugu art centre, and were paid by the hour rather than being rewarded for their individual talent, or better still, encouraged to work on their own terms.

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  The very first important bark painting I ever bought was from Queensland. I was so proud of it that I propped it up in the front window of the Coo-ee Emporium for years where its exotic narrative always attracted attention. A dramatic vertical tryptych, created by the great Lardil artist Dick Roughsey from Mornington Island, it was painted in brown and yellow ochres, and featured animated sea creatures and dynamic human figures engaged in a life and death struggle. It related the morality tale of Marnbil and Debil Debil, a favourite theme of the artist.

  Roughsey’s tribal name, Goobalathaldin, translates as ‘rough seas’, hence the English derivative Roughsey. After attending the Mornington Island mission school, he found employment on cattle stations and later as a deckhand on the region’s supply boat. While making deliveries to the different missions and Aboriginal communities, he sought out local bark artists to watch them paint and listen to their stories. His own first attempts at painting were inspired by Albert Namatjira, but his wish to become a professional artist followed a meeting with the airline pilot and artist Percy Trezise, who supplied him with bark and ochres. ‘Paint what you know yourself,’ Trezise reportedly advised him.

  When he was 41 years old, Roughsey’s first exhibition in Cairns generated great enthusiasm among both artists and audience. Later Trezise instructed him in the use of European art materials and techniques. They became close friends, working together on the many award-winning children’s books that introduced tens of thousands of Australian school students to Aboriginal mythology. Through these books, the Rainbow Serpent became established in the national psyche as an Australian creation myth. It was a Dreaming of special meaning to Roughsey. It was on his Lardil homeland that the huge serpent came to rest after it had finished creating the land, seas and mountains. Images for this and other books were painted on illustration board and, after publication, each of these unique sets of paintings was sold. Most have remained as complete sets, having been cherished by their owners, many of whom actually met and were deeply affected by Roughsey’s humour and magnetic personality. In 2006, the set of 16 illustration boards painted in 1975 for his most successful and enduring book, The Rainbow Serpent, set the record price for the artist when sold at Lawson~Menzies for $16,800. The majority of Roughsey’s works, however, were paintings on bark, and though these are extremely appealing and popular they have achieved an average price of just $2,315 since first appearing at auction.47

  Roughsey’s quick-witted intelligence enabled him to flow easily between Aboriginal and European culture, and he constantly tried to extend that opportunity to others. Trezise recalled that he could effortlessly recite verses from Shakespeare and other English poets that he had learned from the Scottish missionaries, or perform a mesmerising traditional song and dance for friends and visitors. He was endlessly fascinated by art and, although there was no art centre on Mornington Island, he regularly returned to spend time with his wife, Elsie, and instruct his children, some of whom followed in his artistic footsteps. By 1973, when he became the inaugural Chair of the Aboriginal Arts Board, he was exhibiting in Australia’s major cities and travelling widely in Australia and overseas. Roughsey clearly saw that
the loss of their lands and lifestyle had left many Aboriginal people living on very meagre resources in depressed conditions. He firmly believed that art could provide a means of income as well as cultural and spiritual regeneration. In 1978, he was awarded an Order of the British Empire.

  Roughsey accompanied Trezise on many expeditions in the Cape York Peninsula, playing a crucial role in the documentation and study of Quinkan rock painting, and meeting with many tribal elders. This eventually led to the declaration of the Quinkan Reserves, and the return of these lands to their Aboriginal owners. Suddenly taken ill at the end of one of these study adventures, Roughsey returned to Mornington Island to ‘sing himself better’. Sadly, after a period of illness, he passed away in 1985.

  Roughsey was a leader of what would later become known as the reconciliation movement. His death came at a time when the Aboriginal arts industry was still very much in its infancy. Perhaps more than anyone, other than Albert Namatjira, he bridged the gap between black and white culture during his lifetime.

  Roughsey inspired other Mornington Island artists, including his wife, Elsie, along with family members Lindsay and Dick and Joe Rootsey, to name but a few. All sold the majority of their works to Queensland Aboriginal Creations. During the 1980s, I met many Queensland artists for the first time through their association with this shop, including Roslyn Kemp, Richard Bell and his brother Marshall, and that great visual recorder of the story of Murri dispossession, Cherbourg artist Vincent Serico. Serico painted potent narrative works that graphically portrayed the violence of colonial times, and captured the misery that still mars the lives of many contemporary Murris.

  Dick Roughsey and Captain Percy Trezise in the Quinkan area, 1979.

  Girlfriends – Jennifer Isaacs and Gloria Fletcher (Thancoupie), Sydney, c. 1970.

  Like Dick Roughsey, Gloria Fletcher also began her career as a bark painter. After her early artistic promise, she trained as a primary school teacher and, in 1971, moved from her home in Weipa, at the tip of Cape York, to the urban environment of East Sydney Technical College, and trained under the guidance of the famed Australian ceramicist Peter Rushforth. Now better known as Thancoupie, she is credited as being the co-founder of Australia’s Indigenous ceramic art movement, along with Tiwi potter Eddy Puruntatamirri.

  When Gloria first arrived in Sydney’s artistic circles she was a painfully shy, devout and rather solitary girl. She had no legal right to move around the country, having run away from a job as a domestic servant. The policies adopted under Queensland legislation made her a virtual refugee from the Sunshine State.

  Jennifer Isaacs recalls that when she first met her, ‘Gloria was wearing a little dress she’d made herself, with her hair covered in pins. She was possibly attempting to hide her background and look ‘respectable’, and she was almost in tears.’ Isaacs offered her the use of her professional studio, and thus Gloria fell into the vibrant Sydney craft scene. She moved in with Jennifer and David Isaacs, Peter Travis and a group of creative friends living in an old stone house in Glebe. The converted stables attached to the house became her studio. Every one was weaving or throwing pots. She was taken to the Australia Council’s popular cocktail parties hosted by the gregarious Jean Battersby and began to meet Aboriginal activists such as Mum Shirl, from the Redfern mob. Slowly she blossomed. It was an inauspicious start to what was to develop into a spectacular career.48

  During her training, Thancoupie refined both the iconography and style of her work through a series of transformations. Her forms and glazes were at first crude, but she went on to develop a unique oeuvre of hand-built large bowls that gave way to spherical shapes, and later to more organic and minimal forms more closely drawn from nature. Though she was greatly influenced by the elegant simplicity and brushwork of one of her first teachers at East Sydney Tech, the Japanese potter Shiga Shigeo, the ceramicist Peter Travis probably did more to shape her evolution at this time.

  As she grew in confidence, she began exhibiting with the best artists, sculptors and craftmakers as a contemporary artist, rather than an ‘Aboriginal’ artist. Her primary focus was the ‘object as art’. Yet her naturalistic forms, the methods of making them, and the incised decoration that adorned their surfaces directly related these objects to traditional ways of storytelling. Thainkuith legends and totemic creatures were grooved into the surface of her objects with her finger, in the same way women have always drawn in the sand while relating traditional stories.

  Thancoupie’s creative influence can be compared to that of the great Native American Pueblo artist Maria Martinez, in that it provided the impetus for the development of the Indigenous ceramic art movement in Australia, most especially in the Far North. At the same time, her unique personal interaction with artists from a range of creative disciplines, here in Australia and overseas, served to strengthen her intimate relationship with her own culture. Over more than 30 years, until her death in 2011, she mentored aspiring artists from remote communities, students enrolled in art and professional development courses, and others she met during her extensive travels. She founded the Weipa Festival and ran holiday programs to teach bush knowledge and art to younger generations. In 1983, she visited São Paulo as Australia’s Cultural Commissioner to the 17th Biennale, and her works subsequently toured Brazil and Mexico. They were later included in the Portsmouth Festival in the United Kingdom.

  In total, Thancoupie produced more than 15 solo exhibitions in Australia and overseas, and with assistance from her close friend Jennifer Isaacs, exhibited at many of Australia’s finest commercial galleries.49 In 2001, 80 works spanning her entire career were presented in a survey exhibition at the Brisbane City Gallery.

  Thancoupie was motivated by a philosophy best expressed in her own words:

  ‘You are here in a lifetime to help, to understand … that is intelligence. And only intelligent people have strong friendships. I wish we all have that.’50

  In 2009, Thancoupie and Jennifer Isaacs sat in the office of Ron Radford, the Director of the National Gallery of Australia, discussing the possible theme of a commission to be made for the new Indigenous wing of the gallery. Sitting on the shelf behind his desk sat one of her early pieces, part of Radford’s own private collection. ‘What about using this piece as your inspiration,’ he said lifting it from the shelf and gently caressing it.

  Today, Thancoupie’s commission, the impressive 2.7-metre spherical aluminium sculpture Eran, is the first work of art that visitors encounter as they reach the entrance to Australia’s premier public art institution.

  LAND OF THE WANDJINA

  In the 1970s Erich von Däniken made a fortune with his first book Chariots of the Gods, in which he claimed that aliens had landed in Australia, intermarried with the Indigenous people, and left pictures of ancient astronauts on rock galleries and caves throughout the northwest Kimberley. Not many people still subscribe to von Däniken’s pseudo-science, despite the fact that he sold millions of copies, but the ghost-like Wandjina figures remain the most potent of all images imprinted on the Australian landscape. Certainly as early as 1837, when explorer George Grey first saw them, he could not accept they had been produced by the local inhabitants. According to Grey, the Wandjina were ‘far superior to what a savage race could be supposed capable of’.51

  There has been much wild speculation about the origin of the images. Many cultures were deemed to be the possible authors besides extraterrestrials, including Hindu, Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese and Phoenician. This perception illustrates the contempt in which the Indigenous inhabitants have been held over the past 200 years. It was a point of view that persisted despite research, from the 1920s onward, that proved these powerful images were inextricably linked to Aboriginal cultural practice.

  It is largely forgotten today that the prohibitions imposed upon Aboriginal people in Western Australia, under the Western Australian Aboriginal Act 1905, included everything from where they could swim to what bedding and clothing they were allowed to buy. J
ust reading the Act, which is easily downloaded from the web, is enough to make even the most conservative person today feel thoroughly ashamed. Aboriginal people were institutionalised, intermarriage was outlawed, freedom of movement and association was restricted, and children were removed from their parents.

  As European settlement expanded and cattle were driven across Australia from the eastern states in search of good pasture, gold was discovered around Halls Creek, and Broome rapidly developed into the biggest pearling centre in the world. By 1910 there were already 400 luggers and more than 3,500 Aboriginals, Chinese and Japanese diving for shells to make buttons and fine cutlery.

  Aboriginal people were far more resilient in the face of these powerful population shifts and volatile economic forces than they are usually given credit. It was Aboriginal divers who brought up pearls from the perilous deep, and Aboriginal stockmen who were in large part responsible for the success of the pastoral industry during the 1940s in the Pilbara, between Port Hedland and Karratha, and stretching inland to Marble Bar. They worked hard, and with great determination, born of their knowledge of and love of the land. Yet, in spite of this, they were treated as cheap labour, and hunted down by police if they absconded.52 Yearly rations of two pairs of shorts and shirts, tobacco, flour and tea were common. Conditions were so bad that in 1942, 200 Aboriginal representatives from 23 different language groups across the desert met and invited the firebrand ‘whitefella’ activist Donald McLeod to advise them on how to escape their virtual slavery. McLeod was in his early 30s and utterly committed to their cause. Publicly branded a ‘communist zealot’, and a traitor to his race and culture, he led 800 Aboriginal workers off more than 25 pastoral stations in May 1946. They demanded fair wages and decent working conditions. The strike lasted three bitter years, during which the Aboriginal stockmen and their families survived on bush tucker. Income was derived from a network of unionists, women’s organisations and churches to which they sold buffel seed and pearl shell. They used picks, shovels and their bare hands to surface-mine high-quality metals. These were sold to McLeod’s contacts overseas.