The Dealer is the Devil Read online

  In 1993, shortly before his death, Coombs wrote that Western materialist civilisation is ‘life without reverence for the past, love for the present, or hope for the future’.3

  The contrast between the conservative and progressive approaches to Aboriginal affairs at the beginning of the 1970s could not have been more stark. On one side was the great champion of assimilation, Liberal politician Paul Hasluck (later to be knighted and appointed Governor General of Australia).

  In his 1988 book, Shades of Darkness, he put the conservative point of view by posing the question:

  Are Aborigines to be living museum pieces? Or a sort of fringe community whose quaint customs are stared at by tourists? Will the drone of the didgeridoo, the clicking of the boomerangs and the stomping in the red dust in the red centre of Australia, still be sufficient employment for the grandchildren of the people of Uluru? Will the separate development that is being pursued with a beneficent purpose today, have the result that, after two or three generations, persons of Aboriginal descent find they are shut out from participation in most of what is happening in the continent, and are behind glass in a vast museum, or are in a sort of open range zoo?4

  Coombs, on the other hand, saw Aboriginal self-determination quite differently. He envisioned a cultural rebirth where traditional hunting and gathering would be combined with Western education. This, he believed, could be achieved through hundreds of small, decentralised homeland communities in which the development of a monetary economy would be based on a combination of small-scale market activities. This would create an environment in which jobs in cattle, emu or crocodile farming, land management, and the production and sale of arts and craft, would be backed by training allowances and welfare payments. Like many others, he hoped that traineeships for Aboriginal people would eventually translate into real jobs.

  From the outset, those on the political right viewed this as a utopian collectivist fantasy. And, sadly, they were proved right, though for the wrong reasons. It was far too complex a challenge to the bureaucratic processes of the public service. Assimilationist policy was too entrenched. Forty years later the only evidence of a monetary economy in the vast majority of these communities is the art and craft industry, which carries the whole burden of providing meaningful employment for Aboriginal people. Coombs’ grand dream has never been realised.

  Following the 1967 referendum, which resulted in Aboriginal people being included in the census for the first time, the need to establish an Aboriginal arts and crafts industry had been placed firmly on the national agenda.5 The Australian Liberal Government, under Prime Minister Harold Holt, established the Australian Council for the Arts (ACA) and Coombs became its Chair, and Chair of the Office of Aboriginal Affairs. Through an Aboriginal arts advisory committee, the ACA now began funding art advisers in remote communities, with an emphasis on the Northern Territory as the ‘last bastion of tribal art.’6

  By 1970–1971, retail sales of Aboriginal art grew to reach a total value of $900,000 annually, of which about half was being returned to producers.7

  In 1971, the Federal Office of Aboriginal Affairs established Aboriginal Arts and Crafts Pty Ltd, as a marketing and distribution company to supply a chain of retail galleries with exhibition quality product from around the country. This was expected to stimulate the growing demand from museums and overseas collectors. Operating within the social and political context of government support, the name, operation and funding arrangements of this company were reshaped many times over the next 16 years by a succession of ministers. To avoid confusion, I will refer to it throughout the following chapters of this book as ‘The Company’. Long before the burgeoning growth of privately owned commercial galleries, The Company took Aboriginal art beyond the realm of mission and souvenir shops and became the primary marketing vehicle of Aboriginal art.8

  By 1973, the Australian Council for the Arts had become the Australia Council and its Aboriginal advisory committee was driven by some of the most important Indigenous figures of the era. They included welfare worker Margaret Valadian, journalist John Newfong, poet Kath Walker (later Oodgeroo Noonukkal), writer Philip Roberts and artist Dick Roughsey. Many of the Aboriginal leaders and their white supporters who were engaged in significant developments toward the industry became lifetime friends and associates, including Percy Trezise, Charlie Perkins, the academic Professor Ronald Berndt and musicologist Dr Catherine Ellis.

  Having spent 15 years collecting and promoting the art of the Far North, Dorothy Bennett was appointed as a field officer for the Aboriginal arts advisory committee. She also purchased works on behalf of The Company, which had opened a small office in the Central Arcade in Smith Street, Darwin. It was here, in the same year Cyclone Tracy hit the northern capital, that Bennett met Shirley Collins, a young, pretty, vivacious Larrakia9 woman who was managing a local cleaning company. She became Dorothy’s apprentice, and together they went on to manage The Company gallery at the corner of Knuckey and Cavanagh streets after it opened in 1975.

  Farewell party for Dr H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs, Australia Council for the Arts, 1974, with Chairman of the Aboriginal Arts Board, Dick Roughsey, and Richard Wydell, Director of Theatre Board, in background.

  The ideas and recommendations that were put forward at the 1973 National Aboriginal Arts Seminar had generated enormous energy and enthusiasm.

  Just as marketing structures were beginning to develop, problems with access to traditional materials became apparent. Bob Edwards, the curator of Anthropology at the South Australian Museum, noted how difficult it was becoming for Aboriginal people to collect materials that were being depleted in the immediate vicinity of settlements. He suggested that access to motor vehicles had become imperative, and also argued for tuition in marketing.

  The Whitlam Government passed the Commonwealth Australia Council Act in 1975, and thereafter its committees became boards, which were far more powerful and autonomous. Now, finally, the new Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB) was in a position to deliver the funding and the mechanisms needed to appoint more art advisers in the field. The potential of its agenda was unquestionable and its founding Director, Bob Edwards, and his fellow board members pushed hard for a combination of meaningful employment and cultural maintenance,10 which they believed would provide the only real future for Aboriginal people. The Board’s first project officer was the erudite former filmmaker, Anthony Wallis, who later took on several important roles at the centre of the developing Aboriginal art market during the 1980s.

  One of the first consultants to the new AAB was the quietly spoken and empathetic 25-year-old Jennifer Isaacs, who had already served as the first project officer of the Aboriginal arts committee. Her family was well connected in Sydney art and intellectual circles. She studied fine art and anthropology at Sydney University in the same class as Charlie Perkins and, having become an activist during Perkin’s Freedom Ride in 1965, developed close ties with the organisers of the land rights movement. Isaacs proved to be an excellent go-between, and undertook a variety of curatorial and administrative roles for the AAB in Sydney. Her art world friends included Tony Tuckson and his wife Margaret and the sculptor Marea Gazzard and, through her work with the Board, she grew close to Aboriginal families in Yirrkala, Bathurst Island and Weipa. Her life-long friendship with Thancoupie was forged when she took classes in ceramics at the National Art School.

  Another of the seminal thinkers who influenced the vibrant scene during the 1970s was the Sydney-based, internationally renowned academic, Professor Ulli Beier. A champion of modern black African writing and visual arts, Beier urged the Board to support brave adventurous programs for new media, new techniques and exhibitions, and to support gifted field operatives in the Top End. He encouraged inspirational teachers such as Madeleine Clear, who was introducing wood block printing and other innovative new techniques to young men on the Tiwi Islands, and went on to support a generation of Indigenous writers and artists.

  At this early stage in the developmen
t of The Company and the agenda of the AAB, mission shops still dominated sales of Aboriginal paintings, artefacts and crafts. Yet a number of entrepreneurial Indigenous artefact producers ran their own small Aboriginal-owned businesses. Old Joe Timbery had been operating a little roadside stall not far from the resident snake-charmer on ‘the loop’ adjacent to the Aboriginal community at La Perouse in Sydney for decades. A descendant of the south coast clans, his great grandmother, Queen Emma, was a renowned shell worker, whose delicate periwinkle pictures had found an unlikely but fertile market in the United Kingdom. Old Joe had a large number of children including a son of the same name, and a daughter Jeanette, who all became artists. Soon after I opened my business, ‘Young Joe’ started turning up at my place in Bondi in his beat-up old Chevy, piled high with plywood boomerangs. I took to driving out to La Perouse to buy the Timbery family wares, and often gave Jeanette blank boab nuts and didgeridoos which she painted exquisitely. In later years, until the close of the Coo-ee Emporium, they would often arrive unexpectedly at my shop, or drop by to visit me at home.

  Shirley Collins and Dorothy Bennett at The Company gallery, Darwin, c. 1985.

  Similar small craft enterprises can be traced all over the country. Pitjantjatjara artisans sold their carvings around Uluru in Central Australia from the early 1950s onward. At Ernabella, the mission produced a range of fabric and printed items, and by the late 1960s so too did the church-operated business Bima Wear, on Bathurst Island. In 1968, the first pottery workshops were conducted at Cherbourg in Queensland and the Bagot Reserve in Darwin, while ‘traditional’ arts and mass-produced tourist items such as bullroarers, didgeridoos and returning boomerangs were handcrafted at Cherbourg and Hopevale. Bark blanks were cut in Hopevale and distributed to other Queensland Murri artists further afield. At Yirrkala and Milingimbi in Arnhem Land, a system of marketing art through resident mission staff had been in operation since the 1950s. Linguist Peter Carroll began marketing art through the mission at Oenpelli in 1967, and in 1969 Maningrida Arts and Culture was established.

  Inside many remote communities, however, even the smallest steps toward autonomy were proving extremely painful. In the settlement of Papunya, deep in the Western Desert, a young teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, was to become famous for his conflict with the white authorities over the sale of paintings made by the local Aboriginal men. Efforts to stop this fledgling art enterprise convinced Bardon that Papunya was run by people who were racist, paternalistic, self-righteous, heavy-drinking and intellectually dishonest. He later wrote that they were ‘the detritus of our culture wielding their power over the Aborigines, about whose culture they had only limited insight’. Bardon revolted against the expectation that he should inculcate black schoolchildren with the ‘concepts of the colonising culture’. When he sought the advice of the Aboriginal yardsmen, cooks and town councillors about a mural the children wanted to paint on the school wall, he could not possibly have imagined the galvanising effect this event would have on all of them. Nor could he have anticipated that this mural would spark a revolution that would resonate across the continent for decades to come.

  HOME OF THE HONEY ANT

  Most of the ‘painting men’ had left Papunya by the time I began working in the industry in the early 1980s. Though not quite a ghost town, its forlorn streets were abandoned to tumbleweed, crushed tin cans and the ubiquitous plastic bags. Many inhabitants had moved to the new settlements closer to their homelands at Kintore and Kiwirrkurra. There was no evidence of the creative impulse that had spread from there a decade earlier. Even the school mural had been destroyed. I’ve been in and out of Papunya and swagged out on the road to Haasts Bluff on numerous occasions, but I‘ve never had any desire to spend a night, or any more than a few hours, there.

  The Papunya community sits at a Dreaming site that is shared by all traditional Aboriginal groups in the Central and Western deserts. The home of the Honey Ant, it is also part of the Emu, Kangaroo, Goanna and Soldier Ant Dreamings, all of which connect Papunya to other sites visited during the ancient travels of ancestral creator beings. With its occasional rocky outcrops, sandhills and scrublands dotted with desert oak and spinifex, it lies just beyond the southern extreme of Warlpiri country, and overlaps inevitably with many other clans, including the Luritja, Anmatjerre and the Arrernte. To the west, the land of the Pintupi and Pitjantjatjara, with its flood channels, vast salt lakes and endless rolling red-ochre sandhills, stretches throughout an area covering almost a third of the Australian continent and much of the state of Western Australia.

  In hindsight, it seems remarkable that the phenomenal success of desert painting should have spread from here. In 1971, Papunya was the unhappiest settlement in the Western Desert, and the site of the last great assimilationist experiment. The community was ‘home’ to the remnants of the ‘lost tribe’ of the Pintupi, the last nomads who were brought in from 1963 onward by the Northern Territory Welfare Branch patrols. The media of the time commonly ran gloomy stories regarding its future. By 1970, its population had risen to more than 1,000, swelled by stockmen and their families out of work after the introduction of award wages in 1968.

  At the time Geoff Bardon arrived in the community, more than half of the residents were under 16, and delinquency, vandalism and violence were commonplace. Important elders such as former stockmen Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra and Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri saw something different in Bardon’s manner from that of the other whitefellas. Their designated leader, Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, was a charismatic figure though police officers at Papunya thought of him as an ‘incorrigible drunk and unsettling influence’. Even Bardon described him in 1970 as a ‘two-legged human swag’.11 Bardon soon recognised, however, that Kaapa was a highly intelligent and gifted man, who like many of his clansmen, had been intimidated by whites and set adrift from his cultural roots after his traditional lands were divided into European cattle stations.

  Amongst his own people, Kaapa was recognised as an important artist who was often called upon to paint objects used in Anmatjerre and Arrernte ceremonies.12 He mistrusted white people who had mocked his early attempts to paint watercolour landscapes in a Hermannsburg School style.

  One can only imagine Bardon’s surprise when these older men expressed interest in his idea for a mural on the school wall. He soon realised that the design would need to be acceptable for general viewing, with subject matter that did not trespass on any secret or sacred imagery. The elders discussed the project intently amongst themselves, while Long Jack Phillipus prepared the blank 3 x 10 metre wall with cement render and coats of white primer. Kaapa explained to Bardon that the Honey Ant Dreaming mural would show the ancestors emerging from the ground, creating landforms as they moved across it, and finally returning underground, to be celebrated forever after in story and ceremony. It would be a gift, ‘given to the white man’s school’ by the ceremonial leaders.

  When Kaapa began to incorporate realistic figurative depictions of ants and birds, Bardon questioned him.

  ‘Not ours,’ Kaapa told him, ‘yours.’

  ‘Well, paint yours!’ Bardon replied. ‘Aboriginal honey ants!’

  Following a whispered consultation with Long Jack and Billy Stockman, Kaapa painted U-shapes with a ‘deft and sinuous hand’.13 These were later changed to horizontal bars, which finally satisfied everyone. The authentic Honey Ant hieroglyph, surrounded by its travelling marks, was the first step in the selection of iconography that could be shared with white people.

  Bardon later described the glorious moment when a number of men went up to the wall and touched it, even before the paint had dried. He wrote:

  This was the beginning of the Western Desert painting movement when, led by Kaapa, the Aboriginal men saw themselves in their own image before their very eyes, and upon a European building. Truly something strange and marvellous had begun.14

  Kaapa Tjampitjinpa and his son, Papunya, 1972. (courtesy Allan Scott)

  Four more murals were painted
on the walls of the Papunya school between June and August 1971. The Honey Ant mural was the largest and most significant. It was a public assertion of Aboriginal identity, chosen because of its great power and relevance to all of the Western Desert clans. It generated great excitement and discussion throughout the settlement. The creation of these murals required a compromise of the painters’ desire to keep ceremonial designs from the prying eyes of the outside world. The interaction generated by the painting process led to at least five or six separate groups of men joining the blossoming art group. The elders hoped that this new Dreaming would play a role in winning back the hearts and minds of the younger generation to their custodial responsibilities.15 And Bardon began to understand the way in which knowledge was passed from one generation to the next in Aboriginal society.

  As the artists began to transpose their designs onto any surface that came to hand (plywood and masonite boards, packing cases and even occasionally panes of old glass and sheets of iron), Bardon’s desire to free the paintings from Western influence led the artists to explore a range of appropriate graphic symbols that could be sold to, or seen by, uninitiated people. While a U-shape could be a man, perhaps a hunter, concentric roundels could represent a variety of features including hills, corroboree grounds, waterholes or soakages. Whole parallel lines could represent clouds when truncated and aligned in pairs, or become travelling lines when positioned between specific sites. When wavy, they came to represent running water. The presence and travels of various animals were shown by imitating their footprints. The round pad of the foot surrounded by smaller toe marks was symbolic of the dingo; a flatter ‘E’ the track of a possum. A kangaroo was represented by the imprint of the extended feet as two short lines or ticks aligned on either side of a longer mark representing its flattened tail. In this way an entire lexicon of symbols was developed. Over time this enabled the artists to relate long narrative stories through iconography. More importantly it enabled them to record the movement from one site to another. These sites could range from a simple ceremonial site, to an extended and vast tract of land. As with the art of Arnhem Land and other regions, the subject matter of paintings was dependent upon each artist’s skin group, and consequently their role as a custodian of a particular corpus of knowledge. The different way each painter chose to transpose ritual imagery onto canvas and board revealed his own individual style.