The Dealer is the Devil Read online

  By the end of the decade, the AAB was the sole funding agency for a rapidly evolving industry. Many people who would go on to play a pivotal role were working in the arts across Arnhem Land.34 Empirical data about the size, scope and potential of the industry was desperately needed, and the AAB, in partnership with The Company, commissioned Dr Timothy Pascoe to prepare a strategic report. Pascoe estimated there were 5,000 Aboriginal people earning an average of $200 per annum from art and craft production.

  In 1979-1980, total industry retail sales were $2.5 million annually, of which about 40% was being returned to producers. In dollar terms, 62% of production was generated in the Northern Territory, with 12% in Queensland, 13% in Western Australia and 10% in South Australia. Sixty communities earned an average of 5% of their total cash income from the sale of art and artefacts. The Company’s six retail outlets and wholesale warehouse generated 30% of total industry sales. As for the general public, most were just not interested; 75% of The Company’s customers were international visitors who purchased 80–90% of all product.

  At the beginning of the 1980s, 56% of all items sold were tourist art, 25% hand-made crafts, and only 16% fine art. After the initial rush to buy the first paintings from Papunya Tula, the market had fallen into the doldrums. The Company warehouse simply could not sell all of the art being sent from communities. A shift to 60-day payment on works transferred the problem of oversupply to art advisers. Angry artists soon began selling their best works to ‘outsiders’.35

  Pascoe concluded that the Aboriginal art and crafts industry had stagnated. Although several art centres were established throughout the 1970s, there had been relatively small growth in the industry’s value since the start of the decade when total sales were estimated at just $900,000 per annum. Pascoe recognised that ‘craft advisers’ had a pivotal role to play at the industry’s organisational level,36 but he believed non-Aboriginal people who understood the Western marketplace were most suited to this role. They were, he argued, less susceptible to pressures from family and community members.

  For every dollar subsidy, Pascoe estimated $2 was generated for the producers. Other than the six galleries operated by The Company, there were only ten independent specialist retailers. Of these, only two were considered commercially viable. In the several hundred souvenir and craft shops across Australia, 5–10% of total stock was Aboriginal artefacts. While Pascoe remained optimistic, he predicted that The Company could only break even if it concentrated on both wholesale and retail sales, and withdrew from educational activities and field operations. This, however, would have curtailed the flow of Kimberley works to Mary Macha at The Company’s Perth outlet, and severely hampered Dorothy Bennett’s activities collecting art in Arnhem Land. His recommendations were ignored, and The Company sank further into debt.

  By the decade’s end, Pascoe had become the AAB Chairman and was intent on putting the industry on a more professional footing. The structural faultlines, many of which still exist, were already apparent. Money was scarce. Given the barely developed infrastructure, there were too many artists. Papunya Tula would not support or supply town artists. Privately owned galleries and dealers with ready money to pay ‘up front’ competed for the artists’ loyalty. The Company, unable to pay for artworks promptly, infuriated art centre managements. Isolated art facilities lacked organisational and marketing skills, and vital cash reserves. The chaos was compounded by the lack of a wholesale/retail pricing structure between community art centres and the retail outlets they supplied.

  ORIGINS OF ART IN THE EAST KIMBERLEY

  The metamorphosis of my business from an emporium dedicated to high-quality Australian craft into an exhibiting Aboriginal art gallery gathered pace after I met Joe Croft in 1984. I needed a dance group for a big promotional opportunity and rather mischievously Anthony Wallis introduced me to Joe, who was managing David Gulpilil and his dance group for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs.

  Even then, Gulpilil’s exploits were the stuff of legend. As a 16-year-old he’d starred in the internationally acclaimed film Walkabout37 and went on to make Storm Boy (1976) and The Last Wave (1977). He was embraced by black and white, and mixed with the likes of John Lennon, Bob Marley and Bruce Lee. He was the most charismatic Aboriginal dancer I have ever seen, but he ran rings around anyone who attempted to manage his affairs. As David sat around our Bondi campfire with Bobby Bunungurr, George Banbuma and Don Gundinga singing, laughing and drinking through the night, Joe holed up in the TV room relaxing in his white singlet, happy to be relieved of responsibility for their behaviour. They’d returned from Japan only days earlier with a $5,000 room service bill. David, feeling lonely, had spent an entire night on the hotel telephone talking to relatives at his outstation near Ramingining.

  Joe and I worked together for ten years, during which the business grew from an Australiana shop into a thriving art gallery. After more than a decade in the Canberra public service, he loved being an entrepreneur, living in a caravan behind the gallery, a ‘fringe dweller’ in trendy Paddington. He would sit at the front counter of the shop studying the racing guide, greeting overseas visitors, and delighting them with his stories.

  When he died in 1996 I was heartbroken. He had never recovered from the death of his son, Lindsay, in 1994. Good-looking and eloquent, Lindsay was one of the most promising and educated young activists of the time. I was in Santa Fe working on a huge exhibition when Lindsay arrived with two young Aboriginal students he was mentoring. He’d just completed a prestigious Harkness fellowship at Harvard University, and also a graduate diploma in public policy at the Australian National University. Already at 27 he was clearly destined to be a leader. We discussed doing a show together at the Bowers Museum just south of Los Angeles, and arranged to meet there the following week.

  He went off to El Paso to visit the Native American reservation. On the way there, driving behind an enormous timber carrier, a log rolled off and smashed the car, killing Lindsay instantly, and injuring his young wife and the two students. Stricken by grief, Joe was hit by a truck a few months later, and after a painfully slow rehabilitation he was diagnosed with leukemia.

  David Gulpilil.

  Mandala, my daughter, with David Gulpilil, Don Gundinga, George Banbuma and Bobby Bunungurr preparing for a performance at Bondi Beach, 1985.

  Joe Croft, entrepreneur.

  Joe had always been such an outgoing personality, and his slow decline had been devastating to watch. As the day of his funeral in Sydney approached, I was working out bush in the Northern Territory. I wanted to make camp at his birthplace, so I drove for seven hours from Katherine to Lajamanu to get there, recalling the many adventures we had shared as I went. The sun was dropping toward the distant horizon when I finally reached Kalkarindji, just a kilometre or two from where Joe had been born in 1926. With a billy on the fire, I lay on my swag in a dry riverbed, a million stars above, while fond memories of Joe lulled me to sleep. Many of Joe’s stories still bring a smile to my face. He’d been especially proud of this place and his Gurindji heritage. It was right here, at Wave Hill, that Aboriginal stockmen across the Far North and West of Australia had begun their momentous strike against the station owner Lord Vestey, led by Joe’s countryman, Vincent Lingiari, in 1966.

  Wave Hill was a familiar landmark on our travels from the late 1980s onward as Anne and I drove between Top Springs and Lajamanu before turning west along the corrugated dirt of the Buchanan Highway to our favourite, hidden, unmarked waterhole on Calico Creek. For 800 kilometres, as we headed toward the Kimberley region, we’d pass thousands of hump-backed cattle treading the dry dust that stretched as far as the horizon. After arriving at Halls Creek the next day, we’d push on to Fitzroy Crossing where, in 1971, the Yungngora on Noonkanbah Station followed the Gurindji in protesting against their work and pay conditions. Like so many others, they had experienced great economic hardship since the 1950s.

  As the Kimberley mining boom gained momentum during the 1970s, hundreds
of mining leases were pegged on spiritually significant sites. There were many bitter confrontations between police and protesters. The damming of the Ord River left large swathes of Mirriwung, Gija and Gadjerring land beneath the rising waters of Lake Argyle, sacred sites included. With the pastoral industry in decline during the mid 1970s, the impact on Aboriginal people was profound.

  On Christmas Day in 1974, Cyclone Tracy tore through Darwin. A number of influential Gija elders of the East Kimberley interpreted the destruction of the city and surrounding countryside as a warning by the Rainbow Serpent against the Gadiya (white man’s) ways. Amongst those who interpreted the event as a call for cultural revival were Paddy Jaminji, a highly respected elder, Jacko Dolmyn, Paddy Mosquito and Jaminji’s ‘nephew’, 48-year-old Rover Thomas.

  The following story has become the stuff of legend, a potent myth in the annals of Aboriginal art that has a number of variants:

  Following a road accident in late 1974, a deceased female relative came to Rover in the first of a series of powerful dreams. His spirit ‘mother’ told him of her travels across the Eastern and Central Kimberley. At journey’s end, she stood on Kelly’s Knob in Kununurra with several other spirit beings, and looked northeast as the wrathful Rainbow Serpent destroyed the northern capital. Rover developed this epic journey into a narrative sequence, relating it as a balga (song and dance cycle), while his ‘uncle’ Paddy Jaminji painted boards depicting the important sites and spirit beings for the dancers to carry on their shoulders. The older man mentored and counselled his nephew while infusing the painted boards with his deep knowledge of the land, its features and its spiritual significance. Over the following years Rover developed and reworked the sequence of the verses. In time, the Krill Krill, or Gurrir Gurrir, ceremony became the unifying cultural focus for the Mirriwung and Gija people at Turkey Creek. The first ceremonial re-enactment took place in 1977, and it was repeated at a number of locations in the East Kimberley region, in Arnhem Land and further afield through the late 1970s and early 1980s.

  Gurrir Gurrir re-enactment held behind the pensioner unit at Warmun, 1995.

  There is a great deal of controversy over the exact time at which Rover began painting his own Krill Krill boards. Differing accounts have resulted in wild accusations about who painted what, and when. What we do know is that sometime between 1981 and 1982, Rover began painting38 without assistance from others. I still marvel at the fact that just 30 years ago, at the very time the first commercial Aboriginal art galleries were opening, these early boards gave rise to the vibrant Kimberley art movement that we know today. Concurrent with these artistic and cultural developments during the 1970s, survey teams were searching the region for diamonds. The Argyle pipe was discovered close to the Warmun Community at Turkey Creek in 1979, and mining commenced in 1983. Paddy Jaminji worked as a gardener at the nascent Argyle Diamond Mine, and sold a number of his early paintings to contractors and members of the site survey team.

  These earliest paintings were never intended for sale, but they soon became the subject of commercial interest. Central to the Rover myth is the story of his relationship with Mary Macha. In her late 20s when they first met, she was a smart, rather chic ex-nurse married to an Eastern European artist, and already the manager of The Company gallery in Perth. She had begun her association with the Aboriginal people of the Kimberley in 1971 as a project officer with the Western Australian Native Welfare Department. She had been sourcing artefacts in the Kimberley with assistance from Don McLeod, a field officer for the Department of Employment based in Kununurra. These artefacts included Paddy Jaminji’s carved owls and ochre decorated boomerangs, along with a range of items created at Warmun, Mowanjum and other Kimberley communities. While she was negotiating the purchase of a collection of Paddy’s boards sometime around the beginning of 1982, Rover supposedly emerged from a crowd of onlookers, and as if reporting for duty announced, ‘Rover Thomas, I want to paint.’ Other accounts, however, confirm that she was first introduced to Rover by Rimas Riauba, the community bookkeeper at Turkey Creek who had already seen him painting, prior to this declaration.39

  The photographer and researcher Neil McLeod40 had been working on the first of more than 60 books documenting Aboriginal culture, natural history, wildlife and art when he met Paddy Jaminji for the first time in 1977.41 He had also photographed endangered species during several field trips, and visited the original community of Mowanjum at the invitation of renowned elder David Mowaljarlai. McLeod purchased at least two paintings on his March 1982 field trip, which Rover claimed to have painted the year before, possibly while he was assisting his uncle.

  Paddy Jaminji, Moon, Sun and Stars, 1978–1979. Earth pigment on discarded builder’s plywood, 122 x 122 cm irregular.

  From the outset, Jaminji’s warm, earthy paintings stood out as appreciably different to the better-known, multi-hued acrylic dotted works that were being created at Papunya during the same period. The remoteness of the Kimberley encouraged a separate development, and Jaminji, and the others who followed him, chose to work only in traditional ochres, dismissing acrylics as gadiya ‘rubbish’. This resulted in a highly textured surface which followed the actual contours of the country and gave the feeling that the traces of events, which had unfolded through time, were embedded in the works. Jaminji’s most emblematic paintings were of mythic creatures depicted in a figurative style. They included Tawurr, the half kangaroo that was transformed into a rock at Elgee Cliffs, the site of an ancient cave painting and Dreaming place. During the Gurrir Gurrir ceremony, the spirit stops to acknowledge Tawurr, ensuring the continuity of the spiritual power that emanates from within the cliffs.

  Unfortunately the majority of Jaminji’s paintings had little, if any, fixative added to the pigments and they were stored between ceremonies on earth floors in poor conditions. Many of those used in ceremonies and subjected to poor handling have suffered varying degrees of damage over the years, including smudging of the ochre surfaces and deterioration of the board on which they were painted. A number were painted while still nailed as lining on the interior walls of community buildings. When removed, imperfections due to joins and removed beading became apparent. These were not created as items of trade. They were never intended for sale. In yet another example of the quite different imperatives of black and white society, the Gija men utilised the only materials available to them at the time, for a higher purpose than the interior lining of a building. As would be expected, major early paintings in private hands are extremely rare, especially those as powerful and iconic as Moon, Sun and Stars, originally purchased by Western Australian botanist Marion Blackwell, a member of the original Argyle mine site survey team. Created some time between 1978 and 1979, it was offered for sale at Lawson~Menzies and was purchased by an enthusiastic Spanish collector for $105,000 in May 2005.

  There were no phones in many remote communities, other than in the council office, in the early 1980s, and Mary Macha, Chips Mackinolty and others who bought paintings regularly often relied on assistance from Rimas Riauba to arrange the shipment out of Warmun. Later, in 1984, Paddy Jaminji and Rover Thomas both travelled to Perth to work with Macha. Unfortunately Jaminji was almost totally blind by the mid 1980s when the Argyle Diamond Mine eventually opened. He was the inspiration behind Rover Thomas’ decision to paint, and toward the end of his life in the mid 1990s, he inspired many others, including the renowned Warmun artist Lena Nyadbi.

  The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg

  In which art centres spread throughout the desert. The urban art movement takes hold, the first female artists emerge in the outback, and landmark exhibitions travel overseas. The dawn of the art star sees a number of artists choose independence. Sotheby’s arrives and makes Aboriginal art ‘collectable’. Retailers proliferate while white box galleries vie for the best artists. As the economy goes into free fall, competition for artists becomes intense.

  ARNHEM LAND

  After my return to Australia, my friend Louise Fer
rier and I opened our ‘Australian emporium’ on a dilapidated stretch of Sydney’s Oxford Street. No more made-in-Japan kitsch, Taiwanese boomerangs and ‘Back to Bourke’ coffee mugs, we declared! Everything must be handmade and genuine.

  Louise had been Richard Neville’s girlfriend in London, during the 1960s. She’d worked with him on the satirical pop culture magazine Oz, which had nearly landed them all in Her Majesty’s jail. The offending issue, compiled entirely by schoolchildren, featured Rupert the teddy bear’s head pasted onto an X-rated cartoon by Robert Crumb. The young editors were charged with obscenity and the corruption of minors. Louise rallied support for Richard, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis during the infamous obscenity trials. They were defended by high profile barrister John Mortimer and Geoffrey Robertson. Even John Lennon and Yoko Ono joined the demonstrations that sent shockwaves through the English establishment.

  The Sydney set was a very incestuous scene in those days and Louise knew absolutely everyone – journalists, musicians, jewellers, gay activists, fashion designers, playwrights, painters and actors. Lots of creative people were returning from London filled with audacious ideas about art and life. Communes were springing up on the north coast. The cultural desert of the 1960s had been replaced by something far more exhilarating.

  After four years of travel overseas, I thought I could settle down and have some success selling the work of the fascinating people to whom Louise had introduced me. Everyone felt we were mad to attempt to sell modern Australiana in a distressed inner city slum such as Paddington (now one of the most expensive suburbs on earth). On one side of our shop stood a hideous hair salon with ancient hairdryers and a linoleum floor, and on the other side was a decrepit old pet shop, which reeked of bird droppings and cockroaches. But you could rent a space for $80 a week, and pay unemployed artists $40 cash a day to work on the floor.