The Dealer is the Devil Read online

  The Dreaming is also a state of being. A person can be said to be ‘living the Dreaming’ or ‘living in harmony with the Dreaming’. This occurs when that person is attuned to the natural world. It should not be confused with the Jungian notion of dreaming, and its association with the unconscious. Foremost amongst those who have explored this theme in art was my good friend Lin Onus, the most influential urban Aboriginal artist of his generation. Within Lin’s realist landscapes there was invariably an element that contained the crosshatched clan patterning (known as rarrk) associated with the bark painters of Garmedi in Central Arnhem Land. Lin was a Yorta Yorta man from Victoria, but he had gained permission to use this particular rarrk patterning from Jack Wunuwun and Johnny Bulun Bulun when they initiated him in Garmedi. At the time he was in his early forties and it was not something he took lightly. By using rarrk, which indicates the spiritual content in an image, Lin was intimating that the Dreaming is a reality that lies beyond the immediately apparent. It is a parallel way of seeing the world, and every living thing in it.

  People were always asking Guboo to come to their properties and tell them where Aboriginal people would have enacted their ceremonies. He knew intuitively where people had gathered and ceremonies had taken place. It was almost as if he could see an X-ray of the ground. Some people can take your hand and you feel the power like an electric current. Guboo was like that. He had a spiritual presence that could hit you at the core.

  Guboo’s Dreaming circles were held deep in the wilderness behind Bulgarn13 on the New South Wales south coast. The rough dirt road winds slowly round the saddle behind the mountain which, when seen from the coast 35 kilometres away, appears as the belly of a mature woman lying langourously on her back. The nipple of her perfectly shaped breast is a rock escarpment with a concealed cave large enough for several people to sleep inside. At night, low-flying cloud streaming across the saddle can create an electrifying skyscape. The track from her belly cuts steeply down the side of a spur and ends amongst a stand of giant old blue gums that sit on a grassy plain 10 metres above the beautiful meandering Clyde River. The river rises 30 metres when in flood, leaving flotsam high amongst the branches of the wattles, paperbarks and gums. When at peace, the floodplain dips to a rocky bed strewn with smooth riverstones and ochre rocks. Just 200 metres further down, the river widens to a perfect swimming hole 40 metres across and 100 metres long.

  Here at the ceremonial Bora ring, Guboo taught us that the Dreaming of a place is the collective memory of each event that has occurred in the lives of all the sentient beings who have lived there. Every person and every action, he would explain, leaves its imprint, its memory, behind in the earth. Any place can become significant through its association with your own, your family’s, your friends’ and the wider community’s collective memory of events that have taken place there. To these are added all the known and unknown events that have occurred in that place. You may, or may not, be aware of many of these events. Nevertheless, by holding this place to be special to you personally, you become a custodian of the stories which keep its Dreaming alive. This site is of significance and a part of your walkabout.

  Guboo was something of a rebel amongst Aboriginal people because he believed that white people could connect to the Dreaming of places in the same way. But he also understood how difficult it could be for a person born of Western culture, who has been brought up in a city apart from nature, to fully enter into the Dreaming as a living reality. Since the invention of electricity and its many technological manifestations, Westerners have been alienated from the natural rhythm of the sun and the moon. Guboo had a series of rituals that he used to help us understand it. He would cut a sally wattle, for which he would thank the Great Spirit, and then hand out timber, tomahawk and rasp to newcomers. He would ask them to make a pair of clap sticks, which is not as easy as you would imagine. Taking hours of endless chipping and sanding, it would force people to sit in the deep wilderness, still their minds, and listen and watch for a day or two. He hoped that at some point they might come to the realisation that the forest is a single organism. That the trees, cicadas, ants and termites, earth, wind and rain all breathe as one, and have done so for all time. What environmentalists label ‘deep ecology’ an Aboriginal person calls the Dreaming. Understanding this state of being in both the head and the heart enables you to discover your own place in harmony with the whole, and accept responsibility for it.

  From an Indigenous perspective a work of art depicting the artist’s Dreaming or country is both a process and a product. The process involves the retelling and reinterpretation of stories that are timeless, in order to keep them alive and pass them on to future generations. Particular Dreamings are shared between those who have a custodial and a managerial relationship. All Aboriginal people are divided equally into custodians or managers for all ‘business’ according to kinship. In North East Arnhem Land these are referred to as Yothu and Yindi, like the Chinese Yin and Yang. Amongst the Warlpiri they are Kirda and Kurdungurlu. In effect these two groups operate much like the House of Representatives and the Senate. The former enacts the Law while the latter ratifies it. The custodians bring the Dreaming physically into reality through song, dance or painting, while the managers or ‘policemen’ see that it is performed in the right way, and that the important bits are not left out. The non-literary oral tradition of Aboriginal culture is not just religious; it is survival-based. It contains vital information such as where and when to find food and permanent ‘living’ water. Keeping the Dreaming intact is the primary motivation for the making of art.

  The notion of the ‘custodian’ and the ‘policeman’ holds to greater and lesser degree amongst various clans and locations. It provides a vital insight into the true collaborative nature of Indigenous cultural practice, and is extremely useful for understanding the issues involved in the question of ‘authenticity’, most especially in art. In modern times, painting has become a new form of ceremonial activity. It may involve the participation of children, wives or husbands in the execution of an author’s artwork. To question the authenticity of Indigenous artwork created with assistants such as these, also a common practice throughout the history of Western art, is, in my personal opinion, totally inappropriate.

  It was Guboo who suggested to me that by putting art on people’s walls I would achieve more to change white attitudes to Aboriginal people than by taking part in land rights marches. Protests, he believed, led to antipathy, while the road to reconciliation and the rejection of racism is paved with love.

  KITH AND KIN

  ‘H ello? Hello? That you Tjupurrula? It’s Jimmy here. I’m at the mechanic at Ringer Soak … for ceremony. I’m down on two rims. We need bullocky for propa feed. Big mob of business coming through. You got any money to send over this way?’

  It was Jimmy Robertson Jampijinpa on the phone: my Aboriginal uncle. Funny really, as I was several years older than Jimmy. I remember the day we met more than 20 years ago, as if it were yesterday. It was near noon, deep in the Tanami Desert just past Supplejack Station. The temperature was close to 50°C: the kind of heat that makes your nose bleed. In the old days Aboriginal people were too smart to move around under the sun during the heat of the day – but times change.

  Standing by the road was a good-looking Aboriginal man wearing a distinctive peaked cowboy hat, not dissimilar to that of the 1990s television star Les Hiddins, the ‘Bush Tucker man’. He flagged me down. Below the wide brim, one-third of which had been severed and reattached with staples, was Jimmy Robertson’s unforgettably open, beaming face. He led me to a broken-down Toyota and asked me if I could tow him to Lajamanu, his Warlpiri township several hours to the north.

  Our friendship was forged on the 150 kilometre drive back to town. I learned that Jimmy had two wives and eighteen children, some his natural heirs and others who were ‘given’ into his care by the extended family. A hardworking foreman in the cattle industry during his youth, he’d returned to Lajamanu and
converted a passion for community health and development into important work in the outstation movement. He also ran night patrol, a common practice in many Aboriginal communities where domestic violence and teen rebellion can get out of hand after dark. In his spare time he worked with his wives and a number of his children creating paintings for the unfunded art centre.

  Jimmy Robertson Jampijinpa, Lajamanu, 1998.

  Jimmy spoke 11 languages, of which English was his worst, and his lack of skills in literacy and numeracy made running the art centre extremely difficult. In one of these very first conversations I learned of his frustrations.

  ‘I want to own my own business,’ he said, looking at me eye to eye. ‘I want to be on the winning side.’

  In other words he wanted to be just like me – free to come and go, to own a business, drive a decent car and make a good living to support his family. He wanted to be free of welfare dependency. But I could see straight away what he was up against … and it didn’t look likely. The art centre was all broken windows, with rubbish piled on the floor, and everything covered in red dust.

  I ended up spending the next ten years working with the artists of Lajamanu. Each time I visited, more than 40 old bedraggled men and women would drift in, desperately hoping to make some money by painting. One by one the women would sit down, spacing themselves generously apart throughout the old gymnasium, and they’d happily paint all day. The men weren’t so comfortable, being unwilling to work in the same room as the women, and they usually left quickly to paint in the shade of a tree or on their wide verandah at home.

  I tried everything to get funding for an art coordinator, holding repeated meetings with the town clerk, the Lajamanu Council, ANCAAA,14 and with a dozen or more bureaucrats in Darwin. Finally the Council agreed to provide funds for a three-month trial, and to repair an old house in the community that had been damaged after the previous occupant had died. But without any additional financial support during the trial period, the art centre failed to generate sufficient sales to be viable.

  Undeterred, Jimmy tried to run the art centre himself, and over the following decade his phone calls asking for help became commonplace. A succession of my bookkeepers rolled their eyes at me each time there was a new request for $1,000 here and $500 there. I even purchased a troop carrier in Darwin at Jimmy’s urging so he could ferry the artists around, and take paintings into Katherine and Darwin to try to generate income. He became a board member of the Australian Indigenous Art Trade Association (Art.Trade). He also attended industry conferences where he met gallery owners and dealers from around the country who purchased paintings to help him keep the art centre going and the artists enthused.

  In 2001, Jimmy and I visited Paris and London together. We attended a UNESCO conference on the impact of new technologies on Indigenous people around the world with Marcia Langton, the prominent Aboriginal scholar, anthropologist and geographer.15 Doors seemed to spring open everywhere when I travelled with Jimmy. After attending a launch by the Parisian dealer Baudoin Lebon in his chic Marais gallery, we were immediately invited to a soirée at his home. Baudoin wanted Jimmy’s opinion on his spectacular collection of Western Desert artefacts. On another occasion, we were given back stage passes to a World Music Festival. Before I knew it, Jimmy was onstage with clap sticks and ten musicians improvising as he sang in Warlpiri.16

  On our return Jimmy died of a burst stomach ulcer which must have been excruciatingly painful. It was not something a white person would normally die from. He was just 60 years of age. In many ways, he was typical of traditionally initiated Aboriginal men. He could withstand pain without complaint. He knew far more about life than he let on, and he was as competent in his own familiar environment as I was in mine. He managed a very complex life with the good humour and authority of a superb negotiator. What I gained through my friendship with Jimmy was further proof that Aboriginal people are not gullible children to be molly-coddled by well-meaning but misguided ‘whitefellas’. They deserve the right to engage in their own business on their own terms.

  The Lajamanu Men – Abie Jangala, Billy Hogan, Joe Bird, Jimmy Robertson, Tony Sampson, Joe Long and Paddy Gibson, 1998.

  My trips to Lajamanu usually included a visit to Balgo Hills. It was just ‘next door’ – only 400 kilometres to the southwest. The people here had walked out of the desert and into a Catholic Pallottine mission in 1939. By 1965 they’d been resettled near permanent water in Wirrimanu, Balgo Hills. The older people grew up during a period when the church, which I was told had been built from rocks dynamited out of a nearby sacred site, dominated just about every aspect of their lives.

  Unlike Lajamanu, the art centre in Balgo had received continuous funding and support since its establishment in 1986. A succession of art coordinators had overseen its development. When I visited the community on the first of dozens of trips between Sydney and the Kimberley, the art centre was operating out of a ‘donger’ between the two main camps in the community. This metal shipping container functioned both as the art centre and as accommodation for the art coordinator. Several visits later I found the art centre had moved to the last two rooms of a long narrow wooden accommodation block originally set aside for white teachers. It was enclosed and padlocked in metal mesh. I couldn’t help but feel that I’d driven hundreds of kilometres through a pristine wilderness and arrived in the Bronx.

  It was in Balgo that I first met the Mapan,17 Dominic Martin Tjupurrula. I’d crossed the huge dust bowl between the art centre and the community store only to find it closed. A wizened figure was vainly sweeping the dirt, his long grizzled beard flying in the wind, his face gnarled as a mallee root. Dominic had witnessed a sacred ceremony as a young child, and whether it was a punishment or the result of pure terror, he had been struck dumb ever since. But he was recognised as having special powers and, now in his 50s, he’d been through many levels of initiation into the greatest secrets of esoteric knowledge.

  I stood amongst a small knot of people idly waiting for the store to open again. Watching the swirling dust and litter around Dominic, I became aware of a gaunt stranger loitering beside me. He turned out to be an American from Wyoming who’d worked for years on oil rigs and platforms out from Exmouth off the West Australian coast. After returning to the United States he’d been diagnosed with cancer, and told he had less than a year to live. His doctors wanted to put him on a program of chemotherapy immediately. His response, he told me, had been, ‘No way, not in your wildest dreams!’ Instead he’d gone home and tried something less orthodox.

  ‘Ever hear of Wilhelm Reich?’ he asked me. I clearly remembered the disgraced therapist who became infamous after claiming he could cure cancer with primordial libidinal energy, which he generated in ‘Orgone Energy Accumulators’.

  ‘Built me an Orgone box, all lined with sheep fleece,’ my new friend explained. ‘Out the back of my ranch house. As soon as I finished it I got inside. No food. Went into a trance. Brought up all this vile black mucus. Crawled out three days later. I was weak all right. But I weren’t goin’ back to no doctors.’

  Looking at him I wondered if you could call this a cure? But he’d travelled a hell of a long way for a healing, and Dominic was the traditional Aboriginal medicine man he’d found.

  ‘Hey, you seen that filum, The Right Stuff? Yeah? Well I knew the test pilot, Chuck Yeager. You remember the Aborigines in the desert and all the sparks flying off his plane on re-entry? I asked Chuck what he reckoned that was. He looked me over and said it was fireflies. Fireflies my arse! Old Dominic knows but he aint tellin’! Some kinda supernatural phenomena for sure.’

  Next time I was in town, I was reminded of the American visitor. ‘What happened to him?’ I asked Freda Napanangka, who was in her usual place in front of the art centre.

  ‘Dominic fix ’im up, all right,’ she told me. ‘Pull ’im big stick out of the back of his head!’

  I looked at her in amazement as she held her fingers 15 centimetres apart and indicated a
large splinter of wood had been drawn out of the back of his neck. 1993.

  ‘He be okay now, I reckon,’ she grinned.

  It still amazes me that someone could just show up in a place as remote as Balgo, and expect the local medicine man to cure cancer. Clearly Dominic was no ordinary sorcerer.

  My next encounter with him was no less significant.

  We were standing outside the art centre when he made me his ‘brother’.

  ‘Oompf oompf,’ Dominic grunted, tapping my heart and breast with his fingers and then tapping his own in turn. He broke into a big smile, his lips yellow, encrusted with Log Cabin tobacco, which he’d chewed up and dipped in ash to bring out the flavour. The Kukatja call this Munjul and store it behind an ear or in the peak of a cowboy hat.

  ‘Oompf oompf,’ I repeated, tapping him in the same way.

  A strong wind was blowing as we stood facing each other with our forearms clasped. He drew me into a bear hug. My face stung as I smiled. I understood instinctively that in this one gesture Dominic had placed my entire family within the cultural conventions of desert culture.

  My ‘brother’: Dominic Martin Tjupurrula, Balgo Hills, 1993

  I’d been given a name on earlier visits to the Tiwi Islands and Ramingining in Arnhem Land, but I didn’t know enough about Aboriginal culture at that time to understand what it meant. By the time it happened in Balgo, I’d learned enough to realise how important it was, and how central the kinship system is to the Aboriginal world view.

  An outsider in a desert community is like a jigsaw piece from the wrong puzzle – in effect a nuisance and even a liability. In our world we generally ask, ‘What do you do?’ when we meet a person for the first time. Invariably an Aboriginal person will ask, ‘Who are you? What’s your country? Where are you from? What’s your family?’