Albert and Vincent Namatjira

 

This work by Vincent Namatjira, a member of one of Australia’s most well-known artistic families, can be displayed beside the painting that inspired it, and will enrich the ongoing importance of its famous subject.

Vincent Namatjira is one of the leading lights of the emerging generation of artists from remote central Australia. Namatjira is a Western Arrernte man from Ntaria (Hermannsburg) and a descendant of the great artist Albert Namatjira. Vincent’s mother passed away when he was young, and he and his sister were uprooted from their country and placed into foster care in Western Australia. The period that followed was characterised by loss, with his sense of belonging and self eroded by his adoptive experience.

It was not my decision to leave Hermannsburg and go so far away, but I was just a child, I didn’t have any voice. That life, my childhood memories, are not very good. Adolescence was hard for me, I was so lost. I had to figure it all out for myself.1

At 18, Namatjira travelled to Ntaria to find his estranged extended family. Returning to his homeland, he drew strength from his reaffirmed connections to culture, language and country, and devoted much of his time to land management issues and training. On a trip through the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY Lands), he met his soon-to-be wife, Natasha, and settled with her family at Kanpi. Natasha’s father, senior artist Jimmy Pompey, introduced Vincent to painting, and he soon began experimenting, in the more dominant dot style as well as the naive figurative style for which Pompey had become well known.

Namatjira and his young family visited Ntaria, where they would watch his aunt, the late Eileen Namatjira — a leader of the Hermannsburg Potters — paint and create art about their country and the legacy of their forebear, Albert Namatjira. These moments had a resounding impact on Vincent and he soon began to incorporate these important familial and national narratives into his own works.

Recently Namatjira has focused on portraiture, imagining and immortalising important historical figures and heroes. Many of his major works have featured his grandfather, Albert, but others have portrayed Queen Elizabeth II, and William and Catherine, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. His recent depiction of Captain James Cook was acquired by the British Museum. Namatjira’s inquisitive and exploratory portrayals — largely free of any judgemental quality — of these historical figures of British dominion have endeared his works to a wide audience.

Vincent Namatjira ‘Albert and Vincent’

Vincent Namatjira, Western Aranda/Pitjantatjara people, Australia b.1983 / Albert and Vincent 2014 / Synthetic polymer paint on linen / Gift of Dirk and Karen Zadra through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation 2014. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Vincent Namatjira/Licensed by Copyright Agency

Albert and Vincent is the result of the artist’s visit to the Gallery in May 2014 to view the Collection work Portrait of Albert Namatjira 1956 by Sir William Dargie. Previously Vincent had seen the work only as a low‑colour reproduction, and as a portrait painter whose work is often inspired by the image and cultural impact of his grandfather, he had a strong desire to view the Archibald Prize-winning portrait. Visiting the Gallery earlier in 2014, Namatjira spent many hours with the work, sitting in quiet reverence in the Australian art galleries, leaning a small mirror against a plinth (on which Daphne Mayo’s Olympian c.1946 stood) so that he could view and sketch himself with the portrait of his grandfather. Taking his sketches home to Tjurkula and finishing the work there, he imbued it with the conflicting emotions so often evoked by Albert’s stories, giving the portrait a celebratory feel while retaining a sombre sensibility.

William Dargie ‘Portrait of Albert Namatjira’

William Dargie, Australia 1912–2003 / Portrait of Albert Namatjira 1956 / Oil on canvas / Purchased 1957/ Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © QAGOMA.

Namatjira is one of the many grandchildren Albert was never able to meet, and through his portraits of his grandfather, Vincent is building his own connections to the Australian hero, while giving audiences an idea of the importance of Albert’s story and legacy within his own family.

I hope my grandfather would be quite proud, maybe smiling down on me; because I won’t let him go. I just keep carrying him on, his name and our families’ stories.2

The work was generously donated to the Gallery by Karen Zadra, the artist’s dealer, who identified that it should come to the Gallery where it can be displayed with the Dargie portrait, enriching the ongoing contemporary importance of its famous subject.

Bruce McLean is former Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, QAGOMA

Endnotes
1 Artist’s biography, Marshall Arts website, http://www.marshallart.com.au/sites/default/files/Vincent%20web%20bio.pdf, accessed 17 December 2014.
2 Artist’s biography, Marshall Arts website, http://www.marshallart.com.au/sites/default/files/Vincent%20web%20bio.pdf, accessed 17 December 2014.

Acknowledgment of Country
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land upon which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution Indigenous people make to the art and culture of this country.

It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs on the QAGOMA Blog are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.

Featured image detail: Vincent Namatjira Albert and Vincent 2014

#QAGOMA

Building a collection: Glenn Manser

 

Private collector and Gallery benefactor Glenn Manser has gifted an astounding number of works to the Collection’s Indigenous Australian art holdings — this reflects a longstanding relationship with the Gallery that began in 2008. Bruce McLean spoke to Manser about what building a collection means to him.

Related: Glenn Manser

Arthur Tjatitjarra Robertson, Ngaanyatjarra people 1936-2011 / Tjinytjira 2006 / Synthetic polymer paint on linen / Gift of Glenn Manser through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation 2013. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Arthur Tjatitjara Robertson 2006. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2014

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Bruce McLean | What was it that first drew your attention to Aboriginal art and stimulated the interest that compelled you to begin a collection?

Glenn Manser | I guess my first real contact with Australian Indigenous art was when I visited the Red Centre quite a few years ago now. I had a few hours spare and wandered into the old Papunya Tula Artists gallery in Alice Springs. I was instantly mesmerised by the quality and diversity of the art on display. I didn’t quite comprehend the motifs in the paintings or the different stories that were inherent in the men’s and women’s art. However, I subsequently made it my business to learn as much as I could about Western Desert art, and particularly that of the Pintupi people, who painted for Papunya Tula Artists.

Bruce McLean | What was the first work of Aboriginal art that you ever acquired?

Glenn Manser | The very first piece I purchased, if I remember correctly, was a 122 x 61cm earlier piece by Papunya Tula artist Makinti Napanangka. It was purchased from Michael Eather’s Fireworks Gallery here in Brisbane. This piece is now in the Owen Wagner Collection at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire.

Bruce McLean | Do you have any focus areas within your collection and how have they developed?

Glenn Manser | The focus has essentially remained the same, i.e., work sourced from art centres that are owned and directed by the traditional Aboriginal people of the Western Desert. Centres like Papunya Tula Artists, Tjungu Palya, Tjala and the Spinifex Arts Project and so on have provided talented Indigenous artists with the opportunity to tell stories about their own traditions . . . Over recent years, however, a greater effort has been made to collect works by the descendants of Albert Namatjira. The Ngurratjuta Iltja Ntjarra/Many Hands Art Centre was established in 2004, and I have attempted to collect some of the best works by the third and fourth generation watercolourists. Works by Elton Wirri, Mervyn Rubuntja, Albert Namatjira Jr, Lenie Namatjira and Gloria Pannka and others form the basis of the collection. It is important to me to keep the legacy of this most prominent Australian family alive for future generations.

Bruce McLean | Personally, what has building a collection meant for you?

Glenn Manser | The process of putting together a collection has involved a considerable amount of self-education, so that I can understand what artists are expressing about their experiences and their culture. I have a better understanding of what country and disenfranchisement mean to Indigenous Australian people, whether from remote areas or urban centres. A real respect for those like Sarah Brown, CEO of the Western Desert Dialysis Unit, and Paul Sweeney, Manager of Papunya Tula Artists, and others who attempt to improve people’s lives has also grown through my association with Aboriginal art. The aesthetic pleasure of collecting has been underpinned by a far more insightful appreciation of what art means to the artists themselves and their communities.

Bruce McLean | How did you begin your relationship with QAGOMA?

Glenn Manser | I have always been a visitor to QAGOMA but took a greater interest in the Gallery when I happened upon the exhibition ‘Namatjira to Now’ (in 2008). It coincided with my own collection focus at the time. It presented interesting insights into the place of Albert Namatjira and the Hermannsburg School in Australian art and history. I also saw a natural synergy between the exciting direction the Gallery was taking under new director Chris Saines, the vision articulated in the amazing ‘My Country: Contemporary Art From Black Australia’ exhibition, and my own collection preferences.

Bruce McLean | Do you think private philanthropy is important in art today, especially with regard to Aboriginal art?

Glenn Manser | For a large public gallery that services not only Brisbane but regional centres as well, it is important that it holds a large, diverse collection of Indigenous Australian art. While a focus on Queensland Indigenous art is necessary, it is important that QAGOMA also holds substantial collections that reflect the full Australian context. With the Gallery budget stretched in many directions, it is especially important that individuals with an interest in Indigenous art give generously to the Foundation, so that all Queenslanders can appreciate the complexity and remarkable beauty of the art of the First Australians and their descendents.

Glenn Manser was interviewed in March 2014.

Bruce Johnson McLean is Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, QAGOMA. He is a member of the Wierdi (Wirrid) people of the Birri Gubbi nation of Wribpid (central Queensland).

Harry Tjutjuna, Pitjantjatjara people, Australia b.1930 / Wati Wanka (Spider) 2011 / Synthetic polymer paint on linen / Gift of Glenn Manser through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation 2013. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Harry Tjutjuna / Courtesy: Ninuku Arts

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Acknowledgment of Country
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the Turrbal and Yugara (Jagera) peoples who are the traditional custodians of the land upon which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution Indigenous people make to the art and culture of this country.

It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name or reproduce photographs of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.

Feature image detail: Arthur Tjatitjarra Robertson Tjinytjira 2006

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Harry Tjutjuna is known for his iconic paintings of Wati Wanka

 

Part of a generous gift of Glenn Manser, this radiant work by senior Anangu artist Harry Tjutjuna is now held in the Gallery’s Collection. In the 1970s, many Anangu spoke out against revealing works based on Tjukurpa (Dreaming) to the general public, and chose to keep their own traditions and art strictly separate. Here, we find out why they changed their minds.

Harry Tjutjuna, Pitjantjatjara people, Australia b.1930 / Wati Wanka (Spider) 2011 / Synthetic polymer paint on linen / Gift of Glenn Manser through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation 2013. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Harry Tjutjuna / Courtesy: Ninuku Arts

Glenn Manser is one of the Gallery’s strongest supporters in the field of Aboriginal art. His private collection speaks of the power of Tjukurpa (Dreaming), of tradition and cultural continuance, generational change and innovation, emphasising work from the central and western deserts, with works by senior and authoritative practitioners as well as exciting younger and emerging artists. His collecting strategies complement the Gallery’s holdings of works from the same regions, and among a recent generous gift to the Collection is a painting that is exemplary of one senior artist’s work.

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Senior Anangu man and artist Harry Tjutjuna is from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, which straddle the borders of South Australia and the Northern Territory west to the Western Australia border. Tjutjuna, like many others, has travelled between the Anangu communities and has painted for the different art centres that represent those communities. Currently he lives at Pipaljatjara and paints for Ninuku Arts, based in the nearby community of Kalka.

In recent years, Anangu artists have been at the centre of a revitalisation of desert art and painting, joining the ever-expanding movement after a period of mostly voluntary self-exclusion. In the 1970s, many senior Anangu spoke out against the revelation of Tjukurpa by Papunya artists, who would go on to dominate the desert art movement.

The male elders were unprepared and shocked to encounter the dangerous signs and symbols of men’s business on open display in Alice Springs and Perth and rioted, regarding them as sacrilegious. The Papunya Tula artists’ mimetic depiction of secret or sacred aspects of tjukurpa watiku (men’s law) was seen as a selling out of Aboriginal culture to maliki (outsiders).1

Related: Building a collection

The Anangu chose not to reveal their stories and the art produced in that area reflected their dedication to keeping tradition and art separate. The most obvious example is the Ernabella batiks, which focused on aesthetics and represented country in terms of its beauty, featuring walka — designs based on milpatjunanyi (sand drawings) — rather than divulging the ancestral narratives that give cultural meaning to the landscape. The title of Ute Eickelkamp’s 1999 publication on and with the Ernabella batik artists, Don’t Ask for Stories, is reflective of the Anangu approach to art up until the 2000s. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, a group of senior Ngaanyatjarra artists (from the closely related country over the Western Australian border) painted a body of work on canvas in order to stimulate and reinvigorate cultural practices.

The seeds of a new painting movement were sown, travelling back with the artists through communities from Warburton to Warakurna, and into the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara territories. In 2001, the community of Irrunytju, just over the Western Australia border, became the first community art centre in the region to secure funding, and soon artists were engaging with the medium and new art centres proliferated.

Harry Tjutjuna is well known for his iconic paintings of Wati Wanka, the Tjukurpa associated with the ancestral Spider-man. Here, the Spider-man appears above a repeated circular design, which Tjutjuna has explained represents the many women and children of Wati Wanka.

Although it has been said that Tjutjuna’s paintings ‘don’t look particularly traditional’, they carry a sensibility that is seen in many works by senior men from this region, and are informed by the paintings found on the walls and roofs of Anangu cave galleries. Tjutjuna also takes great pride in his position as an artist and acknowledges the importance of using his skill to share knowledge with the youth of his community:

Old generation are here now and I am old generation, too. Lots of old generation have passed away. What are you going to do? What happens when I pass away? New generation got to learn Tjukurpa.2

This shift in attitude was one of the driving reasons behind the acceptance of painting in the Anangu communities, and today senior artists like Tjutjuna are working with extreme purpose, recording their Tjukurpa to ensure the continuance of Anangu law and culture.

Bruce Johnson McLean is Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, QAGOMA. He is a member of the Wierdi (Wirrid) people of the Birri Gubbi nation of Wribpid (central Queensland).

Endnotes
1  Judith Ryan, ‘Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra art of a new millennium’, in Tjukurpa Pulkatjara, the Power of the Law. South Australian Museum, Wakefield Press, Ananguku Arts and Culture Aboriginal Corporation, South Australia, 2010, p.4.
2   The artist, quoted in Certificate of Authenticity provided by Ninuku Arts, QAGOMA artist’s file.

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Acknowledgment of Country
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the Turrbal and Yugara (Jagera) peoples who are the traditional custodians of the land upon which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution Indigenous people make to the art and culture of this country.

It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name or reproduce photographs of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.

Feature image detail: Harry Tjutjuna Wati Wanka (Spider) 2011

#HarryTjutjuna #QAGOMA

Works From The Barambah Pottery, Cherbourg

 
BARAMBAH POTTERY RILEY, Mervyn(Vase)635.2013Ceramic27 x 20cm (approx.)
Barambah Pottery c.1967–80, Cherbourg / Mervyn Riley (artist), Muluridji people / (Vase) 1970s /Stoneware, wheel-thrown with glaze / Purchased 2013. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © The artist

A multitude of voices in a nation’s cultural history are often dimmed by the emergence of a dominant narrative. In the case of Aboriginal art in the last half of the twentieth century, that narrative is the story of the desert painting movements. However, it is important and valuable to consider the experiences and artworks of Aboriginal artists from other parts of the country.

A number of important engagements occurred between Aboriginal artists and the wider art world prior to the emergence of desert or ‘dot’ painting from Papunya in 1971–72. The most notable of these, of course, is the story of Albert Namatjira and the Hermannsburg School of watercolour landscape painting, but others of the same period include Western Australian carvers Jack Wherra and Butcher Joe Nangan, watercolour painter Wattie Kurrawarra, as well as painters Joe Rootsey and Segar Passi from Queensland, among many others.

The Barambah Pottery was one such example of thriving cultural activity in Queensland, a pottery studio based in the Aboriginal settlement of Cherbourg, previously Barambah Aboriginal Reserve. It was inspired in part by the work of Michael Cardew (1901–83), the eminent English studio potter who had previously worked with communities in West Africa — Nigeria and Gold Coast (now Ghana) — then in 1968 at Aboriginal communities in Bagot (Darwin) and on Bathurst Island (Tiwi Pottery). The Barambah Pottery was established around 1967, following a feasibility study by Queensland potters Carl McConnell and Jeff Shaw, with McConnell serving as the inaugural instructor.1

The pottery was somewhat anomalous: it was set up through a regular state government departmental process — as was nearly everything officially related to Aboriginal people, especially those living in the reserves system — but was conceived and locally managed by well-known artists, who envisioned it as a place of art making rather than as a government curio production depot. McConnell, noted as the most important potter of the post-World War Two generation in Queensland, left after less than a year, after the Department of Aboriginal and Islander Advancement suggested that he build the promised pottery studio and kiln himself. The attitudes of departmental officials would plague the pottery throughout its existence.

BarambahPottery_(Plate)_636
Barambah Pottery c.1967–80, Cherbourg / (Plate) 1970s / Stoneware, wheel-thrown with glaze / Purchased 2013. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © The artist

In the six years between the departure of McConnell and the arrival of Kevin Grealy in June 1974, the work of the Barambah Pottery was largely driven by officials of the Queensland Government’s Department of Native Affairs, which insisted that the potters make stereotypical works based on ‘market research’, which suggested that Jolliffe-style cartoons, symbols and designs from other parts of the country, and Aboriginal faces on ashtrays, would sell best.2 After Grealy’s arrival, and during his tenure until March 1976, the artists were afforded a little more artistic freedom, though departmental officials still tried to control the centre’s output.3 The pots produced often featured ‘Cherbourg style’ art, in which stylised X-ray and decorated animal paintings — reflective of north-Queensland rock art (where many of Cherbourg’s residents originated) — and particular line and dot motifs predominated. This visual repertoire was mixed during this period with an elegance of form and Japanese-style brushwork, the hallmark of potters such as Cardew, McConnell and Grealy. Although the pottery was quite successful and was well-known both locally and nationally, many specifics about its operation are still unknown and details about the individual artists remain scarce. A wealth of information likely exists in departmental files, awaiting further research and discovery.

These works represent a period in Queensland art during which, for one group of artists, production was controlled by the state. Yet the artists here showed that a mastery of the medium — and the subtle subversion of departmental dictation — meant works of great quality could still be produced.

Endnotes
1  Kevin Grealy, ‘Barambah Pottery, Cherbourg’, in Pottery in Australia, vol.16, no.2, 1977, pp.3–7.
2  Grealy.
3  Grealy.

BarambahPottery_(Jug)_638
Barambah Pottery c.1967–80, Cherbourg / (Jug) 1970s / Stoneware, wheel-thrown with glaze / Purchased 2013. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © The artist

My history: This land is mine / This land is me

 

‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ (GOMA 2013) examines strengths within the Queensland Art Gallery collection of Indigenous art and recognises three main central themes: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander versions of history; responses to contemporary politics and experiences; and connections to place. These themes are expressed in the three main Gallery spaces as the visual chapters: ‘My history’, ‘My life’ and ‘My country’.

Joan Nancy Stokes (Wir Innbe Ngali), Warrumuungu people Australia 1961–2011 / The Killing Fields at Attack Creek 2002 / Synthetic polymer paint on canvas / Gift of Karen Brown in memory of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2013. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © The artist

Indigenous histories have emerged as a strong current in contemporary art over the past two decades. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from across the country have begun to add their histories, held in oral traditions or state and family archives, to the known, taught and accepted versions of Australian history. Some see this as a program of ‘revisionism’, where artists are heavily engaged in questioning established narratives. Others see it as part of a ‘two-way history’. ‘History wars’ and ‘culture wars’ notwithstanding, each artist records their stories, re-examining ‘whose point of view gets recorded, whose voice matters’.5

Joan Nancy Stokes’s suite of paintings are among the most powerful works in this exhibition, depicting a massacre of Warrumuungu people at Attack Creek on the Barkly Tableland near Tennant Creek.6 Why are these people being displaced from their country, marched by men on horses, then lined up and shot? Did they kill a European’s cow? Did they protest their dispossession too strongly? Does it matter? The works are emblematic of the tragedy and futility of war and conflict.

Stokes’s paintings present one of numerous accounts of massacres of Aboriginal people, held and passed on in oral traditions, but often excluded from official records. Details of other massacres continue to emerge from early frontier settlers’ personal records. The memoirs of Thomas Davis (father of author Steele Rudd), an early settler of southern and south-western Queensland, make special note of the killings of Jiman (Iman/Yiman) people following their resistance and killing of a group of settlers at Hornet Bank:

My occupation frequently took me over the Dawson country, necessitating my travelling via Hornet Bank, Booroonda and Mount Hutton. Often have I ridden over the very ground where the police came up with the murderers of the Fraser family and saw the bleaching bones of the dead blacks strewn here and there — a gruesome sight! — full-ribbed bodies, fleshless arms, disjointed leg-bones and ghastly grinning skulls peeping out of the grass.7

Vincent Serico, Wakka Wakka/Kabi Kabi peoples, Australia 1949-2008 / Carnarvon collision (Big map) 2006 / Synthetic polymer paint on linen / 203 x 310cm / Purchased 2007. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery /
© The artist

Vincent Serico’s final work, Carnarvon collision (Big map) 2006, tells Jiman contact history in the lead up to the Hornet Bank Massacre (1857), as passed down through his Jiman family links, relaying the history held by a people so brutally treated that they were thought by some to have been exterminated.

The survival of Aboriginal people along the colonial frontier created new problems for settler society. A huge number of displaced people from devastated societies became fringe dwellers, living off the invaders’ scraps. Those who were not useful to land barons as unpaid or underpaid labourers were moved onto state reserves and Christian missions, where their lives were controlled by church and government officials.

Dale Harding, Bidjara/Ghungalu peoples, Australia b.1982 / Unnamed 2012 / Lead and steel wire / Gift of Julie Ewington through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2013 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © The artist

Dale Harding, a Brisbane-based Bidjara and Ghungalu artist, has created an arresting simulacrum of a nineteenth-century ‘king plate’, inscribed with the code ‘W38’. King plates were used by colonial authorities to identify those Aboriginal people they recognised as leaders, or appropriate liaisons — as ‘king’, ‘queen’ or ‘prince’. In Harding’s case, the plate manifests the codification of his grandmother at Woorabinda Aboriginal Mission. ‘W’ refers to Woorabinda and ‘38’ is the number that was used by mission authorities to identify her — she was reduced to an alphanumeric code on a case file. Harding’s rusted cast-iron crescent identification tag imagines Australia’s quite literally buried history. (These gorgets are often found by farmers ploughing fields.) Harding, by creating this object, has excavated his family’s history and unearthed debates about the systems that classify Indigenous Australians and that still seek to control lives.

Warwick Thornton’s 3-D video Stranded 2011 sets up another dichotomy that has left an indelible mark on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples: country and culture versus Christianity. In Stranded, Thornton is literally crucified, bound to an illuminated cross that hovers above a waterhole in the West MacDonnell Ranges. This place is home to the Arrernte people who were perhaps the most affected by Christianity in central Australia. The setting, almost certainly a site of ceremonial importance, dramatically illustrates the contrast between Christianity and the land’s latent culture and religion. Thornton’s work also elucidates the crucifixion of Aboriginal cultures and people at the ‘humanising’ hands of Christian churches.

Archie Moore, Australia b.1970 / On a Mission from God (Cherbourg) 2012 / Cut, folded and glued pages from miniature gold-cased bible / Purchased 2008. The Queensland Government’s Gallery of Modern Art Acquisitions Fund / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © The artist

Archie Moore considers the same history through works from ‘On a Mission from God’ 2012, reconstructing nine important mission churches from Queensland’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander reserves from the pages of miniature bibles. They examine the supporting role these churches played in the government’s control and assimilation of people and in the destruction of culture. The act of cutting, of physically intervening, into a holy book is controversial and highly political. Moore is selective about the passages he uses, constructing churches from Luke 12:47: ‘The servant who knows what his master wants him to do, but does not get himself ready and do it, will be punished with a heavy whipping.’ This verse relates to the colonial experience of many Aboriginal people in Australia, where church-controlled state reserves were used to break down existing social, cultural, political and linguistic structures.

The exhibition presents a wide range of Indigenous experiences, and Irene Entata’s reminiscences of the very same Lutheran-run community at Ntaria (Hermannsburg) present a scene of happiness and harmony. For the older generation, the ‘Mission Days’ were often bittersweet; traditional practices were lost, but everyone had a job and on the whole felt relatively content. This contrasts starkly with the social problems and deteriorating conditions numerous communities now face. Ken Thaiday’s Symbol of the Torres Strait 2003 also paints a positive picture of relations with the church in the Torres Strait, where the London Missionary Society’s brand of Christianity was introduced in 1871, and eventually widely adopted. Today, the ‘Coming of the Light’ is commemorated annually on Zulai Wan (July 1) and is the biggest cultural celebration, both in the Islands and among the large diasporic community.

A number of artists mine extensive family and state archives to reclaim and re-present their own history. In Jones’s picnic 2001, Dianne Jones continues her campaign to introduce a real Aboriginal presence to colonial Australian art. Here, Jones has substituted a photograph of her own family for a group of unnamed or imagined Aboriginal people in John Glover’s Aborigines Dancing at Brighton 1835, claiming a space in Australian art history and popular culture.

Lesley Anne Murray, Australia b.1968 / From ‘My grandfather’ series 1994 / Black soldier / Linocut on BFK Rives paper, ed.10/20 / Purchased 2003. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Lesley Anne Murray 1994. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney, 2013

Similarly, Lesley-Anne Murray’s prints give insight into the experiences of the many Aboriginal and Islander men who wore multiple hats, working extraordinarily hard to support their families while building strong communities. Exploring her grandfather’s life, Murray’s 1994 suite references the anonymity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people right up until the late 1960s through the repeated use of the appellation ‘Black’. Black boy recalls the practice of removing Aboriginal youths from their families to work in the pastoral industry; Black soldier shares the pain of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who fought for their country in various military campaigns, only to have their service effectively ignored until recently; Black boxer represents Aboriginal men who worked in touring boxing circuses, which were often stages for racial tensions; while Billy Murray presents a proud Aboriginal man and patriarch.

Bruce McLean is Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, QAGOMA

Endnotes
5 Dr Ingrid Piller, ‘Yiman does not have a word for ‘massacre’, Language on the Move, 27 April 2012, http://www.languageonthemove.com/language-migration- social-justice/yiman-does-not-have-a-word-for- massacre.
6 For further reading see: Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2008.
7 ‘The Recollections of Thomas Davis, Collected by Steele Rudd’, viewed online at http://espace.library. uq.edu.au/eserv/UQ:216890/F3517.pdf.

‘This land is mine / This land is me’ is an extract from the 2013 exhibition catalogue ‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ by Bruce McLean.

My life: This land is mine / This land is me

 

‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ examined strengths within the Queensland Art Gallery collection of Indigenous art and recognised three main central themes: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander versions of history; responses to contemporary politics and experiences; and connections to place. These themes are expressed in the three main Gallery spaces as the visual chapters: ‘My history’, ‘My life’ and ‘My country’.

Gordon Hookey ‘Blood on the wattle, blood on the palm’

Gordon Hookey, Waanyi people Australia, b.1961 / Blood on the wattle, blood on the palm 2009 / Oil on linen / The James C. Sourris AM Collection. Gift of James C. Sourris AM through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Gordon Hookey/Copyright Agency

The works presented in ‘My life’ show the crucial engagement of artists of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage with contemporary politics. Worldwide, agitation for sovereignty, self-determination, justice, freedom and social and legal equality has traditionally flowed from street movements into the arts. This is equally true of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander protest and political movements in Australia.

The recurring shame of Aboriginal deaths in custody features prominently in the exhibition. Across Australia, the first meetings between Aboriginal people and the police were often facilitated at the end of a gun barrel. Mounted police and their ‘native’ recruits were used to clear the frontier of ‘problem’ Aboriginal populations; ‘to disperse’ became a euphemism for killing entire groups of people. Today, ‘to defy’ has become a common response from Aboriginal people who still bear the scars of a historically abusive relationship. Gordon Hookey’s painting Defy 2010 bears witness to this history while acknowledging the contemporary reality that little has changed.

This strained relationship shows scant sign of healing, with alarmingly frequent reports of police assaults on Aboriginal people and continued deaths in custody, despite a 1990 Royal Commission into the matter. The issue was brought to a head by the death of Daniel Yock, an 18-year-old Aboriginal man and well-known dancer who was killed by police in West End, Brisbane, in 1993. Vincent Serico’s Deaths in custody was made that year and encapsulates the mournful feeling attached to this era. It refers to a friend who took his own life in jail after a series of visions. In it, a mopoke owl — a reference to the totemic spectre of death — watches over the jail cell.

Perhaps most famously, in 2004 an Aboriginal man died while in police custody on the Queensland Aboriginal community of Palm Island. The ensuing political circus tore the heart out of the proud community. Vernon Ah Kee’s Tall Man 2010 pieces together amateur video from the day a tipping point was reached following the report that this death was the result of an accident. This flashpoint is one that is just moments from exploding in nearly every Aboriginal community. Gordon Hookey’s Blood on the wattle, blood on the palm 2009 (illustrated) stands in solidarity with the leaders of the resistance or ‘riot’ that ensued on Palm Island. His painting is fuelled by anger at the fact that the only people jailed after the killing of one of their own are Aboriginal. Hookey’s work references Bruce Elder’s controversial book Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788 8 and recalls Henry Lawson’s iconic poem ‘Freedom on the Wallaby’, penned to galvanise the Barcaldine Shearer’s Strike of 1891:

So we must fly a rebel flag
As others did before us.
And we must sing a rebel song,
And join a rebel chorus.
We’ll make the tyrants feel the sting
O’those they would throttle;
They needn’t say the fault is ours
If blood should stain the wattle.
9

Hookey connects this stand to the historical mistreatment of Aboriginal people and to universal struggles against tyranny.

Life in all Aboriginal communities is complex. There are still struggles with the legacy of colonial conflicts and policies, yet life continues to be far richer than as reported in mainstream media. Community life is an important aspect of ‘My life’. Lama Lama painter Adrian King reminisces about times of happiness in the Lockhart River community and the unifying effects of football competitions, as well as his return to Wenlock Outstation on his own country; Bindi Cole illuminates the story of the ‘Sistagirls’ or ‘Yimpininni’ of the Tiwi Islands, bringing just one of countless diverse Indigenous experiences to light; Christian Thompson’s sinister ‘Black Gum’ 2008 series contrasts Australia’s infatuation with native flora with ideologies that correlate Aboriginal people with flora and fauna, not humanity. The black ‘hoodie’ that the artist dons alludes to the growing numbers of disaffected Aboriginal youths for whom the gap between their realities, and those of the general Australian populace, continually widens.

Importantly, the exhibition also examines issues of racism in three realms of contemporary Australian society — sport, music and art — which are often theatres for racial tension, despite Indigenous Australians making significant impacts.

Ron Hurley ‘Bradman bowled Gilbert’

Ron Hurley, Gurang Gurang/Mununjali peoples, Australia 1946–2002 / Bradman bowled Gilbert 1989 / Oil on canvas / Purchased 1990 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Ron Hurley/Copyright Agency

Ron Hurley’s Bradman bowled Gilbert 1989 (illustrated) unites the contrasting lives of two depression-era sporting heroes — Donald Bradman and Eddie Gilbert. Even in an impoverished era, Australians paid handsomely to watch these enormously popular sportsmen play. But on one day in 1931, Gilbert, considered one of the world’s fastest ever bowlers, did the unimaginable. He bowled Bradman for a ‘duck’, which led to controversy over Gilbert’s bowling action.10 Soon the Queensland Cricket Association instructed the Protector of Aborigines in Queensland to ‘return Gilbert to the Cherbourg Aboriginal Mission at once’. He was scarcely heard of again until news of his death emerged in 1978 after he had spent the preceding 29 years in a Brisbane psychiatric hospital.11

From the world of music, Gordon Bennett’s If Banjo Paterson was black 1995 imagines what the life of Australia’s most famous poet might have been had he been born Black. Musicians in the pre-modern era were marginalised while their music was appropriated. Bennett connects this practice to the appropriation of designs from First Nation and traditional societies by an art world intent on liberating them from their original contexts and mitigating meaning until a modern art design remains. Bennett’s cubist-inspired banjo sculpture takes aim at the appropriation of African traditions by one of Europe’s most important art movements, while his mirror-lined box of ‘Coon Sticks’ (a confectionary produced in Melbourne in the early 1900s) is:

‘a metaphor for complexity and the indescribable (with language) “reality” of the human mind with its constant flow of thoughts, knowledge, memories of the past, experience of the present and imaginations of a better future’.12

Richard Bell considers the same history in Bell’s Theorem (Trikky Dikky and friends) 2005, but he goes one step further, listing the names of visual artists he believes have appropriated Aboriginal designs or misrepresented the art and culture of Aboriginal people in their works.

One of the most important social movements toward positive change in recent decades has been the Reconciliation Movement, which gained momentum in the wake of then prime minister Paul Keating’s 1992 ‘Redfern Address’, perhaps the most significant and stirring oration concerning Indigenous people and issues by any Australian politician. In the address he asked Australians to imagine themselves in the shoes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in a particularly poignant passage:

. . . it might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of land we have lived on for 50 000 years — and then imagined ourselves told that it had never been ours . . . Imagine  if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless. Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, suffered and died in the defence of our land, and then were told in history books that we had given up without a fight . . . Imagine if we had suffered the injustice and then were blamed for it . . . It seems to me that if we can imagine the injustice then we can imagine its opposite. And we can have justice.13

Richard Bell’s I didn’t do it 2002 looks at the popular backlash against this move toward social change and equality. Unfortunately, not all Australians were touched by Keating’s words. Instead, collective amnesia and forfeiture of responsibility for Australia’s colonial history dogged this campaign, and continues to tarnish political, social and historical debates surrounding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and issues. Bell’s I didn’t do it takes aim at this ideology, explaining that, to some extent, every Australian is living off the wealth of colonisation and the deprivations of Australia’s First Nations.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’ was another move toward recognising the hurt to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, brought about by past policies and practices:

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country . . . For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.14

Bindi Cole ‘I forgive you’

Bindi Cole, Wathaurung people, Australia b.1975 / I forgive you 2012 / Emu feathers on MDF board / Purchased 2012. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Bindi Cole/Copyright Agency

Bindi Cole’s brave work I forgive you 2012 (illustrated) was created in response to this apology, and to events that have affected her family for generations, such as the government- mandated forced removal of mixed-race children from Aboriginal families.

In February 2013, the fifth anniversary of the Apology, and on the passing of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Recognition Bill 2012,15 Prime Minister Julia Gillard commented that:

. . . there is no record of any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander person taking part [in building our national charter] . . . No mention of their dispossession, their proud and ancient cultures, their profound connection to the land or the unhealed wound that even now lies open at the heart of our national story . . . No gesture speaks more deeply to the healing of our nation’s fabric, than amending our nation’s founding charter . . . We are bound to each other in this land and always will be. Let us be bound in justice and dignity as well.16

Tony Albert ‘Sorry’

Tony Albert, Girramay people, Australia b.1981 / Sorry 2008 / Found kitsch objects applied to vinyl letters / The James C Sourris, AM, Collection. Purchased 2008 with funds from James C Sourris through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Tony Albert

Despite these hard-won victories, Bell, Albert and many other Aboriginal people view these speeches and apologies as piecemeal or as an emotional sideshow distracting people from the ultimate goals of self- determination, land rights (over Native Title) and recognised sovereignty for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. In recent years, Albert’s Sorry 2008 (illustrated) has been installed backwards to highlight this point.

Bruce McLean is former Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, QAGOMA
Extract from the ‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ exhibition catalogue essay ‘This land is mine / This land is me’

Endnotes
8 Bruce Elder, Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Australian Aborigines Since 1788, New Holland Publishers, Frenchs Forest, NSW, 1988.
9 Henry Lawson’s ‘Freedom on the Wallaby’ was first published by David A Cumming in the Brisbane newspaper, The Worker, 16 May 1891, p.8.
10 The Queensland Cricket Association president rejected the ensuing claims that Gilbert had a suspect bowling action, saying that ‘every umpire whose business it was to decide the question passed him’. However, controversy about Gilbert’s bowling action abounded, no doubt contributing to a slump in form for a man many Queenslanders saw as a hero. There were suggestions that the colour of his skin obscured a ‘chucking’ action. Sunday Mail, 3 September 1995, p.1 by John Hay.
11 For more on Eddie Gilbert see Mike Coleman and Ken Edwards, Eddie Gilbert — The True Story of an Aboriginal Cricketing Legend, ABC Books, Sydney, 2002.
12 Bennett, in a letter from the artist, to Sue Smith, art writer for the Courier-Mail, 11 May 1995.
13 For more on the Redfern Address see australianscreen/ National Film and Sound Archives: http://aso.gov.au/ titles/spoken-word/keating-speech-redfern-address/ and http://aso.gov.au/titles/spoken-word/keating- speech-redfern-address/notes.
14 The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Recognition Bill 2012 aims to begin the process to formally recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the constitution.
15 Former prime minister Kevin Rudd, Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples http://australia.gov.au/ about-australia/our-country/our-people/apology-to- australias-indigenous-peoples.
16 Eleanor Hall, ‘Recognition Act a step to constitutional change’ (ABC News/The World Today) http://www.abc. net.au/worldtoday/content/2013/s3689301.htm.

‘This land is mine / This land is me’ is an extract from the 2013 exhibition catalogue ‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’ by Bruce McLean.

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