The painted desert - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 2: Dreams of Land
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Geraldine Brooks
THE NEXT MORNING, THE ARTISTS WHO HAD CREATED the Ngurrara paintings gathered inside an old mechanic's shed in Fitzroy Crossing. None of them was younger than 60, some looked impossibly frail, leaning on the arms of younger relatives or labouring through the mud in wheelchairs. Inside the shed, a slight stench of old motor oil mingled with the scent of drying paint and human sweat.
After some discussion, a wangki, or decision, was reached. Ngurrara II would stay, for now, in Fitzroy Crossing. But as the sun beat down on the tin roof and rising humidity made the shed's interior feel like a baker's oven, a consensus emerged that Ngurrara I – which Skipper referred to as "that little shorty one" – "might be a ‘little freer' ".
The artists decided to take a fresh look at Ngurrara I, which many of them hadn't seen in years. It took three people to carry the canvas and several more to unroll it over the dingy carpet that covered the workshop's earth floor. Suddenly, the shed was filled with the colours and forms of the desert: swirls, dots, concentric circles, serpentine curls. A strong, dark line with circular protrusions bisects the canvas: it represents the Canning Stock Route, a series of wells sunk by white settlers in the early 1900s for the convenience of inland cattle drovers. At the base of the painting – to the south-west, if you view the canvas as a map – Hitler Pamba's saltpan country spreads out in his characteristics opalescent wash. The gestural swirls of his wife, Stumpy Brown, depict the waterholes that abut the livestock path to the east. Just above, Skipper's signature quatrefoil, its acid green the brightest hue in the composition, draws the eye upward, cushioned by Chuguna's more muted, less structured ovals. The sinuous curve of a snake spirit defines the top of the canvas.
The elderly artists began slowly walking across the canvas, pointing, their voices rising with excitement. To anyone versed in the "Don't touch" conventions of Western art, the sight of people walking on a masterpiece – in mud-crusted stock boots – was startling. It was also a reminder of how non-Western and non-materialistic Aboriginal society remains. After the artists had a chance to reacquaint themselves with the painting, Dayman introduced Klingender, who she said worked "for a mob called Sotheby's", adding: "That mob is looking around all the time for anything that they might be able to sell."
Klingender rose to his feet. "If you want to sell this painting here, I will take this painting, get a stretcher made for it, photograph it and put it in a book like this one," he said, brandishing a glossy auction catalogue. "Then I'll take the painting, put it on a airplane to New York and put it up on a wall there in an art gallery, then back in an airplane to Sydney and to Melbourne."
As a translator repeated Klingender's words, Skipper, a veteran of city exhibitions, interjected his own elaboration. "So people can see 'em," he said to his fellow artists. "So they can know that thing and get it into their brain, ‘Right, I want to buy that thing'."
"After we show it," Klingender said, "people who've seen it will all come together and try to buy the painting or call us on the phone and say, ‘I'd like to give so much' and someone else will say ‘I'd like to give more'. It's a competition and the winner gets the painting."
A painter named Tommy May, who as a stockman had delivered cattle to livestock auctions, offered his own analogy. "Just like selling a bull," he said.
"Exactly," Klingender said. "This painting is a number-one breeder bull." Klingender explained that the buyer might be the National Gallery of Australia or a foreign museum. "It might be just one person who'll put it in his house," he said. Laughter erupted at the thought of any one person having a house big enough for such a painting. "I don't know anyone with a house that big," said Dayman, "but Tim might know a few."
Klingender explained that if the artists wanted the painting to stay in Australia he could sell it with that stipulation. "But the money would be less. Either way, if you want to sell it this year the decision has to be made soon, so it can be put into the book."
Skipper stood up and said that he was worried about how much the painting would fetch. There were murmurs of assent around the room and reminiscences about other sums that had come and gone with little lasting effect. Chuguna voiced this financial concern as well. Her tone then shifted and she used the word ngalkarla – which means a familiar sound or a rhythm heard from a distance. In this context, it meant, "spreading the word": if the painting was widely seen, it could convey to outsiders the enduring ties that exist between the artists and their land.
After further discussion, the artists concluded that they wanted to get more than $20,000 for the painting. Klingender smiled. "We're on safe ground there," he whispered to me. His estimate for Ngurrara I was about $300,000 and, since Sotheby's had decided not to charge its usual commission, the artists would receive almost the entire sum. Because auction results are uncertain, especially with a unique work, Klingender did not share his estimate with the group. He simply said that he thought their expectations would be met.
A brief, desultory discussion continued, mostly in Walmajarri. People walked around the painting. Someone spilled a glass of cordial on it. Chuguna wandered outside and gazed up at the gathering clouds. "Big rain coming," she said. "Got to get back to Bayulu and look after them kids coming home from school." Suddenly, without a vote or any dramatic declaration, the artists told Dayman they had reached a decision. The wangki was that the "little shorty one" was free to go.
THERE WAS INDEED BIG RAIN COMING. A cyclone moved close to the coast that night, deluging roads and closing airports. After three days of being immersed in the world view of the Walmajarri, I wondered briefly if the snake spirits were angry about the artists' decision to sell the painting. Apparently not: the cyclone didn't cross the coast. We made it back to Broome before the Great Northern Highway became inundated.
Two weeks later, Ngurrara I arrived in Melbourne, where Sotheby's restorers cleaned every centimetre of the canvas with water and ethyl alcohol. "They said they couldn't believe what came off it," Klingender told me. "Buckets of red mud." The canvas was gently ironed flat and then placed on an elaborately engineered stretcher: a new black border was added to mask the work's irregular edges. Klingender rented the Museum of Contemporary Art, an art-deco building opposite the Opera House at Sydney's Circular Quay, for a glittering pre-auction showing. The auction itself took place on July 28 in Sydney and a West Australian entrepreneur bought the painting for $213,000.
In Fitzroy Crossing, Ngurrara II awaited a different fate. As Ngurrara I was readied for display before the art world's elite, the big canvas went on display in the bush. The Aborigines – the old artists and their young descendants – decided to take the painting on a journey back towards the lands that it depicted. Last April, about 30 Aborigines set off from Fitzroy Crossing in a convoy of battered trucks and four-wheel-drives. They made camp in a sandy bend of river on Cherrabun Station, the vast cattle property where Skipper and Chuguna had first encountered white people almost half a century ago. In the bright sunlight of a clear morning, the canvas was unfurled on the ground. Among the artists who had come on the journey was Spider Snell, who, at just under 80 years old, is an elegant and surprisingly vigorous dancer. Snell is the custodian of an important ritual dance, the Kurtal ceremony, which is performed while carrying long, thread-wrapped boughs that represent the rain clouds controlled by the snake spirits. Accompanying him were three young apprentice dancers, boys who usually attend boarding school south of Perth, thousands of kilometres away. For three days, the old man shared his stories with the young ones – stories of dreaming, of water, of survival, and of a past kept alive for them in the thick swirls of paint beneath their feet. ♦