Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

CHARLES MOUNTFORD AND THE 'BASTARD BARKS' A Gift from the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, 1948 Mountford Expedition Works Margo Neale Facing page Groote Eylandt Community Australia The Southern Cross and the coal sack (the Wanamoumitja brothers spearing Alakltja) 1948 Natural pigments on bark 68.5x47.5cm (irreg.) Gift of the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land 1956 Queensland Art Gallery Above Charles Mountford recording iconographie details of a bark painting, Arnhem Land, 1948. Howell Walker © National Geographic Image Collection All works discussed in this essay are from the Queensland Art Gallery Collection. / n harles Pearcy Mountford (1890-1976) was an amateur ^ ethnographer and collector who helped promote Aboriginal art during the 1940s and 1950s, at a time when it was seen to reside more correctly within the precinct of orthodox anthropology. Mountford collected bark paintings as art, rather than artefact, using methods dismissed as illegitimate by the anthropological establishment, thus the title 'bastard barks'. From the air there was a tree so full of white birds in its branches, so crested with birds, it looked like a tree in white flower. As the plane came over it the tree-top broke into a wheeling white cloud ... under the right wing a big boomerang of blue water was shining in its verdant rim of rice-grass. Beside the billabong lagoon were a dozen tents, their canvas a sun- faded green. The Arnhem Land Expedition.1 Camped in these tents at Gunbalanya (Oenpelli), five hundred kilometres east of Darwin, in November 1948, were the sixteen members of the American- Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land (AASEAL), grandiosely described as 'the largest [scientific] expedition in Australian history',2and the first major collaborative project between Australia and the United States. Led by Charles Pearcy Mountford, it was an extraordinary event that attracted national attention, with politicians, public figures, scientists and the media lauding the expedition members as they toured capital cities attending viceregal, civic and academic receptions.3Funded by the Australian Commonwealth Government, the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, the participants carried a staggering forty-five tons of gear, including over a ton of laboratory glassware, and collected a further twenty-five tons of specimens over the eight months of the tour, amongst which were about five hundred paintings on bark and card, along with several thousand Aboriginal implements and weapons. In an unprecedented gesture, one hundred and forty-four of these paintings were pledged to the six state art galleries, in preference to museums.4The Queensland National Art Gallery was the site for this landmark distribution, when the state gallery directors converged on Brisbane for an August 1956 meeting. The paintings, freighted from Melbourne, were assembled for the directors to select twenty-four works apiece, which they were keen to do, as one director commented, before 'the anthropological people' pick(ed) first 'and we get the leavings'.5 This gift now forms the historic core of the Queensland Art Gallery's Indigenous Australian Art Collection. This was one of the first instances of Aboriginal art being accepted into art galleries for aesthetic rather than ethnographic qualities — a reversal of prewar collecting practices in which works from such expeditions would go to museums without question. This convention was compounded by a lack of interest from public art galleries in Aboriginal art. Even three years later, when Tony Tuckson installed the newly commissioned Pukumani poles from Melville Island at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the commentary was ambivalent: the graveposts ... made a somewhat bizarre display ... and most people, admitting that the poles are delightful in themselves, will wonder if the proper place for them is not the museum ... Though they have definite artistic merit of an elementary kind, they are really in the nature of ethnological curiosities [rather] than works of art.6 The Queensland National Art Gallery was a partial exception, having begun active purchasing, albeit low key, before the 1956 gift. However, despite the apparent early interest in the Mountford Collection at this Gallery, these works were not officially accessioned until 1991, a process repeated in the other receiving galleries. Reluctant to 'look a gift horse in the mouth', especially from such a high-profile national spectacle, and flattered to be treated to the booty before the anthropologists, the state gallery directors accepted a gift they were not 210 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965