Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Kudjamandi, at the source of the East Alligator River. At about the time of the first rains of the wet season each year, the spirit of an Aboriginal medicine man, armed with powerful chants for protection, will enter the waterhole and collect honey for dispersal to all places around the region. In this schematised version (other figurative depictions were also collected), transverse lines along one side represent beeswax, while two rectangles are masses of honeycomb and two other rectangles are described by Mountford as bee bread (young bees and eggs). Mardayin or ceremonial designs used for body painting and on carved wooden objects combines the figuration of the mortuary poles with the abstracted cross-hatching and infill pattern associated more with the Liverpool River people to the east. Mountford was known to draw on artists from this region as the Gunbalanya artists were busily engaged in mission work.18 He speculates on the links between this Yirritija skin design and similar markings occurring in art by peoples from the Central Celebes who consistently visited these northern coasts from around 1600 to 1907. Although Milingimbi, a small island two hundred kilometres north-east of Gunbalanya, was not an expedition campsite, two members of the team did make a detour in August 1948 to collect material culture. Archaeologist Frank Setzler from the Smithsonian Institute and anthropologist Frederick McCarthy from the Australian Museum collected some thirty bark paintings,15two of which were gifted to the Queensland National Art Gallery. These are among the few barks not collected by Mountford. Mountford It is an interesting predicament for an Indigenous curator in the late 1990s to write about a collection of Aboriginal bark and card paintings without also writing about the artists who produced them. Although several names were retrieved during contact with the communities in the preparation of this paper, by virtue of historic circumstances one finds oneself discussing the man responsible for collecting the paintings: a man who has become notorious for not documenting the identities of the artists and for providing detailed, but sometimes wildly inaccurate descriptions of the work; a man whose name has become inextricably linked with the collection, which is more commonly referred to as the Mountford Collection rather than the correct title of the AASEAL Collection. We are dealing with bark paintings collected in 1948, by a cultural explorer of sorts, whom the press of the day described as venturing into the geographic and artistic unknown. Not only does this dilemma expose the changes in the collection and reception of Aboriginal art over the past decades, it also reveals the extent to which this venture was a catalyst for those changes. Although the Aboriginal missions had been marketing specific Indigenous art forms for some time, and the burgeoning world of Australian anthropological studies was active in academic documentation, it was the popular reception of information about the Mountford expedition that made a difference. As Philip Jones has pointed out, the influence of Charles Mountford s collecting activities on national and international perceptions of Aboriginal art should not be underestimated.20 Mountford was a self-made man who left school at eleven and spent the next twenty years trying to better himself through a range of menial jobs and night studies. Without professional qualifications, Mountford was viewed as a maverick outside the anthropological establishment and was the target of criticism and obstruction from some powerful members of the profession. We had a lot of trouble getting the expedition through, because here was I with the status of little more than a telephone mechanic, taking out the biggest scientific expedition in history (my italics), and what the academic world tried to do to me was nobody's business! Dear, dear, dear! However I took it out and brought it back .21 Against this peer resistance, Mountford became a photographer, filmmaker, broadcaster, author of seven books, 216 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965