Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Left OenpelM Community Australia Five royal spoonbills 1948 Natural pigments on paper 58.5x45.7cm Gift of the 1948 American-Austra lian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land 1956 Queensland Art Gallery Oenpelli Community Australia Boubit-boubit, the wild honey man 1948 Natural pigments on paper mounted on card 57.2 X 45.4cm Gift of the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land 1956 Queensland Art Gallery international promoter and populariser of Aboriginal art and life, and a recipient of a great number of distinguished awards. He participated in nine expeditions, including the AASEAL, which he also initiated. Despite Mountford's claim to be merely a recorder of Aboriginal culture, his work as the leader of the 1948 expedition and the author of the publication that followed was regarded as an unwelcome incursion into the serious world of Sydney-based anthropology. Ronald M. Berndt, a pre­ eminent anthropologist, supported by his equally eminent wife Catherine Berndt, and Professor R. Elkin, at that time Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, condemned Charles Mountford in a review of his publication on the expedition (Art, Myth and Symbolism ) in the influential journal Mankind in 1958. It was as sharp an academic autopsy as one could get away with in print: Apart from the acknowledged value of this book in making available to us a great number of illustrations ... it has little to commend it', wrote Berndt,22who then systematically demolished the contents in detail, attracting a number of letters to the editor of Mankind over subsequent issues.23 Karel Kupka, the renowned French anthropologist who championed Aboriginal art in his pioneering book The Dawn of Art (1956), also came under criticism in the same review for his so- called 'misrepresentations of the art and culture of Arnhem Landers'. Interestingly, Kupkas advocacy of the exhibition of bark paintings in art galleries caused him to comment positively, in a 1956 issue of Oceania, on the lead the Queensland National Art Gallery was taking in this regard and he urged 'other public art galleries to follow (their) example'.24 It could be argued that because Mountford was not inducted into the anthropological way of seeing and recording, he was able to occupy and champion a relatively unexplored, but hardly 'illegitimate' terrain, exhibited in his scrutiny of bark paintings as art objects rather than as anthropological specimens. In a catalogue essay for artist James Cant's exhibition of drawings of rock art in Melbourne in 1949, one year after the Arnhem Land expedition, Mountford, in defence of his outsider position, bemoaned the fact that: it was the scientist rather than the painter who studied 'primitive art' and therefore approached the subject intellectually rather than emotionally ... The designs are analysed, compared, their sequences ascertained, and their ages estimated. But in such painstaking investigations one finds little appreciation of beauty, of balance in colour and form, or of appeal to the senses25 Mountford's interest in art can be traced to the 1920s when he first became aware of the Indigenous art of Central Australia. He later became a champion of Albert Namatjira, who was the subject of a popular film that Mountford co-produced with Axel Poignant in 1947. Following this there were several editions of a book he wrote on Namatjira, first published by the Bread and Cheese Club, Melbourne, in 1944, and later the publication of his photographs of rock and bark art appeared in the 1954 Unesco World Art Series. The impact of these accessible forms of 'ethnographic' information on the public imagination cannot be discounted. The National Geographic Magazine, which published Mountford's papers on his Arnhem Land activities, had an impressive worldwide distribution (around 1.8 million by 1949) and was renowned for reaching a general audience.26 People like Mountford were part of a growing number of'amateurs' being thrown into relief during the 1950s as a result of Australia's reassessment of its position in the postwar era. 'Handling' of race was high on the agenda, with the 1951 appointment of Paul Hasluck to a new position concentrated on Aboriginal affairs — the Minister for Territories. Established canons were being challenged and terms like assimilation, citizenship and human rights were being bandied about, attracting the attention of the United Nations. During this decade the Victorian Aboriginal Advancement League was formed (1957) and international calls for the promotion of'understanding between peoples' created a climate in which the field for 'looking at' Aboriginal people and culture moved beyond anthropology. General and more specialised books and films by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Film Australia textured the viewing surface and popularised the names of photographers and filmmakers such as Axel Poignant and Cecil Holmes. Both men had a strong interest in art and were also seen as somewhat renegade, working as they did across disciplines, and therefore not fully initiated into their own 'tribe'.27 Mountford's accessible and commercially successful rhetoric, within a field dominated by men and women of science, was bound to cause outcries of 'illegitimacy'. Although he maintained the conventions of the time by exploiting terminology that emphasised the 'primitive',28his broad activities, including over sixty-five publications from 1928 to the early 1970s, were generally respectful of Aboriginal cultures. Consequently, the dispersal across the nation's art galleries of the 'bastard barks' collected by the Mountford-led AASEAL expedition was a milestone event that should be fully acknowledged within Australian art history. Margo Neale Is the Curator of Indigenous Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery. CHARLES M O UN TFO RD AND TH E 'BASTARD BARKS' 217