Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Percy Leason Australia 1889-1959 William Johnson Reproduced in Percy Leason's The last of the Victorian Aborigines, published In 1934 In association with an exhibition of portraits at the Athenaeum Gallery, Collins Street, Melbourne. Reproduced here with permission of the LakeTyers Community and the artist's estate Leason noted that Johnson was a Kurnai elder living with his family at Lake Tyers, 'an expert canoe maker and one of the few who can still practice the old crafts and speak the Lakes dialect.' In the 1950s Leason's unfashionable 'tonal naturalism' had consigned this series to oblivion, though it was precisely the Meldrum approach to painting that 'express(es) no concepts only ...particular optical impressions' that had enabled him to render these individuals outside of contemporary racial stereotypes. Details supplied by the author from, Percy Leason, unpublished diary, 1934, 1954, State Library of Victoria, 3-8-1981 and colour that we have to use', Dargie reiterates. 'We [painters] have got no soul, no expression, we haven't even got a third dimension.'8A focus on the formal elements of painting was antithetical to local Modernism at this time when Expressionism dominated both figurative and abstract work. In painting a fellow painter there is frequently a desire to match or invoke the other's work, like the double-act of John Brack and Fred Williams in which there is a palpable jockeying for position, as if they felt compelled to paint each other into a comer.9In contrast, Dargie does not compete with his subject. In the early 1950s he had painted with Namatjira in Central Australia several times and a mutual respect developed between Dargie the oil painter and Namatjira the watercolourist. Dargie recalls: We had agreed that he was going to sit for me. I liked his natural rebelliousness. He bought a block of land to the north of Alice Springs which he had to eventually sell. He once said to me, 'Bill, they think I'll bring all my dirty blackfellows into the place. And I would !'.10 In the portrait there are no signs of Namatjira's own work or tools of trade, the painter's hands lie unused in his lap. Only a vague reference is made by the loosely brushed bands of orange and blue behind the figure, alluding to the colours that Namatjira used to represent his country. In fact, the background is the least convincing aspect of the painting, like a flat stage-set at odds with the interior lighting that highlights his features. Albert Namatjira was ten years Dargie's senior and both were household names of the time. In November 1956 they were photographed in a Sydney art supply shop holding tubes of paint, and the press finally pursued Namatjira to Dargie's studio where, half a dozen times over a fortnight, he had sat in the early mornings while Dargie worked on the canvas. At the end of the twentieth century, Dargie's identity is eclipsed by his subject. Namatjira's work has assumed a powerful model for representing Aboriginal land and culture to (and protecting them from) Europeans. His work continues to influence contemporary Indigenous culture and artists beyond his own community, such as Gordon Bennett, Ian Bum, Tracey Moffatt and Imants Tillers, who seek to work across borders. Namatjira never used his European style of watercolour for portraiture and he never painted himself before a mirror or from memory, possibly because the form of heightened individualism that self-portraiture implies may have been inappropriate to one initiated into the kinship structure of Western Aranda culture. Dargie's contra- modernist portrait emerges as a curiously appropriate way to represent the conundrum of Namatjira. Ann Stephen is a curator of social history at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. NAMATJIRA IN THE GUISE OF AN ELDER STATESMAN 253