Contemporary Australia: Women

137 Wakartu Cory Surprise Australia 1929–2011 Walmajarri people Ngurrantili Pamarr (Hill) Big One 2009 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas 120 x 120cm I didn’t know Wakartu Cory Surprise well — I met her only briefly in Mangkaja in 2010 during the last year of her life. Despite her frailty, I watched enthralled as she commenced an ambitious new work with all the expressive vigour of an artist in her prime. It was clear that at the Mangkaja arts hub her seniority still held sway and, as one of Australia’s great women artists, her new paintings were keenly anticipated. Sadly, in 2011 Wakartu passed away, in peace, surrounded by her family and friends. Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency Aboriginal Corporation was initiated in the mid 1980s in the small town of Fitzroy Crossing, Western Australia. For years Wakartu was one of the painting shed’s most consistent visitors, making art in its electric atmosphere almost daily. Karen Dayman, who was there from the beginning, described it as a ‘cavernous ramshackle space that hosts the daily painting routine’. 1 In the still of evening in the aftermath of a typically creative day, she observed: You walk quietly then, the silence a shock to the senses until you look around at the work, the canvases that have emerged and the noise is all there, contained within those borders and the experience is not of silence at all but of loud and busy lives that are being played out daily in the shed, in a pantomime of reverence and revelry. 2 Wakartu came late to painting — at around 50 years old — after attending numeracy and literacy classes at the Karrayili Adult Education Centre in Fitzroy Crossing. With typical humour she remembered those early days: ‘The idea of me, an olgaman [old woman] going off to school was so funny.’ 3 But her enthusiasm and tenacity for learning paid off. Fluency in English opened channels of expression and communication for sharing her richly layered life stories and deep cultural knowledge, inspiring her to illustrate her narratives in paintings, initially on paper, later on canvas. These classes were the catalyst for a remarkable career that saw her win, at 81, the nation’s richest Indigenous art prize, the 2009 Western Australian Indigenous Art Award. The immensity of Wakartu Cory Surprise’s desert country cannot be overstated, but she knew it intimately through crossings on foot and later in four-wheel drive vehicles. She also understood it in a spiritual and poetic sense through creation stories from Ngarrangkarni (Dreamtime). Wakartu will tell you that she walked. She walked long distances across vast stretches of her ngurrara, her country in the jilji, the red sandhills that cut across the northern reaches of the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia. She walks still. She moves effortlessly around her canvases as she paints, just as she moved around from waterhole to waterhole as a young woman. 4 Her paths across the landscape became painted shapes and lines and she expressed the emotions and sensations she felt in rich colours, committing to bold forms set against the emptiness of a minimal ground: ‘I put down my own ideas. I saw these places for myself, I went there with the old people.’ 5 The very real presence of sandhills in desert life are distilled in Wakartu’s paintings into horizontal, tapered forms standing for the sheer masses of sand (jilji) that have to be physically scaled to reach precious sources of fresh water (jila). The artist knew the length and height of these parallel sand masses and their specific locations. She painted about them and around them and from above them — their importance to her never diminished. Though she faced no lack of water after moving to Fitzroy Crossing, the sites for fresh water in her country remained a constant theme for Wakartu, as in the circular forms of rock holes in Ngurrantili Pamarr (Hill) Big One 2009: ‘This [painting] got all the pamarr, he got water all around and big mob of jila’. 6 In Mimpi 2011 — Wakartu’s final major painting — the presence of water is more subtly implied: ‘Big ngapa [water] long way desert side, that ngapa its in between that jilji’. 7 Another manifestation of water in the desert, Warla 2008 is about a claypan that fills with water (usually salt) after rain. As well as being vital for survival in potentially hostile conditions, waterholes Wakartu Cory Surprise Wakartu Cory Surprise Sandhills and living water