My country, I still call Australia home: Contemporary art from Black Australia

MY COUNTRY and dark, emerges — or dissolves — into a landscape of bleached bone-like forms veiled by a scrim of eddying marks. The swirling designs suggest the flurry of whirlwinds across the desert, or the delicate patterns of a baby’s hair. The only clear images in this timeless, cyclical state of flux are the cryptic circles of stones hovering above the surface. The purposeful placement of these enigmatic markers suggests human engagement with the land, a cultural inscription reminiscent of the stone arrangements found throughout Australia. Near Kiwirrkura, in the remote Gibson Desert, exists an open plain crisscrossed by a network of stone arrangements. Made by the ‘old people’ before living memory, according to Bobby West Tjupurrula, the complex scree of stones is visited and maintained by contemporary descendants of the old people. In recent decades, this community has found a new forum for expressing culture and the inspirational wellspring of country, under the aegis of the Papunya Tula Artists cooperative. The catalyst for the emergence of the collective was exile from their country, far to the west of Papunya. When the outstation movement gathered momentum from the late 1970s — championed by Uta Uta Tjangala — a new phase of artistic endeavour emerged, galvanised by the familiar embrace of country. Today, linen has replaced the ground and the body as the support for renderings in acrylic paint that are mnemonic; like the encoded hand signals they convey a visual narrative. In the late, and sadly missed, Doreen Reid Nakamarra’s mesmerising paintings of the site of Marrapinti, the zigzagging lines create a mirage-like vision of tali (sandhills). For Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who included Nakamarra’s work in dOCUMENTA (13), the paintings evoke aspects of the intangible world — currents of energy in the air or water — and the ceremonial power that reverberates through the landscape with an unseen force. Nakamarra was not born in the country she painted. Her country was farther south and it was only as a mature-aged woman that she moved to Kiwirrkura with her husband. Before his passing, he urged her to paint the women’s stories of his country and in doing so bequeathed her the responsibility of negotiating the complexities of having the artistic right to paint her ‘adopted’ country. It was not an easy line to walk as Nakamarra’s renown grew, while others who belonged to that country by birth did not realise such success. It was, perhaps, a reason for Nakamarra choosing to express the visual and cultural pull of the country in meticulously abstracted line work, more commonly associated with men’s painting and reminiscent of her late husband’s paintings. This optical style is now finding increasing expression in the work of women artists from the region, while others continue to punctuate their paintings with the ceremonial sites, objects and other encrypted symbolism pertinent to women’s business. Dibirdibi country, in the western reaches of the Gulf of Carpentaria, is the inspiration for Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori’s bold landscape paintings. Her diminutive size and senior age belie the scale and power of her paintings — and her indomitable personality. At the media preview of the second National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia in 2012, Gabori waited until the media entourage had passed her work before rising from her wheelchair to dance in front of her paintings. It was a spontaneous celebration but also a tearful commemoration as she danced her country and honoured her late husband, her Bentinck Island countryman. For Gabori, now living on Mornington Island, the making of art is not only a way of celebrating and remembering country and kin; significantly, it provides the means to now return to country frequently. The works of Gabori — and her contemporaries at the Mornington Island art centre — are immediately eye-catching, but their captivating quality is owed to more than a pleasing array of colour and form. In their collaborative work of 2008, Gabori, Birmuyingathi Maali Netta Loogatha, Warthadangathi Bijarrba Ethel Thomas, Thunduyingathi Bijarrb May Moodoonuthi, Kuruwarriyingathi Bijarrb Paula Paul, Wirrngajingathi Bijarrb Dawn Naranatjil and Rayarriwarrtharrbayingat Amy Loogatha map their homeland, Makarrki. This work represents a significant era in the chronology of the artists’ lives. It pays tribute to the leadership of King Alfred, a senior Kaiadilt lawman, at a time of massive upheaval in the 1940s when the Kaiadilt people of Bentinck Island were moved to Lardil country on Mornington Island. The corporeal or kin relationship to country is implied in this collaborative ‘portrait’ of a leader expressed through the genre of landscape. We have painted one of the most important places on Bentinck Island. This is where King Alfred was born. This is his country. King Alfred was Sally’s big brother and he was also Netta’s father. He was famous as a strong warrior and leader, he was feared by other tribes. This place is special to all seven of us. We all have close connection to this country. That is why we picked it as painting for us to do together. 3 Bidyadanga artist Jan (Djan Nanundie) Billycan paints the country of her birth, Kirriwirri, far to the west in the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia. In her paintings, jila (‘living water’) is represented as a shimmering opalescent surface and is literally encrusted by a filigree of white paint — evoking the saltpans of her desert homelands or the salt water of her adopted country. As such, the work simultaneously implies the drying up of water sources in her birth country from seasonal change, and the impact of mining that eventually compelled the migration of her people to Bidyadanga. The topography of the landscape is synchronous to the anatomy of the human body; these paintings of country are more than skin deep, they reveal its organs, bones, and spirit. The vital presence of fresh water is brilliantly expressed in the pooling Yves Klein- blue depths and verdant fringe of a spring near the vast saltpan Ngayarta Kujarra (Lake Dora) in Mukurtu 2010. Nancy Chapman, one of the four sisters from the Pilbara region who created this seamless collaborative work, further asserted the amazing properties of mukurtu (spring water); ‘. . . it is good water to drink, it is bad to drink if you are a big woman, if you are a woman this kapi (water) makes you fat!’ 4 Like a heartbeat, the ‘My country’ works pulse with life, sending a tremor of recognition through the viewer; striking a chord that reverberates beyond aesthetic connoisseurship. At almost 100 years of age, the veteran artist of this exhibition, Dickie Minyintiri, has experienced irrevocable and profound change in his long lifetime. For me, his painting Kanyalakutjina (Euro tracks) 2011 is a self-portrait, radiant with the artist’s spirit and the power of inma (ceremony); the delicately entwined filigree is an allegory for the subtle yet tenacious ties that bind. Within this cultural matrix courses the lifeblood of our people — a synergy of past and present, the earth and sky, and our people and our country. 1 ‘Richard Bell: Lessons in Etiquette and Manners’ [exhibition], Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, February 2013. 2 Peter Denham, ‘Not to give away, not to die away: An interview with Arthur Koo-ekka Oambegan Jr’ in Story Place: Indigenous Art of the Cape York and the Rainforest [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2003, p.67. 3 From the ‘Bentick Island artists’ page on the Queensland Art Gallery’s ‘21st century: Art in the First Decade’ exhibition webpage: http://www.qagoma.qld . gov.au/exhibitions/past/2010/21st_Century/artists. 4 Nancy Chapman, quoted in ‘Painting story’ for Ngayarta Kujarra (Lake Dora) , from Punmu women’s collaborative painting notes, Martumili Artists, Newman, WA, 2009. Birrmuyingathi Maali Netta Loogatha Mirdidingkingathi Juwarrnda Sally Gabori Warthardangathi Bijarrba Ethel Thomas Thunuyingathi Bijarrb May Moodoonuthi Kuruwarriyingathi Bijarrb Paula Paul Rayarriwarrtharrbayingat Amy Loogatha Wirrngajingathi Bijarrb Dawn Naranatjil Kaiadilt people QLD Makarrki – King Alfred's Country (detail) 2008 Synthetic polymer paint on linen Purchased 2009 with funds from Professor John Hay, AC , and Mrs Barbara Hay through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 29