AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL PAINTER

Te Ao Hou, June 1960, Page 24

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL PAINTER by EVELYN PATUAUA The death of Albert Namatjira, aged 58, in August 1959 was not only a great loss to Australian Art circles but struck a severe body blow to the Aboriginal Art Movement in Central Australia. This movement was founded by well known Australian artist Rex Battarbee in the early thirties, when together with fellow artist John A. Gardner they caravanned to Central Australia, stopping to paint when the landscape inspired them to do so. In the MacDonnell Ranges country round Alice Springs they found the landscape particularly inspiring for water colour painting and discovered the unusual violet-blue quality found only in that area and so well depicted in Namatjira's “The Peaks”. An exhibition of the two artists' work was shown at Hermannsbury Lutheran Mission Station, Alice Springs in 1934 for two days. Among the interested and curious native spectators was young Arunta Chief Albert Namatjira. It is doubtful whether the natives, at that time, ever thought of drawing and colouring other than as a means of teaching used by the old men of the tribe to illustrate ancestral tradition, or religious life. The exhibition by these two artists coincided with a disintegration period of the Arunta social system which was then in its death throes, brought about on one side by well meant missionaries intent on christianizing, anthropologists eager to fill books with conflicting, not always accurate, versions of the dying customs of a primitive people, and that holy of holies, British Law pinning notes on British justice on every kangaroo and emu in the outback for the benefit of ignorant natives. The whole setup when boiled down is known as the gentle art of civilizing. Tugging for all he was worth, but making no impression, we have on the other end of the rope, the tall, wiry, stubborn old man of the tribe, holding hard to the customs, sacred traditions and ceremonial rites that had served him and his forbears well for centuries and which he hoped to pass on to his sons. Albert Namatjira, 12 July 1959.

Then we have his sons born into an age of confusion but recognizing early the symptoms of an old order already doomed, turning their backs on their birthright and facing a future that held nothing but a question mark. With the collapse, not only of the old social system, but the old religion and the old arts, a depressing vacuum was left in a community that had once spent all its leisure hours in chanting, dancing and working on decorations. Therefore it was not surprising to see them turn out in their hundreds to view the work of these two white artists. Paintings of European scenes and white people would have bored them; but here were oil portraits of their own folk and water colours of their own homeland. The new art of the foreign intruder was beginning to speak to them in accents modulated by their own familiar environment. Here was an art that was worth emulating. By learning its techniques a full blooded aboriginal could win respect and social standing in the new but inescapable world of European ways and ideas; and he could do so without having to abjure all the emotional ties that bound him to his own homeland. It only needed a clever, gifted native to prove that the dark man could acquire the technical skills necessary to work in the new medium, and many followers were assured. No one at that time thought it possible for any aboriginal to acquire the necessary technical facility; but Albert Namatjira proved them wrong. Namatjira's first excursion into the world of colour was as Battarbee's camel boy during a painting expedition into the outbacks after the 1934 exhibition. While Battarbee painted the landscape Albert engaged in decorating his boomerangs with marks from a hot branding iron; these were then sold to tourists. Turning from the branding iron, Albert developed an interest in water colours and after four weeks' tuition by Battarbee in 1936 turned out a very creditable painting, “Erra and Ghost Gum, Glen Helen, MacDonnell Ranges”, original in possession of Battarbee, Alice Springs. Immediately, his potentiality was recognised and he forged ahead, quickly mastering the difficult art of water colour. However, since the technique of painting must be learned from some master in that medium, it was inevitable that he should model himself rather closely on Battarbee. To blame him for that is mere stupidity. We all learn from our predecessors and teachers. No modern painter is entirely uninfluenced by the past. Even should he consciously try to avoid the old rules and conventions, he still affords thereby clear evidence of his knowledge of those rules and conventions, and of his fear of being regarded as an unoriginal imitator unless he modifies or rejects them. Albert Namatjira in his paintings reveals a oneness of artist and subject, which is found only in a person as close to nature as he was. Many of Namatjira's critics have said he was merely an imitator of Battarbee, but this to me is untrue. Their similarity stems from their common objective—that of painting truthful, sympathetic and loving pictures of the finest landscape in Central Australia. Namatjira had no pathological fear of painting trees that were trees and mountains that were mountains, but he did draw the line at including a human figure in any of his work because of religious taboo. Of all the work of the 18 aboriginal Arunta artists, in only one painting by Enos Namatjira titled “Spearing an Emu” is the human figure depicted, and for this reason the work is of great interest and value. The other aboriginal artists, who learned to paint from Albert, including his three eldest sons Ewald, Enos and Keith, have not acquired quite the same technical skill and there tends to be a similarity in all their paintings. But in their best works they have achieved numerous stylistic idiosyncrasies of their own. From my own private research and what I have seen of the aboriginal artists' work, there are among the younger men several who have developed a more original or native style than Albert, such as the Pareroultja brothers and Richard Moketarinja. Unfortunately these aboriginal artists are painting far too many pictures each year. There is a ready market for their paintings, and in their desire to meet the public demand some of these artists lower their standards by attempting to exploit the familiar scenes to the limit. Over production is certainly not inducive to high artistic merit. No doubt many pictures have been sold which should have been destroyed. Even some of the pictures reproduced in “Modern Australian Aboriginal Art”, were in my opinion selected rather unfortunately; for nothing can be so ruinous to the reputation of an artist as his own worst creations. However, even in all-white exhibitions pictures are some times hung which do not reflect very highly on the skill or sensitivity of their creators. Namatjira was an artist who was wholly and sincerely captivated by the lights, the colours, the lines, and the shapes ever present in his home area. In his paintings he set forth the fine, grand, and beautiful scenes of this landscape with intense pride and feeling and with all the technical skill at his disposal. Because he had the courage and conviction to portray his scenes so vividly and in the violent colours decreed by nature he was often the butt of severe criticism by city-bred critics. They wrote and spoke about the harsh reds and heavy purples of an eroded, sunburnt country, the monstrous shapes of rocks and mountains, of paintings done in the interior, and one realizes instantly that they have been emotionally repelled not only by the paintings but by the landscape as well. Yet these same critics would wax lyrical over the work of Gaugin whose trade mark was to emphasize the best points of his work with brilliant, harsh colours and outrageous distortions.

“THE PEAKS”; a celebrated painting by Albert Namatjira. Gaugin would certainly have been in his element in the painting of Arunta's country. The average Arunta chooses landscapes, where they can give vent to their sense of colour, of rhythm, of line and of decoration. Their work tends to be uneven, but much of it is interesting. Most of them alter, change and distort the natural outlines and shapes which they see before them, and then either heighten or tone down the colours in sympathy. The imaginative quality thus acquired is not always liked by the public and less by the critics unless they have been to Central Australia and can fully evaluate the alterations introduced during painting. Of these younger painters Edwin Pareroultja is generally content with broad effects and strong colours, but he reveals also a strong decorative sense, when he divides his pictures into planes of contrasting colour. On the other hand his brother Otto, whose work is somewhat reminiscent of Van Gogh, loved continuous coiling, wavy forms, and the complicated networks of sharply angular and jagged diagonal lines, and highly elaborated patterns; but Otto learnt his decorative devices from nature, not from Van Gogh. The Central Australian landscape is full of intricately traced natural patterns. The broken cliff faces are criss-crossed with lines, wrinkles, and cracks. The trees, because of their sparse foliage, reveal all their limbs and branches and do not cast heavy opaque shadows as do the European deciduous trees in summer. Throughout the day, the tracery of their shape shifts on the ground as the sun rises in the sky, then descends. From the first, Otto Pareroultja has been interested in these patterns, in the tracery of these delicate shadows, also in the flow of lines and in rhythm. His colours are always heightened; and the natural network of lines and shadows is elaborated by conscious design till it becomes an involved pattern that is entirely original. His striped “tiger like” ghost gums are of special interest. It was Battarbee who first thought of using curved lines running across the length of trunks and limbs to indicate the rounded smoothness of the white ghost gums. Otto Pareroultja has multiplied these half rings and placed them all over the trunks and limbs of his trees. His ghost gums now show the common alternate black and white rings that were once put by the totemites on the trunks of many sacred totem poles. This practice is in close harmony with ancient Arunta mythological tales, according to which many of these old gums had arisen from poles abandoned on their travels by the original totemic ancestors. Ewald Namatjira at one stage worked concentric circles into his tree trunks and for awhile he introduced a tracery of sharp and jagged lines meeting at sharp angles into his imaginative representations of rocks. Walter Ebatarinja has often spread clusters of dots and groups of short parallel lines as dashes resembling cicatrices into his landscapes. The blotchy appearance of some of the rock-strewn slopes and much of the foliage is also intentional;

flecks and spots in white down were often used in sacred body decorations to break up large expanses of smooth red down. All these devices are illustrated in various paintings I have seen of the above artists. They are old aboriginal decorative motifs, which have been introduced—often with surprising effectiveness—into the new medium learnt from the white man. At times these native aritsts have been criticised for not keeping to their own art. This is very unjust as it is doubtful if the Australian aboriginal really had true art expression. Most of the art forms which this Arunta tribe possessed really belonged to their religious life and were not practised by the younger men; only the old men of the tribe made these designs, which conformed to ancestral tradition. These were largely symbolical, and were confined mainly to concentric circles and wavy lines. The young Arunta native of today is not only uninterested in the myths, songs, ritual and art of his forefathers, he generally despises these things as trash belonging to a defunct age. It is useless to expect him to work in the old art medium, except to turn out shabby, fifth rate copies for visiting white tourists. This does not mean that the old type of art could not in some form give added vigour to the designs of white Australian artists. It is even possible that in two or three generations' time—perhaps sooner—young aboriginal artists may begin to use again spirals, lines and circles in a new, geometrical form of abstract art. Recently Australian art critics have given the Hermannsburg Art Movement the gun properly. The pictures have been variously condemned for being ‘pretty’, ‘photographic’ and ‘saleable’. Complaints have also been that their remarkable sales value depended merely on their nature as anthropological curiosities. Is it an artistic crime to paint “beauty” or even “prettiness” or is an artist nowadays permitted to paint only scenes suggesting stench, ugliness, barrenness and decay when delineating the outback and never the unearthly beauty that also transfigures certain scenes in the interior? The viewing public go to an exhibition prepared for scenes of arid desert land and sandy dunes and come away pleasurably enlightened or revolted to know there is another side to the interior scene. “Photographic” is, of course, a much more frightening epithet to a painter. Fear of being labelled “photographic” however, is apt to inspire such panic in art circles that many artists would probably distort even the finest lines drawn by nature and soil, the loveliest colours of her eternal canvases, rather than risk incurring any possible censure on this score. This criticism is totally unjustified. The next sneer relates to the so called “curio value” of these pictures. Undoubtedly some people do buy these paintings for this reason; but the same criticism could be raised against many other buyers of art, ancient and modern, everywhere in the world. For instance there are many people who buy books for their private libraries purely for show, without any intention of ever reading them. Such practises are to be deplored and should reflect only on the buyers. Why victimize the artists and writers in this way? Critics of course are necessary, even indispensable for supplying to us the necessary contexts of situation relating to the artistic endeavours of people of other ages and other countries, but surely there should be no need for any intermediaries, critics included, to stand between the writers, artists, musicians and the readers and audiences of their own age. They should not be necessary to induce the regimented enjoyment of creations that have originated in our own times and in our own society. This glorified band of propagandists who are 10 to every one artist, whether it be music, writing or art, tell us in newspaper columns, books, magazines, even the church papers, what to look for and what to appreciate in the musical, literary and artistic fields, I believe this to be a severe indictment of much of the work done today in our artistic media. There was a time when art in all its forms gave joy to the community, and established between the individual members of the audience that great bond of sympathy which comes from a shared appreciation of things that are capable of moving listeners and beholders to laughter, to joy, and to tears. It is probable that the real force of art can best be felt emotionally, not explained in cold and rational abstract terms. It is one of the diseases of our age that it is becoming increasingly difficult for men and women to find relaxation and uncensored enjoyment not only in art, serious music, literature etc., but lately in sport. First night reviewers have a dreadful habit of rebuking in print uncritical people who have dared to enjoy mediocre performances by actors, orchestras and ballet companies. People who enjoy modern poetry, listen to jazz music or have contemporary paintings adorning their walls, sometimes feel uneasy in their own minds unless they can explain to themselves and their friends that their enthusiasms are justified by true aesthetic considerations. It's too bad that we have become so successfully civilized that we have lost the gift to enjoy. As for sport, well, one only has to look at the mess our present rugby football situation presents to understand what I mean. No thought of enjoyment there, only a two-sided national resentment. I seem to have wandered off the track somewhat but I think much of what I say has some bearing on the art of Rex Battarbee and the Hermannsburg School of Native Artists. Not all their pictures are good art. Many of them are not spectacular or clever exhibition pieces fit to be stored in some National Art Gallery and this is a big point in their favour.

Their best works are among the few modern paintings that can be hung and lived with indefinitely, not only in Australian homes. They impart colour, beauty and warmth to the rooms on whose walls they hang and looking at them one is immediately inspired by the feeling of wide open spaces and airy spacious freedom. These artists are interpreting for their public not houses or harbours, man-made fields, seascapes or pleasant green fields, but the harmonies of colour in rugged landscapes and the glow of patterning light that is reflected from the fissured faces of mountain bluffs. The colour symphonies of Central Australia are derived from the sheer beauty of its eternal rocks, unobscured by any cover of earth or grass. These artists, uneducated in the ways of the white man, who apart from Enar and Keith Namatjira speak no English, have never been to a city, nor read any criticisms of their work—not that they would understand any of the modern art jargon—are a unique and absorbing study. It's amazing to think that it is only 90 years since the Aruntas came in contact with the first white man, that they are only one step removed from the stone age and that unasked they have taken to water colour painting as a serious and lifelong occupation. There were other European ways of making a living open to them. But to this very day the white man's new occupations are indulged in with little pleasure or perseverance by the young natives of Central Australia in spite of their complete detribalization and their profound ignorance of the traditions of their forefathers. So far painting has proved the only exception. Of Namatjira much has been written and said. He was a fine person and a true gentleman of nature, who fell, as have done others before him arid no doubt others will after him, into the abyss between his old culture and the new, European way of life. In 1956 he was granted full Australian citizenship rights, enabling him to vote, to own property, and to go into hotels. He aped the white man, became a celebrity overnight and thus a controversial figure among his own people. They told him he had no right to their reserves, that he was a New Australian now, and to leave them be. As he was a leader of his people this situation presented all sorts of odd complications. In 1957 he made his first trip to the city to meet Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. He stayed at the home of Australian author Frank Clune. In December 1958 he went again to Sydney to Frank Clune with Albert Namatjira. December 1958.

have his portrait painted by William Dargie. This portrait was painted at the home of Frank Clune in one day and now hangs in the Brisbane Art Gallery. Shortly after this trip he was convicted of sharing a battle of beer with a fellow native back in the Centre. The ever zealous long arm of British justice, upholder of law and peace etc., etc., was right on the job. There'd been nothing doing in the centre for months, Albert's friend took a swig from the bottle and then went walk-about. The law got to hear of it and rushed at Albert with notebooks and pencils and a subpoena as long as the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The fact that Albert and his people, like any other ancient society, had been sharing more vital things than a drink from the same bottle for centuries, didn't matter in the least. He was an Australian citizen and should have known better. For his generosity to his tribal brother Albert was sent to prison for six months. All through his trials and while the press reverberated with pleas on his behalf and various literary figures and art circles took their places behind him, Albert remained aloof and more than a little bewildered. He was thrown into a compound with all the down-at-heels—the methos, the scum of the earth, the killers. Albert was brokenhearted, his mana was desecrated, his leadership jeopardised, his spirit well and truly broken. In his own words—the white man had pointed the bone at him. Less than six months after his release Albert Namatjira collapsed while painting his beloved mountains 90 miles north of Alice Springs. Since his death, the Hermannsburg School of Art for Native Artists has been without a leader and the artists have all gone walk-about. Let us hope that Battarbee will have sufficient influence to get them back on the path again, united perhaps under the leadership of one of Albert Namatjira's sons. ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ Of the total New Zealand population of 2,174,000 enumerated at the 1956 census, 137,000, or 6.31 per cent were classified as Maoris. This is stated in a report on the eighth volume in the 1956 census of population series. The volume deals with Maori population and dwellings. Of the total Maori population, 96.2 per cent was located in the North Island and 72.5 per cent in the Auckland provincial district. The drift to the towns, a characteristic of the New Zealand population generally, was accentuated in the case of Maoris. Where 9 per cent of Maoris were located in cities and boroughs in 1926, this rose to 19 per cent in 1951, and 24 per cent in 1956. Though there was increasing intermarriage between Maoris and other sections of the community, the majority of the Maori population, 64 per cent in 1956 compared with 71 per cent in 1926, were classified as Maoris of full blood. The occupations of the Maori labour force showed less diversity than the European, though the differences were less marked in the case of the female working populations. Data on Maori incomes were collected for only the second time in the 1956 census. More Maoris than Europeans were in the lower income groups, though again the differences were slighter for females. The comparative youthfulness of the Maori population would contribute to this, but was not enough by itself to account for the differences in income distribution. Similarly, the higher proportion of wage and salary earners and lower proportion of employers and workers in the Maori labour force was explained to some extent by youth. As in the European population, the religious denomination most strongly represented in the Maori population was the Church of England. However, the second largest denomination for Europeans, Presbyterian, comprising some 24 per cent of the population, claimed only 2 per cent of the Maori population. After the Church of England, the largest religious bodies among Maoris were Roman Catholics with 16 per cent, Ratana with 14 per cent, Methodist with 8 per cent, and Latter Day Saints with 7 per cent. Of the total adherents of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) 75 per cent were Maoris. ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ The Citizens' All Black Tour Association, which fought discrimination in the selection of the team to tour South Africa, will disband this month. The possibility of a permanent organisation aimed at promoting race relations in New Zealand is being studied. One of the final acts of the national organisation may be to seek a bipartisan policy statement on race relations from Parliament. This was one of the main submissions a deputation made to the Prime Minister, Mr Nash, and the then acting-Leader of the Opposition, Mr Marshall, in February. Mr Rolland O'Regan, chairman of the Wellington branch of the national executive, is known to be anxious that the present organisation should end now. It has always been his belief, however, that the country needs a permanent body to promote understanding between the races. There has been no move yet to form such an organisation, and many questions have still to be studied before a decision will be reached.