Color: A Natural History of the Palette (10 page)

I had seen how the Central Desert painting movement had not only transformed people’s lives but also how it had provided a language through which outsiders could try to understand something of Aboriginal culture, as well as helping to keep some of the traditional stories and Dreamings alive in people’s memories. And I was intrigued by a tale I had heard again and again about how the movement had started in the early 1970s, with the gift of paint.

WHEN THE COLORS WERE TAKEN AWAY

Geoffrey Bardon was a young man full of ideas and ideals when he went to the Aboriginal settlement of Papunya in 1971 as an art teacher turned social studies teacher. “A dreamer in a blue VW Kombi van,” he once described himself. When he left that place eighteen months later he was in some ways a broken man, as his story would tell. But in that short time he had helped start up perhaps one of the most astonishing art movements of the twentieth century.

I contacted him, and flew up to the small town north of Sydney where he now lives with his wife and two sons. He picked me up from the airport in a VW Kombi van—the kind of van you can just get into and travel wherever you want to go, with your swag mattress in the back. I commented on how he was still driving the same type of vehicle he had been using so many years before. It was a cherished possession, he told me: a reminder of the days before things went wrong.

When we got to his home, we sat on the porch overlooking a garden full of gum trees and flowers, and talked for hours—although he sometimes found it hard, and we would stop and talk about something else. I wanted to learn about the paint, of course. But first he told me about Papunya. It was a hell on earth, he said. A shameful place that in just one year lost half of its population to disease, a so-called “community” where there were five tribal groups speaking at least five languages, trying to coexist and find a new purpose in life when everything they knew had been forbidden to them. It was as if the colors in their lives had been taken away along with their land, and all that was left was lethargy and depression. They were being administrated by arrogant white officials “in white socks”—most of whom, according to Bardon, did not care anything for their charges. “Some of them hadn’t talked to a blackfellow in ten years,” he said. And as for the 1,400 or so Aboriginal residents of Papunya, “they were retiring, withdrawn, and outnumbered,” he remembered. “And they didn’t have the kind of leaders anyone else understood, so they weren’t properly represented.” But as a teacher he was full of ideals and a desire to challenge the system. And although he knew that many of the children went to school only to get hot meals, he tried to teach them as well as he could.

At first the children’s paintings were crude drawings of cowboys and Indians—mimicking the exciting films that were shown on a big screen at Papunya. But Bardon noticed that when they were out of school, talking and playing in the playground, they would draw designs—dots and semicircles and curvilinear lines—in the sand with their fingers and with sticks. So one day he asked them to draw their own designs, and with a little bit of persuasion they began to do so.

The old Pintupi tribesmen were watching, interested, as Bardon’s lessons progressed. The children started calling him “Mr. Patterns” because of his insistence on neatness and careful presentation—and, as he says, it is hard to know just how much this kind of early guidance (from him and from the art coordinators who followed) influenced the work we see today. The elders had their own rich painting traditions that had in the distant past been concentrated on body and sand painting, with some more lasting ochre designs on the walls of caves and the sides of rocks. They had tried a few times to revive the practice. But they had almost no modern paints and no encouragement, and Bardon gave them both. And he did something extraordinary. He asked them what they wanted. “This was an amazing inquiry: I saw that in their faces. Nobody ever asked them what they wanted, they were always being told what to do. The slogan was that if you help one fellow you help them all . . . so nobody helped anybody at all.” When Bardon asked them there
was
something the Pintupi elders wanted desperately: paint. And what they offered in exchange—what a delegation of men came over to Bardon’s apartment and offered one evening—was to paint one of their sacred Dreamings on the gray concrete outside wall of the school. It was to be a work of art that was significant to the black people themselves, in contrast to much of what is painted today which as I had seen in Utopia is designed for white buyers.

The Honey Ant Dreaming (describing a story, or songline, that runs through Papunya from west to east and was felt to represent all the people of that troubled settlement) had three incarnations on the school wall. All the versions were in ochre colors, red, yellow and black, and all of them showed a long straight line with patterns of concentric circles posted along it at irregular distances, making it seem like string with enormous knots. The first version included little semicircular lines like double bananas, placed around the “knots,” and representing the honey ant Ancestors. When it was finished, some elders were horrified that it revealed too many of their tribal secrets, and they held an emergency meeting. The next day the controversial curved lines were scrubbed off and replaced by very realistic little line drawings of ants. But this time it was Bardon who objected, saying he didn’t like them: they were too much like “whitefella” painting. So on the third attempt, the “honey ants” were replaced by symbols that all parties agreed on. In retrospect they looked like little fast-food hamburgers, a yellow filling between red burger buns, but it was an important moment in the development of this new art movement. It was probably the first time that symbols had been deliberately swapped in order to show the “blanket” and yet keep the secrets that lay beneath it. In a way it marked the beginning of these dispossessed people finding a way of representing what was esoteric by something that was exoteric—something that was hidden by something that could be shown.

It was an amazing act of generosity for these men to paint their Dreaming—the representation of their layered system of knowledge—on the walls of a whitefellow building, Bardon said. “But few people really appreciated it. Nobody cared what they were doing.” In those days he used to joke that with the industrial-strength glue he had provided to bind the colored poster paint, the Honey Ant Dreaming would last a thousand years. But it didn’t, it lasted only until 1974, when a maintenance man, on someone’s orders, painted over it with acrylics. If it existed today it would be one of Australia’s greatest pieces of art.

The honey ant was just the beginning of the journey. A few men— like Old Mick Tjakamarra, or Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri or Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, whose names are now huge in the Aboriginal art world—started painting a few canvases in a converted storage area that they had fixed up like a cave. Bardon took the works into Alice Springs (about 250 kilometers to the east of Papunya), and to everyone’s surprise came back with substantial amounts of money. Suddenly everyone went wild for materials. The crates that held the oranges for school break would be dismantled as soon as they had been emptied, and used as canvases; “people were painting on matchboxes and bits of board; anything,” said Bardon, who remembered one day even using toothpaste as a primer to prepare the wooden planking, because he had run out of everything else. He used up the substantial poster paint supplies in the school and then ordered more. “They particularly liked the bright orange paint,” he said. “They said it was from the land—it was the color of the ochre pits.”

His first thought was to continue the tradition of painting in ochre or ochre-like colors, and one day he was taken by some of the Anmatjirra artists to a mine in the McDonnell Ranges to the north of Papunya. It is called Glen Helen and has river cliffs of yellow and white paint running through it, representing 700 million years of geological history. “I thought we could have truckloads of this stuff and big cauldrons of glue and we could paint the town red ochre.” But the artists, despite being aware of this great natural paintbox, preferred to use non-traditional paints. Perhaps because they were brighter on the canvas, or smoother to use, or easier to find. But perhaps also because it made it less complicated for them to represent their Dreaming stories for outsiders if the materials themselves were not sacred but only represented sacred colors— like images in a mirror. It was almost as if by changing the paint, the designs had begun to lose the things that made them dangerous and powerful. It was also an immensely practical choice: as I had seen with Katherine and Greenie Purvis at Boundary Bore, much of the work is done outside. The advantage of acrylic-based paints is that they dry fast. Ochre mixed with linseed oil would be corrupted by red sand long before it dried.

The story of Papunya (the art movement was labelled Papunya Tula, with Tula meaning the meeting place of siblings or cousins) seems on the surface a simple and heart-warming tale of success despite the odds. Having been released from the pressure of being powerful, having even been released from the pressure of being ochre, ochre paintings became a way for dispossessed people to operate in their new environment, as well as also being extraordinarily moving works of art in their own right. But Bardon’s story—partly told in his 1991 book
Papunya Tula: Art of the Western Desert
—has many layers too. And the ones below the sparkling surface are darker and more difficult.

At first it was exciting; he was selling the art in Alice, bringing back money—and later cars—for the painters. But within a few months, he said, things started turning bad, until they culminated in one terrible night that Bardon will never forget, and will still not talk about. The white administrators started to resent the fact that their “dispossessed” people began to have possessions. The paintings suddenly had a value, and as Bardon said: “Anything the Aboriginals had of value they had to be relieved of. It was that kind of place.” One constant threat was that Kaapa Tjampitjimpa, one of the star artists and a respected man in the community, would be deported from Papunya. “They had a game with me, I can’t be more emphatic than that.” But Bardon kept selling the paintings, and returning with increasingly large amounts of cash for the artists. He started giving driving lessons on the air strip—although, as he said, the police discouraged Aboriginal men from having licenses, and nobody was granted one while he was there.

And then there were more threats, with the superintendent telling Bardon that the paintings were by “government Aborigines” and were therefore “government paintings.” One day, while Bardon was away from the settlement, an administrator went to visit the painters—to tell them that, of a consignment of paintings worth $700 and left in Alice Springs, they were owed just $21, with the rest deducted as expenses. When he came back, oblivious of the lies that had been spread, Bardon felt shunned by both white and black communities: “I couldn’t have been more isolated than if I had gone to the South Pole on my own. There weren’t even penguins for company.”

The way he describes the end of his time in Papunya, it is like a bad dream—he fell sick, the Aboriginals began to distrust him and once even chanted the words “money, money, money” in their own languages outside the school in protest at what they felt was his perfidy. It seemed, he wrote later,
²²
as if he was becoming quite separate from the artists and, in a way, even from himself. “From my window I’d see strange and wistful caravans of black faces coming back and forth along the spinifex tracks. I’d see someone I thought was one of the painters, and then whoever it was would walk away.” It was finished, he knew, but it really ended late one night, when someone or several visitors knocked at his door and demanded to talk to him.

Whatever happened under the Southern Cross in the bush that night shocked him so much that he left Papunya in despair and in a hurry, and a few days later had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the hospital. Thirty years later he has recovered from it, but the pain is still there. “There are certain things which can’t be said, so I can’t say them either,” Bardon said as we sat companionably on the verandah looking out at his garden. “I’ll stop now,” he said. And we stopped; it wasn’t right to look under the blanket of secrets anymore.

After you take off in a 747 from Sydney’s International Airport it takes nearly five hours to leave Australian airspace, and I spent most of that time just gazing out at the bush below. From above, the whole desert is a strangely mesmerizing shimmering orange. Whenever a friend was asked what his favorite color was, he would say it was just that: the red of the Australian center, when you flew over it in the morning. From this bird’s-eye perspective, the spinifex and other bushes made little dots on the landscape, just like so many of the Central Desert paintings I had seen. And from a plane the dried-up creeks and the curves of rocks turned into whorls and wiggles that no doubt had whole epic choral symphonies enclosed in them. But I had seen that before, and what I took back from this journey was something extra, something more complex.

It was a sense of ancientness, in a way—the ancientness that had so charmed me with that little yellow stone in Italy—but it was also a sense of the land as a conscious thing. And about how although on the top there is, along with all the beauty, a great deal of misery—alcoholism, racism, ill-treatment of women, and that terrible dull sense of boredom and pointlessness that I had seen in my travels—there was still a sense that below that ochre surface there is a different reality. It is a reality that the best red paint and perhaps the best art can give a glimpse of, but just a glimpse. Old Bill Neidje from Oenpelli had tried to explain its elusiveness. We don’t know what it is, he had said, in words that were recorded in his book
Kakadu Man
, “but something underneath, under the ground.”
²³

Eight months after my journey to find ochre, Christie’s held an auction of Aboriginal artworks in Melbourne. “What a night,” art dealer Nina Bove wrote to me a few days later. “The atmosphere was electric.” There were a few big sales that night—of “Emilies” and “Clifford Possums” and “Ronnies”—but the biggest interest was when Rover Thomas’s 1991 ochre-and-gum painting of
All That Big Rain Coming from Topside
was brought onto the stage. It is an extraordinarily powerful depiction of something elemental: the white dots pouring down the ochre-brown canvas, seeming to settle for a moment in a ridge and then cascading to the bottom in floods. And that is a fair description of what happened in the auction room that night: a cautious start increasing in momentum until it reached an unprecedented high tide.