Renaissance on the Roper
Review of Crossing Roper Bar
There is a stretch of country down the winding Roper River where the most hectic art of north Australia springs from the landscape into life. Dance, music, carving, painting – in this far corner of Arnhem Land, at Ngukurr, a former Christian mission, all these cultural forms are still at a peak of creative fervour – yet in recent times the community and its rich traditions have been largely invisible in the mainstream cities of the south.
This year, though, art and music from Ngukurr are poised to take centre stage. The Roper region’s multiple traditions are turbulent, and vibrant, and sensuous: the rhythmic pulses of its music and the sheen of colour in its painting styles seem almost to reflect the glint of the river, the lush slopes and sudden jump-ups, the brightness of the humid sky. This is the world conjured up by a group of new exhibitions and publications devoted to the clans and interconnected families of the Roper, and its associated cultural areas, which stretch north towards Numbulwar on the shore of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and south almost as far as Borroloola and the Queensland coast.
It was in this country, just over a hundred years ago, that the first Anglican mission in the Northern Territory was established, an event that helped create the extraordinary cultural fusion of Ngukurr today. The story is told in We Are Aboriginal, a handsome commemorative volume that contains DVD archival images as well as a sampling of early Ngukurr art. Together, these records hint at the hybrid realm that Christian faith and ceremonial traditions, yoked together down the decades, helped bring about.
But the modern painting movement in the community only took definite form in the wake of an outreach education program launched at Ngukurr by the Northern Territory Open College in 1987. From this seed grew the career of the Roper’s great art star, Ginger Riley, a visionary stockman with a sharp sense of colour and landscape form. Riley became, fast, one of the best-known Aboriginal artists: his “look” was inimitable, there was a quality of attack about his work, and a tenderness in his painting of country. In 1997 the National Gallery of Victoria devoted a retrospective to him. Five years later he was dead, and all serious discussion of Roper region art went into eclipse. Other senior male painters who had caught the attention of art collectors also died. Out of respect for their families, their work was not exhibited or marketed for several years. A brief flourishing was snuffed out.
Yet there was much more to the movement; a product of the interwoven regions, languages, clans and families. The old mission settlement was merely the fixed metropolis, the bustling, Kriol language-speaking centre where these influences and rivalries played out. Its history is only now being written and assessed. Riley’s decade and a half of painting is the subject of a catalogue raisonne being prepared by his dealer, Beverly Knight, for publication next year. It also stands at the centre of a landmark new exhibition of Roper art, Colour Country, curated by the director of the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Cath Bowdler. Colour Country, which opens on June 5 at Wagga before touring to Adelaide, Canberra and Darwin, also makes plain what lovers of originality within traditional Aboriginal art currents have long known: that Ngukurr in recent years was the equivalent of some north Italian renaissance city-state, rich in art-makers of the highest talent.
There was Willie Gudapi, born on Nutwood Downs station in Alawa country, in early life a stockman, before his move to Ngukurr, where he refined a gleaming, finely detailed style, dividing his paintings into tiny animated scenes. There was Djambo Barra Barra, perhaps the most potent ritual leader in that stretch of South Arnhem Land. He painted crosshatched totemic creatures in bright acrylic; his was a strong look, too strong for easy comfort. There was Maureen Thompson, a matriarch who still paints today, and whose works, along with the mazy landscapes of her daughter Faith Thompson Nelson, will be shown (from today) at an exhibition in the Darwin Parliamentary Library.
But the most remarkable, and least studied, Roper art dynasty is undoubtedly the Joshua family: five artist sisters, daughters of the first Aboriginal pastor at the mission. The first of the sisters to come to prominence was Gertie Huddleston, whose painted paradise gardens, made up from linked story panels, seem like manifestos for a new way of seeing country. Huddleston’s early work had strong appeal: she won the general painting prize in the 1999 Telstra national Aboriginal art award, an achievement matched eight years later by her youngest sister, Angelina George, whose imaginary landscapes conjure up the receding ranges of the inland’s Ruined City tract. George spent years working with her cousin Ginger Riley in stock camps, and there are intriguing commonalities in the works of the two artists: both adopt an aerial perspective, and seem at once to be staring down on the landscapes they paint, inviting the viewer’s eye to scale them, to move slowly from the bottom of the picture upwards to a narrow band of overmantling sky. The other three Joshua sisters, Betty Roberts, Eva Rogers and Dinah Garadji, are less well known, though each perfected a striking individual style, and displayed a penchant for dividing pictures into panels, rather reminiscent of stained glass window segments in a church. Relationships between fields of colour were their prime channels for conveying emotion in their art: Garadji, who died three years ago, was a painter of body marks; diamonds and triangles, converted, on her canvases, into abstract colour planes. The five sisters were the subject of a memorable group retrospective held last December at Darwin’s Karen Brown Gallery. The relationships and variations between their works, in both tone and theme, stood out plain. Their works also feature in Colour Country, and highlight the links and engagements between individual painters in the Ngukurr school.
This profusion of visual artists is matched in the musical domain. For the past three decades, a blend of blues-accented rock has thrived in the Roper valley, centred on the long-lived Yugul band, whose recent album, Blues Across the River, captures much of the hazy, edgy feel of Ngukurr life. The region’s traditional dance and music also thrive, and form the core of the collaborative Crossing Roper Bar project, spearheaded by Paul Grabowsky of the Australian Art Orchestra, with Benjamin Wilfred of Ngukurr as his partner. Grabowsky has been working for several years with members of the Wilfred family, elaborating pieces that bridge modern jazz and Arnhem Land song cycles, or “manikay”. After a three-week bush tour last year across the northwest, the fruit of this collaboration between two drastically different traditions of improvisation is being converted into a studio album; further performances will be held in August at Melbourne’s new Recital Centre. A tradition is being continued here. Wilfred is the grandson of Burra Burra; when Riley’s retrospective was held 12 years ago in Melbourne, it was Wilfred who danced at its opening at Burra Burra’s side. It is not so much that the fields of music and art are closely linked along the Roper’s banks: they are aspects of a single creative tide.
Why, though, now, and only now, the Ngukurr vogue? Perhaps a new phase in Australia’s understanding of northern art is looming, as the first generation of prominent artists and musicians step back, and the initial, rigid convictions as to what Aboriginal art and music should look like or sound like come under scrutiny. As mainstream knowledge of indigenous communities grows, so too has an appreciation for their traditions and histories. Ngukurr, lying close to the Yolngu cultural empire of North East Arnhem Land, was long overshadowed by the dazzle of its dance and art, and was also regarded by purists as a home of synthetic, Christian-accented art-making.
But in these postmodern times, that quality of hybridity now looks less like a weakness and more like a strength. Ngukurr is the ultimate melting-pot, where clans intermingle, and old language traditions hang in the air, overlaid by a common kriol vocabulary: fast, allusive, full of barb and wit. The art was always hard to pin down: it came from several workshops and through different dealers and galleries, and the painters displayed a baffling array of techniques and palettes. That diversity, which contrasts with the homogenised look so characteristic of other northern traditions, is now being viewed by collectors as a sign of distinctive vitality. Even individual artists have a multiplicity about them: Huddleston’s work, with its Christian and traditional elements intertwined, exemplifies this pattern to perfection. Her painted world is one only she could have made: in this sense, she is a contemporary artist adapting her twin inheritance of beliefs.
Writing for the Colour Country exhibition, Bowdler speaks of Huddleston as a painter whose aesthetic and whose subject matter are purely of her own devising. She is disclosed as a figure set in the complex domain of modern Aboriginal identity. In this way, her work, like that of many of the Ngukurr artists of today, challenges the standard picture of traditional, “authentic” Aboriginality as a kind of unchanging bedrock, reflected in a static culture. Rather, the art of the Roper is alive, unpredictable, inconvenient, full of clash and contrast: it is a gift shot through with surprise and delight, novel and exploratory, as changeable as the light on the Roper’s sluggish waters: a source of beauty whose time has come at last.
- The Australian (Nicolas Rothwell), 30 April 2009
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