Remote filling station en route to Yuendumu

Paint supplies at Warlukurlangu

Yuendumu, Central Australia

Gondwana’s Roslyn and Peter lost in the desert

The world famous Shorty Jangala Robertson

Shorty paints another highly valuable water dreaming

Aboriginal art pioneers Bessie and Psddy Simms

Cushions used by artists at Yuendumu

We find it two hours later, and we haven't had to dig. We’re in the hot, cramped gallery of Yuendumu’s Warlukurlangu arts centre and a beautiful Chilean woman is unrolling a huge sausage of painted canvasses at our feet. Outside, the raw dirt streets of Yuendumu are scattered with abandoned cookers and snapped CDs and hounded by dogs that yelp and scrap like tick-bitten delinquents. The single-storey houses are choked with filthy sleeping bags, loud televisions and levels of dysfunction that were declared, in 2007, a national emergency. And yet, that same year, the people of this town of 1000 produced paintings worth A$2.3million. Which is a lot, but not that much when you consider a single work by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri was recently sold for A$2.4 million, that the government estimates the industry to be worth up to A$300m and that it’s grown by between 40% and 70% every twelve months for the last decade.

I’ve been brought here by Roslyn Premont, the owner of Gondwana Gallery – one of the world’s most veteran and prestigious Aboriginal art dealerships, which has showrooms in the centre of Alice Springs and a fashionable corridor of Sydney. I’m here to witness a buying trip and, along with Peter Astridge (the 40 year old manager of her Alice branch) she’s agreed to explain the golden appeal of indigenous art and to attempt to answer some of the more complex questions, like – what happens to all that money?

But first, there’s shopping to do. Big shopping. The lady with the art-sausage is Cecelia Alfonso and it’s her who – along with her partner Gloria Morales – runs Warlukurlangu, one of the country’s most celebrated Aboriginal arts centres. Established in 1985 and famous for it’s canvasses of vibrant colours, Warlukurlangu represents over 400 residents of this ragged town. The first work under consideration is by Bessie Nakamara Simms, one of Warlukurlangu’s stars. It’s all oranges, reds, yellows and blacks and there are dots and circles and wavy lines. It’s pretty. It’s exactly what you’d expect. And it’ll cost you $9000.

“This represents a dreaming, which is a creation story,” Roslyn tells me. “The bush carrot and the bush potato have a huge fight.”

“Cool,” I say. “I’d love to have seen that.”

There’s a silence.

“They changed into people,” Peter mutters. “They weren’t actually a carrot and a potato.”

I look at the work with a vaguely disappointed pout and think about something Roslyn said earlier, about how the late Emily Kngwarreye was the first Aboriginal artist, “to go from the fourth floor of the art gallery –  the ethnographic floor – to the contemporary art floor on the fifth.” To me, Bessie Simms is still struggling to pull herself towards the stairs.

***

Not on this evidence. I stand quietly, and watch Roslyn consider the work. Born in Sydney in 1950, she’s a warm, seemingly unshakeable woman who’s always beautifully presented in flowing flowerprint dresses. Her first experience of Aboriginal art was in Paris in 1978, when she turned up for work at the Australian embassy, where she was secretary for the defence and naval attaché. “I walked in and they had these desert paintings – I was dumbfounded. I thought ‘What is this?’,” she said earlier.

Ultimately her interest resulted in her posting, by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, to Alice Springs – a searing, fly-menaced town, marooned in the geographic centre of the continent – to run the nascent government art gallery, which she did from 1986 until 1990, the year it closed and she founded Gondwana. Today, she’s one of the most richly informed dealers in the country and her business thrives – which grosses around A$2m annually – in part, because of her keen commercial eye.  Of the A$275,000 worth she bought on her last Yuendumu trip, in April, just two works have yet to sell.

Today, the first on the ‘yes’ pile is the Bessie.

“People who like classic iconography will relate to this very strongly,” Roslyn says. “It’s very traditional, very purist.”

Peter explains this colour palette is popular because it’s redolent of the desert. But Bessie, according to Cecelia, doesn’t always use it. 

“We try to guide her to these colours, and she does one thing nice but then starts using the greens and pinks,” she sighs. “Bessie’s very stubborn. She’s very proud. You have to deal with her delicately. She’s a very senior woman who’s been painting here from the start and she’s watched other people make more money than her and gets very jealous.”

“So why does she keep using pinks and greens?” I ask.

Cecelia shakes her head. “She doesn’t really understand.”

I ask Ceclia how she manages the tantrums. “With Bessie, I give her more money than she’s entitled to because of who she is. With the others – it breaks my heart, but you manage it by copping a lot of abuse, you know? They get angry.”

When I ask if this anger ever bursts into violence she nods. What, I wonder, happens then? “I call the police.”

The creative ‘guidance’ that art centres offer Aboriginal artists has been controversial, with some worrying about the validity of a work that may have been tainted by a white eye. But Cecelia is unapologetic. “Gloria [her business partner] and I believe very strongly we’re here to guide. We work with the artists to develop a style which is distinctive and authentic. We work with what they already have. It’s still their style, but we’re emphasising things.”

In truth, the relationship seems no different to that of an author and an editor. And it’s essential that at least some of Warlukuralngu’s artists are guided into pulling in the hefty bucks. Cecelia estimates that ten percent of her artists draw 75 percent of her income and although the centre’s managed by her, Gloria and a small team of volunteers, it’s owned by the Aboriginals and run for their benefit. All profits are hosed back into various community projects and, of course, to pay for the materials. Moreover, their ‘total acquisition policy’ means they buy everything, although canvasses are strictly rationed in order to prevent the centre suffocating under an influx of four-million mediocre dots. Which would likely happen: artists are given an advance when they collect new canvasses – between A$20,000 and A$30,000 a week is handed out – with the rest of the fifty percent of the retail price being paid when work sells. And, even for Yuendumu’s wealthiest artists, this is rarely sufficient. “They just don’t spend money like we spend money,” Cecelia tells me. “Even for someone like Shorty there’s never enough.”

‘Shorty’ is Shorty Jangala Robertson, Celecia’s top-selling male painter (who, Peter mentions in an aside, strolled into Gondwana, recently and, apropos nothing, asked for $10,000). His generation were born in the desert (the last nomads ‘came in’ as recently as 1984) so, although nobody knows how old this Stetson-wearing superstar is, he’s thought to be in his nineties. I first saw his work yesterday, at Alice Springs’ Araluen Arts Centre, where the annual ‘Desert Mob’ exhibition shows the best of the year’s works.

“That’s a breathtaking Shorty,” said the curator, Kate Podger, admiring the canvas that had already sold for A$8800. “A colour-field abstractionist from any part of the world would die to have that degree of finesse. And this is someone who hasn’t been to art school. It’s from the heart.”

Indeed, Cecelia tells me as she unfurls a couple of new $14,000 Shorty’s, he hardly even requires guidance. Before her arrival in Yuendumu, he’d produced seven canvasses, which Cecelia thought beautiful. But the first he produced for her was a disaster.

“His family did it,” she says. “I could tell. I was really disappointed. I said, ‘Shorty, if you want to paint for me, you’re going to have to come to the centre and do it’.” But that didn’t appeal to the senior genius. There followed a year where Cecelia unsuccessfully, “chased him around the community. Then one day I saw him. I turned the car round and I said, ‘Shorty, come paint for me’ and he said ‘I’m hungry’. I had some nuts in the car, so I said ‘Here, have these nuts. If you come to the centre to paint tomorrow, I’ll give you $300’.” The canvas Shorty painted the next morning ended up in Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria. Since then, he’s produced 1066 works. Every one has sold.

“The day Shorty dies,” says Cecelia, “I’ll hang up my hat. It would just be so much harder without him.”

***

“He says he paints the water dreaming,” says the interpreter.

“But why do his paintings sell, whilst others don’t? What is it that he’s doing that’s unique?”

“He says it’s water dreaming.”

“Yes, ” I say. “But what does he think white people like so much about the water dreaming?”

“He says it’s because it’s water dreaming.”

“Why does he paint water dreaming?”

“Because it’s water dreaming, water dreaming.”

By now, the are dogs sitting on Shorty’s canvas. He doesn’t seem to mind. I remember a complaint by one of Cecelia’s harassed volunteer art-squad that, when he delivers new work, they spend a long time removing mongrel hair and chewing tobacco from it. Baffled by the conversation so far, I decide another tack and enquire as to what he does with his money. Does he have any savings? A bank account?

“He’s got no savings. He says he can do what he likes with his money.”

I blush, afraid I’ve accidentally taken a patronising turn.

“Of course he can,” I say, suddenly sounding even more patronising. “But people from England hear about successful indigenous painters and the conditions here and wonder where the money goes. What did he do with his earnings from his last canvas?”

“He says he’s bought a Troop Carrier but one of nephews got took him away. He’s not happy because he wanted that car.”

“And what will he do with the money from this canvas?”

Shorty doesn’t need the interpreter for this one. He looks at me with a severe, watery gaze and, patting the pocket of his jeans, says, “Plant him in here.”

***

We turn back, down the nameless desert track on which we’ve been travelling alone for more than three hours. Everywhere, it seems, there is death. We pass picked remains of kangaroos and starved calves, the upturned shells of burned-out cars and, every now and then, a small white cross planted in the dirt. The ranges in the distance were once higher than the Himalayas, but millions of years of wind and rain have reduced them to sorry, crumbling bluffs. Dead animals, dead mountains, dead land; from the bloodwood trees and the ghost gums to Mount Unapproachable and the Sandy Blight Road, the soul of this landscape is revealed in the way it’s been christened by generations of white pioneers. It’s a place of murderous beauty; a wasteland of spiny shrubs, derelict rivers and psychotic centigrades. Except, of course, that it isn’t. In truth, this is not a place of death, but of secrets. And the ones in the dark are us.

You see, if we could decode any of the A$64,000 worth of canvasses Roslyn bought from Yuendumu, we’d be fine. Because Aboriginal art isn’t just cutesily arranged dots and u-shapes. More than history, more than religion, the stories depicted in their paintings are nothing less than a map of survival.

When, in 1788, the English dismissed these near-naked nomads as evolutionary underlings, what they couldn’t see was inside of their brains. The indigenous mind teams with unknowable layers of knowledge about every tree, hill and water-source for hundreds of kilometres. The invaders derided them for not having books; the Aboriginals could equally have derided us for needing them.

Every Aboriginal has a ‘tjukurpa’ or dreaming – a story from the time of the world’s creation which, in it’s details, will tell an individual everything they need to know about where to find food, medicine and water how, morally, to live their life. It’s a cross between a Biblical parable, a ‘Just So story’ and a travel guide, and every event in the tale corresponds to an actual facet of the physical landscape. Tjukurpas are incredibly complex and taught in stages, with each new level of detail being revealed by the elders when an individual is believed ready. They’re taught in as many ways as possible: dance, song, body-painting, rock carving, sand-drawings a hectare wide. As Roslyn says, “If you can hear a story and paint it, sing it and dance it, you increase your ability to remember it a hundred-fold.”

Aboriginal culture is built on secrets. Men don’t know what the women are taught; one person’s dreaming is never to be shared with another, on threat of death. White people, even today, are told only as much as an Aboriginal child. When the first paintings were produced on canvas, some elders judged they revealed too much. The response was furious and violent, with an early exhibition-building being attacked with stones and boomerangs. Soon, artists learned to deliberately obscure their work with abstraction. Dots – which were originally a relatively unimportant part of the compositions, representing a shimmering ‘dreaming power’ – began to dominate. Back at Desert Mob, Kate Podger told me, “Sometimes when you watch people paint, you’ll see the under-painting, then you’ll see all the layers come on top of it. If you ask questions, it all gets covered up very quickly.”

We stop again, for a toilet break. Peter just stands there, urinating in the open, but, as an Englishman, I have an inexplicable need to find a tree. It’s a ten minute walk away, and on my return back to the car, I find Peter looking severe.

“You just pissed on Dorothy Napangardi’s dreaming mate,” he says. 

I look aghast. Gondwana represent a small and exclusive roster of artists. Dorothy, I know, is a multi-award winner who’s been exhibited internationally and collected by celebrated American abstractionist Sol LeWitt.

“Don’t worry,” he smiles. “I won’t tell her.”

We arrive, two hours later, in a huddled, introspective community called Papunya. Opened in 1960 to house Aboriginals of different tribal groups who had generations of warring between them, this is a place whose past is ferocious and miserable. But Papunya does have another, more staggering, stake in history than all that. Because this is where the art began, thanks, largely, to the vision of a 30 year old teacher back in 1971. Geoffrey Bardon was rare, in those days, for making a supreme effort to become close to the Aboriginals and one evening, as he was watching television, a group of elders knocked on his door and nervously handed him a piece of paper. “Design,” one man said. It was a honey ant, the hero of one of the region’s many dreaming stories. Bardon – who’d been to art school– encouraged them to paint. When they began transposing the Honey Ant onto a mural at the school, Bardon stopped them. “Are these proper Aboriginal honey ants?” he asked, demanding, “Nothing is to be whitefellow.” A man named Kaapa Tjampitjimpa stepped forward. “Not ours, yours,” he said. “Paint yours,” Bardon replied.

Soon, the men were painting traditional designs on any scrap material they could scavenge. After Bardon procured some proper art supplies, they produced between 600 and 800 canvasses within 12 months, some of which the teacher sold, on their behalf, in Alice Springs. But by July the following year, Bardon’s enthusiasm had corroded into despair. In his memoir, he recalls forty artists downing brushes, one day, and chanting “Money! Money! Money!” at him. “The monstrousness of it,” he wrote, “was not lost on me.” Bardon suffered a complete mental and physical breakdown and left Papunya. He died in 2003.

It’s in learning about some of Bardon’s problems that my puzzling chat with Shorty begins to take focus. Back then, Bardon quickly realised the men didn’t understand the way in which westerners value art. The way they saw it, the more important the dreaming, the higher the value of the painting. So when I asked Shorty why people spent so much on his work, I now understand why he kept giving the same reply, “Because it’s the water dreaming”.

As we pull up at the Papunya Tjupi art centre, the sun is making gold with the low range of ruined mountains on the horizon. A group of women are painting in the shade of the step by the front door except for one individual, who’s all alone in the sweltering dazzle, wearing an overcoat and woollen beanie-hat. Roslyn immediately identifies this as Doris Bush.

“Doris could be great,” whispers one of Papunya Tjupi’s co-ordinators, 26 year old Cassie Ejiri. “But we hesitate about promoting her hugely. I don’t think she can look after herself. Her family take money off her all the time.”

This, it turns out, is one of the single biggest problems facing the artist community and it explains the second half of my chat with Shorty, when he was bewailing his lost Toyota. Academics call it ‘clientelism’, Aboriginals call it ‘humbug’ and it refers to the practise – normal, by necessity, amongst many tribal societies – in which the earnings of the individual are automatically made available to the group. This, of course, is also precisely the issue that’s proving intractable in Africa, where clientelism translates into democratically elected politicians sharing the spoils of their victory with their tribal and family associates, and leads all too frequently to jealous war. To us, it smells like corruption. But to them, it’s how life has worked for millennia. 

“It’s hard,” acknowledges Cassie, a 26 year old art student from University of New South Wales. “It’s a cultural thing. Everything has always been shared. They don’t have any notion of personal belongings. Even with the canvasses: I’ve seen them work for days on a painting and then never look at it again.”

Meanwhile, in a back room, Roslyn and Peter are shuffling through the racks.

“That doesn’t do it for me,” says Roslyn looking at one. “The tracking’s [arrows denoting animal tracks] over the top. It’s too concentrated, too directional.”

“A lot of these are very generic,” sighs Peter. But then, he pulls out a medium sized canvas by Tilau Nangala. It seems unusual in it’s roughness. Rather than a shimmering galaxy of fine dots, these are wide, earthy, expressive smudges. This, they tell me, is the kind of work that appeals to connoisseurs: the sensuous mark-making is clearly by an old, shaking, experienced hand. Peter lays it carefully onto a gathering stack of paint and secret wisdom.

***

I’m back in Alice Springs, in a large room above the Gondwana Gallery. And working silently on the floor is Roslyn’s world-famous client, Dorothy Napangardi.

“Do you remember,” Roslyn’s saying to her, “you were painting in the early days? And your Aunties would say ‘Where are the u-shapes in your paintings? Where are the circles?’.” The artist smiles, shyly, into her canvas. Roslyn turns back to me, “And she’d just sit there until they went away.”

Dorothy works purely with dots, usually in an extremely limited colour palette (right now, she’s putting tiny, latte coloured marks on a chocolate brown background). I wonder how much the works that are placed about the studio would cost. “Those little ones, A$2000,” says Roslyn. “The bigger ones, A$40,000.”

Born, it’s believed, in the 1950’s and having spent her childhood walking the desert, Dorothy speaks little English and is so shy, when you talk to her, you fear squashing her with the sound of your own voice. It’s this fragility that’s lead her to fall victim to family members who, on payment of bribes, have bullied her into posing in front of fake canvasses that have ended up for sale in places like eBay. It also means she’s frequently humbugged clean.

“The phone rings all day with family members,” Roslyn says. “Once upon a time it was ‘give me A$50’; now it’s ‘give me a Toyota’.”

Dorothy herself gets through a minimum of A$300 cash every day.

“What do you spend it on?” I ask the artist, when she stops for a sandwich.

“Tucker,” she whispers. “And playing cards.”

“Gambling?!”

She laughs mischievously as Roslyn sighs, “I have to give it. I can’t judge.”

***

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Words & photos copyright 2005-2010 Will Storr