Bush Women

Bush Women

Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara), Garloomboomy, Ngamany the Borders of Gija Country, c.1992, ochre on canvas, 96 by 126cm. Artbank collection, purchased 1994.

This book has been published on the occasion of the exhibition Bush Women, held from 21 July–8 September, 2018 at Fremantle Arts Centre.

This exhibition is a restaged version of the original exhibition Bush Women: Fresh Art from Remote WA, that took place at Fremantle Arts Centre from 19 February–3 April, 1994.

Book published by Fremantle Arts Centre 1 Finnerty Street, Fremantle, Western Australia 6160 www.fac.org.au ISBN 978-0-6483563-0-1 Writers: Erin Coates, Sheridan Coleman, Pantjiti Mary McLean, John Kean, Daisy Andrews, Paji Honeychild Yankkarr, Darren Jorgensen Editor: Darren Jorgensen Proofreading: Sheridan Coleman Designer: Isabel Krüger ‘My Story’ is reprinted from Pantjiti Mary McLean: A Big Story. Paintings and Drawings 1992–2005, exhibition catalogue, curator Nalda Searles, Adelaide, Tandanya: National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, 2005, pp. 6–10.

‘This Picture Just Makes Me Think’ was originally titled ‘Daisy Andrews’ and is reprinted from FAR: Fremantle Arts Review 9:1, February/March 1994, 6.

‘I Put Water in My Paintings’ was originally titled ‘Paji Honeychild Yankkarr’ and is reprinted from FAR: Fremantle Arts Review 9:1, February/March 1994, 6.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright owners of the artworks illustrated in this book. Where this has not been possible, we invite owners of copyright to notify the Editor.

This book has been published with generous support from the Gordon Darling Foundation

Bush Women

The ‘Bush Women’ at Fremantle Arts Centre, 1994. From left to right, Daisy Andrews, Paji Honeychild Yankkarr, Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara), Tjingapa Davies, Tjapartji Kanytjuri Bates and Pantjiti Mary McLean.

Photograph Nalda Searles.

contents

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Erin Coates and Sheridan Coleman: Introduction page 6

Pantjiti Mary McLean: My Story page 10

John Kean: Curating Bush Women in 1994 page 16

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Daisy Andrews: This Picture Just Makes Me Think page 40

Paji Honeychild Yankkarr: I Put Water in My Paintings page 43

Darren Jorgensen: Women of the Western Desert Diaspora page 45

Notes page 84 Acknowledgments page 90

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Erin Coates, Special Projects Curator Dr Sheridan Coleman, Researcher Fremantle Arts Centre 2018

Introduction Bush Women: Fresh Art from Remote WA, shown at Fremantle Arts Centre (FAC) in 1994, was the first exhibition to combine key Aboriginal artists from Western Australia’s Kimberley region and the Ngaanyatjarra Lands of the Western Desert – presenting a suite of around 70 paintings by Paji Honeychild Yankkarr, Daisy Andrews, Queenie McKenzie (GaraGara), Tjapartji Kanytjuri Bates, Tjingapa Davies and Pantjiti Mary McLean. Almost 25 years on, Fremantle Arts Centre is re-staging this ground-breaking show. As one might imagine, locating and reuniting dozens of artworks from a historic exhibition has not been an entirely straightforward endeavour. Since 1994, each object has had a life of its own; the artworks had scattered across Australia, into private and institutional collections, changing hands and becoming known and esteemed as part of a wider history of West Australian Aboriginal art, and as specific moments in each artists’ oeuvre.

The finding of the Bush Women paintings has been part of a larger undertaking at Fremantle Arts Centre: a resolute effort to rediscover our own exhibition history. Prior to the era of rigorous digital archiving at FAC, exhibition records were charmingly, yet hopelessly, two dimensional. Sales records, databases, marketing copy and curatorial essays were typed out with biblical-opacity on now yellowing paper; written onto elaborate forms in lilting, anonymous longhand; or pinned inside then-revolutionary, now-defunct foolscap filing schemes (with

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an odd silverfish). Labelling and filing methods changed often with incoming staff and office organisation fads. This was an unwieldy archive, impervious to keyword searches, data backups and anything but the most manual rummaging. Those researchers, artists and enquirers requesting details about a pre-digital exhibition would be told, reluctantly, that it would ‘take some time’ to find their information, if it could be found at all.

Until recently, the records of FAC’s exhibitions from the inception of the Arts Centre in 1973 through to around 2006, were located in a cache of wood-look cardboard archive boxes, stacked high in council storage or on FAC office shelves well above eye height (and often therefore above remembrance). Determined to address this barrier to accessing our organisation’s own history, we enlisted a small army of interns; tertiary students recruited from information studies or art history. Over a twoyear period they systematically unlidded the archive, made sense of its innards and scanned every item. They grew accustomed to the sweet smell of vanillin, a chemical released as paper ages (it makes old books smell good), the appearance of startled spiders and the amusement of discovering woefully outdated poster design, photographic evidence of the previous haircuts of well-known artists, or now-untenable exhibition ideas (Woman in Art – four male painters exhibiting on the theme of ‘women’, 1975). The ordered and accessible digital database that resulted from this work is a trove of journals, paperwork, publications, memos and press clippings that augment FAC’s ability to mark out West Australian art history, its own role in that history, and to strengthen upcoming projects with the knowledge of past ones. Gaps still exist; the project may never come to completeness.

We began to gain a fuller sense of FAC’s long engagement with West Australian artists, and in particular a now-ongoing commitment to presenting the practices of Aboriginal artists, which became a strong focus from the early 1990s. In its history, few projects did as much to ignite the enthusiastic collecting of and admiration for the work of Aboriginal women artists as Bush Women, curated by John Kean. The artists, some of whom were supported to develop their work during studio residencies at FAC and knew the gallery well, went on to participate in subsequent landmark exhibitions, such as Old Mangkaja (1995), Jila and Jumu Waterholes (1996), McLean’s solo exhibitions

INTRODUCTION

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Pantjiti Mary McLean (1996) and Mustering, Go Along Now (1999) and Groundwork (1998).

One of the first people to delve into our newly uncovered archives was writer and researcher Darren Jorgensen. He soon came across the Bush Women records, and his excitement around this exhibition and understanding of its importance was the initial provocation for FAC to restage this show. The next step was to contact the show’s original curator John Kean, who is now completing a PhD thesis on four of the founding Papunya Tula artists. John was delighted with this idea and has played a key role in its undertaking. Both Darren and John have assisted with tracking down people connected with the original exhibition, contacting the communities and families of the six Bush Women artists, and gaining permission for this project to go ahead.

After the decision was made to restage the exhibition, the crucial but slow process of tracing the original artworks began; uncovering the onward journeys made by the artworks of the original six Bush Women – Paji Honeychild Yankkarr, Daisy Andrews, Queenie McKenzie (GaraGara), Tjapartji Kanytjuri Bates, Tjingapa Davies and Pantjiti Mary McLean. Unpicking twine that fastened the 1994 manila Bush Women sales folder revealed only the first clue in what came to be a treasure hunt to find purchasers. Hand-written and photocopied one too many times, the notes were strewn with confounding information. One painting had been sold to a ‘Hawkins’ who was apparently so well known that they needed no first name or contact information. Another was acquired by a company with a name so generic (think: Acme Holdings), it was one of dozens of so-titled organisations internationally. About two thirds of the exhibited works had been sold, many to private collectors and a few to well-known institutions like the National Gallery of Australia. A couple of works made it into the hands of eminent West Australian collectors such as Janet Holmes à Court, Dr Harold Schenberg and the Berndt Collection. Other works have subsequently changed hands, for instance we traced one McLean painting from a private collection in 1994, to a Perth auction years later, then, having lost the scent, a Perth curator, responding by email to tell us there were no McLeans in her collection, happened to mention that a relative of hers owned works by the artist.

There it was!

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As more paintings came to light and their owners kindly agreed to loan them, we heard about the lives of the artworks, as they changed hands, rooms and frames, and more significantly, we learned of the impact they’d had on the people who owned or had viewed them. Following the impact of Bush Women, many of the collectors continued to seek out work from the same artists or communities, or felt these paintings to be so important to our local art history that they had donated them to major public collections. Wherever they ended up, we kept hearing about how beloved these works were. The paintings and drawings from Bush Women are embedded with vital knowledge, about flora, fauna, hunting, ceremony and ngarranggarni or tjukurrpa (Dreaming) and in some way, an inkling of this knowledge rubs off on those who are close to these works of art. The artists in Bush Women painted their culture and stories from their long lives with authority and vigour. Through six strikingly individual styles of colour and mark-making, each work resonates with the confidence with which these artists expressed a comparable connection to Country.

The reassembly of Bush Women is not just an opportunity to revisit the material from a past exhibition, but an opportunity to reflect on the impact of these artworks on all who have seen them. These are works that teach us how to see bush Country: to see in it McLean’s urgent, vital colours, the layered narratives of Bates’ complex line work or the physical connection with land so prominent in Honeychild’s sweeping brushstrokes.

Of more than 70 paintings, about half have returned to Fremantle Arts Centre for this cultural stock-taking, and they are joined by other works we discovered in the searching – preparatory drawings, paintings made on residency at FAC, paintings conceived in the lead up to, or wake of Bush Women, all by the same six artists. This exhibition is one glimpse into a population of linked artworks that has dispersed widely, and which collectively tell us something about the lives of these women and the impact of their statements about land and culture across the country.

Perhaps as a result of the exhibition and this book, even more fragments of the story will emerge, to be credited with the beauty, history and power of what six bush women once laid out on canvas and installed in Fremantle.

INTRODUCTION

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Panjiti Mary McLean 2005

My Story Ten years I been painting ... ten years, isn’t it? All the time painting, painting, same painting, long one finished ... leave ‘em, get another one.

(I’m) happy painting, my painting ... and they buy it, you know. I’m not lazy. It’s a lot of hard work, you know ... I keep on going painting. I been live for painting myself.

Make a story and painting for the land ... painting people and the land.

[I’m looking at my paintings] ... kangaroo sitting down under a tree.

Minyma ... that lady lying down ... big titty. He’s pointing ... he want to go that way. All the flowers, you can see ‘em everywhere ... all along right up to Docker River and Blackstone. That’s lovely Crown Lake, that red one ... isn’t that lovely! Goanna come along ... big one. Snake going along ... wombat ... goanna lying down. Birds ... they been fighting ... they got their mulya [beak] stuck ... Kakalala [cocky]. Kids waving, “Hello, hello!”

That crow bit ‘em on leg. Little kids in a circle, having a feed, sitting round a dish of quandong.

All bush tucker, no flour, anything. When I grow up we move along, no feed, nothing, going from rockhole to rockhole. If we see a rockhole dry, no water, we go to another rockhole. Sometimes young people go ahead ... they make smoke if there’s water. We all run along, tjitji [children] ... swamp water, we jump in the water. All the men say, “Mustn’t get in the water, we got to drink it.” When they go looking for hunting, we jump in the water!

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You can’t have a feed ... hard to find a rabbit. Can’t get kuka, hard place, hard country, he can die there. Kids crying, crying, crying for feed, hungry, rabbit burrow ... take rabbit, cook him, give it to him. Now he can play around. In cold times [kids] stay in shelter. All man gone, naked fellows ... chase marlu [kangaroo] and kill him, bringing him home.

All the men would cook him in the ground.

Night time we laying around, sitting around like this ... then sleep.

Grandfather wati singing Tjukurrpa [Dreaming stories] ... sing, then we sleeping. Cloud coming rockhole way ... we come and sit down ngurra [home] way, water coming. We make a big shelter sitting down, keeping dry, warm in shelter kanitjarra [early morning] ... sit down, lay around.

Comes thunder ... night time to morning, fire, fire burning for young.

I been sit down Docker River with my mother. This side, that [white] man come with camels. We were frightened ... that big noise [from hobbles]. He talk to us, my aunty, [He’s a] cheeky bugger! [He said] “Come for feed ... come on all you kids, bread!” Wasn’t jam. All the kids came for a feed. He gave ‘em treacle. We put treacle in our hair! We didn’t know. Whitefella said “Come here ... put water ... wash ‘em hair.”

Baby not born in hospital, wiya [no], we battling to get them. My mother had me in the bush, no hospital ... I nearly chuck my boy away ... very hard. My little girl first, Walter’s big sister, she passed away.

We bringing the kids for long, long walk [800 km, from Warburton Ranges to Cosmo Newbury]. We carry ‘em all the way. For all the kids, no feed. [At Cosmo] give me rations for little kids. [At Mt Margaret Mission] they said, “Give kid to me .... [you] got no miye [food]. Give me, I look after him.” Walter McLean, they grabbed him and put him in the home. My daughter born in Mt Margaret mission. Lots of kids, they grabbed them and put them in the home. All the white men, whitefella Mr Schenk, told me to go work on the station.

First time I rode on a horse, they gave me an old black racehorse ... a learner. I was ngurlu [fearful]. I trot along first, then gallop along. They tell me to sit down properly ... put the tjina [foot] in the stirrup ... marna [backside] down, then up. I galloped all around the flats. See the sheep ... they bring them in ... then gallop around. We get up in the darkness, have

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this page from top Pantjiti Mary McLean’s Country west of Docker River, 1996. Photograph Nalda Searles.

John Kean and Pantjiti Mary McLean, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1994. Photographer unknown. previous spread Pantjiti Mary McLean painting near a lake outside Kalgoorlie, 1993.

Photograph Nalda Searles.

my story

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miye, saddle the horse ... you can’t muck around there. Horse tailer get up ... bring the mob into the shearing paddocks. We did tailing, mulesing, crutching ... put the rubber ring on ngampu [balls, eggs] ... they jumping around everywhere. Nuisance sheep! Nice one, too ... I grab the lamb, carry ‘em along on the horse. Cold day, when beautiful sun coming, we gotta go in paddock. “You can’t lie down now!” I say. They still lying down, all the men. I go and saddle a horse. This man here, old man, he get a bucket of water, throw a bucket of cold water over the man lying down. “Get out you fellas, get out.” Lazy buggers! I been bring all them horses. That’s not an easy one ... [it’s] a hard life.

Mrs Foot, Betty Davidson was cooking. Lorna Jennings, my aunty, was cooking too ... morning porridge ... cooking flour bread, big one! We came back in the afternoon. We took dinner [lunch] out in a bag. We had a day off .... women could take time off different. We looked at warntu [clothing] catalogue ... shirt, trousers, boots, they got a buckle on them, lovely shoes.

We book them down and they would go and get them in town.

Dingoes Edjadina way ... shoot them! Clem Gable [said] them dingoes killing lambs. We sitting down morning time [when] they come along for water. Sitting down near a tree at the dam--you know, I been tell you when we went to Mt Celia--shoot him mirri [dead] ... skin him, sell him at the Roads Board office. Long time at Mt Weld, I learn from them ... take them along, that’s the hard work ... take them along, me and my cousin, we take them along in the open cut. We come along the fence ... I see the sheep frightened ... I come along, see a big yilpa [goanna]. I tell them, you go along the other side. I go and get a big stick .... I tied that horse to a tree ... I hit that big yilpa on the nose, kill him mirri. I tied him on the horse ... galloped along to the sheep. I never tied him properly ... we gone a long way ... yilpa fall down. I gallop along and see the yilpa lying down ... you got to tie him on ... I go along and come back. Makes you tired ... it’s a hard life!

Then we were working sandalwood, cleaning wood with tomahawk, taking bark [at] North Rawlina with Charlie Gable. After we came back to the mission with money [from working] ... we take the kids for holidays to Mt Weld Station, to Gindalbie. We go on train to Kalgoorlie.

I buy all the clothes ... my son get blue jeans, lovely blue jeans ... take him

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back to the mission ... my boy he run along crying .... “Mr Miller, he took my jeans, Mummy!” I talk to Mr Miller ... “You take it off -- why? That is my money, you know!” [He say] “He is not allowed to have long trousers, he got to have short ones.” Not allowed to! Mission was hard ... old Mr Schenk, he said not allowed to put on the long trousers.

After a long time I came to Ninga Mia ... we had ‘50 cent’ shelters [hexagon shape] first time. Now I am painting ... nobody showed me how, learning self, painting all the time.

All the people can come and have a look at my paintings. Yeah, they can come [to Tandanya] and have a look, no worries! Yuwa!

my story

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John Kean 2018

Curating Bush Women in 1994 The counter currents that tug at the Australian cultural landscape are persistent and raw. These forces weighed heavily on my thinking when I was appointed Exhibitions Coordinator at Fremantle Arts Centre (FAC) in 1993. While I was excited by the art I encountered in Australia’s urban centres, I was also curious to discover what was happening in the constellation of remote communities far beyond the limestone walls of the former colonial asylum from which I operated.

The idea for Bush Women emerged from an appreciation of startling new paintings that were being produced by senior Aboriginal women across Western Australia. I was struck by the energy with which these women painted disparate sites. Rather than being a curatorial construction, the Bush Women concept felt self-evident, for it picked up on a phenomenon that was already taking shape and which would continue to grow into the new millennium. Introducing the exhibition in a catalogue essay, I proclaimed: Fresh clear paint is the medium through which each of the artists in BUSH WOMEN reaches out to the viewer to tell their history, describe their land and communicate aspects of their culture. PAJI HONEYCHILD YANKKARR, DAISY ANDREWS, QUEENIE MCKENZIE (GARA-GARA), KANYTJURI BATES, TJINGAPA DAVIES and MARY MCLEAN (PANTJITI) come from diverse areas of remote Western Australia and have only become known to the

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Invitation, Bush Women exhibition, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1994.

Curating Bush Women in 1994

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wider artistic community recently. They have lived through a long period of unprecedented social and environmental change. Each of the artists, while sharing a focus on the land and expressing her commitment to Aboriginal cultural values, has developed a distinct personal style. Through their seniority and knowledge, they bring an authority and confidence to their work, which in visual terms finds expression in direct, painterly imagery of breathtaking assurance.1 The six artists represented in the exhibition came from sites along the Canning Stock Route, the Gunbarrel Highway and the Kimberley, regions whose names are redolent of frontier conflict. Each artist painted with visceral energy through which she asserted connection to Country, and its contested history. Providentially, my career had led me to anticipate great art emerging from little-known and diverse locales.

Grounding My first job, as Art Advisor for Papunya Tula Artists (1977–1979), placed me in a working relationship with some of Australia’s finest and most influential painters. I had just finished art school and, while enthusiastic, I was profoundly ill-equipped for the role. The artists, including Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Johnny Warangula Tjupurrula, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa and Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, were critical to the instigation of ‘contemporary Aboriginal art’.2 Together they developed new forms of artistic expression, through which a new vision of this land was revealed. The first masters of contemporary Aboriginal art spoke of Country in intimate, tactile terms. Artists such as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Uta Uta Tjangala, demonstrated how, by tracing ancestral songlines, the lie of the land could be anticipated over the visible horizon. They understood that the earth and its biological constituents, comprised an eternal living whole, arising from the Dreaming. Without contradiction, their paintings also referred to the human body, for designs they had applied to their bodies in sacred ceremony, were reconstituted as art. While Cubism had introduced a radical understanding of space into the Western canon, the Papunya artists added further dimensions and ‘doublings’.3 My experience of travelling and working with these founding desert artists, transformed into a reverence for Country and respect for its

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people —it was the best education. Encounters in the bush, whether planned or unforeseen, alerted me to the multivalence of the environment in which we, as Australians, live. Gradually I became aware that “Country” could sustain subtly layered interpretations. Warumpi, the series of small, rounded hills that overlook Papunya, could for instance be understood as the spiritual home and body of the Honey Ant Sire, Yerrampe. Further, it was believed that the honey-pot ants (Camponotus inflatus) that live in the deep-red loam under the dense Mulga copses of the region, are the descendants of Yerrampe. Later, I became aware that Warumpi was the site of ceremonies that celebrated the journey of Yerrampe from Pintupi Country to the west, events that reached back through recorded history to the Era of Creation. Such revelations came slowly and only cohered more fully in retrospect. Approaching Warumpi by car from Alice Springs still fills me with excited anticipation.

Working at Papunya was in turn, challenging, inspiring and enabling — a lucky formative experience that lead to subsequent opportunities.

Instrumentally, the distinctive way in which space is conceptualised in the Australian desert profoundly informed my later work as a curator.

Orientation The navigator David Lewis, who travelled extensively with Pintupi and Luritja people in the Gibson Desert, to the west of Papunya, cogently describes the ever-present approach to route-finding and spatial orientation that underpins life in the desert, whether hunting or travelling across Country:4 It would appear then, that the essential psychophysical mechanism was some kind of dynamic image or mental ‘map’, which was continually updated in terms of time, distance and bearing, and more radically realigned at each change of direction, so that the hunters remained at all times aware of the precise direction of their base and/or objective [Author’s emphasis].5 This matter-of-fact process of spatial orientation overlies a known ‘totemic geography’, that, according to the linguist Luise Hercus: gives deeper significance to the ordinary geography and makes it more memorable. The Ancestors who fashioned the landscape followed the same pursuits and went along the same recognised routes as Aborigines in their travels.6

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this page Installation view featuring paintings by Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara) and sculpture by Mervyn Mullardy, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1994. Photograph John Kean. following spread Paji Honeychild Yankkarr, Pilija, 1991, synthetic polymer paint on paper, 56.2 by 76.8 (image and sheet), National Gallery of Victoria with the assistance of The Marjory and Alexander Lynch Endowment, Governors, 1991 (O.244– 1991). ŠPaji Honeychild Yankkarr/ Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia.

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I recurrently call on these processes of orientation when conceiving the layout for an exhibition. My method has two stages. First: identify and locate key thematic episodes or ‘locales’ in geographic relationship to each other, to create a model of the relevant world/subject within the gallery spaces. For example, if the frame of reference for the exhibition is geographic, then ascertain and conform to real-world cardinal directions. This part of the process establishes a conceptual structure equivalent to ‘totemic geography’, within the gallery space. Secondly, determine ‘way finding’. This process involves clarifying narrative paths between these major locales. This second stage requires attentiveness to the ‘time, distance and bearing’ between key locales of the totemic geography. Objects and images are located along paths, which link each locale, establishing and reinforcing major themes of the exhibition. This is an intuitive method for configuring exhibitions, and is not particularly remarkable, but I have found that if used as a guide, this land-based methodology can result in comprehensible exhibitions that visitors traverse with confidence. The method was consciously employed to configure Bush Women within the labyrinthine spaces at FAC.

Transmission In 1989, I was a part of a small team recruited to establish Tandanya, an Aboriginal Cultural Institute in the brick shell of Adelaide’s old power station. Tandanya is a substantial building, centred on a cavernous 80-metre gallery. There was no precedent for Tandanya, and without the constraint of conventional boundaries, we sought to bridge the gap between the art museum and community-based initiatives. Our initial program was, by necessity, ambitious, and demanded that we drew on contemporary and historical work from across the continent.7 Significantly, the year before Tandanya’s inception, the ‘celebration’ of the Bicentennial of the British occupation of Sydney Cove in 1788 mobilised a wave of pride in the survival of Indigenous culture.

Unprecedented demonstrations in Sydney promoted pan-Aboriginal perspectives, and coincided with an upsurge in interest in Indigenous art.

These political movements triggered many creatively oriented people to seriously consider becoming an artist. The time was right for initiatives such as Tandanya in Adelaide, Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Collective in Sydney and the Campfire Group in Brisbane.

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So, in the days before a computer was positioned front and centre on every work desk, my colleague Kerry Giles and I picked up the phone and rang emergent cultural outfits, seeking opportunities for creative collaborations. Our initial endeavours were more driven by representation than connoisseurship, and as a consequence, we made connections with little-known artists in diverse locations. The program took shape.

Among the timeliest, and most exciting of these exploratory calls was to Karen Daymen at the newly-minted Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency at Fitzroy Crossing. I gathered from her that senior custodians from several distinct language groups had been painting for several months at Fitzroy, and its outstation, Bayulu. Karen responded quickly to our interest, sending a sheet of slides and photos of the artists. The slides revealed a series of bright works on paper, radically different to the ‘dot painting’ that had spread ‘like a bushfire’ from Papunya to Kintore, Kiwirrkura, Yuendumu, Lajamanu and Balgo during the 1980s.8 When it transpired that a busload of Mangkaja artists were willing to cross the continent to attend festivities, Kerry and I immediately embraced the idea of a major show to fill the main gallery at Tandanya.

The resulting exhibition, Karrayili, (from the Walmajarri word for a ‘gathering of adults for the purposes of Law and education’) was a revelation. Once in Adelaide, the artists collaborated to produce two huge banners that would hang outside the building.9 Not only did it mark the first outing of major artists, including Jukuja Dolly Snell, Nyuju Stumpy Brown and Warkartu Cory Surprise, but the vitality of the collective itself was palpable and ground-breaking.

Rather than the recapitulation of classical icons, the artists of Fitzroy Crossing painted in high-key colours with gestures derived from the core of their bodies. They spoke a new visual dialect, unleashed from the semantics of classical desert iconography. Superficially at least, the painterly attack of the Mangkatja painters resembled trans-Atlantic expressionists, such as Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky and Adolph Gottlieb. Indeed Gottlieb’s statement ‘You arrive at the image through the act of painting’, perfectly describes the soaring harmonies and strident discords that make Mangkaja painting so striking.

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Curating Bush Women in 1994

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The new works from Mangkatja jibed against the restrained rigour of the Papunya Tula artists, for they spoke of everyday experience outside the strictures of ritual performance. Whereas paintings from Central Australia and the Western Desert were esoteric meditations on preordained signs in space. Paintings by Purlta Mary-Anne Downs, Janyka Ivy Nixon and Gypsy Yata took the viewer deep into mysterious places, indexed only with sweeping gestures and centripetal attraction.

It was as if the artists had returned to the jila (wells) that sustained them, this time digging down to the water table with paint, rather than the small wooden scoops of their youth. Here were works that spoke of Country in loving terms; they engendered memories of residence and affinity, rather than authority and command. It was apparent from the excited responses of the artists and institutional tastemakers that Mangkaja would become a major force in Indigenous expression.

Fremantle and the warm winds from the north The experience of working with Fitzroy Crossing-based artists at Tandanya prepared me well for my new position in Fremantle. Director June Moorhouse was restless. She wanted to look beyond the polite confines of the Western tradition for which FAC was then known. She was keen to locate new possibilities for collaborations with diverse communities, especially with those whose Country lay beyond the heavily populated portion of the state.

Unsurprisingly, FAC was not the only arts organisation to sense the warm winds bearing down on the city from the north. In March 1993, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) presented Yarnangu Ngarnya: Our Land — Our Body, a remarkable live-in happening in the very heart Perth’s cultural precinct. It was evident on entering PICA, that authority for the show had been transferred to the twenty or so yarnangu (Ngaanyatjarra people) who had taken up residency in the austere brick building.10 The institution’s commitment to the event was equally demonstrable: twentyfive tons of red earth was spread across the floor of the main gallery.

Complementing PICA’s multi-modal remit, resident yarnangu performed a series of ceremonies, traces of which remained in separate men’s and women’s spaces, where access was restricted according to gender. More conventionally, unrestricted paintings were displayed

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on the walls of the main gallery. Most of the men’s paintings employed Tingarri designs that echoed paintings produced by their northern relations, the Pintupi speakers of Kintore and Kiwirrkura. In contrast, the Ngaanyatjarra women’s paintings were looser and more extravagantly conceived. When viewed from the balcony, the floor of the gallery was filled by a single vast work, Pulpuru Davies’ Yankaltjunkulnga, (1991) 185x 4160 cm, displayed flat on the red earth.

It was apparent from this elevated perspective that the gender balance in desert art was shifting. Where men had once dominated the initial phase of the contemporary desert art movement, the women of Yuendumu, Balgo and Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff ) had developed exciting new approaches.

Meanwhile, at Utopia on the eastern side of the Stuart Highway, Emily Kame Knwarreye’s star was rising.

The FAC exhibitions program 1993–1995 Once behind the desk as Exhibition Coordinator, gaps in the exhibition program provided me with ample opportunity to approach artists who may not have previously considered exhibiting at FAC. A significant breakthrough came when I attended a slideshow presented by fibre artist Nalda Searles at the Western Australian Artists’ Foundation.

Searles spoke of her involvement of the Warta Kutju Street Art Project at Kalgoorlie and her evolving relationship with one of the artists, the woman I would come to know as Pantjiti Mary McLean. While Pantjiti’s paintings were rough, there was enough evidence to suggest that, given the opportunity, she would flourish. Pantjiti’s first solo exhibition, Hunting Grounds, opened in the Hall Gallery at FAC in November 1993, instantly winning the hearts of those who squeezed into the narrow gallery to buy one of her captivating figurative works.11 The exhibition program progressed with a mixture of Fremantle and Perth-based artists, interspersed with intra- and interstate offerings.

The annual Fremantle Print Award and the Festival of Perth offering remained cornerstones of the program, (which won national exposure when the right projects were selected). At this juncture, major exhibition program initiatives were workshopped with June Moorhouse and Melissa Harpley (editor of the Fremantle Arts Review). I remember taking three proposals to the festival programming meeting, all of which I thought

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Pantjiti Mary McLean, Yultukunpa Tjikini, c.1993, drawing in blue fibre-tipped pen, 60 by 84cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

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had potential. Both June and Melissa were confident that Bush Women was the strongest idea. Moreover, I should “get to work on the project without hesitation!”

Which bush women?

The composition of the communities to be represented was clear from the outset, and the only group that I would have like to have included, and who were unable to meet the deadline were the Warlayirti Artists of Balgo.

As well as aiming for geographic representation, a key objective was to showcase selected artists as individuals. I therefore needed to restrict the number of artists to ensure that each participant could show a significant body of work. Pantjiti and Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara) were selected automatically as the most dynamic senior women from Kalgoorlie and Warmun (Turkey Creek) respectively. Determining the artists to be selected from Fitzroy Crossing and Warburton was more challenging.

I had particular affection for the works of Paji Honeychild, for she was among the most senior and minimal of the Mangkaja painters. Her hypnotising compositions concentrated on a single locale at which she had lived in her youth. There she had collected ngarlka (desert walnut), kiyi (grains) marntarra (edible gum) parta (acacia seed) and jirriypa (an edible root), each of which was recalled as her brush described the wall of the jila (well).

Daisy Andrews eventually emerged as the other most compelling contender from Fitzroy, for her landscapes had a skyward elevation that spoke to the earthy verticality of McKenzie’s landscapes. The decision was cemented when I learned that both Andrews and McKenzie produced history paintings, dominated by the remembrance of massacres of countrymen, scarring the land in perpetuity. The devastating impact of the frontier wars was still fresh in the minds of both artists and ‘dispossession’ became a further theme of Bush Women.

The Ngaanyatjarra artist from the Warburton Arts Project (WAP) presented another challenge, and once again the selection was by necessity subjective. I was persuaded to select Tjapartji Kanytjuri Bates, for her paintings spoke with particular authority, while echoing the intimate, sensual and haptic nature of milypatjunanyi (women’s stories told in the sand).12 Kanytjuri’s sometimes-acid palette also suggested

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a realm that embraced the sky (into which the Kungkakuralypa/Seven Sisters of the constellation Pleiades fled), and the phenomenon of vivid lime-green grass growing out of the red earth.

Selecting the second artist from Warburton was more difficult, and in the end I was seduced by a single work of Tjingapa Davies’, Right Way to Have a Kurri (1992). Rather than revealing an aspect of Tjukurrpa, (Dreaming), the painting was pedagogical in its intent. Right Way to Have a Kurri was an instructional poster showing how to select a husband or wife of the correct kinship relationship. The geometric spokes of the wheel, around which the painting is composed, indicate the order in which marriage partners should be selected. Tjingapa’s paintings dealt with the details of customary life as an anthropologist might, but with the joyous subjectivity of paint.

Occupying space Bush Women occupied all available ground floor space at Fremantle Arts Centre. Drawing on what I had learned about spatial relations at Papunya, the artist’s works were arranged as closely as was possible, given architectural constraints, to the geographic relationship of the respective artist’s Country. Accordingly, Kanytjuri Bates’ work was located in the small southern gallery, while Tjingapa Davies’ paintings effected the transition from the southern hall into the Main Gallery.

A small storage room between these spaces was opened for the duration of the exhibition; it housed an assortment of bush foods that Tjingapa had collected for the purpose, below a work titled Mirrkatjarra, about bush tucker. Tjingapa’s works continued into the main gallery where they complemented an array of Arcadian images by Pantjiti Mary McLean.

Her paintings vividly recalled an idyllic childhood before whitefellas encroached on her homeland of Kaltukatjara (Docker River), near the border of the Northern Territory and Western Australian.

The northern end of the Main Gallery was filled with Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara)’s bold hyper-flat canvases. The grim history of the East Kimberley, indexed by the natural ochre surfaces of McKenzie’s paintings, was made explicit by a set of chained hands, carved by Mervyn Mullardy in a showcase on the floor of the gallery. Echoing the orientation of the Canning Stock Route, the hall gallery was occupied by

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this page from top John Kean, June Moorhouse, Pantjiti Mary McLean and Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara) at Fremantle Arts Centre, 1994.

Tjapartji Kanytjuri Bates and Pantjiti Mary McLean at Fremantle Arts Centre, 1994.

Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara) at Fremantle Arts Centre, 1994.

All photographs Nalda Searles. following page from top Tjingapa Davies, Right Way to have a Kurri, 1992, acrylic polymer on 15–18 cotton canvas, 127.9 by 93.5 cm. Courtesy the Warburton Arts Project.

Tommy Lowry Tjapaltjarri, The Artist’s Country from Tjuntju to Kalipyinpa, 1983, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 107.0 by 152.5 cm. Commissioned in 1983.

Gift of The Sportscraft Sportsgirl Group. Art Collection, Arts Centre Melbourne. Photograph Mark Ashkanasy.

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Paji Honeychild in the south, and Daisy Andrews in the north. As always, the ex-asylum’s tainted architectural spaces inflected the exhibition with conflicted colonial resonance. On the other hand, the modest scale and recent history of the venue, encouraged discourse. Neutrality is impossible at institutions that are loaded with so much history.

The floor talks Without doubt, the highlight of Bush Women was the attendance of the artists for a weekend of opening events. A series of floor talks, held in the deep shade of the front courtyard with paintings extracted from the gallery, allowed for a gentle intimacy to flow between the artists and the small group of visitors who braved the heat of the day. We forgot the passing of time in the company of these eminent women.

Opening proceedings were also significant for the artists, who in the company of peers from distant communities, understood they were a part of a larger group of ‘bush women’ whose voices were beginning to be heard. The gathering was also important for the Arts Centre. When the men of Fitzroy Crossing spontaneously arrived in the afternoon and sat in a long arc to sing, play didgeridoo and dance, it seemed that the ‘whiteness’ of the colonial edifice was beginning to lift.

I was also fortunate to spend time talking to each of the artists in front of their paintings in the gallery, where further subtleties were revealed.

A quarter of a century after those sweltering February days I can still recall a few of the stories. Pointing to a small triangular shape in one of her paintings, Queenie told me she was conceived at that place. The pale shape was an ancestral white echidna, consumed by her mother at the moment of her conception:13 that is why Queenie was born with light skin.

Later, Kanytjuri and I worked our way over the surfaces of her richly narrative Kungkarangkalpa/Seven Sisters paintings. The Kungkarangkalpa are a group of ancestral women who travelled widely across the Western Desert. An old man who was sexually aroused by their passing, relentlessly followed the women.14 After relating an account of the pursuit and misuse of the nubile siblings by the lascivious old man, Nyiru, Kanytjuri changed register. Without pause, she began to interpret signs relating to major events of her own life in the area travelled by the Kungkarangkalpa. The first event was her conception at

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this page Mervyn Mullardy, Babirr/Wooden chained hands, 1988, carved wood and ochres.

In the collection of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology.

Photograph John Kean. opposite Tjapartji Kanytjuri Bates with Gary Proctor, diagram atop Yinunmaru, 1994. Acrylic polymer on 15–18 oz cotton canvas, 128.5 by 189.6 cm. Courtesy the Warburton Arts Project.

Yinunmaru, the site from which the painting’s title is drawn. Kanytjuri then described a dramatic turn of events. Pointing to painted signs, she spoke of the approach of warnmala (ritual killers), who came to the waterplace and entered her family camp to spear and kill a close relative.

This revelation struck me – not only was Yinunmaru a depiction of the totemic landscape, the painting was also embedded with recent history.

Her sense of self was effectively united with the cosmology of her people.

On consideration, it became apparent that the Western notion of time as an arrow was clearly deficient when trying to reconcile a worldview in which biography and religious belief were so thoroughly enmeshed.

About time I recall now how some of the Papunya artists described their paintings, pointing to sites (represented by concentric circles) and saying, “I was born there”, “I came out of the ground there”, or “My grandfather passed away there”. I had previously interpreted these statements as assertions of authority, claimed though their affinity with particular sites and associated totemic heroes. In retrospect, it became apparent that these statements

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referred directly to the intended content of the painting. The artists hoped, through their descriptions, that I would more fully comprehend their association with the land they painted. It took several more years for me to comprehend how history and the Dreaming were indivisible.

Bush Women prompted me to reconsider my understanding of time, as expressed in desert art. An artist’s statement such as “I was born there” was intended as an assertion of subject. It constituted an integral part of a circular narrative that looped from the artist’s actual conception, or the death of a close relative, to the actions of the ancestral heroes from which the artist was reincarnated.15 I am reminded of works created by Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri during the late 1970s, a puzzling series that continues to perplex. At the time of painting, Leura told me that he painted his father and grandfather, tracking Euro (Macopus robustus) in the Country now known as Derwent Station. He insisted that his paintings were recollections from his youth, seeing his forebears walk off with intent – woomera, boomerang and spears at hand.

Curiously, Leura represented his paternal ancestors as skeletons, moving with ease across the landscape, sometimes leaving flesh-footed tracks.

Tellingly, Leura also employed icons of the Possum clan, his father and grandfather’s totem, adjacent to the enigmatic, cartoon-like skeletons.

The conjunction of transcultural forms with customary iconography made these works particularly mysterious, for as ‘history paintings’, they seemed to sit outside of the Dreaming.

For years I thought of Leura’s paintings as outliers, anomalous exceptions that proved the rule that Papunya Tula painting was always about the Dreaming. In retrospect, my myopic fascination with ethnography stymied the development of a more nuanced understanding of time in Leura’s paintings. Coincidentally, during the period Leura painted his paternal ancestors, the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner published a series of essays under the title, “White man got no dreaming”. If I had read Stanner’s concise disclaimer, “One cannot ‘fix’ the Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen,” my fruitless search for temporal certainty could have been allayed.16 In 1984, I was engaged to document a series of paintings by Papunya Tula artists, commissioned for the Arts Centre, Melbourne. The

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assignment provided the time and opportunity to record Papunya artists describing their paintings in depth. Of particular relevance was a work by the Ngaatjatjarra artist, Tommy Tjapaltjarri, The Artist’s Country from Tjuntju to Kalipinypa (1983 Arts Centre Melbourne). I wrote: Tjapaltjarri expressed two main levels of meaning in this painting. Typically, one level referred to his heroic ancestors [the Wati Kutjarra] who created and shaped the landforms in the Dreaming. The other was a remembrance of his more recent ancestors who had died and were buried in this same country before his family had contact with Europeans.

After a description of the events of the Dreaming, I continued: All this happened in the artist’s grandfathers, father’s and uncle’s country.

They have all passed away and now Tjapaltjarri is the owner of that country.

In this painting, many of the sites (sets of concentric circles) represent places where these old people died or were buried. The interconnecting lines not only represent the paths taken by the Wati Kutjarra but the paths taken by the artist’s family as they moved from waterhole to waterhole.17 I concluded that account of the painting by emphasising the integration of three levels of representations: events of the Dreaming, contemporary topography and family history, which I suggested, were ‘brought together in a painting of holistic unity.’

Eventually, conversations with the artists of Bush Women buttressed a growing appreciation of the breadth of reference that can be anticipated in any single painting. While many paintings by contemporary desert artists give emphasis to one level of interpretation, other levels are implicit. For instance, as a senior custodian of sites along the Canning Stock Route, Paji Honeychild had an intimate knowledge of the songlines that passed through her Country. But rather than painting the tracks of the Ancestral Heroes who had created the earth’s visible landmarks, she places emphasis on the significance of life-giving water. Devoid of an explicit narrative, Paji accentuates emotions of affinity and the comforts that accrue with familiarity and residence.18 The iconographic signifiers of the Dreaming, made explicit in early Papunya painting, are sequestered in Paji’s paintings, understood only by those with a shared knowledge of the Law.

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Paji Honeychild Yankkarr, Mukurrurtu, 1993, synthetic polymer paint on paper, 103 by 131cm. Artbank collection, purchased 1994.

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The rise of painting across the Western Desert has been described as following a trajectory from iconicity to abstraction. The anthropologist John Carty has traced the dissolution of iconographic forms at Balgo, a phenomenon paralleled at other remote locations, including Warburton, Warkurna and Kiwirrkura.19 However, painting developed from different precedents in the Kimberley communities of Warmun and Fitzroy Crossing, where contemporary art emerged from shared principals.20 Art of the east and southern Kimberley has subsequently been characterised by the efflorescence of distinctively individual styles, advanced by further waves of artists, including Nora Wompi, Shirley Purdie and Mabel Juli.

Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara) and the Mangkaja artists painted with an associative informality that allowed for sweeping gestures and bold composition. While the narrative was not always encrypted in a series of signs, events were remembered as the painting unfolded. Painting materialised as a mercurial process in which the lived experience of the artist was imparted through gesture. The authority with which such paintings were composed was expressed through open forms and assured mark making.

Bush Women’s moment Bush Women tapped into a dynamic moment, as the expressive trends, that would reach their zenith in the new millennium, were emerging.

Unencumbered by the narrative burden associated with earlier Papunya painting, Kimberley-based artists were free to seek out forms that suited their Country and personality. The original catalogue essay for Bush Women concluded with the extravagant assertion, “The freedom and directness which causes some viewers of their works to comment ‘my kid could do that’ is paradoxically the quality that is most admired by the art world.”21 Indeed, the approaches pioneered by McKenzie and Honeychild have flourished, taking distinctive forms, several of which have been embraced by an expanding market impressed by their scale and bravado. In contrast, the narrative urge evident in paintings by Pantjiti and Tjingapa has not received ongoing critical valorisation, perhaps because it is impossible to fully encounter their works without being drawn into a bilateral communication. Witness the waving hands in Pantjiti’s figures, gesturing, ’hey, look at this!’ ‘Ahoy, come over here!’ or the pedagogical drive of Tjingapa’s Mirrkatjarra (a taxonomic painting about bush foods).

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My challenge throughout the new hang of Bush Women, almost a quarter of a century after it was first presented, will be to determine the extent to which the exhibition stands for the moment when it was curated, the zeitgeist, when senior women artists working at remote locations across arid Western Australia first came to prominence. Alternately, can these bright paintings surpass that moment in time? Will Bush Women II, an exhibition reconstituted with paintings originally produced in the early 1990s, connect deeply with paintings being produced in those same regions to this day? And can the paintings by the ‘bush women’ themselves also reach back, before white contact, to touch the Ancestral Past? Such a reading would allow a circular understanding of time, in which the power of place is renewed and transferred to a new generation through the process of ceremony, storytelling and painting.

Perhaps both possibilities can coexist, with the paintings in Bush Women doubling as exemplars of their time, while demonstrating continuity – to embody Stanner’s sense of the “Everywhen”. Such a multiplicity of meanings would confound the art historical urge for linear progression.

Instead, it would elevate the paintings of Bush Women to become objects that both narrate and transcend time – the most ephemeral of all dimensions.

Tjapartji Kanytjuri Bates, Rilyi, 1993, acrylic polymer on 15–18 oz cotton canvas, 128.4cm by 189.8 cm. Courtesy the Warburton Arts Project.

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This Picture Just Makes Me Think

Kaningarra: Daisy Andrews’ Country, 2007. Photograph Tim Acker.

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4

Daisy Andrews 1994

This Picture Just Makes Me Think When I paint I think about my mother and father when they were living in the desert. The policemen brought them in. They were travelling, walking. At Kaningarra people were shot. That is the living place for these old people. Living in the bush they had a lot of tucker.

I went to visit that country for my mother and father. I was feeling very sad, it made me sorry. When I first went to Kaningarra I didn’t know that place. They told me, ‘you should go and see your parents’ country’.

I was really broken in my heart. I was really sad. I knew all of my family had been there. I first went when I was an old woman, just this time now.

From Kaningarra they travelled right up to Lake Gregory. When I went there I was thinking to myself, ‘why am I coming to see this country?’ I was very sad just travelling and looking at this beautiful country. I was crying at Kaningarra. People were killed there, policemen killed the people.

That’s why my parents left there.

I didn’t see my grandparents. They came in from the desert and died at Kurungal [Christmas Creek Station].

I knew that country in my mind from my brother Boxer. When I was travelling I was really sad because my people were living in that country.

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They shot one old man there, right in the open. I couldn’t stop thinking about it when I saw that place. They should have shown me that country when I was a young girl, not now I am old with grey hair. The people were too frightened to go there. They were shooting them.

The country is empty now. It made me cry. I tell you I was upset. I didn’t say anything I just stood there and looked at that country. That waterhole where they would be living. When I went there I was just standing.

I sat down and just looked. That old man Alec, he was telling me ‘this is the place where we used to play’ [hold ceremonies]. People came from everywhere. Nobody is here any more.

When I draw my picture I am seeing that country in my head. Looking at those sandhills, flowers, everything was very good. When I am painting I tell my grandkids these stories. I tell them that next time they will come and visit this country.

I like to take these paintings to the city. I want to tell my story for this country. The country for my grandparents and my mother and my father.

I think hard when I look at my country. I think how I have to paint it.

I look and see what to paint.

At first I didn’t know that I came from the desert. We were all here together, Goodiyandi, Walmajarri, Bunuba. We are really Walmajarri.

My husband is Bunuba. People used to tease me and say ‘how you bin come to love him?’ I would tell them ‘it’s just love, young days love that’s all’. Everybody makes fun that he’s my husband. He speaks my language too. When we were married we moved between Leopold and Brooking Springs Stations. He looked after me properly. That’s why I don’t want to leave Bunuba people. They looked after me properly.

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5

P a j i H o n e y c h i l d Y a n kk a r r 1994

I Put Water in My Paintings I put water in my paintings, places where we were walking around. I put bushfood too like ngarlka (desert walnut), bush tucker, everything.

When we were living near living water (permanent), we got bush tucker, everything. We got kiyi (seeds) and ground them up. We cooked them in the coals like damper. We got ngarlka too. We had good tucker then. We had lots of different sorts like kumpupaja (bush tomato), jurnta (onion).

We filled up our coolamon and cooked them on the coals. Then we cleaned the skin off, then we ate them all!

It was the same with ngarlka, we filled out coolamon again. Another one, like a bean is kulparn (pindan wattle seed) and lungkurn (acacia seed). We didn’t cook this one. We ground it up and ate it raw. Another one is puturu. We ground this up on a rock and put them on the coals like damper. Another one we cleaned with a tomahawk, soaked it in water to make it soft and then cooked it on the fire. We ate a lot of this soft one.

Also, we ate marntarra (edible gum). We took it from the tree and ate it straight away. We ate the red seed from the parta tree (Candelabra wattle). We cooked them in the coals and ground them too, we ate it like that, straight away.

We dug for jirrilypa (edible root) and we pulled them out from the ground. We would get a coolamon full and then cook them on the fire.

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Another one like carrot, we cooked them on the fire again. We burnt them to make them soft. You pull them out from the fire and leave them.

You can’t eat them straight away.

This is some of the food we eat in the bush. I don’t always put this in my painting. I paint ngapa (water) too. I wanted to put this word in the book, it is a good word for people to read. I paint jila (living waterholes).

My painting is about how we lived in the desert. We were living on bush tucker, we had plenty. We didn’t go short.

Trees in the Great Sandy Desert, June 1980. Photograph Kim Akerman.

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6

Darren Jorgensen University of Western Australia 2018

The Western Desert Diaspora In the 1990s, the women of the Western Desert painted themselves into the history of Australian art. If with the Papunya movement of the early 1970s, “a new kind of beauty is born to the world,” the work of these women offers a bewildering sublime.22 This is because their lives were bewildering, at least for those of us who did not live them. The Bush Women artists Daisy Andrews, Tjapartji Kanytjuri Bates, Paji Honeychild Yankkarr, Pantjiti Mary McLean and Tjingapa Davies grew up gathering seeds, hunting lizards and camping by waterholes. As Pantjiti says, “All bush tucker, no flour, anything. When I grow up we move along, no feed, nothing, going from rockhole to rockhole. If we see a rockhole dry, no water, we go to another rockhole.”23 Andrews remembers waiting while the men cleaned out the waterhole Japingka: “We (the women) waited until they were finished and we went to get water. I called out to the snake to keep him quiet …“24 From life in the desert, these women lived to witness the arrival of whitefellas, and then the establishment of new communities and towns. They became artists only in old age, after taking on responsibilities to community and family. They were painting to remember what they had known during long lives as witnesses to many seismic changes in Australia.

In 1991, the curator of Bush Women, John Kean, was working at Tandanya in Adelaide. In an exhibition called Karrayili Andrews and Honeychild debuted their paintings in a big Australian city. A teacher

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in Fitzroy Crossing remembers the week-long drive to Adelaide, with twenty people crowded into a bus patched together with flywire and glue.25 The trip was organised to give the women of Fitzroy Crossing an insight into the workings of the art world, to show them how their paintings looked in an exhibition. It was part of an education that these women had begun undertaking late in life; learning to read, write and use the telephone so that they could understand and use the ‘secret English’ of kartia.26 The painting movement was part of a broader push to understand the wider world, and an offshoot of an educational organisation called Karrayili. Comparable education programs offered a beginning in painting elsewhere too, in Balgo, Papunya and Lajamanu.27

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The success of the women of Fitzroy Crossing in becoming artists, and in exhibiting their work all over Australia in the coming years, remained however at one remove from the mainstream of Australian art. The excitement that had accompanied the discovery of Aboriginal art, the rush to embrace its newness, produced instead an art world of its own, constituted by specialist curators, collectors and galleries. Tandanya was one of many new galleries opened at this time to exhibit Aboriginal art. It was as if the artists of remote Australia existed in a parallel universe to mainstream artists, and would only become more insular as Aboriginality itself became the subject of increasing national attention.

In the 1990s, the frontier wars, stolen generations and Native Title were given national attention, politicising Aboriginality to a new degree of

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intensity. By the late twentieth century, the focus was on “selling the Dreaming, selling the country, in which there is little room for the artist’s voice.”28 Yet these artists were as much citizens of the world as anybody else, having learned to navigate urban life in their remote towns and communities. They drove cars, watched television and went shopping, and yet the discourse that arose around them largely worked to fix them into a relationship with desert traditions, to gathering bush foods and living according to the ancient Dreaming.

This essay turns instead to the ways in which the women of the Western Desert embodied the global experience of the Twentieth Century. For while these artists often paint the Country and their childhoods, lived between waterholes, they also reflect the modern experiences of cattle stations and missions, communities and outstations. In this process of movement and settlement, they came into a new kind of relationship with the Country that they once walked, Country that is now distant from where they settled. This distance and this relationship with Country is not unique to Aboriginal people. It is one shared by the migrants and refugees of the world, who are tied to distant places, who raise children in countries that are not their own, and whose yearning for traditional worlds are often distant in both history and geography. In this sense, and as curator Henry F. Skerritt writes, their “world-pictures must necessarily be both local and global; they must be planetary in scope but human in scale …”29 While produced within the life-worlds of the desert diaspora, the paintings of the women of the Western Desert diaspora express more universal experiences of alienation, longing and exile. Through intercultural negotiation, and sometimes conflict, remote artists have grappled with what it is to paint alongside people who are not always family, who speak languages that are not their own, and who belong to countries that lie in different directions. Such negotiations constitute the ways in which Dreamings become visible in the art of the 1990s.

Women of the Third Wave30 Much of the scholarship on women’s desert painting focuses on the rise of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, the most successful artist from desert Australia during the 1990s.31 Kngwarreye emerged, however, from an expanded field of women’s art. Two exhibitions at the cusp of a boom in women’s panting illustrate a longer history of women’s art in remote

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right Installation view, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1994. Photograph John Kean. previous spread from left Pantjiti Mary McLean, Untitled (People Laughing Round a Rockhole), c. 1992, synthetic polymer paint on paper, 83 by 100.5cm, Artbank Collection, purchased 1994.

Paji Honeychild Yankkarr, Jarjupi, 1993, synthetic polymer paint on paper, 103 by 131 cm. Artbank collection, purchased 1994.

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Australia. In 1987, Karnta: Aboriginal Women’s Art featured works from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankuntjatjara Lands (APY Lands), Balgo, Kununurra and Utopia alongside women from Saltwater Country in Broome and the Tiwi Islands. It toured to Adelaide, Darwin, Adelaide, Sydney, Fremantle and even Hawaii in 1989. This Pacific connection was also at work in a second exhibition, Minymaku–work of the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, held in Alice Springs in 1989. It was inspired by Pacific Arts Festival in Townsville, where delegates took an interest in desert art.32 Minymaku featured crochet, linocuts, necklaces, paintings and woodcarvings, representing a diversity of women’s practices that had long passed under the gaze of the Australian art world. Before this, and since the 1940s, experimental painting had long been the province of an art centre at Ernabella in the APY Lands. Under the supervision of mission workers such as Winifred Hilliard, women had become so identified as artists that when men were invited to make work at a new art centre in nearby Wingellina in 2000, the women said that “they [women] were the ones who knew how to paint.” In the eastern states, 1989 was also the year of the Aboriginal Women’s Show, where carvings from the tropical north sat alongside works from the urbanised coast at Boomalli Gallery in Sydney. Boomalli curators Brenda Croft and Hetti Perkins would go on to bring Aboriginal women to their most prominent international exhibition, when Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie and Judy Watson represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1997.

It is instructive to follow Bush Women curator John Kean, who worked throughout this transformation in Australian curatorial practice. In the late 1970s, he was the Art Adviser to Papunya Tula Artists, a job he facilitated amidst an uncertainty around its future. During Kean’s tenure, students threatened to burn Papunya paintings being exhibited in Adelaide in 1979, seeing them as a product of the capitalist exploitation of black people by white.34 Shortly afterward in Sydney, however, the Australian art world was impressed by an exhibition of several large Papunya Tula canvases hanging in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Australian Perspecta 1981.35 By the late 1980s, the success of the men of the Papunya movement had established the place of Western Desert painting within the Australian imagination. By this time, however, and when Kean took up a curatorial job at Tandanya in Adelaide, it was no

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longer enough to be exhibiting only the men of Papunya. In 1991, Kean and Kerry Giles invited the women of Papunya to do a ground painting to accompany a Papunya Tula retrospective.36 The ground painting was ingeniously designed to be portable.37 Today it is in the National Museum of Australia collection, and was recently exhibited in 2016 as part of the Streets of Papunya exhibition at the Drill Hall Gallery in Canberra.

The 1990s represent a proliferation of remote art, as in various communities, outstations and towns, people took up painting to make the most of the new opportunities offered by an increasing interest in Aboriginal art. This new diversity of practice meant that the dot-andcircle style of Papunya was no longer the dominant the style of Western Desert painting. The history of the Balgo artists illustrates this new era of enthusiasm and experimentation. Situated just off the Tanami Road that runs between the Central Desert and the Kimberley, Balgo occupies a privileged place in the broader history of the Western Desert art movement. The bright works that Balgo artists were making in the late 1980s and early 1990s troubled the Papunya Tula painters to the south and the Kimberley artists to the north, for different reasons.

While the first Balgo paintings from 1981 resemble Papunya works, using desert ochre colours, and rectilinear in design, by 1985 the artists had adopted the full palette, and were experimenting with all kinds of figurative and iconic motifs. The Papunya artists were shocked by Balgo’s loose expressionism, as they set out to build a “bulwark against the monochromatism of the desert.”38 Up the road in Fitzroy Crossing, however, they had a different view. They had not yet seen the tight dotting and muted, ochre colour tones from Papunya, and instead took the bright canvases from Balgo to be the standard to which they should aspire. They thought that these outrageous paintings were in fact the proper “Aboriginal painting” that as ‘Aboriginal artists’ they would have to emulate.39 So it is that the Karrayili paintings, such as Paji Honeychild’s Palija (1991), are bold in both colour and design.

It is perhaps no coincidence that women were painting in Balgo early on. Curator Judith Ryan thinks that women played a crucial role in the development of Balgo’s style: “Kukatja art is, however, less formal than that of the Pintupi, partly because Kukatja women are also encouraged to paint, unlike their counterparts at Kiwirrkura (connected by road

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Liddy Napanangka Walker, Topsy Napanangka, Judy Nampitjinpa Granites, Wakirlpirri Jukurrpa, 1985, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 124.6 by 123.8 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1986, licensed by Viscopy.

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to the Balgo outstation Yagga Yagga).”40 In the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s 1986 show of Balgo painting, Art from the Great Sandy Desert, around half of the artists were women.41 By 2000, the proportion of women artists at Balgo had increased to two-thirds.42 The diversity of styles and the primary, acrylic colours of Balgo, and of the many other places developing their own art centres, broke definitively with Papunya’s austere and masculine dotting Even the Walpiri artists of Yeundumu, who share ceremony and family with Papunya, turned to “a vivid palette” when they began painting in the mid-1980s.43 The collaboration of Liddy Napangka Walker, Topsy Napangka and Judy Napangka Granites on Wakirlpiri Jukurrpa (Dogwood Dreaming) in 1985 represents a first major painting of bush foods, a genre that would become women’s own across the continent. It is also a dramatic and gendered contrast to the early collaborations by men at Yeundumu, who worked on documenting creation stories. In Wakirlpiri Jukurrpa, women move away from these powerful tjukurrpa and their ancestral, patriarchal power. In choosing bush foods as a painting subject, Walker, Topsy and Granites deconstruct the claims to power that were so much a part of the aesthetic and political message of Papunya style paintings, turning instead to quotidian Dreamings that surround the daily affairs of women.

The beginning of women’s painting at Haasts Bluff, Fitzroy Crossing, Lajamanu, Kintore and Utopia in the 1980s and early 1990s brought with it feminine ways of picturing the world. At Lajamanu, Ryan writes that “kurawarri [ancestral] designs tend to be curvilinear, circular and formed of smaller, separate units in abundant clusters.”44 Such designs, Jennifer Loureide Biddle argues, are “about the intimacy of the Dreaming as a profoundly embodied and lived experience.”45 This new women’s art was both geographically and geopolitically distributed, comprised of differences in style, a range of colours and subjects, constituting feminine images of the desert, and relations to the Country.

Rey compares this women’s art movement to the explosion of global, contemporary art and intersectional feminism, analogising women’s desert art with the multiplicities of the former and the anti-essentialism of the latter.46 The differences of this ‘third wave’ of Aboriginal art are not only feminine, but are also feminist, as they push against the masculine refinement of dot and circle.

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The Expanded Field The intersectionality of remote art is constituted by differences and relations, by women who speak different first languages painting side by side in art centres. James Cowan, an art co-ordinator at Balgo who wrote of the ‘bulwark’ they were building against Papunya’s restricted palette, makes sense of Balgo’s style through such relationships: The very nature of a number of different tribes living together has created tensions which surface in the art. This is not a homogenous society with assumed cultural accreditations that brook no argument … Inevitably, the art absorbs these tensions in a way that only enhances the play of symbols on the individual canvas. In one respect a Balgo painting reflects the social displacement of these peoples, thus intensifying the nostalgia many feel for what is lost: that is, an enduring recollection of what may be called the ‘absent terrain’.47 Painting this “absent terrain” or what Cowan also calls “imaginary distance” becomes a way of returning “to psychic outposts that ensure collective and individual spiritual renewal.”48 Many of the Balgo painters were not living on the Country to which, by conception and ceremony they belonged, but had shifted with the regimes of the Twentieth Century. These artists had witnessed the opening and closure of cattle stations and missions to Aboriginal people, the beginnings of new families and new settlements. Many would not see the Country they had left as children and teenagers in the 1960s until they were very old.

Painting the ‘absent terrain’, artists were able to testify to the place of distant Country in the mind’s eye.

Here the Walmajarri painters of Fitzroy Crossing are exemplary.

Andrews’s brother Boxer Yankkarr testifies that, “There was no kartiya (whiteman) when I was a little boy … I grew up in river country, but I think all the time about the desert.”49 Andrews, who is Walmajarri by descent, paints this Country of their childhood, the ranges of Yilirrji where she camped with her parents and played as a child. Honeychild, like Boxer, paints the Great Sandy Desert, the great claypan Pirntirri and the warla (dry lake) Jarrawarnti. So it is that nostalgia can take different forms.

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Bush Women artist Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara) is also from the Kimberley, and like Andrews paints its hillocks and steep ranges, its ngarriny and gawarre. Her art also comes out of a history of displacement, as she was moved with other Kimberley people off Texas Downs, a cattle station on the Ord River. McKenzie recalls her intimacy with Texas Downs Country: “Every rock, every hill, every water, I know that place backwards and forwards, up and down, inside and out.”50 By the time of Bush Women, she was a community leader living at the Pensioner’s Quarters on the Warmun community. She had revived women’s ceremonies, been central to the growth of an ochre art movement in the East Kimberley, and begun to revisit Texas Downs.51 Such visits were largely not possible for artists until the 1990s and the 2000s, when trips funded by Native Title claim research and the painting movement itself enabled old people to visit the places they had grown up on. Often, they took their children with the hope that they would take on responsibilities for the Country they had left behind.

This movement and return, this deterritorialisation and the reterritorialisation of the Country by subsequent generations, constitutes much of the story of the Western Desert art movement, and some of the reasons why many artists only began to make paintings in old age.

Andrews had mixed feelings about visiting her ancestral Country, where people had been shot: I knew that country in my mind from my brother Boxer [Yankkarr]. When I was travelling I was really sad because my people were living in that country.

They shot one old man there, right in the open. I couldn’t stop thinking about it when I saw that place. They should have shown me that country when I was a young girl, not now I am old with grey hair. The people were too frightened to go there. They were shooting them.52 Returning to Country is inscribed not only into such family histories, but also in Dreaming conceptions of mortality. After death, Western Desert people return to the place from which they came, the place where their spirit came into the world.53 The belonging and longing for Country is what the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls an “involuntary memory”, one that is inscribed into a living body.54 The impetus to return to ngurruru comes from layers of family, history, and the Dreaming.

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from left Daisy Andrews, Lumpu Lumpu, 1994, synthetic polymer paint on paper, 89 by 150 cm, National Gallery, Melbourne. Gift of the Hon. Justice David Angel through the Australian Government’s Gifts Program, 2003 (2003.59). © Daisy Andrews/Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia.

Daisy Andrews, Lumpu Lumpu, 1993, acrylic on paper, 75 by 110 cm. Private Collection.

Photograph Bo Wong.

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It may be that Cowan overdetermines the way in which this ‘involuntary memory’ inspires the various styles of Western Desert painting. He proposes that the degree of an artist’s looseness relates to the distance they paint from their Country. The colourful expressionism of the Balgo artists is born of a Country that lives in the mind rather than in recent experience, while the Papunya Tula artists of the outstations Kintore and Kiwirrkura dot tightly because they are representing the Country to which they are proximate. Cowan puts Yeundumu in this category too.

In spite of their use of bright primary colours, the “close dotting” of the early Yeundumu paintings betrays a proximity to the Country, a fidelity to the lines and shapes of the land itself.55

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Art historians Ian McLean and Nikos Papastergiadis have also tackled questions of exile when they write about the earliest of the Western Desert art movement’s dot paintings, the Papunya boards.

Papastergiadis thinks of the Pintupi at Papunya as far from their Country, in exile, while McLean argues that they were already at home at this Dreaming site, that it was familiar to them, “thus part of the network of ancestral relations that bind Pintupi to Country. For them the desert is an extended homeland.”56 Here McLean and Papastergiadis focus on the ‘New Pintupi’ because it was these recent arrivals who went on to shift back out west to found outstations at Kintore (Walungurru) and Kiwirrkura, where Papunya Tula Artists supported them through the 1980s. Other groups, including the Anmatyerr who played key roles in the beginnings of the art movement, remained at Papunya. It is to these neglected groups that a new body of scholarship on early Papunya painting turns. Vivien Johnson, Luke Scholes and in a later incarnation as an art historian, John Kean, all focus on relationships between the various language groups and personalities in Papunya.57 They emphasise the way that relations between the ‘New Pintupi’, the ‘Old Pintupi’ (or ‘Haasts Bluff Puntupi’), and the Anmatyerr, created the impetus for the Western Desert painting movement.58 In this renewed fascination with the early art history of Papunya, Johnson, Scholes and Kean are drawn to the way that early Anmatyerr men had developed cross-cultural skills in their movement between cattle stations, missions and ration stations. Such relations change the way the Papunya paintings themselves are understood, as the ceremonies and Country to which they relate are constituted by negotiations, movements and local histories. Such relations are in constant flux, subject to renewed negotiations. As Vivien Johnson writes in an early book on Michael Jagamara Nelson, the stories of one of his most famous paintings, Five Stories (1984), changed as he described them to different people over the years.59 Nelson was reasserting his authority over the painting and over the Country, always staying ahead of the game of power that would fix the Dreaming in time and politics.

Such works, then, should be read less as the representation of an artist’s Country as a conceptualisation of Country through a shifting regime of signification. In this, the Papunya revolution was not dissimilar to those that shook New York galleries in the 1960s and 1970s, in

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which conceptual art, minimalism and Pop broke definitively with the oscillation between abstraction and representation that had dominated the discourses of late modernism. Locked into a zone of indiscernibility, somewhere between Country and the minds of its artists, Dreaming remains within these works, but is also obscure, just as conceptual artists in New York were tracing new modes of seeing with works of art made of gas and typed on pieces of paper. So it is possible to say, as Alexander Alberro says of the conceptual art movement, that the Papunya movement was as much about the discourse around the work as the work itself.60 Representing the Dreaming was a complex act, a problem that can only partly be resolved by painterly visualisation.61 When women, such as Pansy Ngapangati, became a part of the Papunya Tula painting movement during the 1980s, they generally emulated its masculine formalism. In the 1990s, however, the ageing Inyuwa Nampitjinpa, Makinti Napanangka, Tatali Nangala and Naata Nungurrayi demanded big canvases, and came to loosen and join the tight dotting that had been the province of the men for so long.62 They were inspired by the art centres not only at Balgo but also at Haasts Bluff, where in 1993 Kintore women sang a new painting studio open, Ikuntji Women’s Centre, that from its beginnings would host both women and men.63 Later, and to the west in Kiwirrkura, the women of Papunya Tula did not so much break with Pintupi formalism as push it to richer heights of abstraction. Here this innovation may have been inspired by Balgo’s radicalism, but had also experimented with painting off-Country after Kiwirrkura was flooded in 2001. When its population was exiled to Morapoi Station to the south, the women painted their canvases with bright, primary colours, and after this they went on to become leading proponents of a new Pintupi formalism. Doreen Reid Nakamarra and Yakultji Ward Napangati appear to have done their first solo paintings at Morapoi; Reid painted a story of gathering bush foods on her mother’s Country with wavy parallel lines.64 It was only after the death of their husbands, however, that Reid and Ward began painting frequently for Papunya Tula, becoming the “Kiriwrrkura Women,” who combined tight dotting with a shimmer that is soft on the eye.65 Rather than being iconographic, these works are aesthetic and diffuse. So it was that by the 2000s, even Papunya Tula’s high formalism had been feminised, its women turning the powerful, rectilinear compositions of the 1980s into a hazy op-art that appears like sand shimmering in moonlight.

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Doreen Reid Nakamarra, detail from Women’s Dreaming at Marrapinti, 2006. In the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.

Courtesy of Papunya Tula Artists.

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The rise of women not only unsettled the dominance of the dot-andcircle style, but forced the dialogue around Western Desert painting away from the patriarchy of the secret-sacred, creating instead a poetics of relation.66 These relations are between individuals, communities, outstations and towns, relations that were born in the desert and continue through the painting of Dreamings and sites. In North America, this shift had taken place decades before, when high modernism gave way to the experiments of the 1960s. This is what Rosalind Krauss called ‘the expanded field’ within which older, modern categories such as painting and sculpture are suspended.67 The proliferation of paintings in the 1990s also suspended the dotting by which the Western Desert had come to be visualised. Yet it is also impossible to think of Western Desert painting without dotting, just as it was impossible for Krauss to forget sculpture and painting in her essay on what came after. It is only in relation to dotting that this expanded field of painting remains part of the Western Desert’s art history, and after Papunya that an expanded geography and history of the Western Desert can take shape.

The Western Desert Diaspora In the First Diasporist Manifesto (1989), R.B. Kitaj writes: Diasporise painting is unfolding commentary on its life-source, the contemplation of a transience, a Midrash [exposition, exegesis of nonliteral meaning] in paint and somehow, collected, these paintings, these circumstantial allusions, form themselves into secular Responsa or reactions to one’s transient restlessness, un-at-homeness, groundlessness.68 Groundlessness rather than ground is the subject of diasporic painting, whose subject is the absence of the ground to which it also alludes. In the Western Desert, artists make allegories of the experience of exile, belonging and psychic return; in a restless negotiation; with being in-between; as they live on communities and in towns. They play out the tension of being away from places of significance while also belonging to them.

There is no better illustration of how the Western Desert diaspora has taken shape than the history of the Walmajarri artists of the Great Sandy Desert, who now reside in and around the river Country of Fitzroy Crossing in the north-west. Fitzroy Crossing was a refugee centre for five major language groups: the Gooniyandi, Nyigina, Walmajarri, and

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Wangkajunga, as well as for the Bunumba, whose Country hosted the town. It welcomed waves of people who were evicted from the Molla Bulla reserve in the mid-1950s, and again after the late 1960s as cattle stations were emptied of their workers. People came to the Crossing because a native welfare depot had been established there, as well as the United Aborigines Mission with their evangelism and schooling programs. People who arrived were directed by the local Bunumba people to camp in the direction of their own Country. This was not uncommon in the new settlements of the diaspora. At Papunya, people arranged themselves in the direction of their countries. At Balgo, people moved to top and bottom camps according to the Country from which they had come. In Fitzroy Crossing, these camps became incorporated communities during the 1970s: The Go Go mob became Bayulu Community. The Christmas Creek mob became Wangkatjunka Community. The disparate residents of the old Mission camp transformed into the Junjuwa Community. The Noonkanbah mob down at Loanbung incorporated as Kadjina Community, which in turn spawned the Yungngora Community. And Fig Tree Camp became Kurnangki Community. The Cherrabun mob had fractured somewhat, with people from that station finishing up at Kadjina, Junuwa and Kurnangki, but a core group stayed together and became Djugerari Community.69 The Walmajarri, now settled to the south and south-east, were some of the last groups to arrive from life in the Western Desert, and stretched its cultural borders to the fertile plains of Bunumba Country. Here ritual leaders, who had often spent time mingling with different groups on cattle stations across the Kimberley, expanded their mythic visions by coming together for ceremony. The tjukurrpa stories born of dry sandhills and soaks mingled with ngarranggarni stories of rocky rises and rivers.

The Walmajarri and Wangkajunga brought their powerful rainmaking skills from the desert, helping the Gooniyadi at Kunpurrngu, a site not far from the Crossing.70 Over time, through cultural exchange, intermarriage and cross-cultural negotiations in the dry riverbeds and camps of the Kimberley summers, local and once distant families became integrated into a new cultural milieu. The Walmajarri made

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Fresh Water in the Kimberley, 1980. Photograph Kim Akerman.

new sacred objects for ceremonies in the region, while also moving older ceremonial objects up from their hiding places in the south to re-authenticate desert rituals.71 And through contact with the desert people, the Bunuba people of the river Country experienced their own renaissance of culture, one that took place across the settlements of the 1970s after lives largely spent on cattle stations and missions. It was amidst this cultural resurgence that the Walmajarri started Karriyili, the education hub that would in turn emerge as a painting movement in Fitzroy.

At Jigalong, where Martu people had moved from their desert heartlands, a revival of ceremonies took place in the 1960s. While the children were

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Kungkayunti Windmill, 2017.

Photograph John Kean.

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at school, and with food provided by the Mission, the elders conducted ceremonies.72 Amidst the displacement of families, seniors turned to traditions and laws that pre-dated the arrival of whitefellas, rather than turning to the new ideas introduced by missionaries, station owners and government agents.73 The Country, once driven by an intimate memory of its waters, was reterritorialised by this psychic, ritual movement.

Elsewhere, new ceremonial relationships were not so easily made. At Balgo, the Walmajarri distrusted the Kukutja, moving up the Tanami Road to set up their own Walmajarri community of Billiluna.74 As a Walmajarri hub, Billiluna became a crucial trading centre during the cultural renaissance of the 1970s, a renaissance empowered by the vehicles and money that came with newly-awarded citizenry. In Billiluna, rain-making pearl shells from the coast were exchanged with hardwood shields, djara, that bore designs similar to those which decorated the shells.75 The Kukutja outstation of Yagga Yagga, close to sweet potato fields and waterholes, was also occupied as a part of this movement away from Balgo. After a bore was sunk there by an exploratory mining company, and a road built, Yagga Yagga enabled many of Balgo’s best artists to move closer to their countries, and to work in a smaller community. So many artists lived there that they campaigned to have the new Balgo Art Centre built at Yagga Yagga, rather than at Balgo.76 So it was that the diaspora populated the Australian landscape with people whose relations with the Country were always in flux, and determined by their relationship with each other.77 The population of larger settlements dwindled; Balgo dropped to around 300 people, from a thousand at its peak.78 From Jigalong, the Martu returned to set up Punmu and Parnngurr on the southern border of the Great Sandy Desert, while to the south, the Pintupi moved out to Papunya, to Waruwiya and Kungkayunti, then to Kintore (Walungurru) and Kiwirrkura.79 To the west, the Yulparitja were taken to La Grange Mission. They joined hundreds of people speaking other languages: the two dialects of Yangumarta (northern and southern); Nyangumarta, used by those who moved from Anna Plains Station; as well as Mangala, Juwaliny and Karajarri. These groups largely came from the south, following the telegraph line from Marble Bar. The Yulparitja came instead from the west, after the waters of the Great Sandy Desert began to dry up. Sorcery

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was suspected, and the Yulparitja and Martu at Jigalong began to sing vengeance on each other.80 It may have been that this water table was emptied by mining activity further south, as groundwater was drained to make exploration and extraction easier. It may also have been that these waterholes dried out since the desert itself was being emptied of people, the Country left in want of its songs of rain and rejuvenation.81 The Yulparitja lived just south of the Walmajarri, but once settled would not see their Country for twenty-seven years until they returned as a part of research into Native Title in the mid-1990s.82 As part of this process of thinking about the place from which they came, and to introduce their children to this ancestral Country, the Yulparitja also began to paint. Being so far from their Country, they set out to negotiate with the local Karajarri about what they should and shouldn’t do. The Karajarri said it would be okay for the Yulparitja to paint the local Country, however they decided to paint their own ancestral land, while using saltwater colours as a homage to the Country where they lived.83 It is easy to recognise Bidyadanga painting for its use of blues, reds, whites and greens. These paintings express both the syncretism and the tension that is at work within a diasporic situation. The early works of two of the older masters of the Bidyadanga art movement, Alma Webou and Jan Billycan, testify to the psychic return of these artists.

Designs appearing out of an undefined space, from out of memory, lie on an unpainted ground. After these early works, and after 2005, the tendency is instead to fill the compositional space, doing all-over dotted and brushed, luminescent images of their Country. While in their earlier works the jila sit isolated from each other, later they stretch and become the Country all around. It is as if the practice of painting was making the jila more visible, and strengthening their place in the mind’s eye.

In this sense, the Western Desert diaspora is not so different to the global diasporas theorised in the 1990s that were defined not by ethnicity or religion, but by social conditions and processes. As Floya Anthias describes it: This condition is put into play through the experience of being from one place and of another, and it is identified with the idea of a particular sentiments towards the homeland, whilst being formed by those of the place of settlement.

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above Tjapartji Kanytjuri Bates, Tjukurrpa Kungkarrangkalpa Kunangurra, 1994, acrylic polymer on 15–18 oz canvas, 94.5 by 129 cm.

Courtesy the Warburton Arts Project. previous page Alma Webou, Pinkalarta, acrylic on linen, 150 by 100. In the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. Courtesy Short Street Gallery.

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This place is one where one is constructed in and through difference, and yet is one that produces differential forms of cultural accommodation or syncretism: in some versions hybridity.84 So too does diaspora describe the processes, including painting, undertaken by Kukatja, Yulparitja, Martu, Pintupi, Wangkajunga and other people to reach accomodation with others in places like Fitzroy Crossing, Papunya, Balgo and Bidyadanga. Yet the Western Desert diaspora has a longer history than this. For the Western Desert has always been a space of mobility and cultural negotiation, a place in which relations of family and Dreaming play themselves out in relation to others.

As the anthropologist Fred Myers argues, these relations are hierarchic, as Dreaming is learned, and takes new shapes after people moved into communities and towns.85 These new relations take shape relative to a deep time in which borders, boundaries, identities and territories were under negotiation in networks of kin, Country and ceremony.

Symptoms of the complexity of the Western Desert included the contradictions that anthropologists ran into when attempting to map its peoples. Wangkajunga Country is sometimes mapped to the south of the Walmajarri, and sometimes lies within Walmajarri terrain.

It sometimes overlaps with the Country of the Kukatja and Yulparitji, and the anthropologist Erich Kolig refers to the Yulparitji as the southern form of Walmajarri.86 Such complexities speak of the ways in which processes of identification took place as the Twentieth Century shaped the settlements of people away from the desert, as people sought to differentiate and associate themselves with each other, as well as explain themselves to whitefellas. Kean explains that “the problems with mapping arise as the names of the language groups were derived from surrounding groups, who may refer to them ‘as the ones who always say ‘kuka’ [for meat], or ‘the ones who say ‘Ngaatja’ [for this] or ‘pitja’ [for come] those who are located in the centre may just call themselves ‘Yanangu’ [people] or ‘Wilkinkarrangurrara’ [‘of the place’ ‘Wilkinkarra/ Lake Mackay’].”87 Norman Tindale’s colourful and much-reproduced map of Aboriginal Australia implies that there are boundaries between people, groups that occupy “discrete territory with finite limits beyond which members have

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a sense of trespass.”88 Certainly there are powerful and determining notions of land tenure, trespass and inheritance in remote Australian societies, but these do not imply the existence of discrete societies such as tribes. Such structures, if they can be said to exist at all, only came into being upon the colonisation of Australia, as the first people of the continent were required to identify themselves in relation to outsiders, a process most recently cemented in an era of Native Title claims. If anything, the hierarchical political system that constituted the desert resembles a vast modern nation, whose local dialects and ceremonies echo each other as much as mark out their differences. As a set of relations, the Western Desert bloc’s history is constituted by inter-relationships and exchange, as well as conflict and its resolution.

These relations were founded well before the arrival of missionaries and pastoralists. The scarcity and spread of food and water meant that having amicable, if not intimate, and reciprocal relations with neighbours was essential. Although finding food and excavating water in the deep desert could take half a day or less, the seasons could shift dramatically, and droughts set in.89 In such times groups depended upon each another for survival. The area over which small groups roamed was often shared, creating a systemic diaspora, one in which exile and mobility were part of a system of expectation and reciprocity. This was not only an economic system, but a social one, as people often came together after seeing the smoke from each other’s hunting fires at a distance.90 There are many ways in which the Western Desert diaspora is exceptional, rather than typical of global diasporas and the theories that tie them together. Such theories tend to think of its members as expatriates, living outside the nation state to which they belong. William Safran, for example, defines diaspora through processes of dispersion, shared memories, a belief that they are not entirely accepted by their homelands, and a wish to return home.91 Yet Western Desert people do not live outside the nation state to which they both belong and do not belong. They are both at home and not at home in the nation that has superseded the first nations from which they come. These second nations will never cede their own sovereignty to the first nations that they have displaced, leaving them to occupy a terrain that is not their own, a Country that becomes an ‘absent terrain’, an ‘imaginary distance’.

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The sovereignty of second nations like Australia depend on the disaporic condition of first nations, while ironically celebrating the impossible return of these nations in painting.

As the long Jewish experience of exile, and the African experience of slavery served to turn religious and racial commonalities into political causes, so the exile of Western Desert people has turned into a movement to reclaim the Country. This is not the same kind of return celebrated by Jewish and African diasporas, however. For globally diasporic populations orient themselves to a centre, but the desert was a dispersed environment to begin with, tied to multiple sites and Dreamings, to a complexity and hierarchy of obligation. They are defined, as scholar James Clifford writes, by “networks of community, collective practices of displaced dwelling,� combining the experience of exile with that of diaspora.92

Exile It is worth turning to two histories of the Great Sandy Desert, where two stories illuminate aspects of exile, Walmajarri dramas that come with moving to and from their homelands. The first is the autobiography of Ngarta Jinny Bent, a Walmajarri artist who lives and paints in Fitzroy Crossing.93 Her work is lively and colourful, showing the places she travelled before coming into the pastoral belt. She moved with her family between jila, as seasons, cultural life and necessity demanded. These travellers were some of the last to live in the desert. They knew many relatives who had gone north to live among the kartia (whitefellas), or/ and who had established sheep and cattle stations in the Kimberley.

Ngarta’s father decided to leave too, but she remained at the waterhole Japingka with her mother (this is the same waterhole Bush Women artist Andrews remembers so well). Her father never came back, and the mother and daughter were left with just eight remaining Walmajarri people in the desert; seven women and a boy.

It was a dangerous time in Country that had been emptied of family.

They had been warned about two brothers, Manjiljarra speakers from the east, who were travelling about killing people, including a relative of Ngarta. Other relatives traveling from the stations to the north and back again brought flour and blankets to the remaining Walmajarri, warning

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them of the killers. After a couple of years living in what was now an empty Country, plentiful with food, some of the group met one of the brothers, who speared Ngarta’s mother. She healed, but not long after, Ngarta’s grandmother was speared and killed. After this, the brothers took over the family, and they travelled together. Ngarta finally decided to flee after they killed her brother, who was getting older and becoming a possible threat. She tried to convince her mother to come with her but could not, and later heard that she had been killed. Ngarta spent a year living alone between jila before the brothers tracked and eventually found her. She told them she had seen bullock tracks, and convinced them to travel north to the stations, likely saving her own life.

The group were observed by someone from Christmas Creek Station, who organised a group of station people and police to track and surround them, put them in cars and bring them into the homestead.

The travellers did not know enough English to tell the kartia that the brothers were murderers, but later, it seems, one of them died “blackfella way” after a windmill rod crashed onto the back of his head.94 The other brother, Yawa, who had killed Ngarta’s grandmother, disappeared soon after. In 1982, his footprints were recognised by a group of people on a field trip with anthropologist Kim Akerman.95 They tracked them, and those of a dog, back to a camp in a cave and a tree that he had used to make a container to carry emu eggs. Yawa had been living without contact with other people for twelve or fourteen years, and the group decided to leave him be. Through Ngarta’s history it is possible to conceive of the very different experiences of women and men as the order of desert life broke down. As men sought to re-establish power relations amidst the chaos of colonisation, women coped as best they could.

A second history is from later in the twentieth century, after the desert had been long empty of people. Canadian anthropologist Daniel Vachon visited jila in the Great Sandy Desert with ageing desert men during the 1990s. Jila Country is defined by the presence of Kalpurtu, snakes called wanambi who inhabit these living waters of the sandhills. Such jila are permanent waters, and should be distinguished from wirrkuja that are impermanent rainwater pools caught by depressions in rock.96 On one of these journeys, Vachon watched elders digging out the sand from the jila

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Soak in the Great Sandy Desert, June 198. Photograph Kim Akerman.

Kurtal. Beneath the sand, there were series of rocky ledges from which water bubbled. One of these, Vachon’s informants told him, was a ‘window’ or an ‘eye’ of a dangerous snake living there, a mil or japi.97 This is the snake that the men had attempted to appease by speaking to it on the way there, while burning the Country around as they approached.

It is only through the largesse of the snake that water is available at Kurtal, and after doing a rainmaking ceremony, the group were soon driving with storm clouds chasing them across the sky. So it is that the water of the jila is also the rain, and digging it out the right way will call upon water from above.98 Although such events appear supernatural, Vachon argues that the jila are mortal. On the Canning Stock Route, snakes died, such as the

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snake at Kulyayi, Well 42, that was killed by a well-sinking crew that used gelignite at the site.99 Wangkajunka artist Lloyd Kwilla testifies to the effect of the death of Kulyayi when he says that, “People feel empty when Kulyayi was gone. They moved away. Animals moved away. People, animals, they’re connected. Killing the snake made everything out of balance.”100 The snake’s death is symptomatic of the emptying of the desert at this time. These jila are not only crucial for bringing water to the desert, but for the way in which they reproduce human relationships.

Their existence depends on, “certain conditions, relationships and phenomena, as a matter that needed their attention.”101 So it is that jila encompasses not only waterholes and snakes, but a series of meanings of ceremonies, of relations between human and inhuman. Digging out

from left Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara), Barramundi, 1990, ochre and bush gum on board, 45 by 55.3 cm, Edith Cowan University Art Collection.

Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara), Hunters in Landscape, 1990, ochre and bush gum on board, 45.5 by 60.8 cm, Edith Cowan University Art Collection.

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water from beneath the surface of the desert should be undertaken with certain people alongside, who have sung the place and pacified it before, and only at certain times of the year.102 A jila is a set of relations as much as an ancestral power, an intensity of circumstances that are as natural as supernatural.

It has been a truism of the interpretation of Western Desert art that it is about Country, that it expresses a feeling for Country and that it constitutes a claim to it. This is not, however, an organic relationship.

The concept of nature was never developed by classical or colonial Aboriginal societies, and the attachment to Country at a distance invokes a relations of “consensus, exclusion, alliance, and antagonism that are inherent in the transformative life of all societies.”103 Clifford describes an “articulated indigeneity” that expresses the differences both political and stylistic between Bidyadanga’s colours, Fitzroy Crossing’s expressiveness, Papunya Tula’s austerity and Balgo’s outrageousness.

Through such differences it is possible to glimpse the histories of the diaspora, the way that different experiences of exile produce different styles of art. In configuring a tension between the content and the form of the work, between sites and their expression, Country and history, it is possible to think with Clifford of an “articulated ensemble.”104 These paintings are a coalition of historical ideas that come about at a particular time, a way of differentiating the artists from each other and from the overarching colonial situation that has determined their lives.

Such works become a way of expressing “relational sovereignty.”105 They convey the multi-naturalism of the Western Desert, in which relations between people determine nature, rather than nature determining the way in which people paint.106 Bush Women artist Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara) is typical in this respect. As a leader of the Warmun community, raising vegetables and keeping goats amidst the diaspora gathered at Turkey Creek, she was well placed to document the times. Her works name specific times and places, as if McKenzie is archiving the history of Country, recalling events both contemporary and in the deep past, from the times of communities, pastoral stations, and the Dreaming. To achieve this, curator and former arts advisor in the Kimberley Eric Kjellgren observes that McKenzie uses two techniques: compression and simultaneity.107

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Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara), ochres used for making paint, installation view, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1994. Photograph John Kean.

The first pertains to space and the second to time. Compression of the landscape works to make significant features proximate to each other, while simultaneity puts events from the Dreaming alongside more recent history. Here McKenzie relies on an iconographic style in which hills, rivers and human figures sit alongside each other in overlapping stories.

This is a very different strategy to that of her friend Rover Thomas, who relied instead on expansion rather than compression, his compositions of great expanses of ochre-coloured Country creating a centrifugal gaze.

In this, McKenzie resembles more the style of Paddy Jimanji (or Jaminji), who began the Turkey Creek painting movement with ceremonial boards that were inspired by Thomas’s visions. McKenzie’s work can be distinguished from Jaminji and Thomas, however, by breaking with their

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deep ochre colours. In 1987 she mixed an entirely new colour, produced with red ochre and white kaolin (clay), that marked out her practice from theirs. So it is that in this history of contemporary painting at Turkey Creek, McKenzie innovates to produce her own difference, to mark out her work with compression and pink ochres, overlaying history with memory, geography with Dreamings.

Exhibitions The women of the 1994 Bush Women exhibition were part of a growing market and institutional profile for Western Desert art. By the late 1990s, the most successful women artists from remote Australia were valued more than their most successful male peers.108 The Bush Women artists were among the leaders of the movement that feminised Aboriginal art. Pantjiti, for example, was made the ‘commissioned artist’ for the Festival of Perth in 1996, something that would have been unthinkable just a decade before. This period in which remote women became stars of Australian art lasted until 2007, when sales in the art market generally dropped by around half, after the effects of the Global Financial Crisis and changes to regulations around superannuation investments.109 2007 also marked the beginning of a government ‘Intervention’ into remote communities, which subjected them to financial and political stresses.

Artists have kept working since these disruptions, albeit in new ways.

They have been increasingly focused on archival and commissioned projects, on exhibitions of multi-media rather than individual paintings, and on collaborative processes of art and exhibition making.

The first of these post-2007, Intervention-era exhibitions was the Yirarra Kuju exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in 2010, which reimagined the kartia history of the Canning Stock Route from the perspective of Western Desert people. What was new about this show was its deliberate method, as artists and curators worked their way up the waterholes along the route, archiving each site with artworks and documentation that complemented Alfred Canning’s own records.

Fremantle Art Centre’s own We don’t need a map: a Martu experience of the Western Desert (2012–2013) is a second iteration of collaborative exhibition practice, making an immersive spectacle of burning practices in the desert, with videos and paintings surveying the movement of Martu people across Country. We don’t need a map offered a different

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model for the exhibition of Western Desert art, not only by presenting immersive digital installations rather than simply paintings, but also by fostering collaborations between Martu and non-Martu artists. These collaborations revealed what was implicit in the Western Desert painting already, that remote artists were experienced cross-cultural negotiators and facilitators. Speaking as part of the public program, anthropologist Robert Tonkinson told of his experience meeting Martu people in the 1960s, of seeing 70 or 80 performances over a three-week period at Jigalong. From his time there, Tonkinson published his study The Jigalong Mob: Aboriginal Victors of the Desert Crusade (1974), arguing that settlement had created conditions by which culture thrived.110 Time was available for culture and religion, and for the ceremonial life of the Dreaming.

Far from being conquered by the displacements of the Twentieth Century, the Martu, like many other desert people, became ‘victors’.

We don’t need a map carries on this history of Martu cultural production, in relation to settler society. Yet its ‘collaborative’ focus was also misleading. For while the artists, Martu and non-Martu, were credited side-by-side on their video installations, the Martu were the leading partners in each of the collaborative works, turning their collaborators into technicians of the Dreaming. After making an animation with Yunkurra Billy Atkins, Sohan Ariel Hayes reports that the Martu elder never missed a beat while directing the team of curator Coates, anthropologist John Carty and Hayes himself.111 They attempted to record the story he was singing, entranced but unable to fathom the logic of the cannibals who live underneath Kumpupirntily (Lake Disappointment). So it is that Atkins’s shift from a career as a painter to animator is one in which he goes from one media to another, albeit now with a team of assistants.112 The great time of the Martu, of the cannibal beings, collides here with the time of contemporaneity.

State-run galleries have typically been slower in picking up on the post2007 shift in remote art. When the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney put together their exhibition Martu Art from the Far Western Desert in 2014, they did not want to include the Fremantle collaborations.

Instead they hung a group of big collaborative paintings from the same Martu women, including a canvas that was created as part of the legacy of We don’t need a map. Preferring Yarrkalpa (Hunting Ground) (2013)

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from top John Kean and Pantjiti Mary McLean in front of Pantjiti’s Perth Festival taxi, 1996.

Photograph Nalda Searles.

Erin Coates, John Carty, Yunkurra Billy Atkins and Sohan Ariel Hayes at Fremantle Arts Centre during the production of Cannibal Story, 2012. Photograph Bo Wong.

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to its collaborative context, they chose not to install the video walls that showed its production amidst non-Aboriginal actors, with a soundtrack by the singer Anohni who was invited into the studio at the time.113 Just a few days after the Museum of Contemporary Art Martu show closed, We don’t need a map opened at The Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, not far from Sydney. Like FAC, the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre is run by a local council, and is tied to its community. As is so often the case, smaller organisations, operating with fewer resources, generate significant new trends.

Yirarra Kuju and We don’t need a map were models for curator Margo Neale when working more recently on the Songlines: Tracking the Seven

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Sisters exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in 2017. She saw these shows as “journey exhibition[s],” describing a movement to and from Country, the ways in which Dreamings are immersed in complex overlays of community and history.114 In Songlines, these overlays came to the fore in debates over the nature of ‘songlines’ themselves: whether such tracks are whole or fragmented; their role in navigating the desert; and whether the Sisters becoming the Pleiades star cluster is but a recent overlay to the tale. For while it is tempting to see the songlines, Dreaming tracks that cross the Country, as lines of story that lie immanent within the Country, yet they are also constantly being contested, negotiated between desert people. The journey of the visitor to the Songlines exhibition concluded with a corridor of paintings by Bush Women artist Tjapartji Kanytjuri Bates, Kungkarrangkalpa at Kunangurra (1994) that was also exhibited in Bush Women in 1994. Her expansive, spatialised canvas maps out an episode of the story of the Sisters as they again escape Yurla their pursuer. The story is one of constant movement through the landscape, and to tell it, the Songlines exhibition moves between artists, who in turn move between sites, explaining as they go. Since the 1930s, when the Warburton Mission was established in Kanytjuri’s Ngaanyatjarra Country, people have been moving back and forth to sites like Kunangurra. While the supply of food attracted people to the Mission, there was never enough food to keep the Ngaanyatjarra population fed over the summer months. People kept moving to sites of plenty, back and forth from Warburton into the adjacent Country, until new settlements were established across the Gibson Desert. The Ngaanyatjarra people subsequently turned their summer camps into permanent settlements, their Dreaming places into permanent homes.115 The Country was never left without song, and even into her old age, Kanytjuri lived close to the path of the Seven Sisters in Wanarn. Here the wind still brings trepidation to the ladies living in Wanarn Aged Care, as they listen to the breath of the Dreaming in the Country around them.

The recent history of the Western Desert, with its movement to and from various parts of the Country, has transformed the meaning of the ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Indigenous’. Clifford’s descriptions of ‘becoming Indigenous’, involving a combination of relations to Country that are both ‘displaced’ and ‘sustained’, combine the experience of dispossession and re-attachment. Here Clifford is writing of people

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living in big Western cities like Los Angeles, but could equally be describing the lived experience of people in remote Australia. For remote Australians also live in urban environments, in communities, outstations and towns, returning to their countries from these urban centres only occasionally. The combination of movement, dislocation and homeliness means that becoming Indigenous and being diasporic are not exclusive of each other.116 So it is that people painting in Balgo today identify with Balgo as much as with their ancestral countries.117 In the 1994 Bush Women exhibition such identities and non-identities, tied to settlements and Country, communities and deserts, became visible. In returning to Bush Women in 2018, it is also possible to see the way in which these identities are being constituted once more by relations beyond the Western Desert. This diaspora comes into relation with other diasporas, other histories. The exceptional lives of the bush women are also unexceptional, part of a global history of displacement.

The restaging of Bush Women in 2018 reminds us that alienation is expressed in different forms by artists living at different times. The artists of Bush Women went in one lifetime from growing up in the bush to surviving a frontier of white settlement, and then witnessed the dawn of an era of digital technology. Such was the high drama of the Twentieth Century, in which brutality coincided with intimacy amidst the mass movement of people around the world as migrants, refugees and exiles, and the founding and fall of nations. Bush Women brought a fragment of this experience into the art gallery, showing the tumult of Australia’s history, the intensity and exceptionality of its artist’s lives. Amidst a diaspora of pastoral stations, towns and communities, the women of remote Australia gave rise to an expanded field of art, one whose visions arose from one of the frontiers of the Twentieth Century, frontiers of personal experience as much as history.

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above Tjapartji Kanytjuri Bates, Kungkarrangkalpa at Ngurrutjarra, 1993, acrylic polymer on 15–18 oz canvas, 182.5 by 187.5 cm. Courtesy the Warburton Arts Project.

previous spread Lynette Wallworth, Still Walking Country: Nga-laju nyurri parra yarnkuni – we are here, still walking around, 2012, three-channel video installation with sound, installed in the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, 2014–2015. Photograph Ben Pearce.

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Notes

1

John Kean, Bush Women: Fresh Art from Remote WA, exhibition catalogue, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre, 1994, n.p.

2

Ian McLean, “How Aborigines invented the idea of contemporary art,” in How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art: Writings on Aboriginal Art, ed. Ian A. McLean, IMA and Power Publications, Brisbane and Sydney, 2011, pp. 333–342.

8

Long Jack Phillipus cited in Luke Scholes, “Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra,” in Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, ed. Judith Ryan and Philip Batty, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2011, pp. 92–104 at 96.

3

See Fred Myers, “Doublings,” in Everywhen: the eternal present in Indigenous art from Australia, in ed. Stephen Gilchrist, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, 2016, pp. 52–60; and John Kean, THE ART OF THE DOT, CIRCLE AND SIGN [WITHIN THE SQUARE]. How Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Johnny Warangula Tjupurrula invented contemporary desert art. PhD thesis, forthcoming.

9

These banners can be seen as a precedent for the Ngurrara Canvas 1 & 2, 1996, produced for the subsequent land claim for lands along the Canning Stock Route.

4

5

Lewis travelled with several of the men with whom I worked, including artists, Bill Stockman Tjapaltjarri, Long Jack Philipus Tjakamarra, Uta Uta Tjangala, Freddy West Tjakamarra, Anatjarri Tjampitjinpa and Nosepeg Tjupurrula.

David Lewis, “Observations on Route Finding and Spatial Orientation among the Aboriginal Peoples of the Western Desert Region of Central Australia,” Oceania 46.4 (June 1976): 249–82 at 262.

6

Ibid.

7

John Kean, “As soon as the cement dried,” in Karromarranendi: Tandanya’s 10th Anniversary

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Exhibition, ed. Rosie Potter, exhibition catalogue, Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, Adelaide, 2000, pp. 3–7.

10 Gary Proctor et al., Yarnangu Ngarnya: Our Land — Our Body, exhibition catalogue, PICA Press, Perth, 1993.

11 Nalda Searles, Pantjiti Mary McLean. A Big Story: Paintings and drawings, 1992–2005, Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, Adelaide, 2005, pp. 40–41.

12 Ute Eickelkamp, “don’t ask for stories…” The Women from Ernabella and their Art, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1999, p. 23–24.

13 Customarily, conception is regarded as the moment a mother feels a child quicken inside her.

14 The name of the old man changes according to location, while his ardent desire is consistent. An exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters was presented by the National Museum of Australia 15.09.2018 – 28. 02.2018. Songlines featured several paintings by Tjapartji Kantjuri Bates.

15 There is a widespread belief in Western Desert cosmology that individuals are reincarnated from the totemic heroes associated with the site where they were ‘conceived’.

16 W.E.H. Stanner, White man got no dreaming.

Essays 1938–1973, Australian National University, Canberra, 1979, p. 24. More recently the curator Stephen Gilchrist used Stanner’s term for the title of an exhibition Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia presented at the Special Exhibitions Gallery, Harvard Art Museums, 05.02 – 18.09, 2016.

17 John Kean, unpublished report to Melbourne Arts Centre, 1984.

18 My understanding of the notions of ‘residence’ in Western Desert culture has been informed by Fred Myers, “Emplacement and Displacement: Perceiving the landscape Through Aboriginal Australian Acrylic Painting,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 78.4 (2013): 435–463.

19

See for instance John Carty, Creating Country: Abstraction, Economics and the Social Life of Style in Balgo art, PhD Thesis, The Australian National University, 2012. Or Henry F. Skerritt ed., No boundaries: Aboriginal Australian contemporary abstract painting from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, DelMonico Books, Munich, 2014.

20 Kim Akerman and Wallu Caruana, “The Rainbow Serpent in the Kimberley (Western Australia) and the emergence of the modern painting movement,” in Territoire du rêve: Art Aborigène Contemporain/Country of the Dreaming: Contemporary Aboriginal Art, ed. Georges Petijean, Arteos, Paris, 2017.

21 Kean, Bush Women, n.p.

22 Roger Benjamin, “The Fetish for Papunya Boards” in Icons of the desert: Early Aboriginal paintings from Papunya, ed. Roger Benjamin and Andrew Weislogel, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2009, pp. 21–49 at 21.

23 Mary McLean, “My Story” in this volume.

24 Paji Honeychild Yankkarr, “Japirnka” in Ngurrara: The Great Sandy Desert Canvas, exhibition catalogue, South Australian Museum, Adelaide, 2008, n.p..

Notes

25 Maree Gaffney, “The Bayulu Story” in Karrayili: Adult Education in a Remote Australian Community, ed. Sue McGinty, Tarungka Irene Jimbidie and Pangkaylala Gail Smiler, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2000, pp 33–37 at 35.

26 See Joyce Hudson in Joyce Hudson, Geoff Rogerson and Sue McGinty, “When are you going to teach us about money?” in Karrayili, pp. 6–10 at 6.

27 On education programs at Papunya, see Jack Frawley, “Genesis and genius (and gymnastics): Another ‘new truth’ of the Papunya art movement,” Ngoonjook: A Journal of Australian Indigenous issues 24 (December 2003): 39–46 at 44.

28 Edwina Circuitt, quoted in Una Rey, “Women in the cross–cultural studio” in Invisible Tracks, ed. Jacqueline Millner and Catriona Moore, Routledge, London, 2018, pp. 38–56 at 50.

29 Henry F. Skerritt, “Marking the Infinite” in Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists from Aboriginal Australia from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection, exhibition catalogue, edited by Henry F. Skerritt, Nevada Museum of Art and DelMinicoBooks, Prestel, Reno, 2016, pp. 9–17.

30 The term ‘third wave’ is taken from an interview with Karen Dayman, in which she quotes Margie West on “third wave Aboriginal art coming out of the desert in the 1990s, that is, women’s painting.”

See Una Rey, “Women in the cross–cultural studio,” p. 46.

31 On this success, see Ian McLean, “Cargo Cult: The Art World craze for Aboriginal Art” in Conversations, Insights and Anecdotes: Proceedings of the Inaugural Cairns Art Fair, Arts Queensland, Brisbane, 2009, pp. 47–55.

32 This was the 5th Festival of Pacific Arts in Townsville in 1988, and the exhibition was held at Araluen Arts Centre.

33 Amanda Dent quoted in Una Rey, “Women in the cross–cultural studio,” p. 49.

34 M. Ruth Megaw, “Squaring the circle: Papunya Tula Artists and Flinders University” in Twenty– Five years and beyond: Papunya Tula painting, exhibition catalogue, Flinders Art Museum, Adelaide, 1999, pp. 6–9 at 6.

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35 See Jim Berryman, “Exhibiting Western Desert Aboriginal painting in Australia’s public galleries: an institutional analysis, 1981–2002,” Journal of Art Historiography 7 (December 2012): 1–19 at 9–10.

36 Papunya Women’s Ground Painting, Tandanya: National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, 5 March to 12 March 1990.

37 Private communication with John Kean, 10 May 2018.

38 James Cowan, Balgo: New directions, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1999, p. 19.

39 Wayne Bergmann and Karen Dayman, Introduction, Karrayili: An Exhibition of works by students of Karrayili Adult Education Centre, Fitzroy Crossing and Bayulu Community, Kimberley, Western Australia, exhibition catalogue, Tandanya, Adelaide, 1991, pp. 3–4 at 4.

40 Judith Ryan, “Art of Balgo” in Images of power: Aboriginal art of the Kimberley, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, 1993, pp.

86–93 at 89.

41 Art from the Great Sandy Desert, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1986.

42 John Carty, “Creating country: Abstraction, economics and the social life of style in Balgo art,” PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2011, p. 76.

43 Susan Jenkins, Gallery notes on paintings by Liddy Napanangka Walker, Topsy Napanangka, Judy Nampijinpa Granites, Paddy Jupurrurla Nelson, Paddy Japaljarri Sims and Larry Jungarrayi Spencer in Australian Art in the National Gallery of Australia, ed. Anne Gray, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p. 343.

44 Judith Ryan, in Paint Up Big: Warlpiri Women’s Art of Lajamanu, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, p. 14.

45 Jennifer Loureide Biddle, breasts, bodies, canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience, UNSW Press, Sydney, p. 29.

46 Rey, “Women in the cross–cultural studio,” p. 40.

47 Cowan, Balgo, p. 11.

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48 Cowan, Balgo, p. 12.

49 Boxer Yankkarr, “Boxer Yankkarr” in Karrayili: An exhibition of works by students of Karrayili Adult Education Centre, Fitzroy Crossing and Bayulu Community, Kimberley, Western Australia, exhibition catalogue, Tandanya, Adelaide, 1991.

50 Patricia Vinnicombe, “Queenie McKenzie,” Artlink 20.1 (March 2000): 20.

51 Patricia Vinnicombe, “Women’s Sites, Paintings, and Places: Warrmarn Community, Turkey Creek: A Project with Queenie McKenzie, funded by the National Estate Grants Programme,” report for the Aboriginal Affairs Department, West Australian Museum, 1995–6.

52 Daisy Andrews, “This Picture Just Makes Me Think,” in this volume.

53 This is documented in numerous anthropological accounts.

54 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and signs, trans. Richard Howard, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2014.

55 Cowan, Balgo, p. 11.

56 Ian McLean, “Theories” in Double desire: Transculturation and Indigenous contemporary art, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge, 2014, pp. 31–42 at 39.

57 See Sid Anderson, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra, Michael Nelson Jagamarra AM, Joseph Jurrah Tjapaltjarri, Bobby West Tjupurrula and Desmond Phillipus Tjupurrula with Luke Scholes, “Tjunguntja (from having come together)” in Tjungunnutja: From Having Come Together, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 2017, pp. 116–125; Vivien Johnson, Once Upon a Time in Papunya, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2014; John Kean, “Framing Papunya Painting: Form, Style and Representation” in Tjungunnutja: From Having Come Together, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 2017, pp. 172–194.

58 The term ‘Haasts Bluff Pintupi’ is from Kean, “Framing Papunya Painting,” p. 174.

59 Vivien Johnson, Michael Jagamara Nelson, Craftsman House, Sydney, pp. 134–139.

60 See Alexander Alberro, Conceptual art and the politics of publicity, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003.

61 On the conceptualism of Papunya painting, see Imants Tillers, “Fear of Texture,” Art & Text 10 (1983), pp. 8–18.

62 See Paul Sweeney, “Papunya, Kintore (Walungurru) & Kintore” in Beyond sacred: Australian Aboriginal art, The Laverty Collection, auction catalogue, Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 2015, pp. 161.

63 Marina Strocchi, Introduction, Ikuntji: Paintings from Haasts Bluff 1992–1994, IAD Press, Sydney, 1994, p. ix.

64 See Kiwirrkurra in exile: A collection of work by displaced artists, dreaming of their homelands, unpublished essay and catalogue, c2013. With thanks to Tim Pearn for letting me know about this collection’s existence.

65 Luke Scholes, “Kiwirrkura women: The shifting shape of Western Desert painting,” Art and Australia 46.3 (Autumn 2009): 498–505.

66 The phrase is from Eduoard Glissant, Poetics of relation, trans. Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1997.

67 Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture and the expanded field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44.

68 R.B. Kitaj, First diasporist manifesto, Thames and Hudson, New York, p. 31.

69 Steve Hawke, A Town is born, Magabala, Broome, 2013, p. 196.

70 Daniel Aime Vachon, The Serpent, pp. 267–8.

71

See Erich Kolig, “Darrugu: Secret objects in a changing world” in ed. Christopher Anderson, Politics of the Secret, Oceania Monograph 45, University of Sydney, Sydney, 1995, pp. 27–42.

72 Tonkinson _ 164.

73

See Erich Kolig, Dreamtime politics: religion, world view and utopian thought in Australian Aboriginal Society, Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin, 1989, p. 35.

74 See Rex Johns, “Mulan Story,” in Steve Morton, Mandy Morton, Kim Morton and John Carty, eds, Desert lake: Art, science and stories from Paruku, CSIRO Publishing, 2013, pp. 71–79.

Notes

75 Erich Kolig, The Silent revolution: The effects of modernization on Australian Aboriginal religion, Institute for the Study of Human Issues, Philadelphia, 1981, p. 126.

76 Scott Cane, “People and Policy in the Development and Destruction of Yagga Yagga Outstation, Western Australia.” In Experiments in Self–Determination: Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia, ed. Nicolas Peterson and Fred Myers, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2016, pp. 253–278 at 264.

77 Sylvie Poirier, A World of relationships: Itineraries, dreams and events in the Australian Western Desert, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2005, p. 87.

78 Poirier, A World, p. 46.

79 John Kean, “Getting back to country: Painting and the outstation movement” in Papunya Tula: Genesis and genius, exhibition catalogue edited

by Hetti Perkins and Hannah Fink, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2000, pp. 217–223 at 221.

80 Emily Rohr, “Yulparitja artists from Bidyadanga: A Proposal for a retrospective,” n.d.

81 On singing the country, see John Carty and Kim Mahood, “Everything comes back to here” in Desert Lake: Art, Science and Stories from Paruku, ed. Steve Morton, Mandy Morton, Kim Morton ad John Carty, CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne, 2013, pp. 21–27 at 21.

82 Vachon, The Serpent, p. 104.

83 Personal communication with Emily Rohr, 18 August 2014.

84 Floya Anthias, “Evaluating ‘diaspora’: Beyond ethnicity?’, Sociology 32.3 (August 1998): 557–580 at 565.

85 Fred Myers, “Emplacement and Displacement: Perceiving the Landscape through Aboriginal Australian Acrylic Painting,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 78.4 (2013): 435–463.

86 See Kathryn Ellen Thorburn, “The Gulf Between In Two Organisations in the Fitzroy Valley, West Kimberley,” PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2011, page 42, note 45.

87 John Kean, private communication, 3 March 2018.

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88 Cited in Henry Reynolds, The Other side of the frontier: An Interpretation of the Aboriginal response to the invasion and settlement of Australia, James Cook University of North Queensland, Townsville, 1981, p. 69 89 Tonkinson, The Mardu Aborigines, p. 42.

90 Robert Tonkinson, The Jigalong Mob: Aboriginal Victors of the Desert Crusade, Cummings Publishing Company, Menlo Park, 1974, p. 19.

91 William Safran, “Diasporas in modern societies: Myths of homeland and return,” Diaspora: A Journal of transatlantic studies, 1.1 (Spring 1991): 83–99 at 83.

92 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1997, page 365, note 9.

93 Ngarta Jinny Bent with Pat Lowe, “Ngarta’s Story” in Two Sisters: Ngarta and Jukuna, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 2004, pp. 19–63.

94 Lowe with Bent, “Ngarta’s Story,” p. 62 95 Lowe with Bent, “Ngarta’s Story,” p. 63.

96 Daniel Aime Vachon, The Serpent, the word and the lie of the land: The discipline of living in the Great Sandy Desert of Australia, PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2006, p. 151.

97 Vachon, The Serpent, pp. 16–18, 183 98 Vachon, The Serpent, p. 166.

99 Vachon, The Serpent, p. 141.

100 Lloyd Kwilla, didactics, Yiwarra Kuju: Canning Stock Route exhibition, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2009.

101 Vachon, The Serpent, p. 33.

102 Vachon, The Serpent, p. 150.

103 James Clifford, “Indigenous articulations,” The Contemporary Pacific 13.2 (Fall 2001): 467–490 at 473.

104 Clifford, “Indigenous articulations,” p. 478.

105 Clifford, “Indigenous articulations,” p. 483.

106 See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal metaphysics: For a post–structural anthropology, (ed. and trans.) Peter Skafish, Univocal, Minneapolis, 2014, p. 56.

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107 Eric Kjellgren, “Mingmarriya: Art as autobiography in the paintings of Queenie McKenzie,” Pacific Arts, 23/4 (July 2001): 11–20.

108 Tim Acker and Alice Woodhead, Productivity, income and gender: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Artists. Cooperative Research Centre for REmote Economic Participation Research Report CR012, 2015, p. 15.

109 See Tim Acker, Lisa Stefanoff and Alice Woodhead, “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Economies Project: Literature review,” Working paper CW010, Curtin University, Perth, 2013, p. 3.

110 Robert Tonkinson, Aboriginal victors of the desert crusade, Cummings, San Francisco, 1974.

111 Sohan Hayes, private communication, August 2016.

112 On shifts of media in Atkins’s works, see John Carty, ‘Pretty One’: The Art of Billy Atkins, Martumilli Artists, Newman, 2010.

113 On the collaborative context for the production of this painting, see Una Rey, “Women’s Business: Cross–Cultural Collaborations in Remote Indigenous Art Centres,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 16.1 (2016): 39–54 at 46–48.

114 Margo Neale, “Introduction: Alive with the Dreaming” in Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, exhibition catalogue, ed. Margo Neale, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 2018, pp. 14–18 at 17.

115 See David Brooks and Vikki Plant, “Out of sight, out of mind, but making the best of it: How outtations have worked in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands,” in Experiments in self–determination: Histories of the outstation movement in Australia, ed. Nicolas Peterson and Fred Myers, Australian National University Press, 2016, pp. 121–134.

116 James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty–First Century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2013, p. 70.

117 John Carty, “Creating Country,” p. 75.

Acknowledgements

Fremantle Arts Centre would like to thank the following collections and individuals who kindly loaned artwork for the restaging of the Bush Women exhibition in 2018: Artbank, Claire Brittain & John McKay, Fred & Angela Chaney, City of Albany Art Collection, City of Fremantle Art Collection, City of Joondalup Art Collection, Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, Curtin University Art Collection, Edith Cowan University Art Collection, Janet Holmes à Court Collection, Lyn Hughes, John Kean, Annemaree & Ray Lanteri, June Moorhouse, Murdoch University Art Collection, Deborah Pearson, Nalda Searles, Anabel Shears Carter OAM, Fred Spring, Warburton Arts Centre Collection, Bert & Shirley Whittle and Geoff Williams.

Fremantle Arts Centre would also like to thank its Archive Interns Taylor Buoro-Long, Kat Campbell, Matilda Franklin, Olive Lipscombe, India Main, Annie McCloughlin, Maranne Purnell, Caitlin Rooker and Dani Ryder.

This publication would not have been possible but for the enthusiasm of people who allowed its authors to check facts and reproduce images, photographs and texts, to write letters of support and make themselves generally available. For this we are immensely grateful to Belinda Cook of Mangkaja Arts Resource Agency, Cecilia Alfonso of Warlukurlangu Artists Aboriginal Corporation, Daniel Vachon, Edwina Circuitt, Ella Mudie at Viscopy, Emily Rohr and Tahnee Roberts of Short Street Gallery, Fred Spring, Gary Proctor of Warburton Arts Project,

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Ian McLean, Jane Menzies of Warakurna Artists, Joanna Mendelssohn of the University of New South Wales, John Stanton, Julia Rodwell of the National Gallery of Victoria, June Moorhouse, Kim Akerman, Mark Stewart of Murdoch University, Miriam Kelly and Lucy Willett of Artbank, Nalda Searles, Paul Brinkman of the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, Paul Sweeney of Papunya Tula Artists, Susan Starcken of Edith Cowan University, Thea Van Veen of the National Gallery of Australia, Tim Acker, Tim Pearn, Sharon Tassicker of Holmes Ă Court Gallery, Ted Snell and Yolande Kerridge. Many thanks too to Eric P. Kjellgren for his help.

Part of Darren Jorgensen’s research for this catalogue was enabled

by Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP110104509, Mobilising Remote Art Centre Records for Art History.

acknowledgements

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In the 1990s, women from remote Australia became prominent in the Australian artworld. After a century dominated by male artists, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Pantjiti Mary McLean, Queenie McKenzie (Gara-Gara) and other women began to find a place on the walls of galleries and homes around the country. They captured the imagination with their distinct visions of growing up in the bush, of working on pastoral stations and living in missions. They showed a different side of Australian history, one full of the dramas of living in the desert and small settlements.

Fremantle Art Centre’s 1994 exhibition Bush Women: Fresh Art from Remote WA contributed to the forging of a new frontier in the continent’s imagination, as it brought together women from the freshwater country of the north-west of Western Australia and artists from the deserts of the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in the south-east. It was the first exhibition to show the extent of this women’s art movement in Western Australia.

In 2018, Fremantle Art Centre is restaging Bush Women, returning to this vision of the early 1990s and to the beginning of an era of Australian art commanded and articulated by women from remote Australia.