Rough Sea: Goobalathaldin

contact’ as the new Law. Importantly, he also radically expanded the materials he worked with, moving to oil and sometimes acrylic paint on various boards. While his signature figurative style remained fluent, an explosive palette opened up a rich vein of bright colours, and he bathed his compositions in them accordingly.

The latent symbolism of these paintings caught the apparent ‘everydayness’ of the community and his acute observational compositions were visually laconic, nuanced, yet unsentimental.

Whether it was the way he registered the mannerisms of girls playing netball at Mission School, or a group of youths trying to whack a snake, or high clouds steaming through the Gulf propelled by seasonal trade winds, Roughsey’s unique perspective is framed clearly by each work. By being placed behind the action, usually looking over the shoulders of people toward central protagonists, or country, the viewer is constantly included, and yet subtly, reminded of the primacy of the Lardil point of view. An Indigenous perspective of the changes wrought by the socialisation processes of ‘contact’ becomes the constant meta-narrative at play or work, in the art of Dick Roughsey, where land fused with society is both subject and object.

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Kennedy and Jacky Crossing the Escape River 1983 © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

his country, often around Cairns, he’d prepare and prime each substrate observing methods learnt from other communities in Northern Australia. He was keen, from the start, to develop a figurative style to speak of how life prior to occupation was governed in his community under Lardil Law, underpinned by narratives he’d been taught as a child. After moving back into the region he was assisted by elders and relatives with source material. Work from this period was done with earth pigments in a limited spectrum, redolent with Lardil signifiers: creation story figures such as Thuwathu 1965-6 (aka Thwiathuu, Thuwatloo, The Rainbow Snake) and Gidegal (The Moon), body paint designs, hair belts, armbands, conical headgear, striped weapons and vessels. Foodstuffs and instructional cooking guidelines prevalent within the community were also popular subjects. Each of his works related in some way to Lardil designs for living, intellectual property, governance or punishment.

The role played by Trezise in facilitating Roughsey to start painting is a seminal part of the equation, and it is undeniable that the former pilot’s influence was catalytic and ongoing until the artist’s death

in 1985. Trezise became a prescient go-between and facilitated links to mainstream dealer galleries around Australia. He regarded Roughsey as a great painter, and his own efforts in much lesser terms.

Roughsey’s work was always priced higher, to the point that in 1973 he was getting up to $500 for a painting. Significantly, although the two men and their families became famously close friends, Trezise appeared to stand aside and position Roughsey for the forging of his own destiny as a painter, loathe to accept credit. In a recollection around the time of Roughsey’s passing, the relationship between the two was likened by Trezise to that of the illfated surveyor/explorer Edmund Kennedy, and his companion Galmahra (Jacky Jacky). The subject of Kennedy and his travels through Cape York was central to a number of paintings each did over the years, and Roughsey’s — as with Kennedy and Jacky Crossing the Escape River 1983 — were attributed as the representation of an Indigenous viewpoint.

It was around 1968 that Roughsey moved to tell a parallel set of stories in paint, directly related to what he and his community had begun to experience ‘post-

Goobalathaldin translates roughly to ‘water standing on its ends’, or ‘rough sea’, and was the basis of his anglicised name, chosen

by Mission staffers. Throughout his life Dick Roughsey, his wife Elsie and their six children, witnessed the tumult of remote societies in constant transition. He saw ‘contact’ first hand, watched his own community and nearby Mornington Island become ‘settler’ societies, and experienced all that it entailed. Along with the Mission came new ways of doing things, different social mores and recreational pursuits, and new dietary regimes. Early in his life he contracted trachoma, a serious eye disease borne by cattle, as others around him went blind. While he worked at national political and administrative levels to advance the cultural priorities of Indigenous people, he is perhaps best known as a person synonymous with painting from Mornington Island and surrounding communities, and its revival.

Image Captions

SP Wright, Griffith Artworks

1

Hollow Tree Burial, Mornington Island 1969 oil on masonite panel 35 x 46 cm © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

2

Digging a Camp Oven 1971 oil on masonite panel 30 x 45 cm © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

3

Return of the hunting party 1983 oil on masonite panel 45 x 60 cm © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

This focus project is an industry partnership for CIAF2010 between Jan Manton Art, Brisbane, and Griffith Artworks (Queensland College of Art, Griffith University), supported by Mornington Island Arts and Craft Centre. Works offered are not subject to the recently introduced Resale Royalty Scheme administered by CAL, but the equivalent rate of 5% will be returned regardless.

4

Getting Wild Honey (sugarbag) 1981 oil on masonite panel 30 x 37 cm © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

5

Kennedy and Jacky Crossing the Escape River 1983 oil on masonite panel 45 x 60 cm © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

6

Thuwathu c.1965-1966 (Thwiathuu, Thuwatloo, The Rainbow Snake) ochres on bark panel 74 x 39cm. © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

Acknowledgements Jan Manton Art and Griffith Artworks would like to thank Mornington Island Art Centre and relatives of Dick Roughsey, Noreen and Peter Wright, Judith and William Ewart, and CIAF Director, Michael Snelling.

Cover Image

Fishing at Big Bay, Mornington Island 1983 oil on masonite panel 25 x 36 cm © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

Images are reproduced under license and with the permission of Vi$copy, with photography courtesy of Carl Warner.

Designed at Liveworm Studio Designer: Kenneth Hilton Creative Director: David Sargent Title: Goobalathaldin ‘Rough Sea’: Dick Roughsey O.B.E (c.1920-1985) 6

Thuwathu c.1965-1966 (Thwiathuu, Thuwatloo, The Rainbow Snake) © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

Author: SP Wright Pubished by Griffith Artworks and JMA for CIAF 2010 ISBN: 978-1-921760-13-6

Cover Image

Fishing at Big Bay, Mornington Island 1983 oil on masonite panel 25 x 36 cm © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

GOOBALATHALDIN: ROUGH SEA Dick Roughsey O.B.E (c.1920–1985)

This focus project is an industry partnership for CIAF 2010 between Jan Manton Art, Brisbane, and Griffith Artworks (Queensland College of Art, Griffith University), supported by Mornington Island Arts and Craft Centre.

CAIRNS INDIGENOUS ART FAIR Tanks Art Centre

20 – 22 AUGUST 2010

1

Hollow Tree Burial, Mornington Island 1969 © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

2

Digging a Camp Oven 1971 © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

3

Return of the hunting party 1983 © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

4

Getting Wild Honey (sugarbag) 1981 © Goobalathaldin /Licensed by Viscopy, 2010.

Dick Roughsey, Goobalathaldin, Gara Gara, O.B.E SP Wright

The time has come for reappraisal of significant historical figures of Indigenous art in Queensland.

The revelatory exhibition of paintings by Joe Rootsey (1918–1963) from the 1950s and 60s, depicting Far North Gulf country — currently on display at Queensland Art Gallery — represents a groundbreaking move. Rootsey, an Amu Wuriingu man from the remote Barrow Point region north of Cooktown, is heralded by the retrospective as the first Indigenous person from Queensland to be recognised as a contemporary artist.

The QAG show models how public institutions can contribute significantly to new scholarship and the re-contextualisation of an individual’s contribution to Australian culture, in ways that balance the scope of the achievement with an evaluation of the effects of the times around them. Projects like these establish a more complex and nuanced register of participants and place, broadening our understandings of unique identities and abilities.

They bring into play connections between political concepts and social practices from the past which have resonance for contemporary application, by

artists of today, to reinforce the inherent dynamism of Indigenous cultures. In many cases, it is only with time that due recognition comes to pass.

Dick Roughsey Goobalathaldin OBE (c.1920–1985) was a Lardil man born on Langu-Narnji (Sydney Island), a small land mass connected by tidal flats to Mornington Island. He began painting on bark around 1961, a couple of years before Rootsey finally succumbed to a decade long battle with tuberculosis. Where Joe Rootsey, a wonderful watercolourist, had been described as ‘the second Namatjira’, Roughsey was inevitably claimed later as ‘the next Namatjira’. Certainly, the influence and significance of Albert Namatjira is a well documented and seminal factor in Roughsey’s desire to become a painter, but comparison or placement on such a trajectory is deeply problematic. Links like these tend toward diminishment of each artist’s unique perspective and cultural authority, particularly their independent explorations of new possibilities in visual storytelling and connections to place, and their desire and prowess in different mediums.

In his autobiography (1971: Reed Books), the first to be published by an Aboriginal person in Australia, and in later published interviews, Roughsey spoke of his removal from family and country as a very young child, and the Presbyterian Mission education he subsequently endured. Through those years, he recalled having felt like he always had ‘an artist in him’, starting at school when he’d sit down with a slate ‘in my spare time and draw horses’. After working as a stockman and setting his sights on being a painter, he became fond of several other figures that further influenced his ideas for art, including the self-styled anthropologist and artist Percy Trezise, along with William Dobell, Norman Lindsay, Ray Crooke, and Thancoupie (Dr Gloria Fletcher). In a rare reversal, Picasso is reported to have sought out and seen Roughsey’s work in Paris, which is possible given that Roughsey showed there in the early 1970s. Upon having viewed it, Picasso apparently lamented not being able to have possessed “the same innocence of attack”.

In keeping with the time and coverage afforded Roughsey by national media, any news of his practice often swung between romantic sentiment or fascination with ‘fullbloods’, where an ethnocentric determinism was the order of the day. Assimilation policies and other ‘protective’ measures would further shape Queensland politics and the lives of its subjects until the year his autobiography was published, when the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 was finally replaced by the Aborigines Act 1971.

Dick Roughsey and, subsequently, Thancoupie became the first Queensland Indigenous artists to enter the mainstream contemporary art world in Australia, right at the moment when new moves were being made to draw on Indigenous symbolism in the formulation of national identity. They were not subject to restrictions placed on the trading of their work as ‘fine art’ by the state’s Protector of Aboriginals or Department of Native Affairs, as Joe Rootsey was, so they began selling work to people locally, formed associations with private gallerists, and kept income from sales. Several of Roughsey’s

early shows, including one in Toowoomba during 1973 billed as an “Exhibition for Queensland”, were shared with Thancoupie, and they both went on to develop increasingly successful careers. Both often combined ‘self-representation’ with more formal arrangements at some of Australia’s most influential private galleries. It was a key period in Australian art, between 1970 and 1980, and in tandem with the rise of Papunya Tula and Western Desert practices, a market was slowly taking root, along with a new museology which began to include Indigenous art in surveys and public collections of contemporary art.

Roughsey’s solo show in 1980 at Gallery A in Sydney, a revered site for modernism and abstraction in Australia, was part of a program of cutting edge artists, including Michael Johnson, Ralph Balson, Janet Dawson, Mike Brown, Rosalie Gascoigne, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri and Oenpelli bark artists. He also held one person shows, or shared projects with Percy Trezise at galleries in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide. With private dealers such as Holdsworth, Solander, Macquarie, Bonython and Australian Galleries, his various guises oscillated

between ‘naïve artist’, ‘traditional Aboriginal painter’, and ‘Queensland artist’, none of which greatly illuminated his unique place in Australian art.

negotiate two realities, the one he learnt as a child, and the one he learnt after the first nonindigenous people arrived at Mornington Island:

He was, by example, also a tireless advocate for Aboriginal rights, expression and recognition, and was appointed in 1970 as a member of the Australia Council’s Aboriginal Arts Advisory Committee; and then by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam as the first Indigenous Chair of the Aboriginal Arts Board (1973– 76). He and colleagues such as H.G (Nugget) Coombs and Jennifer Isaacs lobbied for the development of educational collateral in mainstream Australia to promote the significance of Aboriginal sacred sites and cultural practices here and abroad. At the same time he became an internationally acclaimed author of children’s books, which often put his painting and illustrations into the context of Cape York storytelling for an audience ‘of millions’ outside Australia, which were translated into several languages.

“I realised how lucky I had been in meeting just the right people to help me…what a long way back to those times…happy times…followed by not so happy times…when I discovered what it was like to be just a poor bloody blackfellow in a world run by whites…how lucky that I was able to become an artist so that nearly everyone now treated me as an intelligent human being and an equal”. (Roughsey, D. ‘Moon and Mountain’, Reed Books 1971)

‘Art’ for Roughsey was an all-encompassing and integral aspect of his ‘life’ experience, and indeed, it was the path he chose in order to

Roughsey often felt he represented a changing of the guard, and lamented that his generation would be the last from the region that knew and taught originary languages, ways of hunting, and crucial survival and climatic information that had been recorded verbally, in dance and song, by every generation before him. He was scathing of the growing force and influence of welfare payments in remote communities, and the lack of support to offer historically significant, language-based education

alternatives delivered locally by Aboriginal people. His most active campaigns, however, were involved in the protection of sacred heritage sites throughout Far North Queensland, against mining, non-indigenous access and housing or pastoral development. He was an inveterate traveller across the Cape and Gulf countries over decades, and recorded a plethora of FNQ rock art galleries, with the permission of local custodians, most often with Percy Trezise. They frequently sent detailed drawings, transcripts and diagrams of rock art sites to public archives and government affiliated agencies, and campaigned for their conservation. The striking inverted figure and crocodile painted by Roughsey in Return of the hunting party 1983, by example, is a direct reference to Mushroom Rock Gallery, one of the most significant rock art sites in Australia, documented near Laura in the early 1960s. This figure is also the subject of a major work held in the National Gallery of Australia

by Imants Tillers titled Island of the Dead 1982.

Roughsey’s earliest surviving artworks, from the 1960s, are painted on flattened bark panels.

Although sourced from trees situated well outside