Color: A Natural History of the Palette (9 page)

In the same library was a book about the Dreaming places of Alice Springs—which directed me to the road running along the Todd River (so dry that there is an annual regatta where the racers run, carrying the boats) and leading to the casino. The map recorded it as Barrett Drive; the Aboriginals preferred to call it Broken Promises Drive. When it was first proposed, the Aboriginal guardians gave permission for it to be built—as long as it wriggled round a spot that was known as the Caterpillar Dreaming because it included a long mound believed to mark the space where the caterpillar Ancestor rested beneath the earth. But the road builders were greedy; the wriggle would cost dollars. They blocked the road off and a few months later opened it unrepentantly—with several meters cut off the tail of the caterpillar. The wound was still there. From the road I could see a long mound about three meters high and five meters wide curling away into the distance, covered with eucalyptus and grass and signposts warning people to stay away. The mound ended abruptly at the road, where it had been chopped, and I saw something glinting in the debris. In fact I saw a lot of things glinting. It turned out that the “caterpillar” was made of a rock that flaked off with shiny silica dandruff. This rock on the road to the casino was not just ordinary stone, it was stone that changed color as you moved. Once again I saw how the “sacred” was something that was full of gleaming colors.

Everywhere in Alice Springs you can find Aboriginal designs. They are on logos and place mats, T-shirts and didgeridoos, and, of course, they are on canvases—in the dozens of art shops that line the streets of the town center. There were a few of the Northern Territory ochre paintings I had seen at the beginning of my journey, and there were others that seemed to represent some kind of stylistic transition—by artists who came from the Kimberleys to the north-west of Alice, who still used ochre but in ways that involved large areas of paint, rather than either dotting or stripes. One of the most powerful of these was a man called Rover Thomas, who lived between 1926 and 1998 in Warmum, Turkey Creek, just to the west of the Darwin–Alice road, and about halfway along it. His paintings look like pieces of kangaroo skin stretched taut with pins of white pigment. The work seems less a painting of the country than a kind of wrapping up of the country—rather as Christo did with the Reichstag in Berlin. He uses a deep chestnut brown and his skies are the color of bitter chocolate. He always uses natural pigments, often mixed with bush gum and applied to marine ply.

But most of the paintings in Alice were, quite naturally, from the Central Desert. They were bright acrylic canvases in patterns of dots and curls and splashes and concentric circles. If they had been from Europe or America they would have been given labels like “abstract expressionist” or “neopointillist,” and the influence of such artists as Miró and Picasso would have been discussed in unending detail. But they were from Australia with their own distinctive artistic inheritance, so although those comparisons have been made, they have mostly been allowed just to stand for themselves. Many of the paintings had a title like “Two Snakes Dreaming” or “Dingo Dreaming,” and some included explanations of the iconography—that, for example, a concentric circle meant a waterhole, or that an oval shape was a shield, or that little curled lines represented men sitting at fires. These were some of the stories that had so intrigued Bruce Chatwin, in his journeys for the book that became
Songlines
, describing the way Aborigines traditionally conceptualize Australia as a series of sung stories, criss-crossing the land.

The paintings, when you look at them for more than a few minutes, seem to be an exercise in optical effects—like one of those Magic Eye games, with an obvious picture in the front and another picture “behind” it which you can see if you focus away from the paper. Like the shiny red ochres that I had not seen but had heard of in Arnhemland and South Australia, the paintings from the Central Desert seemed almost like another way of flipping reality. In their case by dotting it into non-existence.

I began to recognize some of the different artists—particularly the more famous ones. Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, whose work was made up of bold squares, either set inside each other or spiralling geometrically into a central point. Then there was Rover Thomas, of course. And the Petyarre sisters—Ada Bird, Gloria and several others, much of whose work is made of small, swiftly painted dashes in contrasting colors such as green and purple, giving the effect of a weeping willow shivering in the wind. Listening quietly to conversations in different galleries, I learned that “Glorias” were getting more expensive, while “two Ronnies” cost about the same as a car nowadays. “Though good Ronnies are so hard to get nowadays,” was the sad comment from the dealer I was eavesdropping on. “He’s having domestic problems.”

UTOPIA

The Petyarre family comes from a place called Utopia. Perhaps it was the name or perhaps it was the art from that Central Desert settlement—with its bold control of color contrasts—which intrigued me. But I was determined to go there, and was fortunate enough to get an invitation from Simon Turner, the arts administrator who works as a go-between connecting dealers and artists. The settlement is about 100 kilometers north-east of Alice Springs. To get there from the Darwin Highway you turn east onto a dusty track and north onto an even dustier one. For kilometer after kilometer the land stays flat, a dry plain of gum trees. Then there is a tiny rise. Just 10 meters elevation or less, but suddenly you are in another world. The Aboriginals describe it, when they do, as the Mountain Lizard Dreaming or the Bush Plum Dreaming, and they tell its stories in layers and paint them in dots. With my stranger’s eye, I knew only that the country was suddenly greener and lusher. The land had lumped itself into rocky formations like stone citadels, or entrance gates to another country. In a strange way it felt as if I had really arrived somewhere.

And then, a few kilometers later, I did indeed arrive somewhere. Utopia was named a long time ago before there was a settled community here, and so the name was not as ironic as it may have appeared. It was certainly a strange, dislocated place. It was a scattered series of seemingly unplanned houses or “camps” separated by trees and tracks and “humpies,” which were blocks of corrugated iron surrounded by mattresses and bits of dirty clothing, where many people stayed outside on the warmer nights. There was a convenience store—containing the strangest mixture of highly priced items such as televisions combined with cheap ones like white bread and fried food. And there was a playground with broken equipment. One swing had curled up on top of the frame and begun to rust up there. Helped by two half-naked children, I prodded it with a stick until it swung down again. They grinned and jumped on it. The job had taken only ten minutes, but nobody had bothered to do it.

Utopia is what is called a decentralized community, consisting of sixteen outstations. I had been invited to the main one, called Yuendumu. It was the first dry Aboriginal community I had visited (which made it safer, especially for children and women who lived there), although the place had other problems, largely due to boredom and lethargy. It is a terrible thing to lose your land, but when (as in traditional Aboriginal culture) that land is not only physical but also an embodiment of the spiritual, it is hard to find anything to take its place. The nomadic life has its own purpose to it: without the need to walk, what do you do? On my first morning I went for a walk and some women beckoned me over to their “camp.” From the outside it looked like a house with a verandah but inside it was like some of the air-raid bunkers I used to break into in my childhood: bleak and dank, covered in graffiti and radiating a sense of unkemptness. One woman had a black eye. The others had invited me over because they wanted to see whether I had any clout with the arts administrator and, more importantly, whether I could use it to get them new canvases. “Finished this one,” one said, pointing to a painting that showed her “country” in tiny dot patterns of bright greens and whites. “Without a canvas, nothing to do.”

Later I went down with Simon to the arts center—a tumble-down place, although recently built. So many things in these communities age too quickly. The Formica cupboard doors were hanging off their hinges and rubbish threatened to take over; there was a sign stating (on behalf of Arapuntja Artists Inc.) that no dogs were allowed in the studio. This one-room building was not intended to be a retail point—few individual art-buyers reach Utopia—but a place where art was made, although now it is more like a place where canvases are doled out and cash transactions arranged.

Utopia was the country of the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, dubbed “the old lady,” a former horseback rider in the stock camps who became one of Australia’s most famous female artists (whose paintings of her country were used as evidence in land rights hearings). Many of the artists of Utopia are women, and it seemed that most of them were at the arts center that morning handing in their latest works, and lobbying for new canvases, while their toddlers and babies played on the dirty floor of the center. The paintings were made up of pointillist dots, and the effect was rather similar to looking at spring meadows full of flowers—but with blurred eyes and from a vantage point high above them. “What do you want to say here?” Simon asked each of them as she handed in her completed painting. “White is flowers,” Polly Ngalr said. What kind of flower? “Yam flower. And yellow is seeds.” What kind? “Yam seed,” she said, being patient. Some of the titles of the paintings shifted during the morning from
Emu Tucker
to
Bush Plum Dreaming
, and back again. Nobody seemed too bothered once the price had been set and the negotiations started for another fresh canvas.

Amy Nelson Napangardi hadn’t been given a canvas last time, so this time she was desperate. She has custodianship for the Witchdoctor Dreaming, which describes how bush medicine can be found. “Like that one,” she said, pointing to the Bush Plum Dreaming someone else had painted—interlapping dot patches in pinks and yellows. “But my colors are not pink, ” she added emphatically, and explained that the Witchdoctor Dreaming used just four colors—yellow, red, white and brown. That morning I had found myself desperate to somehow understand the paintings better—to understand what made them represent “country” or a Dreaming story, to appreciate them for more than their (often spectacular) color contrasts. I had hoped that perhaps by knowing what was not allowed, or at least not appropriate I could understand the paintings better. “Why not pink?” I asked her. “ ’Cos whitefella buyers don’t like it, ” she said.

And this is one of the curiosities of this extraordinary art movement. The buyers seem to want a sense of “authenticity” and yet nobody is quite sure what that means, nor indeed what it should mean. The fact that the painting is done by Aboriginal people seems to be vital—when, in 1977, it was revealed that the “Aboriginal” artist Eddie Burrup was in fact an eighty-two-year-old white woman called Elizabeth Durack, there was national outrage —and that it is made by Aboriginal people who somehow have some insight into nature seems to make it even more “valuable.” The fact that many “whitefella buyers” demand paintings in the natural colors of the land (ochre colors, although in acrylic versions of the original earth) also suggests they are searching for that ever elusive authenticity—a country and a history embodied in the canvas of a painting available in an art gallery or auction house. In Alice Springs I had visited one gallery advertising the work of an artist “who had come in from the desert.” Somehow his work was seen to have more integrity because he was a nomad—by buying it, or having it, there was a sense of being part of a world that has now disappeared. Yet in truth, as I would learn later from the man who helped start it, the painting styles of the Central Desert Art Movement are actually combinations of Aboriginal patterns and colors and the visions of white art administrators. And the two influences can scarcely be separated anymore.

Gloria and Ada Petyarre were away from Utopia—invited by art galleries to tour with their own paintings. But their sister, Margaret Turner Petyarre, was there at the arts center. So I sat down next to her on the floor and—struggling to understand what it was to paint a “Dreaming” rather than a mere representation of a story—asked her several questions about what the paintings meant. Suddenly she looked at me kindly: “You gotta garden, right? You must have nice flowers in your garden; lovely flowers? ” I nodded, not wanting to go into the issues of space limitations in Hong Kong. “Well then, you know; that’s what this is,” she said. “Flowers.” I felt rather foolish, almost as if I had pointed to a landscape painting in a European art gallery and asked for its meaning, only to be told that it was trees and water and hills. Couldn’t I see?

My question hadn’t been entirely misguided, of course. This art, like the shine of the ochre it was originally painted in, is elusive. Yes, it is about texture and tone and contrast and technique, but it is also about something else, something I couldn’t quite grasp. Sometimes, in my travels through the Outback meeting artists, dealers and dyers, I had the fleeting impression that we were not talking about art at all, but about the universality of the human spirit. And then that feeling would disappear again and the talk would be of dollars and four-wheel-drives.

On the way out of Utopia I went to see Greenie and Kathleen Purvis at Boundary Bore, about ten kilometers away, past a shallow lake that stretched through the middle of this parched land. Greenie had the famous name but it was his wife, Kathleen, who was doing the painting, sitting in the sunshine on the ground, surrounded by slobbering dogs, while her husband dozed in the shade of his “humpy” or corrugated-iron windbreaker. These two old people have a house—quite a big one—but as Kathleen explained they don’t use it much “because it’s full of dogs.” Unless it’s too cold they like to sleep outside, on swag mattresses under the moonlight: given the choice, I thought, I would do the same. There are few things as spectacular as the night sky in the Outback. They looked poor, but their work was selling well. They were planning to get a satellite television and a Toyota was being delivered the next day. Four-wheel-drives have been a popular means of payment for Aboriginal desert art—in the early days it was secondhand Holdens from a car dealership in Alice, now it is new Toyotas—and in many ways this is appropriate. In the past, the act of painting (as body art or on sand) was one way of passing on the wisdom and the maps, so other people could know both the land and what lies beneath it. It seems right that today the act of painting should still help Aboriginals reclaim the land. Even if it is from behind a steering wheel.