An Opening Read online

  Mine is not the interpreter or translator’s voice that explains what the work means to the artists or takes the authoritative position of telling true inside stories. For every art story in the world there is always more than one true story anyway, and always many untold ones. A frequent approach to Aboriginal art is to see it as always needing translation by experts; this has had the effect of segregating it from other art. I believe Aboriginal art needs to be interpreted as more than illustrated stories, more than a cash crop or beautiful commodity for generating income and exemplifying national identity, and more than a functional component towards the social cohesion of indigenous societies in Australia, important though they all are. Aboriginal art is not timeless but exists in history and tells us a timely historical tale of survival and of conviction that the earth is sentient. What can be usefully learned from Aboriginal art may not be intricate facts or religious revelations, or indeed the bearing of an inferiority complex of being less spiritual or less connected to singing the land into being, but rather something metaphysical connected to general principles and approaches to living. Such as the importance of a sense of humour, of living in the present, of practical observation skills and respect for your own stories and ancestors whoever they are and however you find them; thus it may mean seeing art itself anew as always potentially a vital medium of human communication (rather than about fashion or investment or progress), as a source of connection to the world as well as a bearer of the conscious recognition of sharing the world with other life forms, animate and inanimate, past and present.

  Like many other people my experience of indigenous people began very early in my life. First at primary school in America where the indigenous people were all called Indians, there was the concept of the Indian giver, and then there was the Indian burn (place two hands firmly around someone’s arm and twist one hand one way and the other the other way – some people know this as a Chinese burn). Then there were the two trips my family made back and forth across America in the fifties on one of which we went through Colorado and the Mesa Verde National Park where we saw the extraordinary cliff dwellings and mesa-top villages with their windows cut into the earth, built between A.D. 450 and 1300 by the Pueblo Indians. And my older sister was given a book called Indians and the Wild West: The story of the First Americans which had a picture of an Indian on a horse on its cover. It was an especially shiny book and the Indian had a very shiny shaved head painted red and I was really scared of it and would carefully turn the book face down if I was in the room with it. It seemed very powerful. I had heard that the Indians scalped people and wasn’t sure whether you bled to death after being scalped or not. Was that why his head was red? Maybe the Indian could come out of the photo and scalp you, he looked so shiny and alive. It made me breathless to think about it. Then there was the story all American children learnt at primary school about Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, saving the life of John Smith. No-one I knew spoke of present-day Indians so they seemed to be extinct, but they were certainly very present in stories.

  In 1967 there was a referendum in Australia in which Aboriginal people gained the right to vote, to be citizens in their own country. I was at school in Adelaide and our class had a debate about the referendum, whether Aborigines should be allowed to vote. I was on the affirmative side and found no problem in saying simply that as democracy was about universal suffrage and the Aborigines were people therefore they should be allowed to vote, how could it be otherwise? The opposition said ‘But they were a lot of “boongs”.’ I asked, ‘What is this word “boong”’? The teacher was thrilled with this response, which I must admit was genuine ignorance rather than skill at debating, and I learned a little bit about racism.

  In 1970 I saw for the first time my favourite film for many years, Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman, fresh from his success and notoriety in The Graduate, playing a 121-year-old man telling his life story. I still remember the old Indian grandfather, played by Chief Dan George, making a point of saying, every day of his life, ‘Today is a good day to die’ (I still sometimes say it to myself); that Cheyenne means Human Beings; that everything in the world is alive; and Hoffman’s character saying in his high-pitched whiny 121-year-old voice: ‘Pawnees was always sucking up to Whites.’ Thus pointing out I guess that all Indians are not the same. In my final year of secondary school, in my editorial for the school magazine in a mood of anti-materialism and counter-cultural fervour I quoted approvingly from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden about the Muclasse Indians who burn all their goods at the end of each year.

  What I am concerned to emphasise is the need to value art as an experience rather than an investment or an illustration. A significant thread in the following pages in the stories about me, love and art, is the renewal and survival of indigenous cultures. The presence amongst us of the first peoples of the earth, not extinct, not superseded, not mere legends or myths but here and now, is miraculous and worth dwelling on.

  How do you know who your people are? Is identity always tied back to the past, to history, birthplace, blood, ethnicity and nationality, or can it also be bigger than all those things and be found or discovered in the present, or invented, like some traditions? Does being here in this suburb before my neighbour give me more rights? If I came to Australia from somewhere else does it mean I can never belong? If I have a small family or no family does it make me less important, or if I don’t know the deep history of my family does it make me worthless? What if I have to run away from my family? Can I look outside family for kinship? Historian and activist Marcia Langton wrote:

  The impetus for Australians to value Aboriginal culture might arise from a sense of this culture as being a part of their own heritage and their own historical legacy, not just that of exoticised and demonised others.

  An intuition about dot paintings as showing an earth that mirrors the sky came to me forcefully in Clifford Possum’s retrospective exhibition in 2003. Possum’s paintings involve a complex layering of imagery, but his friend, writer and historian Vivien Johnson told me in conversation that when she said that he must have a good brain to be able to see a whole work in his mind’s eye before painting it, he said: ‘Not brain but heart.’ His five large extraordinary map paintings, Warlugulong made with Tim Leura (1976) and the solo works Warlugulong (1977), Kerrinyarra (1977), Mt Denison Country (1978) and Yuutjutiyungu (1979), were all shown in one gallery space; four were hung vertically and one was horizontal in the middle of the space on a low platform. Of course each was painted flat on the ground. These extraordinary and beautifully detailed paintings of the topography of Possum’s country, and the incidents from multiple Dreaming stories belonging to it, can be studied with their accompanying diagrams which were recorded by art adviser John Kean when they were painted. The diagrams translate every shape and mark, except what may be secret, thus demonstrating this pictorial language as something that can be read like a book, full of story and incident, description and insight. To learn it is like learning hieroglyphics or pictograms. Here the ancestors travelled over the land creating its features; here they taught a ceremony or performed it for the first time; here they ate or had a fire; here they hunted, camped, danced or were transformed. It is a way of remembering a landscape, a mnemonic for a place and many other things connected to it. Yet at the same time another, perhaps equally rich, way to experience these paintings is to visually wander through them just like our eyes wander through the stars in the night sky, from depth to surface, from near to far, from pattern to spaciousness, from easily interpretable story-trace and familiarity to the unknown. To know that they are meaningful, that their marks are full of purpose, but to hang back from learning their language, to remain in an unknown place, to experience delight and mystery without striving for facts or interpretation and to appreciate the sense of space that they possess, the patterns and textures and the colour relationships that they show – pink against brown, yellow with white, red ochre on black, especially the glowing yellow – ca
n be a very satisfying and rapturous state. I see them as star maps that you can feel inside you. They embrace infinity and wonder by recreating the experience of looking at the night sky and drawing attention to our co-existence in the sky with the stars. After I was thinking about them I had an incredibly vivid dream in which the earth literally slid up to the sky which was covered with multiple, slowly spinning mosaics made of stars. And I knew then that it was possible to know the sky as you might know a house or a garden, and that you might then also think of the sky as a mirror to the earth and the earth as if it was water reflecting the sky.

  ——

  At this point of writing I went outside where, in early May, the leaves of the nectarine tree are slowly turning from green into a luminous glowing orangey yellow, a colour so rich and pure it can barely be described. To collect a leaf I only need to touch it, as they are ready to fall and indeed several are scattered on the ground near the recently planted broad beans which are starting to throw their strong, broad, bright green leaves into the air. The nectarine leaf is smooth and perfect, a folded curved half-moon of colour. From the central vein along its fold other veins branch out, making up the pattern of its circulation. Its edges are very finely serrated; its stem is tinged with pink. I know that if I press it in a book it will keep its colour for many years. When I look closely at it I feel some memory stirring within me, a memory that connects me to myself as a child first discovering the world, first responding to it, first getting to know shapes and colours and forms by looking very closely at things, and somehow both going inside them and putting them inside me.

  JANUARY

  the dignity of objects

  Pebbles cannot be tamed

  to the end they will look at us

  with a calm and very clear eye

  Zbigniew Herbert

  In 1960 when I was six I spent the day in the National Gallery of Art in Washington with my mother and sister. At the end of the day for being ‘good’ I was allowed to choose a print from the gallery shop. The print I chose was Still Life, painted in 1866 by Henri Fantin-Latour. It possesses the quiet bright presence of most still lives. Such works are not all the same, but all possess a sense of the implacability of objects, their calmness or sense of moral certainty. I remember that choosing it was an act bearing in mind my older sister who had been ‘bad’ and complained that she was hungry most of the day. Did we really spend a day there? More likely it was a morning or an afternoon, two hours that felt like four to her. Because the painting has food in it I had the idea that it was for my sister as well as for me. I didn’t want to be singled out as the ‘good’ one and have to face either her misery or her revenge. I am surprised at this memory but I guess I was, for the sake of peace, always thinking I could calm everyone down.

  Our family’s agitation seemed to have no end, though on reflection it was mostly emanating from the endless restless exhausting energy exuded by my father which I got to experience spasmodically again in later life, though never to understand or to feel calm about being anywhere near him, except perhaps when he was dying. As I stood next to his bed in a public hospital, in the steamy heat of Bangkok where he had lived for the previous twenty years, shocked by the clear imminence of death in his shattered body, he made faces at me and tried to get up and go home (this chronic impatience was partly the reason that his stitches were torn and complications set in). Did he know that he was so close to death? Maybe, though he certainly planned to live longer, had things to do and was, after all, only eighty-four. Perhaps he knew because, most unusually, he asked me to kiss him before I left. It was also at this time that his Thai wife and I both saw his hands next to mine on the bedclothes and saw they were practically identical (though mine are smaller) – ‘same, same’ we said to each other. How strange I had never noticed this before.

  What can you ever say to a practically deaf man who never wanted to hear anything he didn’t want to hear? When you are a child it means that you learn to be silent. He was unable to relax or let people be, though would occasionally collapse onto a sofa for an hour or so in the early evening, at which time a tiny bit of peace would descend on our home. Of course he did go to work and travel, and at such times rather than spend time together the three of us would each look for and find the simple peace of solitude as a way of regenerating. Thus at dinner, though we would sit together, each of us would read a book or sometimes watch TV but rarely talk. When he was there we were on guard throughout the meal which often – actually almost always – ended in tears or slamming doors. Being both predictable and unpredictable it created surges of emotion that ruined my digestion. My sister used to always loyally take my mother’s side while I, displaying the odd ability to see two sides of an argument, tried to find some kind of rationale in each parent’s words as they maddened and goaded each other. When he finally left home for good in 1968, a few months before the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, our relief was immense, though he continued to the end of his life to apologise for going. I was never able to tell him how very glad we all were.

  Yet he could be generous, kind and charming, and was a good cook, highly intelligent and hard-working. Born to a Jewish father and German mother in 1920 in East Prussia, he had escaped alone from Germany in 1939 and met up with two of his older brothers in England. The three of them were interned as ‘enemy aliens’ when war broke out and put on a ship, the Arandora Star, for Canada, which was torpedoed, then finally sent to Australia on the Dunera, on which the European internees were notoriously treated inhumanely by the British crew. Arrival in Australia meant further internment at Hay and then at Tatura Internment Camp, a place where grateful peace from the war raging in Europe was connected with fear for those left behind as well as astonishment at the climate, flora, fauna and people of this strange land they had arrived in. Among the prisoners, who ranged widely in age and experience, were many German–Jewish intellectuals, so a university was set up and the primitive art expert Leonhard Adams was made pro-rector. A famous linocut called Desolation, Internment Camp, Hay NSW by another prisoner, artist Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, shows a solitary figure standing behind barbed wire gazing up at the Southern Cross.

  In later years someone who loved my father described him to me as a hamster always trying to escape. He would rush out of cinemas if the film bored him. In a museum he would gallop through all the galleries and be ready to go in five minutes. If you managed to stand up to him and stay to look he would hurry off and go for a long rapid walk before returning to collect the stragglers with impatient comments. Everything was a rush, thus everything became an emergency. He was also always making profound all-encompassing statements about Life, maybe a German trait of thought which I have inherited along with the hands.

  The Fantin-Latour Still Life painting on the other hand reflected something of the spirit of my half-Irish, part Scottish and part British rather irreverent red-headed Australian mother, her amateur but devoted empathy for literature and art, and her embrace of idleness bordering on laziness. She grew up in both Melbourne and the Mallee, and studied journalism at the University of Melbourne in the 1930s but left to work for an insurance company when her stepfather died. She was the one who enjoyed looking at pictures with me and perhaps introduced me to it as an escape from family tension. She collected books and vases, gardened, and enjoyed smoking and drinking more than eating. Picking flowers and arranging them in the right vase to create a picture, a moment of beauty, was an abiding pleasure for her.

  The painting shows a book, a vase of pink and white camellias, a black and red lacquered Japanese tray, a half-peeled mandarin, a basket of fruit including quinces, apples and pears, and a fine white porcelain teacup and saucer with a gold rim. The painting includes just one teacup, because this is not a tea party but an image of pleasurable solitude involving food, drink and intellectual sustenance. The novel is a French one with a plain blue cover.

  Fantin-Latour, who painted between 1856 and 1904, is best known for his flower paintings and s
till lives from which he made a living, though he sold most of them in England not in France where he lived. He also painted four notable group portrait scenes of his friends Manet, Whistler, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Renoir, Zola, Monet and other less well-known artists and writers. Surely the sensitivity with which Fantin-Latour painted the lips of the young Rimbaud and the eyes of Verlaine in the 1872 painting called A Corner of the Table are the same skills he used on the surfaces of teacups and flowers.

  I have often enjoyed the kind of tea party for one implied in my Fantin-Latour print by coming home from the library with a stack of new books, arranging tea and a plate of fruit, then feeding from them all for a few hours, sipping tea, peeling and slicing fruit, dipping into the books here and there, dog-earing the corners of certain pages or more respectfully slipping in torn strips of paper or bookmarks, devouring the words, the ideas, the images, occasionally looking up to stare out of the window, into the sky or the trees and travelling still further in thought. What am I searching for? A few fragments of common feeling, ideas, information about art, about history, about cultures and the making of objects and thoughts, fitting pieces together, the description of something that I have also thought or felt, a feeling of contact, revelation, enlightenment, epiphany. I feed this enjoyment by copying down sentences, noting pages, building and locating an ancestry, a web of connections. To find a voice that takes me confidentially inside another person, the miracle of someone writing in another place and time, sometimes in another language, and speaking through that writing inside my head with a detail and sensitivity rarely expressed by anyone I meet, or to see in an artwork something of the heart of another person, are precious experiences that make me feel alive, that I search for to keep me alive.