An Opening Read online

  The Aboriginal Memorial commemorates all the indigenous people who, since 1788, have lost their lives defending their land – thus it is arguably a war memorial. The log coffins commemorate continuity with the past as well as ongoing cultural strength. Forty-three artists from nine different clans of Yolngu people, each the caretakers of a specific site around the Glyde River, painted them. Such ceremonial hollow-log coffins are still used in mortuary ceremonies to hold the bones of the deceased, but these ones were made only for display as artworks. Like so many Aboriginal artworks they are virtual title deeds to the land. The path that can be walked through the coffins is the course of the Glyde River in the Northern Territory; the coffins are set out according to where the clans live along the river; its tributaries and geographical features, the flora and fauna of each of those places are shown on the coffins. There are the swamp or Magpie Goose people, the mangrove people, the people of the eucalyptus forest who are also the sugarbag (honey) people, the stone country people, the Morning Star people, the freshwater people and others. Stories connecting places and people are implicit: thus a series of striped coffins refer to the mud lines on trees caused by water moving in and out on the edge of the tidal flats. There are images here that we can recognise and others that we need some teaching to understand. A catfish may be easy to recognise with its whiskery head, though knowing it is a symbol of both new life and death is an added dimension. Recognising diamond patterns as honeycomb, wavy or straight line patterns as tides and water or/and clouds and rain or/and fire and smoke may need some coaching, though a bit of instruction makes the viewing very satisfying and makes it possible to begin to see the complexity in its simplicity.

  Within coo-ee of the dancing lights and salt air of Sydney Harbour, Edge of the Trees, a collaborative artwork designed by artists Fiona Foley and Janet Laurence in 1995 and located outside the Museum of Sydney, echoes both these significant artworks, Tutini at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and The Aboriginal Memorial at the National Gallery of Australia. Edge of the Trees was commissioned by curator Peter Emmett to respond to the site of the first Government House in Australia, to represent first contact between two cultures and to draw attention to the connected histories of black and white people in Australia since 1788. Emmett used a quote from archaeologist Rhys Jones to inspire and direct the artists:

  … the discoverers struggling through the surf were met on the beach by other people looking at them from the edges of the trees. Thus the same landscape perceived by the newcomers as alien, hostile or having no coherent form was to the indigenous people their home, a familiar place, the inspirer of dreams.

  Eloquent and spare, these twenty-seven posts, made from sandstone, steel or wood, some rusted, some charred with fire, contain sound elements so that the soft voices of Aboriginal people murmur words and names to you as you walk through or stand near them. They evoke the ordinary everyday artefacts of wooden telegraph poles, symbols of communication and the crossing of distance, as well as train lines and bridge girders, gravestones and steles. Seashells mixed with ash, honey mixed with wax, feathers, oxides, fishbones and crab claws entwined in hair, pipeclay, seeds and resin are captured in glass chambers in the sides of some of the poles. And words, words are everywhere, engraved into wood and stone, and etched into metal, reiterating what is lost and what is remembered. There are names of Aboriginal people and of the members of the First Fleet, there are names of plants in Latin, in English and in Aboriginal languages. The work draws attention to a sense of encounters and interactions across borders. It focuses on the firsthand experience of materials and artefacts that we know by touch, but above all it is language, written down but most vividly present as sound in the murmuring voices, which enters your ears and vibrates in your body, powerfully evoking the intangible nature of memory and emotion.

  Each of these three major artworks are important icons of Australian art; they speak of death and life; and they pin down important historical moments with precision as well as being guides, teaching aids, about respect, knowledge and the distinct presence of past and present Aboriginal countries in Australia.

  Many people see Aboriginal art as for other Aboriginal people, or anthropologists, or tourists looking for something authentically Australian. Yet its recurring themes of close knowledge of land and place, as well as stories of diaspora and dispossession, actually have distinct affiliations with the experience of people all over the world, especially many who have ended up in Australia. The importance of identity, of language and of belonging, is highly significant to today’s mass movements of people. And an ecological approach to life necessitates seeing the planet in a custodial way, with a strong awareness of symbiosis with it, something which indigenous cultures all over the world have always practised. In 2008 in Melbourne Paraguayan art critic Ticio Escobar told me that the Guarani, an indigenous people of the South American interior, say that the bush is their supermarket, their pharmacy and their church. They consider only country that has never been cleared or farmed to be truly alive.

  ——

  Today the dog and I walk along Alexandra Avenue in the late afternoon past the many nineteenth-century houses in the suburb of Rose Park and shuffle through the oak leaves scattered on the ground in great yellow and silver piles. At the end of one of the long avenues of trees I see a stone holding a metal plaque saying Fallen Soldiers Memorial Trees and a list of names. Then I notice each elm tree has a disc driven into the ground next to it with a small cross and a name upon it. All along the wide grassed corridor that lies between the oak tree-lined street seventy-five English elms were planted in 1919, each for a man from here who died in the First World War. How many times have I driven past, seeing and liking the avenue as especially shady, long and evoking Europe, but not aware of the trees’ commemorative function? The dog burrows into the leaves, they release a soft scent – and I remember how once long ago I filled my pockets with dry oak leaves while walking home from school and put them in a cardboard box in my room in an attempt to retain their bittersweet elusive fragrance.

  JUNE

  a leaf from my book

  A thing seen is more believable and long-lasting to us

  than something we hear.

  Albrecht Dürer

  Hanging over the mantelpiece in my bedroom is a framed reproduction of a drawing made by Albrecht Dürer in 1512. I bought it in 1972 at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. On the same trip I went to Nuremberg where Dürer lived for the last nineteen years of his life and placed my hands on the outside wall of his house and silently implored some kind of sympathetic magic to connect me with his spirit. As I had failed to get into art school in 1970 my continuing belief in my destiny to be an artist was for me a kind of shameful secret involving extremes of failure and success. The dream was more feeling and desire than either accomplishment or hard work. My desire was to create, to bring into being, to make exterior and visible what was interior and invisible, to catch a flame of wonder and set down a moment of understanding, to communicate. I was also inspired by the idea of not knuckling down into some conventional existence but to live to the full in making artwork and never to stop, to never retire but always be creating, to never compromise and always to be understood by others through the work. If words and social skills failed me the work would stand in for any incompetence, and thus friendships and relationships would be based on true knowledge rather than a façade.

  This decision was made early in life. I remember confirming it to myself while sitting in the back seat of the family car, in the usual tense silence, somewhere between Sydney and Adelaide, looking out to see the curve of a half-ploughed field divided by a sweeping line, intense green on one side, red-brown on the other. I took a deep breath and thought I definitely know what I want to do, that’s what I will do with my life, show and convey this intensity, this feeling in my heart and gut that this abrupt edge of colour gives me, this visible place of transformation. This was a good feeling, not an act but a decision, but to re
ally belong to me it was important that it remain secret. A secret was a talisman, a source of strength, a place of safety.

  Yet how much of a secret was it? My perception of it is that no-one knew, yet… as a young child I continually asked my grandparents for paints for Christmas and was continually disappointed in getting those hard dry pans of watercolour paints to which water has to be applied and then the paint carefully worked up to get a small amount of watery paint. These paints suggested the making of decorous, careful, slow ‘good’ paintings with fine brushes, not big, energetic, fast ‘bad’ paintings. A bit like the situation at primary school in Austria where we children (or was it just the girls?) were told that we were meant to be like violets, humble and sweet-smelling with drooping heads, not like roses, proud, stiff and beautiful (but I want to be a rose, I cried).

  I persisted with the paint idea and asked my grandparents for paint in tubes and got small silvery metal tubes of watercolour paint. They were tubes but it was still hard to be extravagant with them. I longed to have big fat tubes and squeeze out great thick lumps of paint and really move it around. I did not want to learn how to paint, to follow rules or to become good at following rules. Art was not about rules. Art was about freedom and feelings. If you wanted rules you should be a policeman or a judge.

  I had known thick paint, for in 1961, when I was seven, the whole family went on a skiing holiday in Austria and I was asked by a group of young people staying at the same hotel what I wanted to be when I grew up. My main companion at the time was a large teddy bear, with articulated limbs and a growl box, who was almost as big as I was. He was a replacement for an earlier lamb which had been lost by being accidentally flushed down the toilet. My agitation at this loss had my parents driving me around the streets of San Francisco looking for the lamb I had been attached to since birth which of course they knew wasn’t out walking the streets or having a meal in a diner but stuck in a pipe or heading out to some sewage treatment plant. In despair they introduced me to Teddy, a toy belonging to my older sister that she was not interested in, and that was that. We were inseparable, sleeping and travelling together. His wise glass eyes, his black nose, yellowish fur, his velvet paws and straw stuffing gave him many qualities, both sensual and philosophic.

  Years later in Austria the young people in the hotel we were staying in took an interest in me and asked me what I wanted to be or do most of all. An artist I replied. So much for my secret, yet this was before that decisive moment in front of an Australian field of green growth and red earth. Maybe we were snowed in or there was not enough good snow, but somehow they got some really fat tubes of oil paint and some paper and set me up at a table overlooking the mountains. What shall I paint was my question, what do you love was the answer. Thus I painted a life-size portrait of my beloved friend Teddy in thick yellow ribbons of paint.

  When we left the hotel this painting of a strong body and head covered in yellow fur with a red and blue background was placed in the back window of the car for our further travelling. As it didn’t dry quickly and smelled a lot and smudged everything around it with oily paint, after much swearing it was carefully folded and thrown in a bin. When you are travelling through the mountains having a large wet oil painting on paper in your Hillman Minx is not so great, so sadly the painting was thrown away before it got back to Vienna. I recall no pain at losing the work though I must have been upset; I do remember how he grew to fill the page and then onto another sheet and how thick the paint was and how rich its texture and colour.

  The print of Dürer’s drawing that hangs over my mantelpiece is called Wing of a Blue Roller. It shows the wing of a bird, Coracias garrulous, also known as a European Roller, a bird noted for its blue plumage of shades ranging from pale turquoise to dark ultramarine, with bright reddish-brown on its back. It is called a roller owing to its habit of ‘rolling’, turning over in flight like a tumbler pigeon. Rollers live in Europe but go to Africa for the European winter.

  Dürer has written the date 1512 above the wing and below it the D inside an A that is his signature, both in reddish ink. He would have used a finely pointed feather, probably a goose quill, to write it. The drawing shows the wing realistically but not hyper-real, it is visibly as much a drawing as a painting. The wing is painted on vellum, an early alternative to paper, the processed hide of an animal characterised by its thin smooth durable properties and giving a certain luminosity to a drawing. The large areas of colour are laid down softly with a broad brush and transparent watercolour paint, then delicate lines are drawn over them with a very finely sharpened quill dipped in opaque gouache paint. The drawing shows the layering of feathers that make up a wing, the progression from the stiffer longer flight feathers with their firm shapes to the soft shorter feathers on the body of the bird. The colour of the feathers changes, sometimes gently and sometimes abruptly, from dark blue almost black tips to a lighter blue and then to a very pale blue that is almost white. The painting shows the small overlapping feathers on the shoulder of the wing which outline and pad the bones and are akin to the scales on fish or snakes, evidence of the connection between the bird and other species. The rainbow iridescence of the feathers is suggested by a tremulous quality in the colours like shot silk; the turquoise glints with red, the red glints with blue. The entire drawing is alive with the harmony and rhythm of the wing and its colouring, the evidence of Dürer’s close observational skills, in the care he has taken in recording it and in a release from total precision at the same time, an absorption in detail has allowed him some ecstasy at its depiction. The work is precise but it is not a cold precision, rather a joyful graphic facility that emanates delight and affection.

  Whilst celebrated for his extraordinary imaginative and detailed woodcuts and copperplate engravings of mythological and religious subjects like his three Master engravings The Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Melencolia I, and St Jerome in his Study (both 1514), in this drawing of a bird’s wing Dürer has created a work that is somehow private; it is both miraculous and intimate, personal and communicative. It quietly holds beauty, tranquillity and wonder. This beauty is available to everyone in contemplating something as simple, as complex, as ordinary or extraordinary as a dead bird’s wing, or indeed an insect or a flower. The gesture of the wing is one of expansion and ascension – it is like an open hand. I have always seen this wing drawing as breathtakingly beautiful and tender, and a symbol of aspiration – something that Icarus may have had on his wall.

  In 1961–2 my family lived in Austria. We stayed in an old Hapsburg castle called Schloss Hernstein, forty-five minutes from Vienna, for the end of the winter, the spring and the beginning of the summer. We were to live in a new apartment in Vienna, but as it was still being built the bank that was building the apartment offered us accommodation in the castle that they owned. The yellow-painted Schloss was surrounded by massive green-painted wrought-iron fences with a formal stone entrance, a sweeping circular drive, a great wooden door through which a coach could be driven into the castle’s courtyard, many green-painted wrought-iron lightposts with cast metal statues of green lions holding them up, a lake with an island and large grounds with walking trails to sculptures and an artificial ruin above the castle. Here my sister and I worked with a governess learning to speak and write German in preparation for attending local schools in Vienna. We also learnt embroidery, knitting and crochet, and spent a lot of time outside. An old man and his wife were the caretakers of the castle, and while she showed us how to make apricot dumplings and gave us crushed garlic on bread and dripping to eat, he carved wooden spoons for us, three of which I still have, and wove wastepaper baskets from wood shavings, one of which I still use. The base of the bin is a piece of thick cardboard cut from an old advertising poster. I remember how he cut it from the dark blue and white spotted skirt of a woman, and how it was and is still possible to see the swinging movement of her skirt in the fragment he cut from it. The rhythms of castle life included stopping at the nearby village t
o buy special strawberry lollies, growing vegetables and keeping rabbits, catching butterflies and tadpoles, picking flowers, walking or skiing through the grounds and watching the green sludge of the lake being dredged from a raft.

  My mother encouraged us to keep diaries to make some record of our experiences. We generally ignored this idea, though we both kept autograph books. In Austria this was a serious business, as thoughts of mortality pervaded society and primary school children were very stern and would think nothing of drawing a wreath and writing a verse about death in your autograph book. Under the Gothic St Stefan’s Cathedral in the heart of Vienna human skeletons were on view in the cold dank sulphurous catacombs, and great quantities of yellowy-white wax with which we made spooky, long fingernails could be collected from under the many votive candles. Another child, our friend and apartment neighbour Nora, showed us all these treats. She had decided to be a vegetarian early in life and was very pale and thin with what looked like dark pink bruises under her eyes and especially long dark brown hair. When we played Cowboys and Indians she was Pocahontas with her long thin plait. One day in the apartment playing a game we all pushed against a glass door and she went through the glass and inside her arm the flesh was pink and sponge-like.

  In my autograph book a girl at school drew a neat spray of heart-shaped flowers with coloured pencils and wrote Lern denken mit den Herz und fühlen mit den Geist (learn to think with your heart and to feel with your spirit) quoting German novelist and poet Theodor Fontane. Another girl quoted Goethe: Willst du immer weiter schweifen? Sieh, das Gute liegt so nah, lerne nur das Glück ergreifen, denn das Glück ist immer da. (Why are you always travelling further? See, what is good is so near, only learn to hold onto luck and luck will always be there.)