iDIDJ Australia Didgeridoo Cultural Hub

When beauty walked the world
Nicolas Rothwell | June 04, 2009

IN mid-July 1935, at a modest campsite on the northeast coast of Arnhem Land, an encounter that was to have profound consequences for Australian art took place. Its key participants were young anthropologist Donald Thomson and the overwhelming Wonggu, leader of the Djapu clan.

The two met under the shadow of a deadly clash between Wonggu's family group and a pair of Japanese fishing boats, an affray that had already sparked wild reports of "black war" in the north. They met in uncertainty: a young scholar, going where few Europeans had gone before, and a warrior patriarch at the height of his powers, keen to fend off threats to his ordered world. They spoke for days, as part of Thomson's effort to establish links of understanding between the commonwealth and the people of the far north coast.

At the climax of their meeting, Wonggu, slowly, with great care, prepared and painted two large bark paintings, which Thomson bought from him, along with the brushes and ochre pigment he had used.

Those barks were the beginning of the Thomson Collection, one of the first great assemblages of the art and material culture of north Arnhem Land. Long unseen, the jewels of that collection are on view in an exhibition at the University of Melbourne's Ian Potter Museum of Art.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic is a somewhat formal title for a display of perfectly preserved masterworks gathered from bark painters and sculptors of great power at a hinge moment in the cultural history of the north.

For lovers of Aboriginal art, this is an event of the highest significance. It may be compared with the revelation of a roomful of unknown works from the Florentine trecento: early pieces that hold in them clues to the majesty of the bark painting schools of more recent times.

A similar exhibition was staged last year at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, when the Arnott's Collection of mid-century barks from Groote Eylandt and the Top End was shown. By coincidence, a small, striking display of barks gathered by the American Australian Scientific Expedition in the same region just a few years later is on view at the Art Gallery of NSW.

Exhibitions of this kind clarify our picture of the past; they invite us to recalibrate our understanding of the bark painting tradition, its evolution and the links between its present and its early days.

Until now, it has been easy to look at the first well-known images painted on bark surfaces, made to order for collector Baldwin Spencer at Oenpelli, on the edge of Kakadu, 100 years ago, and see a certain roughness in them, and feel that the barks of recent decades, made for the Western fine art market, represent an obvious advance, a development in artistry and style. But an inspection of the works Thomson gathered during his long sojourns in Arnhem Land quickly dispels that idea.

The first two barks Wonggu prepared for him are distinctive. They are on large, beautifully prepared surfaces of stringybark: one is a grand mythological narrative; the other deals with multiple subjects and serves as a quick guide to several different story cycles and their associated visual styles.

A later piece by the same artist, done in 1942, rivals, in its formal elegance and complexity, any bark painting of the time held in Australian public galleries.

Thomson's emotions on coming face to face with Wonggu, who had a fearsome reputation in the wider world, were strong: he found "a tall, powerful man, frank and completely fearless, with intelligent face, deep-set eyes and a heavy beard, trimmed almost in van Dyck style".

The episode is caught in some of the most evocative of Thomson's photographs: photographs so finely composed they form a separate artistic element lying at the heart of his lifetime's ethnographic work. One of the most famous of these - almost an image of his research, and of its engagement - shows the young anthropologist standing alongside Wonggu and his family. Behind them is Thomson's rudimentary darkroom, built from panels of paperbark; in the background is the sandy shoreline of Trial Bay.

Thomson was not only the first Westerner with time to look for, and eyes keen enough to see, the splendour of the images being displayed before him; he was a trained naturalist and grasped at once the precision of the paintings. He was also a fine-grained thinker; the elaborate, hyper-intellectual world of the Yolngu tribal groups of the region appealed to him. His field notes and diaries provide a detailed sketch of the concepts underlying Yolngu art.

For all the complexity of the subject, little escaped him. He wrote extensively about the minytji, or sacred designs that Yolngu men painted on their skin, designs that recalled the patterns handed down to them by the ancestral creator heroes. As Thomson realised, the finesse and shimmer he saw on the painted barks had been conceived to catch the essence of this ancestral power, to show its strength in flashes of brilliant, eye-dazzling, ochre-painted light.

"The whole sensation expressed to me as light colour," he writes in racing prose in one of his manuscripts, "the penetrating flash, the fixed intent stare of the eye - a wonderful mystical concept". In short, Thomson cracked the code of the Yolngu; he sank deep into that elusive world. His lead has been followed by all the prominent anthropologists and art explainers active today in northeast Arnhem Land.

But his most devoted successor is surely Lindy Allen, senior curator of anthropology at Museum Victoria and conceiver of this landmark show. Allen has spent more than two decades working with the Thomson Collection. Since 1994 she has been quartering the communities and outstations of Arnhem Land, consulting, inquiring, working carefully to see which barks can and cannot be shown: Yolngu ceremonial leaders have spent hours in the Melbourne museum's cavernous storeroom, inspecting the collection's treasure trove: carved objects, paintings, baskets, lumps of ochre, incised message sticks.

Twenty large barks, about one-third of the number Thomson collected, have been cleared for public display and are in the Ian Potter Museum exhibition.

"These are gorgeous pieces," says Allen. "Donald Thomson really understood what they were: re-creations of the drawings inscribed on the bodies of the ancestors when they walked on earth. They were an essence of the Yolngu, an identity. He collected them for their beauty, their shimmer, that sense of power the finest barks can hold."

How was Thomson able to see these things? His insights came, Allen believes, not just from his own high capacity for understanding but from the circumstances in which he found himself, as an incomer in an intact world: "He was surrounded by authentic beauty, by men's ceremonial activity; he saw sculptural forms all round him, he saw body paintings being executed. He grasped the Yolngu aesthetic: he understood at once that people wanted to create a strong, immediate impact with their art."

Indeed, all through his tours in Arnhem Land, art was a leitmotif, though Thomson was always caught up with other ventures.

His pioneering journey to Wonggu's camp was a diplomatic peace mission; his next extended field trip, in wartime, saw him charged with the responsibility to establish an Aboriginal Northern Territory special reconnaissance unit. In 1942, during that stay, while at the unit's base camp, Thomson commissioned a set of 10 synoptic barks that set out Yolngu claims to land, and stand as precursors to the famous "bark petition" dispatched to federal parliament by senior ritual leaders from Yirrkala in 1963.

Many of the objects he collected were made by men who went on to become well-known artists, and fathers and grandfathers of artists; many were collected on the margins of large ceremonial cycles on the central north coast of Arnhem Land. And this gives a clue to the transaction lurking, well-veiled, at the heart of this exhibition. Not only was Thomson drawn to art and to the rituals that shaped Yolngu social life. The Yolngu themselves felt their art was a force for communication. When Wonggu sat down with Thomson and painted his traditional designs, he was showing Thomson the depth of his mental realm and laying out the beliefs he was defending against outsiders.

"The point is not just that Thomson saw the Yolngu men as artists," argues Allen. "It is that the Yolngu men were educating Thomson, drawing him in. They brought him into their world through their art."

For all the breadth of Thomson's research, which embraced kinship systems, magic and medicine, he remained convinced that the bark paintings he had assembled formed the core of his collecting enterprise. He lobbied the commonwealth, unsuccessfully, for funds to prepare a comprehensive book providing an overview of the art of north Arnhem Land.

Only now is his dream being fulfilled, in exhibitions such as this one, which displays pieces drawn from the full range of his journeys, and from the many clan groups he visited. Here his treasures are at last, artworks full of hieratic depth: painted baskets, decorated clap-sticks from the ceremony ground, finely cross-hatched bark designs, totemic stories, sinuous paintings of marrngitj medicine men.

Thomson died in 1970, widely acknowledged as one of the primary anthropological pioneers of north Australia, but his role as a collector of art and describer of landscape has yet to be fully recognised. Commemorative volumes pay tribute to him but fail somehow to catch and hold in balance the many aspects of his adventure-glutted life.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic breaks new ground by displaying 32 of the most majestic pieces in his collection, and making detailed use of Thomson's field notes to tease out the meaning and symbolism in the works. It is a kind of portrait of the collector's own sensibility, but it also builds into a succinct exposition of one core theme in Yolngu art: its role as a channel for ancestral forces to come to light, to show themselves as minytji, the bright designs imprinted in paint on bark.

Throughout his first two years in Arnhem Land, Thomson depended on a single travelling companion, a man who made possible everything he achieved. Rraywala Mildjingi, from the Welingarr clan, negotiated safe passage for Thomson everywhere he went, across hostile country at a time of looming tension. Rraywala went on to become the only enlisted soldier in the reconnaissance unit and, in peacetime, a fervent campaigner for Aboriginal rights.

On his death, after rich, eventful decades passed in remote settlements, Rraywala was buried in an unmarked grave in Darwin's Marrara cemetery. Last month, at a ceremony crowded by Norforce soldiers, dignitaries and anthropologists, a headstone with his name was raised. It symbolises a new determination in the north to write indigenous heroes into their rightful place in the recent past.

On the stone is a quote from Thomson, paying tribute to his friend: "We lived, travelled and hunted together, attended many ceremonies, and finally he adopted me as his elder brother." Those words say everything about the joint enterprise of anthropology and collecting in Arnhem Land in the days, so fresh in memory, when a world of art was waiting for Western eyes and beauty walked the world.

Ancestral Power and the Aesthetic: Arnhem Land Paintings and Objects from the Donald Thomson Collection is at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, until August 23.