Transcriber: Hiroko Kawano Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
Over 30 years ago, in 1987,
I set up a small art gallery in London.
It was a modest affair in a little shop space in Fitzrovia -
at then, at that time, a bohemian and rather rundown quarter of London.
The inspiration and impetus behind this venture
was my desire to show Aboriginal art in London.
It was at the time relatively unknown.
Astonishingly to say,
and shockingly to say,
when I was born in Melbourne in 1955,
Aboriginal people were not full citizens of their own country.
They were wards of the state,
and as wards of the state,
they were not able to marry or to travel without permission.
They were not allowed to own property,
and they were not even legally responsible for their own children.
And it was not until I was 12
that in 1967, a referendum was held,
and the Australian people voted
that aboriginals could be counted amongst its citizens.
And yet despite this,
people living in the white -
the white Europeans living in these coastal cities
were still not interested in Aboriginal people.
And to them,
they remained largely invisible.
They had no voice,
and they had no one willing to listen.
So, standing in front of these paintings in Alice Springs,
I was full of a sense of wonder:
How had this happened?
They were postcards from another world.
And although Aboriginal art was certainly new at that time to me -
and new to many Australians -
it was also old.
Very old.
In fact, it's the oldest continuous artistic tradition in the world,
stretching back in an unbroken line some 50,000 years -
far longer than Stonehenge,
than the pyramids of ancient Egypt
or of the caves of Lascaux -
but also, at the same time, it was very new.
These paintings, the traditional designs,
had been painted on bodies in ceremonies,
using natural ochre.
They had been made as huge, grand mosaics in the sand
and carved into trees and painted on rocks.
But they were ephemeral and fugitive.
And, as I realized in Alice Springs, a huge change had taken place.
In a great act of generosity,
Aboriginal people had set down their art in a permanent and portable form -
on paper, on canvas.
And what's more,
they had allowed us, uninitiated people,
to see it.
And this was a great and extraordinary development
that had happened since I had left the country.
And it had begun in a little place called Papunya in 1971.
In the '60s, the Australian government,
in an effort to assimilate the Aboriginals,
had built settlements in the desert,
and they had rounded up the Aboriginal people
and forced them into these barbed wire encampments.
Papunya was built for 500 people,
but a thousand Aboriginals were put in there,
often people from different language groups
who for millennia had perhaps been at war
and didn't want to live in close proximity.
People deprived of their right to roam across the land
and follow their songlines
sat in despair in the sand.
Into this depressing scene of despair,
in 1971,
a young schoolteacher from New South Wales,
Geoffrey Bardon,
came to take up a post at the Papunya school.
Geoffrey was entranced by the countryside that he saw around Papunya
and the beautiful rock formations.
And he was also intrigued
as he watched the schoolchildren drawing in the sand in their break
and telling stories to one another using their fingers.
The old men watched his interest, and they were delighted.
It has to be said
that at that time in Australia it was almost apartheid.
The European people working at the settlements -
the health workers, the garage mechanics and the shopkeepers -
had no truck with the Aboriginals
and no interest in engaging with them at all.
So Geoffrey's interest was something really special to the old men.
And encouraged by it, they started talking to him.
And you see them -
you will see him sitting here with old Long Tom Onion.
And the men explained to him
how the land had been created by ancestors in the past.
And Geoffrey suddenly thought,
'This is astonishing.
Why is it that I am teaching the children Western things
when we're not even acknowledging this extraordinary culture
of which they are a part?'
And so, in consultation with the old men,
it was decided to paint a mural on the school wall at Papunya.
The minute the idea of painting the mural was mooted,
the whole mood of the community changed.
No longer did people sit in despair.
They started excitedly talking about what would be an appropriate story
to paint on the wall.
Something that could be seen by everybody,
not just the initiated.
And eventually, it was decided to paint the Honey Ant Mural.
And you see it here, painted in 1971, on the school wall at Papunya.
Geoffrey had unleashed this torrent.
And all across the desert, news of it spread like wildfire.
The next community to take up the paintbrushes
was Yuendumu.
The Warlpiri people there
had been forced to live in little, hot, tin Porsche cabins
sent up by the government in an effort to civilize them.
And so their first act of cultural resurgence
was to paint the doors of these little hot tin cabins,
although why it was deemed a civilizing influence
to live in a hot tin box when it's regularly 40 degrees
I don't know.
But one thing united these disparate artists,
and that was that the genesis of all their painting came from the land.
This was something very different for the white settlers.
The interior of Australia was regarded as something hostile
and something very, very frightening.
And you can see here
a Western cartographer's view of the Great Sandy Desert,
a vast, featureless plain:
no distinguishing features,
no mountains, no rocks, no rivers, no streams and no lakes.
And this is an Aboriginal vision of exactly the same piece of country.
But it is important also to realise
that Aboriginal culture is not a single, homogeneous entity.
This is Australia as it was when first encountered by the European.
And all these different colours represent different language groups.
Of course, some of them have gone,
but many have remained.
And the art from these different places
is quite as distinctive
as the different languages and different physical appearances
of the people that live in them.
One of the first exhibitions I did in my little gallery in Fitzrovia
was by the great Anmatyerre artist from Papunya, Clifford Possum.
I had met Clifford in a creek bed on my visit to Alice Springs.
And he was sitting under a tree,
and I said to him,
'Clifford, would you like to have an exhibition in London?'
He looked at me for a long time,
and then he went, 'Queen.'
And I went, 'Yes, of course.
Of course, you can meet the Queen if you come to London.'
So he looked at me for a long time,
and then he went, 'Okay.'
I sent him the money for an airfare,
and a year later,
I went to pick him up at Heathrow.
And he arrived in his cowboy hat and cowboy shirt.
When no sooner had we got in the car to go back to the gallery,
then he said, 'Queen.'
And of course, I had forgotten my promise that he could meet the Queen.
But thinking that it would be so exciting for him to be in London
and if we drove past Buckingham Palace that would be enough,
so we did.
And as we drove past,
I said, ‘Clifford, that is where the Queen lives’,
and he went, 'In. In.'
(Laughter)
And then the penny dropped
that I, like generations of Europeans before me,
had promised something
that I had no intention and no ability to deliver to an Aboriginal person,
and that he, on the strength of my promise, had trusted me.
And as an elder of the Anmatyerre people,
he was going to come to Britain to meet the leader of the British people.
And I realised
he would lose tremendous face if that was not the case.
That night was the opening of his exhibition.
It was an astonishing affair.
These extraordinary, beautiful, mythopoetic canvases
with strange, seemingly abstract designs
coming from the middle of the desert.
People were entranced and intrigued,
and everyone was happy except me.
And my unhappiness must have shown on my face
because a very nice man came up to me, and he said,
'What's the matter, Rebecca?
I mean this is a wonderful exhibition.
You should be so happy.'
And I explained to him what I had done.
And he then understood.
The next morning, I was just about to go and wake up Clifford.
I had not had much sleep, and I felt so sad about what I had done.
And just before I did so, the phone rang:
‘Good morning, Rebecca.'
It was the nice man from the evening before.
‘It's George Harwood here,
and I've spoken to my cousin the Queen,
and she would be delighted
(Laughter)
to see you and Clifford at the palace at two o'clock this afternoon.'
The paintings -
in order for you to understand the aboriginal paintings,
it's important to know
that although they seem abstract to us
they're not.
They are paradoxically rich in significant meaning.
And so, a lot of these images are created as though from an aerial perspective -
as though you were a bird flying over the land, looking down.
And so, if we were going to have,
or if we were having this talk in the desert in Australia -
which would be really fun -
you would all be sitting cross-legged in the sand,
and the imprint of your buttocks would make a U-shape as seen from above.
So whenever you see that shape in a painting,
it represents a human presence.
So these paintings, also,
are not just maps of where to find food and water,
which is incredibly important for a nomadic people,
but also they are tales of the creation of the land
and how to live in it.
And that was the subject matter of the exhibition of Clifford's work.
Now I…
Because of what was happening in Australia,
it was being observed
that Aboriginal people were getting a new voice,
a new pride in their work and in themselves.
And this was not unacknowledged
by other indigenous countries across the world.
And I was in a very privileged position to witness this at firsthand.
Because I had worked an exhibited Aboriginal art,
I started getting requests from all over the world
to show indigenous groups.
And in the early '90s, it was a group of Kalahari Bushmen,
from the San people, from Botswana.
They, like the Aboriginals, had started transferring their ancient designs
into a permanent and portable manner.
So no longer painting on rocks or caves,
but they were painting on canvas and prints.
And their exhibition in London was really wonderful.
They had this extraordinary vision of negative space.
So, often you thought you were looking at a particular creature,
but it was the space in the background that really was the important thing.
Now,
in Western art - art in our Western culture -
art has a special status,
and, indeed, it has a special place.
But it can sometimes seem like an aesthetic add-on -
something that's not really as important as the business of living.
But in tribal indigenous cultures,
art is absolutely at the heart of things.
It is central
to the political, the personal, the social and the sacred.
It is indivisible from society.
This is the painting I wanted to show you.
In indigenous society,
art is indivisible from life.
And some of these paintings now
are not just beautiful, extraordinary objects;
they are also legal documents.
And on this painting,
you see the artists from Fitzroy Crossing.
When they came to visit me,
I said, 'What would you like to do?'
And they said,
'We would like to go and see where the trouble started.'
I said, 'What do you mean where the trouble started?'
And they said,
'We would like to go and see where Captain Cook came from.'
And so we went to Whitby on the train, and it was an extraordinary journey.
And when they saw Captain Cook's simple, little wooden chair
and his little, simple house,
they went, 'Okay, now we understand.
He was just like us.'
And it was an amazing visit.
But here they are,
sitting on a vast painting in the sand.
And I used to be a lawyer,
and many of the people that went through law school with me
are now judges and barristers.
And they sometimes go out to the desert,
and they sit in their wigs and gowns around the peripheries of vast paintings
like this.
And one by one,
the artists will stand up on their bit of the painting,
and they will say,
'I know this is my land.
I can prove it was my land because it was my grandmother's land,
my great-great grandmother's land,
my great-great-great grandmother's land.
And I know where the water holes are.'
And you can see that there are many, many circles in this painting,
which represent the water holes.
Now, you'll recall
the Western cartographers’ view of the Great Sandy Desert,
where the Walmajarri people live.
And there was nothing.
There were no water holes.
But they know how to find them.
Having lived there for millennia,
they know how to find them and how to look after them.
And, indeed, when the British Parliament declared Australia 'terra nullius',
uninhabited land,
one of the tenets by which they did so
was the fact that the indigenous people had no system of land management
or agriculture,
whereas, of course, we know now
that they had a really sophisticated and extraordinary way of living
in the remarkable and rare continent that is Australia.
And I think that there's such a -
I love this painting, and I love the people sitting on it
because you just see their generosity and their desire to share -
despite the vicissitudes that we have visited upon them -
their extraordinary culture.
And I do think that through art,
knowledge and power of indigenous people can be unbound.
But I also think
that as a means of communication,
of sharing knowledge and understanding,
it also can serve to bind us together.
Thank you.
(Applause)