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Article Excerpt
When I moved to the United States in 1989 my longtime friend, teacher, and colleague Topsy Napurrula Nelson (1) gave me a painting (see fig. 1). She said to keep it close by. It would help hold us together despite the distance. I have and it did. Napurrula was not a famous desert artist and until she presented me with the painting I did not know she was working in that medium. I was intimately aware of her beautiful body paintings which reflected her vast knowledge of ceremony, land, and the history of her people. I had danced with her and heard the songs that told of the heroic deeds depicted in the painting. I had visited the country of the two sites celebrated in the painting. I had given evidence in land claims for her mothers, her mothers mothers, and her fathers countries. But, it wasnt until my physical link with place and person was about to be severed that she was prepared to paint in a form that could exist separately from the land and the people responsible for caring for that country.
Women, Religion, and Art
Specific beliefs and practices vary across the Australian continent, but at core is the concept of the Dreamtime and Dreamings. (2) In the long ago past, in the formative era, the land was a shapeless, formless mass. Across this Dreamtime landscape traveled ancestral beings. The paths of these Dreamings crisscrossed the land, marked out the territories of different language and clan groups, and established the Law, a moral code which informs and unifies all life. The power of the Dreamings can be evoked in ceremony, and the explanatory power of the stories of the Dreamtime is vast. Their heroic deeds are inscribed on the land itself. Hence, in the desert a rocky outcrop may indicate the place where the ancestral dog had her puppies, and a low ridge may take its shape from the sleeping body of the emu. Looking at the red streaks on a cliff face, one knowledgeable in the ways of the ancestors might recall blood shed in a territorial dispute. Tall ghost gums (Eucalyptus) stand as mute witness to where the Lightn ing brothers flashed angrily overhead to their father, Rain; and the lush growth of bush berries might be the legacy of the prudent care by two old grandmothers. Particular places are linked through the travels of such ancestors whose power remains at the sites.
(2.) Each of the several hundred languages of Aboriginal Australia has a word that glosses this religious philosophy. In Warlpiri, one of the desert languages spoken by Napurrula, it is called the jukurrpa. For Arrernte speakers, including the Alyawarre and Anmatyerre, it is alyterre. For the Ngarrindjeri, there is a belief in the muldawali, the creative heroes whose deeds are recalled in stories and whose bodies are visible in the land.
To the living, who trace direct relationships to these Dreamings, falls the responsibility to give form and substance to this heritage in their daily routines and their ceremonial practice. It is they who must keep the Law, visit and protect the sites, and it is they who may use the country and enjoy its bounty. Relationships to the land and the founding drama of ancestral activity are traced in many ways. It may be through the lineage of any of ones four grandparents, or to ones place of birth or burial of a parent. This network of structured relationships is further extended by celebration of sites of sentimental significance and economic advantage. Yet another level of land-based alliances is established through marriage. Multiple modes of "being of a place" allow that, although circumstances may change, the chain of connectedness to the land can continue to be asserted by the living. In theory, there will always be someone to care for the country, to sing for it, paint it, and hold the stories.
Women play a number of critical roles in the maintenance and transmission of knowledge of the Dreamtime, but the classic texts on Aboriginal religion were written as if women were the "feeders, breeders and follow the leaders," marginal persons whose lives were mainly profane. (3) Too often male observers--be they missionaries, bureaucrats, anthropologists, or art advisers--assumed that what women were doing was trivial, inconsequential, and of significance to women only. Further, they assumed that men could speak for the entire society. With several notable exceptions, womens ceremonies were not even included in the religious domain. (4) Rather, they were categorized as magic, personal, and peripheral. Within this patriarchal logic all that emerges from the religious domain will be the province of men. Womens quick fingers might be taught to make craft items but certainly not anything associated with the sacred. Indigenous and nonindigenous women have begun to rewrite the earlier patriarchal scripts of Ab original religion, and the received wisdom that the renowned artists will be men is rapidly being transformed by the work of a number of Indigenous women painters and multimedia artists. What happens when women work with women? How do new sensibilities generated at the intersections of the shifting politics of Indigenous and womens rights influence womens art?
Here I focus on the work of four women artists--two from central Australia, Emily Kngwarreye (ca. 1900-1996) and Topsy Napurrula Nelson (1937-99) and two from southeastern Australia, Ellen Trevorrow (1955- ) and Muriel Van Der Byl (1943- ). Over the past twenty-five years I have had the pleasure of watching each of these women at work, visiting their sacred places, listening to their stories and songs, and gathering wild bush tucker (food) with them. I have given expert testimony concerning their rights and responsibilities in land and its sites in a number of cases. My anthropological research in central Australia dates from 1976 when my children and I lived for eighteen months in a desert community, Warrabri-now known as Ali-Curang (Alekarenge)- about 270 miles north of Alice Springs. (5) My initial project was to document the religious lives of desert women, which at the time was underreported and underappreciated. It was there that I first came to know Napurrula and it was from there, over the following decades, that I visited a number of neighboring communities, including that of Emily Kngwarreye. My work in the well-watered land of the Ngarrindjeri in the southeast began in 1996 with a consultancy on an application to protect a sacred place from a proposed development and grew into more in-depth and ongoing ethnographic research in the region.
Emily Kngwarreyes breathtaking, expansive landscapes evoke her relationship to her country in Anmatyerre territory, on and around the Utopia cattle station (ranch), about 150 miles northeast of Alice Springs, and have found an appreciative international audience. Napurrulas fine-grain representations of her relationship to her country and its Dreamings endure in the ceremonies that celebrate her places-to the north, south, and west of Ali-Curang. They have a much more restricted public. However, both painters draw on a repertoire of symbols that encode intimate knowledge of ritual relationships to land. Muriel Van Der Byl, like Emily Kngwarreye, works with silk as well as canvas; but she also paints on small boxes, dishes, tins, and a range of found items. Ellen Trevorrow is a cultural weaver whose work, like that of Emily Kngwarreye, has an international audience. The work of both Ellen Trevorrow and Muriel Van Der Byl draws on Ngarrindjeri beliefs about land, the power of particular places, and the wisdo m of their elders.
"New Schools": From Localized Beliefs to Global Markets
Recognition of the importance of the work of women has been slow. A rich mix of art advisers, educators, missionaries, local property owners, government funding, and savvy collectors has introduced new materials and techniques; and, along with the shifting sensibilities and appetites of the art market, race and gender politics, Australian government policies have framed the emergence of "new schools." Here I track some of the gendered moments of this complex history. For the most part, the visible, public face of the action has been male dominated. Men painted and men set the international agenda regarding style, price, and the potential for innovation. On the one hand, this has meant that women have been ignored and that their work has been underresourced and underresearched. On the other hand, it has meant that women have been relatively free from the constant need to act as informants for outsiders. They were not tutored to produce works that represent "Aboriginal culture" for the consumption of others. T oday the range of women s art rivals and, in some instances, eclipses that of the men. And, on certain occasions, it is now women who represent "Aboriginal culture." (6)
Rex Battarbees 1943 visit to Hermannsburg, a Lutheran Mission eighty-five miles west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, sparked the growth of the Hermannsburg school of water color artists several years later. Albert Namatjira (1902-59), with his renderings of the MacDonnell Ranges, is probably the best known of this school. His story is an ode to assimilation-the "primitive" could learn to paint "just like a white man." However, within the more contemporary politics of selfdetermination, it has become a tale of paternalism with Namatjira cast as one of its most tragic victims. He was granted citizenship, an honor which conferred drinking rights at that time denied to Aborigines who were "wards of the state," but he fell afoul of the law regarding sharing alcohol with nonenfranchised Arrernte kin, was jailed, and died dispirited and disillusioned. (7)
The story of race relations in Australia and the conditions that might give rise to artists and schools changed dramatically with the 1967 constitutional referendum. Ninety percent of the voting population endorsed an amendment to the federal constitution so that Aborigines would be counted in the national census and the federal government would have concurrent rights with the states to pass laws for the Indigenous population. Enter Geoff Bardon who, in 1971, came to teach school at Papunya, a government settlement (reservation) established in 1959, about 150 miles northwest of Alice Springs. (8) Unlike earlier educators, he did not want to impose Western standards. He attempted to get the children to make art but found them reluctant. Instead, two senior men, who had been doing yard work at the school, offered to paint a mural on a school wall. More volunteered. Via the school Bardon supplied boards, paints, and brushes. The men painted Snake Dreaming, Wallaby, Water, Honey Ant, and more. They took the sacre d mosaics, which are painted on the ground during male ceremonies, and made community art. With the assistance of Obed Raggett, Bardon drew diagrams and documented the stories depicting the relationships between specific sites and Dreamings. The paintings can be read as maps of the country by those schooled in the Law, but what could and should be made available to a wider public fueled local debates regarding the propriety of maldng sacred art public. Bardons influence on the style-he) encouraged neatness, restricted the palette to "earth colors," and discouraged anything Western-has been debated by critics. (9)) Initially, marketing was a problem but the Western Desert "dot and circle"...
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