YIWARRA KUJU – The Canning Stock Route

Nyaru 2007
Brandy Tjungarrayi
Warlayirti Artists
149 x 74.5cm image courtesy of Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route
National Museum of Australia 2010 

Australian Museum, Sydney - until April 29, 2012

In Western Australia, in that vast, inhospitable outback terrain, three deserts merge; the Great Sandy, Little Sandy and the Gibson. This hot and isolated land was the birthplace of Rover Thomas, one of Australia's most acclaimed artists. It was also

the territory traversed by the Canning Stock Route, built in the 1930s to trek cattle. The route happened to cross the traditional lands of many Aboriginal people and it is this interface that is explored in the Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route exhibition at Sydney's Australian Museum.

Although our National and State art galleries hold significant collections of Aboriginal art, for many locals the exposure to Aboriginal art is via the plethora of tacky souvenirs depicting mass produced dot paintings, plastered over tea towels and t-shirts. The popularity of cheap Aboriginal art and its mass manufacture has saturated and limited perceptions of what Aboriginal art is all about. 

As Germaine Greer wrote in The Guardian, (9.11.2005) "The punters may have realised that Aboriginal art, in common with all other art, is mostly bad. What they have now to learn is how to recognise the relatively high proportion of Aboriginal art that is not just good, but sublime."

Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route is an exhibition that has amassed the sublime, the ethnographic ‘otherness’, which remains a mystery to the ordinary viewer.  It is an historic exhibition, a vivid explanation of the stock route history, its colonial chronology, the topography of the land, its geographic specificity. Yet the visual brilliance of this exhibition, and its over- riding spiritual power overwhelms the factual historic story utterly. It enables us to attempt to appreciate what this vast expanse of land means to the exhibiting Indigenous artists and it is nothing but overwhelmingly spiritual.

We have so few words that do justice to what this art evokes. “Spiritual” is such a loaded word, the associations are so new age and irritating.   The exhibition looks at what “country” means to Aboriginal people.  The land is seen not as a landscape, but as a spiritual being, the sacred core of the many indigenous people who continue to share it.

Looking at the exhibition and attempting to decode meaning through the parameters of western art is simply unfulfilling.  A purely formalist interpretation will perceive the intensity of colour relationships, spatial arrangements that echo abstract expressionism, composition that could, at times, be categorised as naïve, flat, one dimensional.  Yet through a western prism we see nothing but the outline of a cosmology that is so much more complex. So “other worldly”  that although this exhibition has trailed through my consciousness for months I still struggle to find language that in some way reflects the emotive impact of the relationship between these artists and their mother land.

The Ngurrara Canvas by Ngurrara artists and claimants
1000 x 800cm
image courtesy of Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route
National Museum of Australia 2010 

The Canning Stock Route is an 1850 kilometre track that was forged between water holes in the desert. It operated as a stock route for a few decades in the early 1900s yet its significance was its incursion across ancient Aboriginal land and the conflict and cross-cultural encounter that occurred as a result.  

The forging of the stock route led to the dispersal of many of the Indigenous people whose blood relatives had lived in this expanse of West Australian desert for millennia. Interestingly, many of the painters that returned from this vast diaspora to their ancestral soil painted their land with the intimacy of undisturbed memories; small scale, detailed paintings of home and earth.  Some painters also recalled historic events that occurred on the Stock route, and depicted the radical intersection of white explorers with ancestral spirits and serpents that inhabit the water holes.

Yiwarra Kuju, came about as a result of a collaboration between a West Australian arts organisation, called FORM, that took 100 or so artists with enduring connection to these lands, back to the stock route for a series of outback art camps, to commemorate the 100 years of Alfred Canning’s expedition.  127 finished works, including paintings, contemporary cultural objects and documentary material form the basis of this exhibition.

Kiriwirri 2008
Jan Billycan, Yulparija Artists
Acrylic on linen, 79.5 x 59.5
image courtesy of Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route
National Museum of Australia 2010

One of the most interesting features of Yiwarra Kuju is the collaborative works done by several members of a clan simultaneously. In this example, 3 artists working together paint the ancestral story of the Seven Sisters, Minyipuru Jukurrpa. This collaborative art making is a powerful display of shared history, ancestral knowledge and familial/cultural ties. It reflects a worldview that most non aboriginal people will never experience. 

Minyipuru (Seven Sisters) 2007
Muni Rita Simpson, Rosie Williams, Dulcie Gibbs - Martumili Artists
Acrylic on linenimage courtesy of Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route
National Museum of Australia 2010 

For the stockmen and explorers, the Canning Stock Route was a vital route for delivering cattle from the West Kimberley to growing populations in the south west of the state. For the Aboriginal people of this area it was their desert country sacred to them, the Ngurra kuju walyja, a term desert people use to describe one family, divided into distinct cultural family groups. Each group had special responsibilities and sacred dreaming knowledge. This radical juxtaposition of what land means, what water in a desert-scape means, what place, time and history mean is beautifully examined in this stunning exhibition. On the one hand, Alfred Canning’s detailed, clinical maps provide a geographic/historic context, a useful anchor for a non-Indigenous viewer.  Yet cleverly, the exhibition unfolds to show us that the Canning Stock Route is not so much about a road with wells but about the way Aboriginal artists view the ancient land the Route crosses, and the mapping of their continuing relationships between themselves and their country.

Artists' bush camp at Well 36
photograph by Tim Acker, 2007
image courtesy of Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route
National Museum of Australia 2010

The National Museum of Australia in Canberra is the owner of the entire Collection on display. In 2010-2011 the exhibition was held at the National Museum. It was brilliantly presented and well attended. It is now on view at Sydney’s Australian Museum. Unfortunately the current exhibition in Sydney is a little more dowdy than the National’s,  the lighting and hang is disappointing, the rooms feel somewhat tired and drab despite the luminous brilliance of the artwork. However, this example of institutional cooperation is to be commended and we hope future sharing of collections continue. The strength of Yiwarra Kuju - The Canning Stock Route more than compensates for the Australia’s Museum’s technical limitations and does carry itself proudly irregardless.

Karla Dickens - Black Madonna at Casula Powerhouse

Black Madonna VI, 2009 mixed media on canvas
image courtesy of casula powerhouse

Black Mother 1, 2009 mixed media on canvas
image courtesy of casula powerhouse

Holy Mother II, 2009 mixed media on canvas

image courtesy of casula powerhouse

Sumptuous and textured, laden with floral motifs, beads, and mother of pearl, Karla's new works invite you to almost touch. Black Madonna is a sensuous, introspective yet life affirming and deliciously feminine exhibition. Using a lush and uninhibited palette of bright colours and media, this series of nine explores themes of m aternity, spiritual protection and memory. Religious iconography and Aboriginality are central to the framing of the image of the Mother,fortifying against the fear of malevolent spirits, curses and death.

Bold retro fabrics and faded upholstery florals form the background for many of Karla's new mixed media work. Highly decorative they also invite association. For me the associations were intrinsically female; memories of my grandmother, of being a child fascinated by textured cloth, the smell of a widow's formal parlour room, the embroidered cushions on a faded settee. One can remember what it is to feel small, in a vast old house with curios, spirits and dust.

Black Madonna was inspired by Dicken's recent experience of a malevolent spirit that invaded her home and attacked her daughter and herself. Aboriginal elders were summoned to purge her home of its presence. During what was a most difficult time Karla turned to the image of the black Madonna for protection. In all this series the mother is central and powerful, she holds, nurtures and shields the living. Her body is also a fountain of life and regeneration. Heaving with texture, Liberty flowers, beads and tropical flowers she is also
goddess of memory, darkness and renewal.

Karla's work is both intentional and casual, occasionally almost childlike. In once piece precise floral collage lie beneath the arch of a clumsily painted rainbow. Under the Madonna words such as Holy Mother, Divine Mother, Black Mother are written with a natural unpolished candor. Some of her smaller pieces are far tighter, the composition is refined and clean. On a larger scale the effect is more organic, naive and loose, occasionally rough in places. The other small works, Shining 1 and Shining 2, combine both styles. Using delicate mother of pearl tiles, shimmering and refined, heavy outlined figures are illuminated by broad spontaneous white brushstrokes.

The Black Madonna has been portrayed for hundreds of years, across cultures. Karla's first Madonna was a leather shadow puppet that also had the shape of Sheela na Gigs, the Irish female creative spirit. Karla too is of Aboriginal and Irish descent. The Black Madonna has been a controversial figure that has refused to be buried or forgotten. She has been revered, privately and in some cases illicitly for eons. She is the outsider's protectorate. For Karla the fascination is apt. The Church refused to bury her grandmother and her uncle due to the nature of their death and lives. In return Karla's family forbade her to attend Church. In this realm of marginalization and expulsion, Karla has retrieved this oft abandoned deity and given her centrality and prominence. She has wrapped her in flowers, adorned her with jewels and invited you to worship. A defiantly spiritual exhibition Karla Dicken's Black Madonna was on at the Casula Powerhouse, 1 Casula Rd, Casula.

Adam Hill: Caste-ing Call

Half-caste ten in the morning

2010 synthetic polymer and eucalypt leaves on Aust. made cotton canvas
165 x 200
image courtesy of Harrison Galleries

Adam Hill paints with incendiary bravado; a sharp palette of vivid colour, bold graphic lines and furious symbolism. Caste-ing Call, his current exhibition at Harrison Galleries, takes aim at the cultural hegemony imposed on black Australia. A brilliant exhibition rich with political message, Hill depicts how white Australia engages with black, how it voraciously seeks Aboriginal minerals, women, spirituality, cultural control and at what cost and consequence.

Caste-ing Call features seventeen paintings. Half-caste 10 in the morning depicts an Aboriginal woman striding through desert dust in stilettos, long black hair, huge breasts barely covered by a taut bikini, smiling sensuously. She holds up a placard with number 10 in white letters, which Hill says refers to the movie 10 staring Bo Derek. In letters painted in reverse an ad reads,’Wanted Extras Stereotypically Half Caste Classic White Teeth Characteristic Skinny Legs Broadish Nose’.

The advertisment lists the Australian film industry's obligatory features for an Aboriginal extra. Through this prism an Aboriginal women must climb in order to be given a part, one can only read the ad correctly in a mirror because through this reflection we see what we want to.

This exhibition exposes and debunks commonly held cultural stereotypes that are routinuely bandied about ignorantly. What is an Aboriginal? Where and how is a 'half-caste placed in a heirachy of racial identity? Popular notions of racial characterisitcs are exposed. As the painter recalls, ‘…my personal favourite…”oh yes…you DO have that type of forehead!”’.

The term ‘caste’ has tremendous load in Aboriginal parlance. It is still used as an insult in some communities and in others it is still a way of verifying identity. ‘Are you a half caste?’ - a question that demands a response, a clarification. Because if you don’t have the skinny legs, broadish nose, then what are you? The requirement to vouch for one’s cultural identification and demonstrate to which ‘half’ one still belongs is an odious tagging that occurs within boththe Aboriginal and non Aboriginal community. Caste is a term with eons of historic baggage and remains divisive and affronting.

He hasn't got a leg to stand on
2010 synethetic polymer on canvas
65 x 90cm
image courtesy of Harrison Galleries

In He Hasn’t Got a Leg to Stand On a one-legged man pulls a toy cart containing a small child and kangaroo. Cultural identity is divided into the ‘essentialist’ black man, the desert dwelling native and his ‘half caste’ progeny. The sign on the cart says Halfies Cart, Tried and Tested and the large letters around the one-legged man in classic ‘native’ pose says Hop in Hell, an ironic reference to the genetic load this man may one day carry.

Painted words and symbolism repeatedly feature in Hill’s powerful work. Frequently we see a scorched, fractured sun smouldering menacingly in a harsh blue sky, its nuclear fire matched by the fury in Hill’s paintings. Burning sun, wasted people, parched landscape, the dysfunctional icons of a bright land where racial tension smoulder and lie. Omnipresent seven clouds hover low in the sky, these are the artists depiction of the seven government states and territories that serve as an oppressive glass ceiling above Aboriginal people.

Wong Place Wong Time
2009 Synthetic polymer on canvas
150 x 250 cm
Image courtesy of Harrison Galleries

Far from being politically didactic and predicatable in left/right inclination, Hill takes aim at hypocrisy from wherever it flows. Wong Place at the Wong Time puts Penny Wong’s decisions as Minister for Climate Change, Energy Efficiency and Water as the cause for the parched landscape, dying lizards and denuded environment. Using sharp edged humour Mine over Matter illustrates a light haired Aboriginal man walking along with a carrot dangling from his spear. In the background a large sign is emblazoned with the words, “Your Future Is Mine’.

There is a vitality in Hill’s paintings that enlivens his sharp political discourse even when it hinges on bitter rage. He straddles the capacity to deliver a thunderous bolt of political discourse with a striking graphic style and humour. It is appealing even to those he critiques. He has exhibited his works in the most unlikely settings, the foyer of the AMP building in Circular Quay being one of the more corporate settings. His work is urban and reflects his strong interest and support of street art and graffiti.

Originally from Penrith in Sydney’s west, he now lives and works in Redfern, in Sydney’s inner city. Caste-ing Call is Adam Hill’s latest exhibition and well worth a visit; this artist has a penchant for provocation and a larrikin’s way with language, his paintings are rich with colour and the passion of a forceful message.