Canberra, of course, is more than the National Gallery of Australia, whose National Indigenous Triennial is going to be a first port-of-call for any serious afficionado of FN art. Right next door, the National Portrait Gallery has jumped on the Kaylene Whiskey bandwagon to feature the wild woman of Indulkana’s cartoonish paintings enmasse. And the National Museum is just about to close a surprisingly successful show on the cultural history of the Chinese migrants who created families with Aboriginal Australians.
Behind the glorious ying and yan images that the Yankunytjatjara Kaylene Whiskey has made by crossing her APY mythology with both Christianity and the American TV stars of her childhood lies the remarkable history of her home township of Indulkana. Its first building in just 1982 was its art centre – Iwantja. An early photo GV in the exhibition shows a world of bleak, brown flatness in which a tiny patch of housing now sits – from which one can easily jump to the conclusion that art would be an absolute necessity to cheer this world up, and that wild colouration would tend to be the choice of Iwantja artists. And the extraordinary number of those artists leaping forth from every one of those houses in Iwantrja is surely proof of my theory.
From founding father and elder Alec Baker to the zany Tiger Yaltangki, from the grey and white healer Betty Muffler to satirical portraitist Vincent Namatjira – guided by his late father-in-law, Jimmy Pompey, king of the cowboys, away from Hermannsberg. Variety is everything. Kaylene Whiskey hardly stands out here.
What’s revealed by the NPG show, though, is that she actually had 8 or 9 years pre-portraiture. So one would love to know what influences encouraged her to come up with an early artwork like Rikina Kungka Kutja in 2015, showing Wonder Woman losing her crown to a wicked spirit/mamu. Kaylene, of course, finds the crown, but only after she’s dyed her hair pineapple – or is that banana, as both feature? – yellow! The style is a mix of desert dotting and cartoon segmentation, and one has to wonder whether mingkulpa – that splendid desert wacky tobacco which features in many a later painting, played a role alongside multiple cultural causal factors.
For the last, 2025 work in the show is called ‘Come Party with Me’ and features Tina Turner kicking up her heels with a mingkulpa teapot, Cher as guest of honour and Kaylene wearing a fetching cat mask. In between, many a canvas contains Whiskey’s own take on the Seven Sisters songline – a line-up of super-women, both fictional and real, often pursued as in the songline by a predatory male – would you believe Michael Jackson!
Is this all a joke? No way. For the artist herself, quoted in a Thames & Hudson tome that accompanies the exhibition, declares, “I want my work to show a strong, positive message about life in a remote Indigenous community. We’re proud to live on our land and hold on to our culture and our language. I’m from the generation that grew up with Coca-Cola and TV, as well as Tjukurpa and bush tucker, so I like to have a bit of fun with combining those two different worlds”.
She’s also done a lovely take on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus – a self-portrait on a surf board, naked apart from Wonder Woman’s handy offer of a cloak. And a recent series shows a political slant as Whiskey takes NT tourist brochures that show country minus any APY inhabitants, whom she paints back in. Less successful is KTV, her over-long cartoon film made with the help of most of the Indulkana population – which is fun in small doses.
Cross the lake to the National Museum, and ‘Our Story – Aboriginal Chinese People in Australia’ is a lot more serious despite its invention of the word ‘Chinariginal’! One might well see it and the accompanying book of the same name as partners for Henry Reynolds’s recent “gravity-defying book that turns our colonial and national history on its stubborn head” (as Clare Wright’s blurb has it on Looking from the North’s cover. For a surprising number of the Chinariginals featured in the exhibition call themselves Darwinites as though that was a sufficient multi-racial descriptor. And it’s justified by the Havnen sisters who feature in the exhibition’s engrossing filmed material, who point out that not that long ago, Darwin had five times as many Chinese as white inhabitants. How the pioneering geographer, Griffith Taylor would have rejoiced at this confirmation of his 1920s view that the North was better suited for tropical people than Poms. But he was driven out of White Australia!
‘Our Story’ is the work of the purely Chinese Zhou Xiaoping – another pioneer, an artist who migrated and almost immediately headed North to hang out with Johnny Bulun Bulun in Arnhemland and Jimmy Pike in The Kimberley. There he was introduced to Jimmy Chi, the proud ‘quadroon’ with Aboriginal, Scottish, Japanese and Chinese ancestry that allowed him to write the multi-cultural musical, Bran Nue Dae. Pearling, Stolen Generations, wartime interment all emerge from the stories of Jimmy’s sisters. Elsewhere, we learn how gold may have inspired the Chinese migration, but it was market gardening that turned out to be the way many stayed; and lonely Chinese men often found an Aboriginal woman’s company cheered things up. And they invariably procreated and stayed with that partner more reliably than White men.
Many of Zhou’s connections inevitably come from artists – from visual artist Vernon Ah Kee, who has always preferenced his Aboriginal side, to singer Paul Ah Chee, who admits it’s time for a few songs about his Chinese ancestry, to writer Alexis Wright, the offspring of a Chinese doctor and a Wanyi hunter. Christian Thompson, Jason Wing, Gordon Hookey, Jemma Lee and Damien Shen contribute their art, while the one-time A’Hang family offers eleven generations of their family tree dating back to 1851 in a wall panel that is almost a match for Archie Moore’s Venice Biennale/Queensland Art Gallery masterwork. Professor Peter Yu offers a more political slant on what Dr Christian Thompson sums up as “the richness, depth and complexity of our Australian history”.
‘Our Story’ finishes at the National Museum on 27 January.
Kaylene Whiskey is at the National Portrait Gallery until 9 March.
