Major and Ned

The brilliant new Nolan show at the Art Gallery of NSW – NOLAN Origins – actually begins with an overture as you enter the Old Gallery/Naala Nurra that’s a tribute show from Timmy and Freddy Timms in the distant Kimberley. For those well-educated artists of the Jirrawun group recognised an affinity between the Anglo-Irish Kelly gang (and the Anglo-Irish painter Nolan who’d made them iconic) and their own Wagiman outlaw Major, who’d operated at the turn of the 20th Century to exact retribution on the pastoral intruders into the East Kimberley who’d committed 12 attested freelance massacres.

While elder Timmy Timms used traditional iconography and traditional ochres to show us the boab tree beside Massacre Creek that’s become the potent symbol of that killing, and Gija geography to identify the painful link between the Bedford Downs Massacre and the nearby Turkey and Emu Dreaming site on Mt King, Freddy goes for the full Nolan. His square mask may have beady eyes rather than that often blank eye-slit, but it’s pure Sid as it surmounts a dot-defined Black body, armed only with a nulla nulla. Having made that political link, Freddy Timms then moves into acrylic colours for sumptuous images of Country.

Surprisingly, the Indigenous discussion continued two floors down as NOLAN Origins officially opened. For, while Sid’s early painting years are seemingly all about St Kilda, then Heide where he fell into that strange triangular relationship with Sunday and John Reed, then called-up to fight a non-war in the Wimmera where he discovered the strange beauty of Australia’s outback that he would turn into our first Modernist landscapes, and finally his flight from the Reeds and his escape to the world, he was also about to discover that he lived on “a borrowed land”.

Had he been aware of that even as he painted the St Kilda of his childhood? For he couldn’t resist adding an Icarus plunging into Melbourne Bay beside the usual swimmers? And, as the Gallery makes clear as we leave the exhibition, Nolan clearly knew that “It’s only in myth that the truth about any country can be found”.

And this sensibility would lie with this most Aussie of artists even as he travelled, was awarded a Knighthood and painted the world from a base in bucolic Herefordshire. But, in a sense, it was imposed upon him by a commission from the Courier Mail to record “the worst drought in living memory” in Queensland and NT in 1949. I wrote at length about Sid’s and Russel Drysdale’s efforts to capture the surrealism of cadavers, bare, unbounded plains and the skeletons of deserted houses – and about the market’s reluctance in 2002 to spend good money on such depressing imagery. The extraordinary convoluted Carcass in this show had just failed to sell at auction.
Meanwhile, the great critic (and painter) James Gleeson had attempted to praise “the unpeopled immensities of wind-worn rock and bitter soil” that he saw in such canvases.

Earlier Nolan had attempted to stow away on a boat that would take him to Paris where he believed all art happened, but failed. In a reflective moment on the excellent film that accompanies the exhibition, Sid recognised that “I would just have got lost in all that”. Instead he stayed here long enough to begin to make art that challenged the notion that real art only happened somewhere other than Australia.

Commentators like AGNSW Director Maud Page can read in his artworks that “Nolan looks at Country (I think she intended the capital C) in such a significant way”. Curator Denise Mimmocchi amplified, “He sees a strangeness, a colonial discomfort that’s fresh, bold, mysterious and full of ambiguity”. And she uses the astute phrase, “not-belonging”. But I had the good fortune to encounter and interview Nolan three times. And I know of his thinking, therefore, when he made his three Burke & Wills series of paintings, taking them from utter whitefellar foolishness in the first, via almost sympathetic understanding of their exploitation in the face of those “unpeopled immensities” in the second, to an actual appreciation of their suffering and heroism in the third series that accompanied the Jack Thompson film. The most powerful image from that was a dead Burke with squared-off ribs (pace that helmet), an imperial Union Jack gleaming through his bones.

For almost the first time in Nolan’s opus, an Aboriginal figure stands, an arm raised in triumph to the left of those bones in Sid’s triptych. Had he finally acknowledged this borrowed land’s true owners? More than that; “I’ve always thought of them as an unseen presence witnessing the whole expedition”, he allowed.

Oddly, this is confirmed by a letter he wrote to Albert Tucker in 1950 just after his drought trip: “One of the main surprises was the strong impact the aborigines made on us. They give you the key to the whole situation. They are not only intelligent but superlatively so. They inform the landscape in an extraordinary way. They show you that the country is a gentle, dreaming one; the barrenness and harshness is all in our European eyes”.

The only odd thing about this powerful insight is that it comes at the end of a churlish essay by that everyman of Blak commentators, Daniel Browning, in which he has done his utmost to denigrate Nolan as “reactivating the settler-colonial mythos”, emigrating then “living on self-justifying memories” in order “to define the British colonial project, if not the nation-building exercise”.

Why do people commission Browning to blow his own blinkered and confused trumpet? Is he the only Blak art academic around?

And gosh, this unpleasant diversion has lead me astray so that I haven’t even mentioned the original Kelly series. For all 27 works (and a bonus 6 that weren’t shown together by Nolan originally) were left behind as a farewell gift for Sunday Reed as he fled, are brought together here for the first time in 60 years. Normally, of course, 26 are on permanent display at the National Gallery, while First Class Marksman was expensively bought by the AGNSW at least in part, to thwart the NGA. Generous, therefore of NGA to share; I wonder whether Sydney will reciprocate when NOLAN Origins closes on 7th February next year?

Mind you, it’s partly my familiarity with the Kellys that made me more excited about the other signs of Sid’s early progress into both excess and iconic status. But a comment from the man himself on film in the midst of refusing to go into detail of the autobiographical details of the Kelly series did catch my attention. For I hadn’t realised that there was a whole four year period when he was underground as a deserter from the army, 1943 to 48, which certainly sharpened his identification with Ned. That comment was about the defiantly crossed hands in The Trial, as Ned is consigned to be hanged. Suddenly I wanted to study the hands throughout the series as it progresses from the very early 1946 headless Kelly, barely gripping his rifle, via one where he holds his weapon like a paintbrush pointed straight at the viewer, to the confident, brutal fingers that grasp the gun that’s just killed Sergeant Kennedy at Stringybark Creek.

I urge you to take a fingergrip tour of the Kellys.

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