“I was an apprentice to the Tiwi in trying to comprehend the vitality and unconscious force of their culture”.

Thus Diana Wood Conroy ends the book ‘Tiwi Textiles’, which also credits Tiwi artist and designer, Bede Tungutalum as her co-author. Bede actually only gets a brief CV paragraph towards the end of the book, which takes us from his love of drawing as a schoolboy to “feeling proud inside when I see people wearing designs showing the world what we create”. And what he (and others) created at Tiwi Design over its amazing longevity from 1968 to today may have looked fresh and new printed on paper or textiles, but it was solidly rooted in “the barks that women painted or the pukumani poles that men painted for ceremony. And I do thank them”, adds a humble Tungutalum.

But Bede was there when textile artist Conroy and her painter husband were sent up there by the Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB) of the Australia Council in 1974 to take over (for 9 months) from founding art adviser Madelaine Clear. For it was he (aged just 16), Giovanni Tipungwuti and Eddie Puruntatameri (also a potter) who had been there since the start, using mainly animal imagery at first. And it was Bede who was Conroy’s guide through the complexities of Tiwi culture, who lead her across the Strait that joins Bathurst and Melville Islands from missionary Nguiu to the outstation where really traditional artists lived at Paru, and who accompanied her over the years to exhibitions across Australia and then to museums in the UK where older Tiwi traditions could be studied.

Meanwhile the Tiwi women, trained by the missionaries to sew – in, arguably, a colonial act of assimilation, inculcating order and obedience – finished off the printed materials by hand. While this might seem classically misogynist, it suited the natural division of the sexes on the Islands. And Conroy reveals that the whole process was actually kicked off by the RC Bishop of Darwin who’d seen Inuit print-making and thought it would be a natural, and financially viable development for his Tiwi parishioners.

Indeed, when a new building was needed for Tiwi Design, it was the Church and the Shire Council that came to the party, not the Australia Council or the recently created Department of Aboriginal Affairs.

During Conroy’s brief time there, Tungutalum and Tipungwuti moved on from the animal imagery they knew so well – for Tiwi harvest over a hundred animal species and 80 plants – to develop 18 comparatively abstract repeat patterns. These obviously offered greater possibilities in terms of large textile printing.

But these often only came about after a visit to the traditionalists in Paru – artists like Declan Apuatimi, Jeanie Kerinauia, Geoffrey Mungatopi and Bede’s father Gabriel Tungatalum. They were also visited at that time by Dorothy Bennett, the Darwin-based dealer who worked almost single-handedly with the AAB to develop markets for this great art. The pioneering Tony Tuckson may have commissioned Tiwi Pukumani Poles for the Art Gallery of NSW back in 1959, but few had followed him in treating works on bark as art rather than anonymous objects of purely anthropological interest.

Conroy also raises the question as to whether even Tuckson originally presented his Poles with the names of the artists, or anonymously.

Significantly, ‘Tiwi Textiles’ has introduced me to another pioneer who has remained hidden from history until now. In the 70s, Dorothy Bennett, the Darwin-based dealer who worked almost single-handedly with the AAB to develop markets for this great art. The pioneering Tony Tuckson may have commissioned Tiwi Pukumani Poles for the Art Gallery of NSW back in 1959, but few had followed him in treating works on bark as art rather than anonymous objects of purely anthropological interest.

Conroy also raises the question as to whether even Tuckson originally presented his Poles with the names of the artists, or anonymously.

Significantly, ‘Tiwi Textiles’ has introduced me to another pioneer who has remained hidden from history until now. In the 70s, Frank Norton, painter and Director of the WA Art Gallery was also collecting on Tiwi and across in Arnhemland as well. Why, I wonder, hasn’t he been more celebrated?

Although Conroy does much in the book to archive the development of the Tiwi Design artists’ pattern book and link their work to traditional art, much of the broader interest in the book lies in its snapshot of a time in the mid-70s when Papunya may have just happened but issues like the role of the art adviser, the maintenance of story, song and dance in a changing world, the individual artist versus communal ownership of story, the move from payment of training allowances to award wages, even the pressures of success in the non-Indigenous world and consequent humbugging of artists were all just taking baby steps.

Maybe the Tiwi were fortunate to be ahead of the game. For anthropologist Jane Goodale who was on the Islands with Mountford’s American/Australian Expedition in 1945/6, has pointed out that art-making by individuals was integral to Tiwi society in the traditional creation of Pukumani poles for funerals – and the artist was paid.

But the big picture belongs to Prof Nicholas Thomas from Cambridge University. He believes that at that time, from Inuit Territory to KwaZulu Natal to the Tiwi Islands, the local people “collaborated with non-Indigenous arts workers, adopting new media and styles, discovering new ways of representing customary imagery, and making new kinds of art altogether”. The symbiosis, he believes, “created Indigenous modernisms”.

An offshoot of the book (costing $60) is an exhibition opening this weekend at The Cross Arts Projects in Sydney’s Kins Cross. ‘How It All Began’ offers textile truth-telling in the lead-up to the Voice to Parliament referendum. The artists use cloth and paper to tell tales of encounter, of Country, of creative cultural survival and economic adventure, of uneven government initiatives and of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists seeking new spaces in the art-world. This exhibition makes manifest historical interactions across cultures, feeding pathways to voice, treaty and truth. It runs until 15 April.

And the exhibition will travel to Northern Territory Library in Darwin with a special opening choreographed by Bede Tungutalum in August 2023.