One of the most exciting and challenging of the many First Nations books on art or culture that have come my way has been intriguing me for days as I tracked the mystery of the stories behind the creation and rediscovery of the Birrundudu Drawings.
How could 810 drawings by 16 Aboriginal men over three intense months of cultural dynamism in 1945 on a cattle station in the middle of nowhere, living virtually in conditions of slavery have remained hidden until now?
There are so many factors at play here, almost the whole history of Aboriginal Australia over the past 80 years is involved. And, sadly, the dubious role of the anthropologists who built their lives and reputations around the Indigenous is also an ingredient. For Ronald and Catherine Berndt both encouraged the drawings to come into being, and then hid them – despite knowing how much their revelation might have done for the 16 men and their miserable families, and how much the drawings appearance might have prepared the non-Indigenous world to better understand what happened at Papunya in 1971.
But secrecy was the Berndts’ watchword in the defence of their scholarly careerism. Perhaps they planned to reveal them in their own good time, while giving them only a passing mention in the 1982 book, Aboriginal Australian Art. As for the appalling working conditions, described by Ronald Berndt in a 1987 book as “squalor and poverty, endemic malnutrition and a high rate of infant mortality”, the Berndts were advised by their patron and ‘classificatory father’, the eminent anthropologist AP Elkin, not to upset the powerful Vestey cattle barons who’d employed them at Birrundudu Station as liaison and welfare officers. That despite the Vestey’s clear intention that they make the case for more myalls to be dragged out of the deserts as cheap station labour.
Not just as labour; but as the new book makes clear, their wives and daughters were to be sexually available for the white staff or rations would be withdrawn.
And those rations were also the recompense handed out by the Berndts to their drawers. For Ronald had been filming the men in ceremony until his film ran out. It was then the men themselves who suggested crayon work – an anthropological fall-back on remote expeditions since Norman Tindale had refined it in 1930. The Berndts would go on to commission the similar Yirrkala Drawings in 1947, which were recognised as “challenging any preconceptions we may have about Aboriginal art” when they were seen at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2013. So they weren’t unknown, though it took 66 years before they hit the art world. Why the difference?
The answer is that the Yolŋu had far greater cultural unity, corporate memory and continuity than the disparate bunch gathered at Birrundudu. For those Jaru, Warlpiri, Nyintiny, Walmajarri, Gurindji and Ngarti people were stuck on desolate Tanami Desert country between Lajamanu in the NT and Halls Creek in WA, from which they would be scattered by the consequences of Bob Hawke’s Equal Pay case in 1968. And, in the absence of any follow-up by the Berndts, would never find any other whitefellars to take an interest in their culture. Most of them don’t even have a death date recorded. And none of the drawers would ever make ‘art’ again.
Not that they thought of their work as art. For Prof. John Carty, one of the team of researchers associated (ironically) with the Berndt Museum at the University of WA behind the project, is clear that “their designs were not disembodied icons but embodied meaning – they are ceremony. Everything in their lives had been degraded and disregarded – except the Law”.
As a result, the drawings once unrolled from beneath a Berndt bed, along with the couple’s notes embargoed for 30 years, had to be treated with extreme care in order to cross what Carty calls “a multi-generational gap in the communication of culture”. It actually took the team 4 years and 20,000m kms driving to complete “the most complex cultural conversations and decision-making protocols” before half of the drawings could confidently be made public.
As cultural adviser George Lee Tjungurrayi, now at Balgo away to the south-west with some other Birrundudu descendants, explains the cultural conundrum, “If we don’t open up these drawings today, that next generation are going to be too frightened and they won’t know where to begin. They’ll be stuck in the museum for another 80 years”. And as the book’s introduction amplifies, “Every one of those drawings has a remarkable story to tell. Most of them will take a lifetime to be told, and most of this will happen outside the gaze of art history, museums or anthropology. It will be in the little details of Dreamings that have slipped through the cracks of time, the revival of ceremonies that have lapsed”.
Such as Daryl McCale’s great-grandfather Porgi Jungarrayi’s Gadang Gadang site. Unvisited for 35 years, this rock formation with a magnificent Rainbow Serpent painting took three days and seven flat tyres to rediscover based entirely on the obsessive Porgi’s 62 drawings. For the site sits at a major intersection of Jukurrpa lines relating to the Crow and Eagle rites. “Now we’ve found it again”, declares McCale happily. And is photographed standing beside the image created by the Crow.
Meanwhile, Balgo’s Jimmy Tchooga, apart from advising on many of the drawings’ meaning, was inspired to respond with his own suite of drawings of the Ancestral luurnpa (kingfisher) at various sites pictured by the Birrundudu men. Perhaps he was guided by Ronald Berndt’s notes delicately added to the corner of each drawing, reassured they had been cross-checked with each artist and the other men.
Another contemporary, Margaret Wein makes the case for her great great-grandfather Nipper Japaljarri who was kicked off the neighbouring Gordon Downs Station later and never able to return to his traditional Japuwun Country, never able to perform his important Warlu/Fire Dreaming ceremonies.
Which makes it all the sadder that this “monumental body of Aboriginal knowledge”, of places, of legends, of ceremonies, of Law disappeared for so long. l can only compare with the case of Lance Bennett’s significant book of early Arnhemland artists and their barks published in Japanese for a 1969 tour of that country, though never translated into English. It was, of course, originally in English, but that was never published because the anthropologist Fred McCarthy warned that so many of his fellow academics would have their noses put out of joint by the artists’ own words in Art of the Dreamtime. So it was quietly left on the shelf.
John Carty has written earlier about early Balgo and late Spinifex art. So his contention in the Birrundudu Drawings that “they unwind the chronologies of Desert art” has to be taken seriously. “They challenge the narrative of abstraction in Desert painting as a trajectory tied to market forces and ageing artists”, he says of our reluctance to find true meaning in op art or Desert dotting. For his understanding is that “the central creative act in the Desert is repetition: repetition as a form of renewal”. So he wants to reframe abstraction as “foundational to the entire creative system. The book of Aboriginal art, the book of Australian art has not yet been written” is his boldest claim.
From little things big things grow! That, of course, was a song made about events just up the road on another Vestey cattle station, Wave Hill, where the Gurindji revolted against just the same conditions as were faced at Birrundudu. So, can these seemingly humble drawings – some green squiggles to represent the Moon Dreaming, some circle and line maps, some revealing Aboriginal land tenure, some figures performing ceremony, some showing an Ancestor figure with a foot-print beside him to indicate that he was also a man, some suggesting that Arnhemland mythology was moving into the Desert, some geometrical patterns that appear abstract but always conjure a Dreaming place for the drawer and his initiates – really transform our understanding of the 50 year-old art movement that grew from Papunya?
It’s certainly clear from examples in the book that artworks created later by David Jarinyanu Downs, Shorty Jangala Robertson, Boxer Milner and many a Papunya Tula painter of the 70s contain key images that lay embedded in the Desert mind well before 1971.
The book is with us now from the brave Upswell Publishing at $80, edited by a team consisting of Carty, Luke Scholes, Stephen Gilchrist, Jason Gibson, Alistair Paterson and Jessyca Hutchens. An exhibition is planned for Perth’s Lawrence Wilson Gallery in 2026.
