“What do you think of Australia?”.
How many local artists would pose that question when opening an exhibition of their works? But that was the challenge that Djambawa Marawili AM put to his audience in a long, deliberately political address at the opening of Yolŋu power: the art of Yirrkala at the Art Gallery of NSW last weekend.
For this thoughtful cultural leader of the Yolŋu of NE Arnhemland – one of just two, after Garriwin Gumana AO, in my brief time appreciating their art – was guiding the art press corps to see this exhibition of almost 300 artworks by 98 Aboriginal artists over eight decades from a single language-group as more than an aesthetic experince. Not that there aren’t gorgeous patterns, innovative creations and emotional connections to be enjoyed. But Marawili really wants you to concentrate on that ‘power’ word in the show’s title – the power of the land and the power of Yolŋu artists to tell the stories of that land and their inter-relationship with it.
Marawili went on to suggest that we reflect on how Sydney was before (I think he meant the 1788 invasion), before what he called “worriedness” and economic concerns came to this Great Southern Land, and the invaders denied themselves the need to see Country. “The Balanda wanted us to have real jobs. But we could paint the patterns of the land in our homelands, make money and give clues to our Country; tell the real story of Country; strengthen Country”.
Indeed, last year’s Telstra NATSIA Bark Award winner was just such a pattern of the land, Warrandan Marawili’s ‘Rumbal, the body, the truth’, a deceptively simple decoration on a much larger bark. Despite this simplicity, the judges clearly recognised its significance. For this was part of a recent trend in Yolŋu story-telling – the patterns that are painted on the lilliputian chests of young initiates to reveal to them how their bodies relate to the land they have responsibility for – and to everyone else in their community, their human and natural worlds. For gurrutu, “the all-encompassing matrix of kinship and identity” as Yirrkala’s art centre co-ordinator Will Stubbs explains in the catalogue, “means that because you are related to everything and everyone, you must share. This is the Yolŋu replacement for our materialistic, individualistic and hierarchical world”.
In the exhibition we have a whole wall of Rumbal works, twenty-two, clan by clan.
However, this openness to change doesn’t mean that there aren‘t rules. When Djambawa Marawili gave his approval to revealing the deep patterns relating to artists’ saltwater estates, he was accused by his elders, “You’re killing us”. For he was encouraging a more abstract story-telling based on each clan’s sacred miny’tji to replace the figurative work that the first generation of Yolŋu artists had employed to tell the first balanda/ŋäpaki to penetrate Arnhemland that they had laws, culture, land ownership and therefore rights. As Marawili put it, “The Djang’kawu story (of the two sisters who arrived from the east in mythological times – everywhen – to found the Yolŋu nation and its Country), is our constitution, our governance”.
Not that the ŋäpaki took any notice. Land and sea were taken for mining and commerce despite the Bark Petitions heading for Canberra, the Barunga Statement encouraging Bob Hawke to promise a treaty, and the death of a sacred crocodile causing Marawili’s father to order the mighty Saltwater barks to be painted. All, you may note, involved ‘art’. And, in consequence, the Blue Mud Bay case won sea rights for the Madarrpa clan, and the Bark Petitions contributed to the recent High Court case winning compensation for the Gumatj clan, their land lost to bauxite mining. Only that treaty is yet to be achieved.
All of that lies clearly behind this exhibition from the members of what is undoubtedly Australia’s most successful art centre, Buku Larrnggay Mulka in Yirrkala – which has co-curated the show with the Gallery’s Head of First Nations, Cara Pinchbeck. No wonder AGNSW Director Maud Page could declare it “a privilege to host this exhibition”.
America has just enthusiastically toured a comparable Yolŋu show, Mardayin – though that consisted only of barks. Here we start with a film encouraging viewers just to slow down as they tour. We have the crayon drawings that first alerted anthropologists to both the complex culture and to the instinctive aesthetic qualities of the Yolŋu. I couldn’t resist the elegant ancestral figures by Mungurrawuy Yunupingu that were some of the eariest pieces recognised as art by the AGNSW, thanks to collector Stuart Scougall. But then there are prints that first engaged the women artists and were often used to tell social rather than spiritual stories. We have 2D and 3D works engraved on roadsigns, still conforming to the law that sacred stories can only be imprinted on matter that’s “come from the land”. We have a giant anthill that lights up to show us how termites and the plants that were the special subject of the late Mulkun Wirrpanda’s art are emblamatic of the changing Yolŋu seasons. For the women, denied use of clan miny’tji, were freer in their art-making.
And we can see progression in the art that reveals its community working as one even as individual super-stars develop their own special styles….names like Gunybi Ganambarr, Djambawa Marawili, Mawalan Marika, Narritjin Maymaru, the Yunupingu sisters Barrapu, Dhopiya, Djakangu, Djerrknu, Gulumbu and Nyapanyapa, Nonggirrnga Marawili, Wukun Wanambi, the list goes on.
And we have the soundscape from the art centre’s electronic studio in the basement Tank of the Gallery’s new Naala Badu building that fully captures the earth-shaking capacity of Yolŋu chanting. Some have suggested that here is where you should start your tour of the Yolŋu’s diplomatic embassy – which as Djambawa Marawili tells us is also ”Australia’s first high culture; our opera as well as our law”.
Does that ‘our’ refer to all Australians? Or only those denied a Voice recently?