The Turquoise Suitcase by Helen Womack

Author:Helen Womack [Helen Womack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911280491
Publisher: Melrose Books
Published: 2016-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mixing Up the Colours

My first port of call whenever I went to Alice Springs was always the Daily Grind café, where I was sure to meet my friend and fellow journalist Dave Richards. Along with an injection of caffeine, I got a succinct update on all that had been happening in my absence and was soon back in the loop. To my delight, I learnt that Dave had carried the BushMag idea forward and was successfully running his own news website, called AliceOnline.

“And what are you up to?” he asked me.

“I’m doing a report on Aboriginal art for the BBC,” I said. “Not sure where to start.”

“Why don’t you go and see the Emily Kngwarreye?” he suggested. “It’s just sold for a million dollars.”

So I walked over to the Mbantua Gallery, where the painting, entitled Earth’s Creation, was on display.

I was a bit disappointed to see that the gallery, having spent a record amount to acquire the work, was showing it to poor advantage. The picture was roped off in a small room and thus managed to be both inaccessible and too in-your-face at the same time. It needed the space of a larger hall so it could be viewed from a distance. But despite this, the painting itself glowed, buzzed and danced with life.

I got talking with a student, who was working at the gallery. “When you look at the painting,” she said, “and you see Emily’s use of white on green, with the red and brown next to it, you can really see the famous white gums and the brown dirt, and the spinifex and all the blue skies that never end. I think it’s a great interpretation of our landscape.”

It was, and I went away feeling cheered that positive things were happening on the Aboriginal scene.

Everywhere I looked, there seemed to be Aboriginal galleries, a real explosion of indigenous art. A lot of it was tacky stuff for the tourists but the dot-painting movement had developed to produce some world-class contemporary paintings and the galleries were promoting them.

Some art shops were privately owned while others were cooperatives belonging to the painters themselves. The gallery owners tended to be secretive while the artists, many of whom lived on remote communities and didn’t necessarily speak English, were hard to interview.

“You won’t get people to talk easily,” one gallery owner told me. “Good artists are like prima donnas and the galleries are very protective of them.”

Stuck, I went back and drank some more coffee with Dave.

“Go and see the people at Many Hands,” he advised.

It was a good move to visit the Ngurratjuta Iltja Ntjarra (Many Hands) Art Centre, where both the white administrators and Aboriginal artists were open and friendly. The centre was financed from royalties paid to Aboriginal people in compensation for oil and gas extraction on their traditional lands. The artists were bussed into the centre for their day’s painting and provided with lunch. To some extent, I understood, the centre fulfilled a social as well as a creative function.

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