FIRST PEOPLE

FIRST PEOPLE

'Uluru-Uluru!'

I had the good luck some years ago to visit Australia three years in a row.  I am truly glad I went. To my eyes it looked prehistoric and magical. I loved many things about the country, but there were some things which were difficult to process.

I am writing as an observer; a visitor and an outsider to both white and indigenous Australia. I hope my perspective adds to the dialogue about our purpose on this planet, rather than appear judgemental and romantic. I sense the sense of frustration that many Australians feel at the way various policies designed to help have failed. Social workers are fighting a complex battle weighed against them by the racist policies of past governments.

Driving  around Australia, and particularly in the more remote desert highway early in the morning, or late at night, the red earth  and the billions of clearly visible stars, put me in mind of time travel. In terms of the immense landscape littered with monoliths and exotic flora and fauna, this feeling dominated my thoughts whenever we left the comfort of the city and entered the outback, or took a drive near the endless coast.

It is remarkable what human ingenuity has achieved in such a short time span since the arrival of the Europeans. At the same time it is shocking to see the way life has changed for the first Australians.

Aboriginal Australians are scarce in the gleaming city centres but ubiquitous in areas such as Alice Springs, where 'classy' Indigenous art boutiques (there is a lot that could be written here, but I will save this for another time) seemed  to co-exist on the same sidewalk with the tragic victims of alcohol abuse.

I had spent considerable time looking at the archival materials and photographs in various museums and visitor centres. I was struck by the physical changes in the bodies of indigenous peoples.  The toned, proud people that had stared back at the camera in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (if their faces have not been covered up by some surviving family or clan member, as is the custom) contrasted sharply with the ghostly figures that  drifted across traffic light crossings, disappearing from view as quickly as they appeared.

I did a number of paintings when I came back, some of which were pretty landscapes, calendar images of reds and golds, with artificially enhanced filters and the improbable blue skies. I am still doing some of these because I like the palette. These images have the feeling of expressionist works. On me personally they work on a higher emotional frequency. They are superficially innocuous landscapes, but despite the bright colours  my natural pessimism  taints them with a sense of foreboding, and of a lost utopian wilderness.

The images now, some nine years on, are more sombre. The recent news of the hopelessness of life on some of the settlements, particularly in the Kimberley and the shocking number of suicides, including that of a ten year old, have played on my mind.

The imagery I want to show of course, is all but taboo. Depictions of the face of people that have died, or the use of their names is forbidden. Even as I am copying some of the archival material and various  faces accessed on the internet -which I often alter- I feel the tension.


I have used the face of Samantha Harris, a dual- heritage model in the past, but now I am sensing that this face is the only acceptable face of indigenous beauty.  Here too I feel a great tension and at times an overwhelming sense of  duplicity.  One thing that I found myself thinking when in Alice Springs was how magical the indigenous people looked. Was I romanticising? I don't know, but to my eyes their beauty could not be wiped out by the dire circumstances.

Yet, here I am compelled to do these images.  It is an unresolved set of feelings, tied to my own sense of 'otherness' and my own particular losses.

Gerry Georgatos is the Australian suicide prevention officer for Indigenous peoples and an advocate for human rights. He put it quite elegantly, quoting his father.  I quote the sentiment, rather than ad verbatim here: unless Australia gets it right for the Aboriginal People, it will never as a nation be free of racism and inequality.

My paintings struggle to resolve something in all of us. Here they are, with some of the thinking behind the imagery used. They all have simple, literal narratives....

This image shows the beautiful face of Samantha Harris, in the guise of a young woman living in a community. The empty frame symbolises the sense of hopelessness and lack of connection with the past.  Originally I had painted a stylised image of a  young woman being snatched away, alluding to a loss of connection with the past. I decided that this was too provocative and disrespectful, even in the context of this contentious work,  and  so I painted the archival image of the man over it, in the insipid colour of the faded postcard image I was able to find whilst searching for material. 

The handwritten note under the image can be seen below.  It reads: ''This race is rapidly dying off, the few natives left adopt the customs of the white people''.

to be continued....