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The art of saying sorry

by Philip Adams

3 April 2004 - When we were growing up, my generation knew nothing and cared less about Aboriginal culture. Indeed, those two words - Aboriginal and culture - seemed a contradiction in terms, a classic oxymoron.

The view from the Melbourne suburbs? Aborigines were a dying people and a dead issue. This seemed confirmed by the fact that none of us had actually met an Aborigine. Most of us hadn’t even seen one, although my father, wearing his army chaplain’s uniform, did point to a couple as we crossed Melbourne’s Princes Bridge in a tram during World War II. They were playing gum leaves, begging for coins.

If Aborigines were mentioned at school, it was with plangent piety, in a sorrow devoid of guilt. "Abos" were a primitive people, stone-age leftovers who’d run out of time. Out of time and space. (In short, exactly the view expressed by Western Mining’s Hugh Morgan as his response to Mabo.)

As for their culture, that was confused with mulga wood ashtrays, crude motifs on tea towels and plastic boomerangs in tawdry souvenir shops. Aboriginal art was the Jolliffe cartoons in Pix magazine, showing lubricious lubras in mini lap-laps. Or the drawing of a black man naked except for his dazzling Pelaco shirt - with the slogan "Mine tinkit they fit".

Oh, from time to time an Abo would be given a pat on his head. If he learnt to sing operatic arias like Harold Blair. If he led churchgoers in singing "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam" like Pastor Doug Nicholls. If he painted attractive watercolours like Albert Namatjira.

Beyond that, Abos were deemed doomed, dusty and drunk. And we whitefellas took not the slightest responsibility for their desperation. I never heard anyone express regret about the invasion of their country - or the killings that an author such as Keith Windschuttle disputes.

It took me a shamefully long time to begin to realise that these people weren’t citizens, couldn’t vote, were ignored in the census, lived their lives entirely at the mercy of white bureaucrats. They were human beings being denied human rights. Despite my early involvements in left-wing politics, I was far more concerned with the plight of Negroes - as they were then called - in the southern states of the US than in the conditions of Aborigines on remote cattle stations, or the confused and angry people who lived in country towns or urban slums.

For all practical purposes, for most of us, Aborigines were either the butt of Jolliffe, or Jacky jokes, or of the most suffocating paternalism. And if that was some sort of problem, it was somebody else’s problem.

Strangely enough, it was Aboriginal culture, Aboriginal art, that changed everything for me. The first epiphany occurred in, of all places, Munich. I was visiting an art gallery famous because of its connections to Hitler - the Führer had used it for a notorious exhibition of Nazi art, and to demonise the works of Jews and sundry decadents. The gallery was staging an exhibition to remember those dark days of the 1930s and, in the next room, there was an exhibition that took me back far further than 30 years: try 30,000. Suspended high above the visitors, on pieces of plaster that echoed the curves of cave walls and ceilings, were hand-painted facsimiles of murals from the Kimberley, from the Dreamtime.

I’d long been interested in cave art, in the works to be seen in Africa, the Drakensberg and the caves of Altamira - but it had never occurred to me to look closer to home. And there, in Germany, all was revealed. The paintings were awesome. Majestic. Astonishing. Images of men and animals so richly imagined and stylised as to make those in the celebrated caves of France and Spain look cramped and timid by comparison. On that same trip, I’d look up and see the frescoes on the Sistine ceiling for the first time. They were nothing like as revelatory and magical.

The people who’d painted these images, countless thousands of years before the Greeks built the Acropolis or the Egyptians built the pyramids, were clearly possessed of genius. And I’d had to travel this far to discover them.

The next experience was at the first meeting of the Australia Council in the early 1970s. As chair of one of the seven constituent boards, I was a member of the full council. But the most important person at that meeting was Wanjuk Marika. He looked at each of us, one at a time, and said, very quietly, "Why are you killing my people?"

Wanjuk explained that for some years, he and his people had felt weakened, somehow cursed. As the keeper of his tribe’s stories and images, he’d been able to paint. Now, on this very day, he’d discovered why. He’d been taken to one of those tawdry souvenir shops where he’d seen $2 tea towels depicting his people’s most sacred and secret images. He spoke of them being stolen. But all of us knew that it was more, much more than that. We were dealing with blasphemy. And clearly, the first job of the Australia Council would be to do something about it. We tried, and we failed.

These days, Aboriginal culture and the people who produce it are held in much higher regard. People make pilgrimages to see the rock art. And the dot paintings, widely adopted in far-flung communities, have become the lingua franca of Aboriginal art, fetching prices like Nolans or Boyds, and dignifying public spaces, particularly our houses of parliament. I tend to think they look like political prisoners. But I suppose it’s a way of saying sorry.

Source: The Australian

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