Roy McIvor, renowned Cape York storyteller and painter of an abstract bent, has turned to simple realism.
How else to tell the story it has taken the Guugu Yimithirr elder seven decades to confront through art?
An unfinished print is McIvor’s first portrayal of his community’s forced exile during the second world war in a pique of “fifth-column” paranoia by the Australian government.
McIvor was nine years old when gun-toting military police rounded him up, along with 284 others living on a Lutheran mission near Cooktown in far north Queensland.
The Guugu Yimithirr, whose forbears had encountered Captain Cook near the town that bears his name in 1770, were at risk of collaborating with invading Japanese in 1942, according to the government of the time.
When they eventually heard of the government’s suspicions, the elders were appalled, McIvor says.
“Well, they thought that was absolutely terrible,” he says. “They wouldn’t have taken part in it.”
They were sent 1,500km south to Woorabinda and their two German missionaries interned.
Seven years in the squalor of that government settlement saw an estimated third of the Guugu Yimithirr perish, McIvor’s closest relatives among them.
His journey, from the trauma of Woorabinda to artist and leader of a community he helped rebuild after its return to north Queensland, is the subject of the Dean Gibson documentary, A War of Hope.
Working through the experience in art has evoked a “hard feeling” in McIvor.
“I kept thinking we were just like prisoners of war,” McIvor tells Guardian Australia. “[But] I did feel happy [to learn] that there was a lot of people who felt the same way too.”
Forced onto a ship at gunpoint by the military police in Cooktown, McIvor remembers the tears in elders’ eyes as the sight of their tropical northern homeland receded.
“That makes even us young ones feel sad. We looked at [Mt Saunders] till it faded away, that was like we were missing our place,” he says.
The documentary details how wartime suspicion prompted a government official to suggest that one of the German missionaries, George Heinrich Schwarz, was involved in a plan to help the Japanese.
Schwarz aka Reverend “Muni” (muni means black in the Guugu Yimithirr language) was sleeping on a sheet of corrugated iron in Brisbane’s notorious Boggo Road jail when McIvor’s father visited him.
What happened at Woorabinda – which means “kangaroo sits down” – filled the teenage McIvor with bitterness towards the government. Malnutrition, disease and exposure to central Queensland winters took their toll on a clan from the tropics.
“We lost a sister down there. At the time they called it the ‘double pneumonia’ and she caught that,” McIvor says. “She just got weaker and weaker and just died. Cousin, brother, lots of other people died.”
A glimmer of happiness was provided by the chance reunion of his mother and aunt with relatives who had been relocated from near Longreach.
Another for McIvor was the art lessons from a white schoolmistress who was an eager tutor.
“She saw my art and said, just love your art and keep going. I kept going,” he says.
McIvor’s wife, Thelma, says the Woorabinda schoolmistress remains his biggest influence. She says she has observed McIvor process the sorrow of later experiences through “painting something so beautiful to cancel that out”.
“There’s a lot of emotion that goes into his paintings,” she says.
The Guugu Yimithirr were finally allowed to return to the north, to the new community of Hope Vale, in 1949, four years after the war’s end.
McIvor credits the Lutheran church for “fighting the government” on their behalf, as well as an unlikely ally in parliament.
A young Country party MP by the name of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, himself a Lutheran, was instrumental in instigating their return.
The irony that Bjelke-Petersen was “good for our people” is not lost on the McIvors, who recall his later ferocious opposition to Aboriginal land rights.
McIvor joined his father and brother as the lead construction gang in Hope Vale in the 1950s, where “tree after tree fell” for tin and timber houses, many of which still stand.
He sold his first artworks from the mission art store, then sold paintings out of his home to tourists. Later exposure through galleries and critical praise revealed a distinctive abstract style and a penchant for telling fables.
Asked how he feels about a documentary bringing the little-known story of the Guugu Yimithirr’s exile to a wider audience, McIvor replies: “It’s people really wanting to pass on memories, it’s good that you pass on the story to younger people.”
McIvor sees value in his own art in similar terms, as a vehicle for memories , however painful, he is grateful to retain.
“I couldn’t forget what happened, my memory was really good at that time [of the evacuation to Woorabinda],” he says.
“I’ve seen a few people lose their memory, don’t quite think properly about what happened in the past, it’s not really nice.”
A War of Hope screens on SBS’s National Indigenous television on Saturday, 25 April at 8.30pm
