Warddeken ranger Terrah Guymala wards off the cold with a thick fleece and beanie while he walks around Canberra’s Nishi gallery, its walls adorned with photographs of precious rock art from his place, the “stone country” of west Arnhem Land.
We stop frequently as he highlights the figurative elements in David Hancock’s photographs of the cave paintings and their stories – curious, poignant, some wryly humorous – of first contact between explorers, miners, hunters and the Indigenous Bininj people.
While Australian colonial frontier exploration and settlement is predominantly characterised with extreme violence, this exhibition – Fragile First Impressions – tells of a more (but not exclusively) peaceful engagement between the Bininj and white people beginning in the mid-19th century.
Perhaps the first thing you’ll notice is the number of guns depicted in the Bininj art that adorns countless rock faces and caves across thousands of kilometres of the Arnhem Plateau, which Guymala and his fellow rangers are fighting to protect from the elements and feral animals, especially pigs and buffalo. And that is precisely what the Bininj noticed too, and recounted on returning from the frontier to their people when they effectively reported on the walls what they had seen of the white man and his curious ways.
In 1867 the Scottish-born explorer Francis Cadell disembarked with 20 horses (and a good many more guns) on the Liverpool river in his three-month search for a capital for the northern Australian colony. One painting depicts with extraordinary accuracy (given the image was perhaps held in memory for months before being painted) what appears to be a .50 calibre Spencer carbine of the type carried by Cadell’s party, complete with seven cartridges. The rifle also has a cartridge in the breech – a detail that is depicted with a painterly x-ray technique that is also applied to paintings of white men and women.
Cadell noted on landing that “the natives who had come down on our arrival were much alarmed at the horses”. Some became used to the horses as the weeks passed; others remained terrified and scattered at the sight of them. In July 1867 Cadell (who would later become a slave trader) and his party, guided by a local man Calilly, explored west of the Liverpool river. Calilly’s tribe, Cadell noted, “much wondered at our horses”. Little wonder: they had probably never seen such beasts before.
“At Calilly’s request one of them was made to show paces and gallop; the stockman suddenly wheeling his horse, charged towards the natives, which scattered them in all directions, first to their great fear and afterwards to their infinite amusement.”
Not far from this probable first equine-Bininj encounter, a vast cave painting depicts a European rider standing in the stirrups and bent forward on his galloping horse. The bodily composition of the horse, like most of the early equine depictions in the rock art, is heavily resonant of the shape of a kangaroo – evidence, perhaps, that the most common large mammal in Bininj experience initially sublimated their impressions of the foreign.
There is an engaging cross-cultural reciprocity to the influence of the familiar on imagery of the novel: Australian and British art galleries are filled with early European paintings that lend the antipodean marsupial a strong vulpine, canine or bovine resemblance and the Indigenous (especially female) human form an idealised European softness and contour. Excellent recent examples of this can be found in the paintings of Napoleon Bonaparte’s artists – pictures that were made during Nicolas Baudin’s early 1800s exploration of Australia in which the Indigenous people, flora and fauna were studied and depicted. A worthwhile digression: 100 of the water colours and drawings will tour six Australian museums (including the National Museum of Australia) next year after a recent agreement with the Museum of Natural History in Le Havre.
Meanwhile, however, it’s worth contemplating the influences on Le Havre’s Museum of Natural History’s: “Lagostrophus fasciatus (banded hare wallaby)” by Péron and Lesueur, 1807; the faces of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur’s “Mirounga leonina (elephant seals) Ile King”, and Nicolas-Martin Petit’s “Portrait of an Aboriginal women standing”.
But back to the stone country, and ranger Terrah Guymala who takes me to a painting based on observations in October 1883 of an expedition by David Lindsay whose party had struggled during a six-month horseback crossing of the inhospitable plateau.
Guymala explains: “An Aboriginal guy, an artist, follow him and look at him from a distance and he sees them with horses and blackfella guide and getting rid of guns and saddles and canvas bags of stuff and clothes, and he’s even got a whitefella fishing net there with him he’s leaving behind.”
The exhibition’s curator, Peter Cook, has written how the Bininj reports of this incident, as recorded in ochre on a rocky slope at Narrolombun creek, and the European record of what happened about 15 October 1883, “align perfectly”.
Lindsay wrote: “We lightened our packs by throwing away two packsaddles, the fish net, some rope, a great deal of rifle and revolver ammunition and all the clothes we could spare.”
We move around. Guymala laughs and points: “A piggy!”
Someone else suggests a bandicoot. But the cloven hooves and porcine eyes (if not the long, marsupial tail where a curly flourish would have been more accurate) make the artist’s intention clear.
Guymala and his fellow Warddeken rangers have a duty to care for what is now 1.4m hectares of Indigenous protected area in west Arnhem Land, surrounding Kabulwarnamyo, a permanent remote community that the Indigenous artist Bardayal “Lofty” Nadjamerrek established in 2003 after he returned his family to its traditional lands. The rock paintings, more of which are being discovered yearly, are under threat from constant wildfires, from feral animals that rub against the cave walls and from wasps whose nests dislodge the ephemeral ochre paints.
Since Lofty returned, Kabulwarnamyo has been the venue for continuous cultural camps for young Indigenous people, who are taught the stories incarnate in both the first contact cave painting and others, much older, that portray dreaming stories, the creationist animals and tales of the Bininj ancestors.
The settlement, set around a collection of safari-style tents, does not qualify for a government school and, so, the community has, through a crowd sourcing and a charitable trust, established its own.
Children attending Nawarrddeken Academy will be taught in traditional language a syllabus developed with community elders alongside the Australian curriculum. While national protests against the closure or remote communities have been staged across Australian capital cities, Australians have crowd-funded more than $25,000 for the school.
Kabulwarnamyo seems to be an exemplar of a remote community asserting its determination to educate its young, despite the dictates of government, and of securing a future through astute, job-creating land management and cultural protection.
Government funding for Indigenous protected areas – parcels of Indigenous-titled land of exceptional conservation and cultural values voluntarily incorporated into the Australian conservation estate – and the ranger program, expires in 2018. According to Pew charitable trusts, a supporter of Fragile First Impressions, this is leading to uncertainty about the paintings’ long-term protection, the environmental management of protected areas and the associated jobs and positive lifestyle outcomes.
Pew’s Patrick O’Leary says: “All the things we say and governments say they want in Indigenous policy are encapsulated by the way Indigenous rangers and Indigenous protected areas allow traditional owners to build viable communities, at the same time as delivering really important environmental and cultural benefits for all Australians.”
Terrah Guymala and I stop in front of a painting that depicts, from a chicken’s perspective, a cook coming towards it with a cleaver.
“That chook gonna get his head cut off – he’s gonna be for dinner for sure,” Guymula says. He covers his mouth and laughs much as, it’s easy to imagine, those who sat in the cave and had the artwork explained to them 150 years ago might have.
We stop again and Guymala says: “Billy goat – see he’s even got whiskers and horns.”
And not a trace of kangaroo about him.
That’s because the goat probably lived on a dairy farm established at Oenpelli (Kunbarlanja) in the early 20th century, by which time the Bininj had been painting hooved animals for 50 or 60 years. They got better at it. Just as European depictions of Indigenous people, flora and fauna gained accuracy as contact, dispossession and white settlement expanded.
There is a perfect symmetry, of course, between all of this and establishing a school at Kabulwarnamyo. The cave walls in this Indigenous protected area were, for generations, effectively artists’ blackboards; new paintings would be blithely brushed over others that were thousands of years old, as urgent memories of new stories superseded the ancient.
Posterity was never the intention.
But now it is the aim.
Fragile First Impression is on at the Nishi Gallery, 17 Kendall Lane, New Acton, Canberra, until 14 June
