Abo History (Facts) 1988 130 x 200cm Held by the National Gallery of Australia
You might be finding the detail of this painting hard to see. Its date for example. 1988. Also known as the Bicentenary. Perhaps its title. Abo History (Facts).
From top left: Dad brings a kangaroo home. We might be fishing, chasing kangas or both. Life is good. Whitefellas turn up in ships with a flag. They start chopping down trees and killing blackfellas, although some blackfellas are helping them out. We build a house, they build a house. We’re growing things and fishing together and sharing the produce. Still good. Uh, we’re off in the bush getting stuck into the grog; and they won’t let us use the swimming pool they’ve built. Second from the left, bottom row — them whitefullas, they’ve introduced ‘dog tags’, the thing we hate most in the world. Albert all over again mate. What the hell are ya!
Under the ‘protection’ legislation of 1943in most parts of Australia individuals were permitted to apply for an ‘exemption’ from the Act [‘Act’ meaning the legislation controlling Aboriginal people at the time]. An exemption or ‘dog tag’ as it was often referred to, meant that an Aboriginal person wasn’t treated as Aboriginal for the purpose of the Act. [Think about that!] They were entitled to vote, drink alcohol, move freely, and their children could be admitted to ordinary public schools. [Which indicates, of course, that these were things ‘Aboriginal’ Aboriginal people could not do.] They were however prohibited from consorting with other Aboriginal people who were not exempt.This renunciation of their traditional lifestyle was promoted as the only opportunity to overcome poverty, gain work and access to education and social welfare benefits.
Thus Aboriginal people could buy alcohol at a bar (if permitted by the barman), on the condition of renouncing their family and heritage. What a deal! Sign me up!
Same frame: we can go to the pictures but we have to sit up the front in a special section roped off for blackfellas. Next: we’ve all been jammed together onto a ‘mission’. We decide to burn it down. Last: Aboriginal deaths in custody. (Current rate of Aboriginal incarceration: 2440 per 100,000 population; non-Aboriginal, 216 per 100,000. Aboriginal people about 2 percent of the Australian population, about 27 percent of the prison population. 434 Aboriginal deaths in custody since 2010. All data, 2020)
Robert Campbell Junior was born in 1944 and grew up near Kempsey on Burnt Bridge Mission. Dave Sands, a near contemporary and a champion Aboriginal boxer with a fight record of 108 fights — 97 wins (62 by knockout), 7 losses, 4 no contests — grew up at Burnt Bridge too. In his bigger fights he was billed as being Puerto Rican for fear of turning the fans away.
The Fighting Sands Brothers, 1989 55 x 92 cm
Burnt Bridge Mission. You can read about some of its worst aspects here (Jennifer’s Story from Bringing Them Home) and here (Ian Lowe’s story of being taken away). These stories are both about being taken away from the Mission and there are people today who were brought up on Missions that speak warmly about those experiences contrasting them favourably with what happens in rural towns today. But those two stories speak to the other side. They are, literally, almost unbearable.
My dear friend Merv Bishop, the man who took this photo, Australia’s first Aboriginal press photographer and probably the first Aboriginal person to work on a mainstream Australian newspaper, spent six years of his life from 1974 working for the Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs making a photographic record of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander life around the country. This was in some respects a dream job; in others heart breaking. ‘The things I’ve seen brother boy …’, sucking on his clenched teeth, eyes flashing, shaking his head.
That included spending some time at Burnt Bridge. He went back in 1988. The year of the Bicentenary. Among his later photos were these.
He can take a snap that Merv.
Self-portrait
Robert Campbell left the Mission when he was 14. His art career had begun by doing outline drawings on boomerangs to sell to tourists which his father filled in with poker work (via a heated wire). In his later teens he moved on to scenes on bits of cardboard in gloss house paint that he found leftover at the tip. He’d sell those too, ‘for a carton’. He moved to Sydney and did ‘all the jobs that wasn’t good enough for white people’ — manual labour, factory work, pea picking, brickie’s mortar boy. Sick of this, he went back to Kempsey where he ran into another artist, Tony Coleing, who suggested getting back into painting, this time with better tools: art paint and canvas or artist’s board.
It was then, 1987/88, that the men in red ties began appearing. (Abo History is an early work from this period.) The background patterning, figurative elements, colours and stylistic conventions in his work are all based on traditional Ngaku clan designs found on boomerangs and shields. The National Gallery curator states confidently that the ties are symbols of life and vitality. Other commentators assert equally firmly that they are symbols of ‘suffocation and stifling conformity’. I am inclined to think he found something that would work like a dream to give his figures vigour and interest, and then it became a trademark. A beauty.
Interviewed in 1990 he said:
When I paint, I don’t copy or make a sketch first. It just comes from within me and I keep going. I have a picture in my mind — it’s the spirit in me. It just guides my hand.
I’ve seen some Aboriginal drawings from the Northern Territory in magazines and I kept adding and creating my own style — the Aboriginal spirit in me that I’d lost. When we were on the mission the old people weren’t allowed to talk the lingo, not allowed to teach us. They were too frightened they would be sent away or something. I’m 45 years-old now and yet I’m still searching for that Aboriginal identity that I’ve lost.
One stream of his work is political.
The Dog Tag, 1989 91 x 120 cm
The Dog Tag has the additional inscription Tyerabarrbowaryaou which in Ngaku means ‘I shall never become a white man’.
Map of the massacre of Blacks in the Macleay Valley, 1989 79 x 115cms Art Gallery of NSW
There are records of massacres in his work and a great many stories of dealings with the police. But he also painted the world of his day, the things he was interested in, possibly with an eye to his market as well: the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain, ‘Australia II’s’ victory in the 1983 America’s Cup, the Moon landing, Ash Wednesday, the racehorse trainer Bart Cummings, the boxer Jeff Fenech, Senator Neville Bonner. And he dug more deeply into the day-to-day of his heritage.
Hunting Tucker, 1993 124 x 199 cm, private collection
Blue Light Man: the Ghost of Gravelly Hill private collection
I love the shimmering vitality in his work, but there is always an active mind in play as well as a very gifted hand. It’s that mind and the experience that has formed it which provided another reason for inclusion here.
New South Wales has a larger Aboriginal population than any other state or territory. The rail heads along the Newell Highway (Parkes, Forbes, Dubbo, Narrabri, Moree) and the rich sub-tropical forests and lush riverlands of the north coast produced concentrations of Aboriginal people.
However individual, Robert Campbell’s story would resonate directly in the lives of tens of thousands of Aboriginal people from this area alive today: the Mission background; still somewhere near Country, but not quite; still somewhere near family but parts of that are a blur; lost lingo, lost old time Culture. Something new constructed as culture which includes memories of dispossession and cruelty, grog, intermittent trouble with the law, racism. Struggling with your identity, your place in the world and your future. Sometimes cut badly adrift. But friends, maybe a kind teacher (or priest, or art dealer) among the dross, time spent in the bush, hunting, watching and playing football, doing things together, and feeling that thread of community whatever it might be — but which is not extinguished. Maybe Campbell was more of an Aboriginal artist than he could ever allow.
The first time I went to Walgett, not too many years ago, Marge and I went to the wrong pub for tea. We wouldn’t have minded, but we’d gone to the black pub — no women either — when we should have been at the white-as-white Bowlo. We were gently moved on. Walgett’s pretty bad of course. The shops that are left are all shuttered at night and often during the day.
Charlie Perkins
And it was the Moree pool that was ‘whites only’ when Charles Perkins and the Freedom Riders arrived in 1965. (In fact Aboriginal children could swim there — before 3pm and as long as they’d been thoroughly scrubbed before entry by the pool staff.)
I never saw this but when I was working at Moree, several people whose views I trust absolutely told me that quite regularly on Saturday nights the whitefellas from the north side of the Namoi would get on the charge (get drunk) and go and take pot shots with their rifles at the Aboriginal camp fires on the other side. That’s 10 years ago. Not that many years ago.
And that’s one of the reasons I think Robert Campbell Junior is a great artist. He looked at this, and more, straight in the eye, put it on paper and somehow, somehow, like a lot of blackfellas I know, not only kept his sense of humour but stayed civilised.
And the big finish. And you can’t get bigger than Emily …READ ON.
This is the second most expensive piece of Aboriginal art ever purchased. After appearing as a highlight of the international artists’ exhibition at the Venice Biennale of 2015, it was sold in 2017 for $2.1m. Four panels of synthetic polymer paint on linen mounted on canvas.
And huge.
‘Emily Kngwarreye’s paintings are described by leading international art academics as being equal to the works of Monet and great Abstract artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. Experts have argued that Earth’s Creation, painted at Utopia on the edge of the Simpson Desert in Central Australia … is an even more important painting for Australia than American painter Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, purchased by the National Gallery of Australia in 1973.‘ (The Wikipedia entry)
So there. Monet. Pollock. Rothko. Emily. (Sufficiently big time to have her own design decorate a Boeing 787. How nice that it’s a ‘Dreamliner’.)
In 2007, at one strongly-defined peak of the Aboriginal art market, Earth’s Creation was sold for $1.056m to Tim Jennings, long time owner of Mbantua Gallery & Cultural Museum in Alice Springs. It was initially commissioned for an Adelaide bank but Jennings decided that such a work should ‘come home’ to Alice. In a blog he expanded on why it is more important to Australia than Blue Poles (estimated current value $70+m).
Earth’s Creation was painted by a genius Australian [who was] without any formal or informal art training.…
Emily, a female Australian Aboriginal artist, at the age of eighty or thereabouts, combined a deep rooted Aboriginal lifestyle with being a modern, contemporary, abstract painter. …
Aboriginal Art is the bridge of cultures. With paintings of the magnitude and quality of Earth’s Creation, Emily is reaching out to the world. She is putting both Australia and Aboriginal culture on the map.
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(You’re wondering what the most expensive Aboriginal painting has been? Of course you are, and it’s a convenient segue. But keep all that in mind. They’re the topics.)
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri Warlugulong 202 x 337cm Held by the National Gallery of Australia
I don’t know what Mr Tjapaltjarri got for Warlugulong when he painted it, but the Commonwealth Bank bought it for $1,200 and hung it in a cafeteria for 20 years before it sold at auction on the 24 July 2007 for $2.4m.
The painting includes elements of nine distinct dreamings, of which Lungkata’s tale is the central motif. Lungkata is the Bluetongue Lizard Man, an ancestral figure responsible for creating bushfire. The painting shows the results of a fire caused by Lungkata to punish his two sons who caught a kangaroo and declined to share it with their father. On the right are their skeletons. Art talk: ‘an epic painting, encyclopaedic in both content and ambition’.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s Country was out north-west of Alice Springs near Yuendemu. But in 1971 he was at Papunya when a white school teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, began an art program for the kids at the Papunya School. The men of the community took it up and famously painted a mural, ‘Honey Ant Dreaming’, on one of the walls of the school (painted over in 1974 by a maintenance man, an historical misfortune) as well as everything else even vaguely suitable that they could get their hands on. ‘I just could not keep the boards up to them’, Bardon has written. This is the birth of Papunya Tula Pty Ltd, the company/ association/ group these men established to manage their production, … and also the foundation of desert art and ‘dot painting’.
This is dot painting — actually while a wonderful painting not a great example — from about 1993, although with Clifford Possum’s extra flourishes, the brushing out to form the flash points of the storm of the Dreaming he was painting.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri Water Dreaming c.1993 83 x 126cm
It might be noted that Tjapaltjarri was painting and carving wood art well before this. At right is one of his snakes.
Not much happened for a decade, but in the ’80s this movement exploded. Art centres were established in communities throughout the Northern Territory and Western Australia. In 2010 there were more than 120 such groups in the Centre and across the north from Yirrkala to the Kimberley. You could make money in a culturally legitimate way that brought high levels of satisfaction to individuals and, at least as importantly, to their communities. Today there could be as many as 16,000 Aboriginal artists working in remote Australia. Art commentator Sasha Grishin suggests that, per capita of population, this is ‘the highest concentration of artists anywhere in the world’.
The explosion has not been, to put it mildly, without its difficulties. Clear evidence was provided by the number of whitefellas suddenly hanging round and the range of gambits they employed to take advantage of this situation. There was money swirling round this world such as had never been seen before, and there is nothing like throwing big handfuls of cash into a group of people to disturb its equilibrium. (If you want to read about vicissitudes of the Aboriginal art market try Adrian Newstead’s very fine inside story of this and other periods of Aboriginal art,The Dealer is the Devil.)
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But even in this eruption Emily Kame Kngwarreye (say ‘(k)ing-gorr-eye’) leapt out of the pack as something very special. From an excellent article in ‘Artlink’ by Margo Neale, curator of her three most important exhibitions:
Emily Kame Kngwarreye was black, female, spoke little English [fewer than 20 words] and was already elderlywhen she started painting on canvas, in the middle of the Australian desert, on a patch of country called Utopia [the possibly ironic name of a giant cattle station] some 260 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs, a place she rarely left over her 80-plus years.
She was in her late 70s when she was introduced to painting in acrylics on canvas after a decade of working in batik with the Utopia women’s group. Neither batik nor painting on canvas is traditional; both were introduced, in the 1970s and 1980s respectively, as part of a government re‑skilling program.
Perhaps because painting on canvas grew out of the women’s batik group, painting on canvas became a women’s activity, unlike the situation at Papunya begun by a men’s painting group. These were and remain strongly gendered societies. But Kngwarreye broke the mould.
At Utopia it was Kngwarreye’s painting that secured her place in the Western art market and brought millions of dollars* into the community as the undisputed boss of the ‘money story’. She was the golden goose. Emily had no biological children of her own, although many others, so occupied a separate place and this, combined with her strong personality (described as bossy), her age, ceremonial status and past employment as a cameleer (a man’s role) also secured her unique status. The strength of her arms from cameleering was not an insignificant factor in the power and character of her painting stroke. [*Estimated at $20.2m, more than twice as much as any other Australian female artist (Margaret Olley, just for the sake of interest).]
She is believed to have produced more than 3000 works during her eight-year career as a professional artist. (Rodney Gooch, see below, says 6000.)
This ooo ahh story could be balanced off to some modest degree by the fact that she had spent decades making body art for ceremonial purposes. But, imagine. You’re an art dealer and there is this … this machine pouring out high value product at an unfathomable rate. The punters simply cannot buy it quickly enough. No wonder the scam artists, and others, pulled up in their endless Toyota loads scouring Utopia for scraps.
Emily’s work developed in quite different directions over those eight years. Earth’s Creation, where we started, was done ‘dump dump’ style, clumps of paint manipulated (‘pounded’ according to one observer) with implements including a shaving brush. Neale calls this her ‘colourist’ period and it came just two years before her death.
Her earliest works are dot paintings. Ntange Dreaming, below, is one of her earlier works but her very special eye is already manifest in the way the dots have been managed. The double dots — big white, small red and black and so on — are a cunning tactic for generating depth. They also trace lines which could be imagined as suggesting growth and fertility. Her jukurrpa ‘Kame‘ (or ‘Kam‘) means the flowers and seeds of the desert yam, and this painting could be construed as being about growth, harvest, fertility. It could, but it has also been described as a self portrait.
Ntange Dreaming, 1989 135 x 122 cm National Gallery of Australia
Do we need to know what it means in those sorts of ways? Could we? I am inclined to recognise it as a jubilation of paint with a particularly keen appreciation of colour and settled form. It’s just so … good. So convincing. Art. (Not ethnography.)
Then there are the ‘slab’ pictures of another phase, the Awelye (ritual ceremony) series.
Untitled (Awelye), 1992
There are hundreds of these, and they relate to body decoration at women’s ceremony. But with their emphasis on line they suggest the shift in direction towards the endless ribbons of some of her later work (Yam Dreamings: if you want to be literal, tracks from where yams have opened cracks in the earth as they mature underground).
Big Yam Dreaming (1995), all 3 by 8 metres of it, is one of the National Gallery of Victoria’s treasures and is, along with Earth’s Creation, one of Emily’s two poster pieces.
Finally a move to colour fields, some of which are even simpler than My Country (1996) pictured here.
As noted above, when asked what she painted, she always gave the same answer.
Whole lot. That whole lot. Awelye (my Dreaming), Arlatyeye (pencil yam), Arkerrthe (mountain devil lizard), Ntange (grass seed), Tingu (Dreamtime pup), Ankerre (emu), Intekwe (favourite food of emus, a small plant), Atnwerle (green bean), and Kame (yam seed). That’s what I paint, whole lot.
This sacred rock Alhalkere both is the location of, and is, her jukurrpa.
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I have encountered what I would call some of the bottom 10 percent of the 3000 works — knock ups, lines without obvious purpose or pleasure, muddy noodling, colour looking a little like where a brush was cleaned and not much more — in that direction anyway. You’ll find them for sale online for vast prices that you usually have to inquire about. Or I could have been looking at some of the endless fakes. That’s entirely possible.
But as well there is some of her authenticated (and acclaimed) work I like less. For example, I like the paintings from the Awelye period and the Yam Dreamings better than I like Earth’s Creation and its many likenesses. But when she is on form, and she so frequently is, my goodness! There is such confident exactitude in her judgment. Such surety.
Her international career began in Japan. Her work was championed by the distinguished curator Akira Tatehata, in 2008 director of the National Museum of Art in Osaka. He loved her work, was passionate about it, but couldn’t say why. I don’t know how to explain this work. I can talk about it in formal terms, structure, composition, lines, colour but I just don’t know how she got there. I can draw comparison with Brice Marden, with Pollock and particularly with Yayoi Kusama but I know how they got there. … It is a miracle and I just have to proclaim her a genius. But this is only an interim answer. (Quoted in Margo Neale’s article.)
I like the idea of an interim answer because the question is difficult. How does Emily fit into modern art? Some people really worry about that question, and not in moderate or generous ways.
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In 2013 an exhibition called ‘Australia’ was mounted at the Royal Academy in London. It consisted of hundreds of works one-fifth of which, the first section, were by Aboriginal artists. Emily’s Big Yam Dreaming was a centrepiece.
The critical response went off all over the place including some faint praise (good because it’s like what we’ve already decided is good, that sort of thing). But the general tenor was two thumbs firmly down. Waldemar Januszczak (‘Sunday Times’, 22/9/13) preferred:
original ancient rock art to the dull canvas approximations, knocked out in reduced dimensions, by a host of repetitive Aborigine artists making a buck. Out of a tremendous Indigenous tradition, fired and inspired by an enormous natural landscape, the Australian art world has managed to create what amounts to a market in decorative rugs. Opening the show with a selection of these spotty meanderings, and discussing them in dramatically hallowed terms, cannot disguise the fact that the great art of the Aborigines has been turned into tourist tat.
Brian Sewell of the ‘Daily Mail’ provided his own matchless off spin.
The exhibition is divided into five sections, of which the first is Aboriginal Art — but of the present, not the distant past, at last ‘recognised as art, not artefact’. By whom, I wonder? For these examples of contemporary aboriginal work are so obviously the stale rejiggings of a half-remembered heritage wrecked by the European alcohol, religion and servitude that have rendered purposeless all relics of their ancient and mysterious past. Swamped by Western influences, corrupted by a commercial art market as exploitative as any in Europe and America, all energy, purpose and authenticity lost, the modern Aboriginal Australian is not to be blamed for taking advantage of the white man now with imitative decoration and the souvenir. The black exploits the white’s obsession with conspicuous display and plays on the corporate guilt that he has now been taught to feel for the ethnic cleansing of the 19th century — a small revenge for the devastation of his culture — but the Aborigine offers only a reinvented past, his adoption of “whitefella” materials and, occasionally, “whitefella” ideas (Jackson Pollock must surely lie behind the longest of these canvases) undoing his “blackfella” integrity.
Bang. So stick that up your jumper you colonials. By the way, is the Rum Corps still operational? I fancy a drink.
In the ‘Financial Times’ Jackie Wullschlager tip-toed carefully through some well-prepared background, and then …
The largest Aboriginal work here is an eight-metre canvas of livid tangled white skeins of paint, Anwerlarr Anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming), by Emily Kame Kngwarreye. How authentic is it? A ceremonial leader who began painting on canvas in her seventies, Kngwarreye was promoted as an overnight sensation and became the first Aboriginal artist to sell for more than $1m. Her vigorous all-over compositions recall Jackson Pollock – perhaps too closely. One example is not definitive but, according to Philip Batty, senior curator at Melbourne’s Victoria Museum, Kngwarreye’s later work is simply “a mirror image of European desires”.
Uh oh. Sprung?
Hmm… is that an Emily I wonder?
What’s this thing about Pollock? The two artists were born round the same time, but Emily lived her life almost entirely on Utopia in the middle of the Simpson Desert. She spoke two languages neither of which was English, of which she had just a few words. She couldn’t read or write in any language. Even if she did it would be fair to say that Utopia would never at any stage have been awash in art books. Besides which Pollock poured, dripped and splashed; Emily painted. She had brushes. If you can’t see the fundamental differences between Blue Poles and Big Yam Dreaming … well, what can I say? They both do big ones and they both have a formidable colour sense. Was that enough to trick the critics, or did they just get on a congregational roll, a delicious English pile on?
And just who is this Philip Batty? Was he misquoted? Taken out of context? A Murdoch Press/ ‘Spectator’ snark? Right here the story unfolds with complex beauty.
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Philip Batty is not a sedentary rodent immured in an inner suburban retreat which he has never left, sharpening his poisonous claws on a keyboard. Philip Batty is currently the Senior Curator of Anthropology at Melbourne Museum who has co-authored (with Judith Ryan of the NGV) an important book about the origins of Western Desert art. But in his past life he was one of the three people who established CAAMA, the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association, a landmark media organisation (radio network, video production company and later, a television station). Right there, rock solid, huge credentials. But more to the point, for a time, Rodney Gooch worked for him.
When he joined CAAMA in 1983, I was the organisation’s co-director and therefore Rodney’s manager, although I don’t think anyone could ever really manage Gooch. Before taking up this position, he had been a head waiter at an Alice Springs restaurant where he organised and performed in the occasional drag show. He was extremely energetic, gregarious, creative, and generous to a fault. But he could also get into a terrible funk. (These quotes all come from an article by Batty for ‘Art Monthly’, July 2009 ‘The art of the art advisor: Rodney Gooch and the invention of Aboriginal art at Utopia’. The link is problematic.)
Moroccan Caravan. Rodney Gooch and his camels which he trained and with which he crossed the Simpson Desert. Riding them are Sam Todd and Fairlie Beckner. November 20, 1981. (Photo by Joanna Bailey for Fairfax Media). Flair, or what?
Rodney Gooch became the Art Adviser for the Utopia community.
The Art Adviser occupies a special, if impossible place in the world of Aboriginal art. They are usually white, young and enthusiastic and employed in Aboriginal art centres throughout remote Australia. Fortunately, their zealous commitment to the job helps fortify them against the difficult nature of their work.
Apart from the tedious business of running an art centre, they have to go cap-in-hand to governments each year for funding; soothe angry artists convinced that they have been ripped off; work out what will sell and encourage their artists to paint accordingly; stretch and undercoat innumerable canvases; watch for ‘carpetbaggers’ circling around their artists; deal with vehicle break-downs miles from nowhere; and butter up rich buyers at glittering exhibition openings.
Finally, they must do all this knowing that their artists will give away their ‘art money’ to innumerable relatives or spend it on second-hand cars that inevitably fall apart.
As an art advisor working at the Aboriginal community of Utopia in Central Australia, Rodney Gooch dealt with all these problems and more, but he also took the art of art advising to a more entrepreneurial level.
The short version. Gooch began at CAAMA as a producer and promoter of the Aboriginal bands CAAMA was helping to establish. The batik program at Utopia had been set up some years before in 1978 but, like many such things, after a promising start was foundering and the Aboriginal Development Corporation asked CAAMA to provide assistance.
Gooch, who according to Batty had previously shown minimal interest in or knowledge of Aboriginal art, was chosen for the task (quite probably by his Aboriginal boyfriend’s brother who was on the selection committee and knew an entrepreneur when he saw one). He visited Utopia and the very first time came back wildly enthusiastic ‘laden with brightly-coloured batik silks’ to sell at the CAAMA shop.
However, after some initial success, sales fell away. It was art that was making the money in Alice, not craft. The shop was sliding downhill to the extent that it was threatening the liquidity of CAAMA which at that time was bidding in an extremely pressured environment for a commercial television station licence (which became Imparja).
Rodney decided to take a more interventionist approach. He bought best quality acrylic paint and ‘constructed, stretched and undercoated 100 canvasses all exactly the same size’ and carted them off in the CAAMA truck to the women of Utopia. He showed them how to mix and use the paint and encouraged them to shift from traditional desert ochres to more varied, brighter and more vivid colours and avoid what he called ‘computer painting’, highly symmetrical alternating dots. He didn’t have to work to persuade the women. Painting was a lot easier and quicker than producing batik. Of the 100 canvasses he eventually retrieved 82. (He worried even then about the destination(s) of the other 18.)
Gooch developed links with dealers around Australia including the curator of Robert Holmes à Court’s collection of Indigenous art, the largest in Australia. Sales exhibitions were mounted with the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of NSW. Private galleries were chosen to be key stockists. This process both supported and rode on the rocketing interest in Aboriginal art from remote areas. But the big day came when James Mollison, then Director of the National Gallery of Australia, happened by the CAAMA shop.
Mollison told Rodney that Emily was ‘one of the finest Abstract Expressionists he had ever encountered’, although he was somewhat puzzled. How, he wondered, had an elderly Aboriginal woman living in remote Central Australia ‘mastered’ the techniques and aesthetic conventions of an art movement based in New York? How indeed. Emily spoke very little English, nor could she read nor write. In fact, there was only one white person in the world who had a reasonable grasp of Emily’s language (the linguist, Jenny Green). And as far as Rodney and I knew, Emily had never travelled beyond Central Australia.
It seemed to me that Mollison – an urbane man with little knowledge of Aboriginal people – was projecting his own artistic predilections onto Emily’s work and her aesthetic intentions. But who was to challenge the illusions of the most powerful aficionado in Australian art?
Of course, Rodney had no intention of questioning Mollison’s take on Emily. How she fitted into the history of western art was irrelevant. In any case, Rodney’s knowledge of the New York school of Abstract Expressionism was only marginally better than Emily’s which appeared to be non-existent.
Far more important was the fact that Mollision had not only fallen in love with Emily’s work; he had also bought several of her paintings for the National Gallery of Australia. [A footnote: when Mollison moved to the National Gallery of Victoria he organised the acquisition of Big Yam Dreaming.]
In 1991 Gooch left CAAMA and set himself up as an independent art adviser working with selected artists mostly from Utopia including Emily with whom he had developed a close relationship. It was his idea to make paintings on bits of the car wrecks — doors were popular for a time — which litter the desert. He had a gift for understanding the market and its movements and there is no doubt that he added his own considerable flair to ideas for paintings. Who knows? He might have known about Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, Krassner, Clyfford Still and Yayoi Kusama. Well … Pollock maybe, Blue Poles made a very big splash, but the others … only just the barest maybe.
What is in no doubt is that he didn’t paint the paintings. Or that the women of Utopia did.
After noting several problems that Gooch helped to leave behind — carpet baggers, fakers, desperadoes, exploiters of many kinds — Batty has no doubt that his legacy is positive. Nor that if it wasn’t him, it would have been somebody else. Purists will object,Batty writes, preferring to imagine that Aboriginal art emanates from some pristine, pre-industrial past. But Aboriginal art is an intercultural phenomenon, shaped both by its Aboriginal producers and non-Aboriginal consumers. Rodney clearly understood the nature of this cross-cultural relationship.
That’s what Batty said, and of course he’s right. And he did NOT say that, under the influence of a western Svengali, Emily was knocking out Pollocks.
At the peak of his powers and influence and under the spell of Emily’s work, Time art critic Robert Hughes ‘recognised’ the burgeoning Aboriginal cultural flowering as ‘the last great art movement of the 20th Century’. Emily wouldn’t have cared.
In 1993, she collected a prestigious Keating Award and was taken to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.Margo Neale writes: An eager entourage wheeled her to a painting by renowned Australian abstract expressionist Tony Tuckson that they were sure she would relate to — after all, everyone else seemed to see connections between her work and his. On tenterhooks they waited for her happy recognition of a fellow genius. Eventually, she erupted into her Anmatyerre language. The translation revealed that she was worried about her sick dogs back at Utopia and wanted to go home. To stimulate a more appropriate response, the curator Deborah Edwards explained Tony Tuckson’s painting process and his interest in mark‑making and action painting, hoping she would see some connection. Kngwarreye responded in language: ‘Oh poor fella, he got no story. No Dreaming.‘
Art or ethnography? Pretty much both. (And forget about the money. That’s a different topic altogether.)
The creation of Earth’s Creation
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A FOOTNOTE
Some time ago now I read an article in the ‘New Yorker’ called The Painted Desert. It’s a good yarn which you can read by clicking on the title.
Australian Aboriginal desert art is the broad subject. The Papunya Tula Co-op and Rover Thomas get a mention.
But it is primarily concerned with the story of the Ngurrara mob making up their minds whether or not to sell one of two paintings that they used to describe their country in a land claim (of almost 78,000 square kilometres, about the size of Austria). One of the reasons this is a good story is that the claim was, at first sight and eventually, six years later, successful. One Land Claims Tribunal member described the painting as ‘the most eloquent and overwhelming evidence that has ever been presented’. And isn’t it just?
Ngurrara, The Great Sandy Desert Painting, National Gallery of Australia, 10m x 8m
Note the size: 10 metres by 8 metres, painted by 19 Ngurrara artists. The horizontal mid line is the Canning Stock Route.
Getting your case through the Tribunal is a first step in a long and tortuous legal process. The adviser working at Fitzroy Crossing’s Mangkaja art co-op, was asked to contact someone who might offer information and guidance about selling at least one of the two paintings to provide some cash for the ageing artists. Three had already died. After discussions they decided they would sell one but not for any less than $20,000. Imagine. They could be confidently assured that such a monster painting of such huge cultural and political significance would realise more than that, perhaps 50 times more.
True to ‘New Yorker’ form, the article is very long and packed out with any possible material that a journalist could hoover up for colour, and to fill out 30,000 words. But being the ‘New Yorker’ it will have been assiduously fact-checked which is why I was a little bit tossed when the article seemed to be suggesting that Fitzroy Crossing was in Ngurrara country.
No one disputes (no one would dare) that Fitzroy Crossing is located at the confluence of four mobs: Bunuba and Gooniyandi definitely meeting at the town, the Nyikina a bit further downstream towards the coast with Walmajarri off to the south. Ngurrara country is further inland, real desert country. Its language groups do include Walmajarri, but also Wangkajunga, Mangala and Juwaliny. Perhaps this is the sort of thing you can’t readily fact check.
It just so happens that I was in Fitzroy at this very time and in fact bought an artwork at Mangkaja painted by two Kija ladies I know. The larger purpose of my presence was to introduce a couple of senior members of the Australian school education fraternity to life in remote Australia to try to increase their interest and involvement in the education of Indigenous kids. The Presidents of the Australian Secondary and Primary Principals Associations were the guests of honour.
It was during the Wet. The Fitzroy River, when in flood the river with the largest volume of flow in Australia, was lapping over the bridge (the ‘Crossing’) more than 15 metres above its level in The Dry. Visitors tend not to go to the Tropics in the Wet but, as long as the Monsoon has broken, that’s a mistake. The pindan (‘red soil’) country just leaps into life, furiously, actively, noisily, visibly. It’s like some sort of explosive chemical reaction which I suppose, in elemental terms, is precisely what it is. Just add water and step back.
The estimable John Hill had carted us off to some community schools well off the beaten track. Getting in and out had been something of a challenge, a modest sort of adventure in fact. But we had slept and eaten well at the Fitzroy River Lodge well out of the way of anything in town that might have freaked my colleagues out. (A fairly long list. Which is another thing about the article. The writer seems to take every chance she can to press the poverty, alcohol, sitting in the desert doing weird things buttons. It’s easy enough to do but there’s a lot more going on, and a lot that’s more interesting. It’s the tourist’s mistake, one I’ve made often enough.)
Back to Broome to fly home. Four hours of sliding along a road covered with water — in all that time the Willare roadhouse the only sign of human life — to find that the cyclone we’d been monitoring was due in Broome maybe that night, maybe next morning. Ha ho. So straight to the airport.
Broome takes some international flights and occasional direct flights from Sydney and Melbourne, but the main flight in and out of Broome was a sort of extended mail run around the west coast, a Qantas flight with maybe 150 passengers: Perth – Karratha – Broome – Darwin in the morning; turn around to do the same thing backwards in the evening. If you didn’t want to stay for the cyclone that was the flight to be on.
There are two things about wanting to get out. One is you mightn’t want to be in a cyclone, although none of the locals seemed especially bothered. Everything built in Broome in the last 25 years is supposed to be cyclone-proof. The correct way to prepare is to drive to the bottle shop and procure as much of the merchandise as the proprietors will allow, and hope your mate has been to the supermarket for the chops and snags. Looking at the queue of cars curling away from the drive-through, certainly 500 metres worth, the town was preparing.
The second is that you might get stuck for a while wherever you are. It’s not just that you need to wait for a plane to be able to fly after the storm. The whole schedule is kicked out of whack, so you wait your turn. It could be two or three days, but you don’t know. That might moderate what follows.
We’d booked for the next day so I wasn’t over-confident about getting out that night, although you never know. Not much travel in the Wet. We made our representations to the harried staff. There would be pressure for seats and we probably wouldn’t be leaving and there were people who needed to leave more than we did. Families with little kids, and so on.
The Broome airport is pretty much an open air affair, which suits. You can have quite enough of air conditioning. We’re sitting there watching the world go past, and there’s a commotion. Three top-of-the-line Land Cruisers drive up and screech to a halt like something out of a movie. You don’t screech to a halt. There may also have been ‘get out of the way’ type honking. You don’t honk either. Nine, count them, nine people, an entourage, got out, all apparently in a state of acute anxiety, and began shouting at people: people handling baggage, people who were booking, people who were helping with parking, people who were standing in their way. And then they started demanding things. Demand demand demand in strident American voices which included the identifier ‘We’re “New Yorker”‘ as though all gates would open; and when all gates didn’t open, they started metaphorically kicking them down. The main gentleman started screaming at the booking receptionist.
This is him. Tim Klingender, ‘the Sotheby’s expert who mounted Sotheby’s 1994 exhibit of Aboriginal paintings who divides his energy between Sotheby’s clients — whom he calls “the richest two hundred thousand people on the planet” — and Aboriginal communities, where the living conditions and life expectancy rival those of the most dismal outposts of the developing world.’ I am quoting from the article.
The focal point otherwise was a woman with an attack of the vapours, sobbing when she wasn’t making acidulous and strident remarks to the airport staff.
And this is her. Prize-winning journalist and author Geraldine Brooks with her prize-winning journalist husband Tony Horwitz. ‘They have two sons – Nathaniel and Bizuayehu – two dogs, three alpacas and a mare named Valentine. They live by an old mill pond on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts and spend as much time as possible in Australia.’ (‘About Geraldine’, author’s website) Next time you’re reading Nine Parts of Desire, March, Year of Wonders or Caleb’s Crossing, just remember that.
I wasn’t absolutely certain that I had the right crew, but voila!
There was, indeed, a big rain coming. A cyclone moved close to the coast that night deluging roads and closing airports. After three days of being immersed in the world view of the Walmajarri, I wondered briefly if the snake spirits were angry about the artists’ decision to sell the painting. Apparently not: the cyclone never touched down on land. Klingender and I made it back to Broome before the Great Northern Highway became inundated.
The Presidents somehow managed to get on (we know who you are Ted Brierley and Tom Croker), and the crazed nine, (Q. How many people does it take to write a ‘New Yorker’ article? A. Well …) still complaining, managed to bump three families and elbow their way on to the plane. Memorably unpleasant, twenty years later.
I had two nights at the Mangrove Hotel. It blew a bit. There was a snatch or two of Stairway to the Stars, the moon reflecting on ripples in the Indian Ocean. The hotel’s lawn terrace is the perfect viewpoint. Then, with my painting, I went home … to another world entirely.
Bush Tucker, Madeleine and Yangkana Laurel, 2002, Our kitchen wall
World Heritage Site. Exhibition Buildings, gardens and fountain. Not much to do with the text but the day before. A very pregnant woman and her partner dressed in skintight white clothes were having their photos taken in various sculptural poses in/near the fountain.
11.6. Feels like 7. Clear. Still. But with that icy note in the air.
I stretched out a mid-morning trip to Essendon to deliver some newly-made medical scrubs to a Pakistani Australian (nurse? aide? doctor?) with his two gorgeous young children who lived in a recently constructed suburban mansion. As always Essendon seemed Catholic and hilly and in the morning cold, and despite the endless family muscle cars, slightly frozen and surreal. Weird for weird times.
At the coffee shop the Greek owner stood just inside the door and directed traffic as owners might but rarely do. A young woman with two rather clever patches of dyed yellow thatch in her otherwise jet black hair (I did say it was Essendon) sorted out everything else with such deftness it was gripping. The conversation in the coffee shop had dints in it, assertive but stop-start declarations about what you could and couldn’t do. ‘No mate. No way. You can’t. They won’t letcha.’ The BMW SUVs kept up a steady stream going past, broken by the occasional Porsche Cayenne. Essendon. Plenty of money out there. Plenty of money spent out there anyway.
In the afternoon, it’s Sunday, we decided to go over to the Uni tram stop and take the first one that came past to its terminus and then walk home. It’s the busiest tram stop in the world with eight lines running through it, so there were options. It turned out to be a Number One, East Coburg to South Melbourne Beach. Wasn’t my first choice but who cares. We put our masks on and climbed aboard.
The terminus of this line is at the corner of Victoria Avenue and Beaconsfield Parade. We were at the beach. The cafes and coffee shops were full, the paths along the beach heaving with active wear and kids on scooters. Beaconsfield turn right along the beach to Station Pier then turn right up the light rail reserve back to the city.
Myrna needed a location for a Zoom dance so for a start we thought we’d bother the fishermen on Lagoon Pier.
We crossed the river over Webb Bridge, a bundle of modern architecture near Charles Grimes Bridge, Charles Grimes being the Surveyor General of NSW and the first European who ever saw the Yarra.
I looked down the river and it wasn’t Melbourne as people usually imagine it. Perhaps ever. But there was something about the whole that seemed to capture the afternoon. This place that time. Monumental, but vacant.
Then it seemed like wherever I looked it was the same.
This track takes you past Docklands Stadium where there was a game on. And the crowds had gathered, he says with heavy irony.
The forecourt warning about kicking the footy — ‘a no no. No punts, no big torps, no droppies or even bananas’ — was entirely unnecessary.
Dyse couldn’t even remember what to believe in.
Some kids were playing basketball watched by Ben Simmons and Liz Cambadge.
But the restaurant overlooking the forecourt was like a lot of other restaurants.
Food was coming from other sources. (The dominant form of traffic in our neighbourhood.)
It’s probably important to say Myrna did find a place to do her dance. It wouldn’t be coronavirus times if there wasn’t something slightly weird going round on video. All I can do is apologise we didn’t have the light rail passing in the background.
You may have noted the careful washing of hands (0.02-0.09) before the show really gets on the road.
Cattaro is a tiny, greatly coveted, much-fought-for town. The natural port for Montenegro but the property of Austria, it swelters, breathless, on a strip of shore, with the waters in front of it, and the the great wall of the Black Mountain rising sheer up behind.
Behind the town starts the rough zig-zag track, the celebrated ‘ladder of Catarro’ which until 1879 was the only path into Montenegro, and is the one the peasants still use. The making of the road was for a long while dreaded by the Montenegrins, who argued that a road that will serve for a cart will serve for artillery. The road that can let in artillery can let in something more subtle, irresistible and change working. The road was made, [by the Austrians]and there is now no barrier to prevent the twentieth century creeping up silently and sweeping over this old world land almost before its force is recognised. Whether the hardy mountain race which has successfully withstood the gory onslaught of the Turk for five hundred years, will come out unscathed from a bloodless encounter with Western civilisation time alone will tell.
Crnagora[in Montenegrin ‘crna’=black, ‘gora’, mountain], gaunt, grey, drear, a chaos of limestone crags piled one on the other in inextricable confusion, the bare wind-swept bones of a dead world. The first view of the land comes as a shock. The endless series of bare mountain tops, the arid wilderness of bare rock majestic in its rugged loneliness, tell with one blow the suffering of centuries. The next instant fills one with respect and admiration for the people who have preferred liberty in this wilderness to slavery in fat lands.
— Through the Lands of the Serb (1904) Mary Durham, yet another of those astonishingly intrepid English women travellers
‘Cattaro ‘is called Kotor now. The old walled city where tourists of Dalmatia still swarm is at the bottom of the picture. The ‘Ladder’ is the zig-zags going up the hill, seemingly endless when you’re walking up them on a hot day. But this is what you see from the top.
Quite something. Enough to attract 30 cruise ships a day in the high season. The passengers rush onto shore in crocs led by an umbrella lady or gent, wander through a few squares, look in the Cathedral of Saint Tryphon, wonder who St Tryphon was, buy an ice cream and a souvenir and tear off again. They generally leave by 6 at night and I can’t remember if that’s by choice or required by ordinance.
This is meant to be a story of a walk and to some degree it is. Walking occurred. The intention was to do a self-guided walk from Perast (one of the villages close to Kotor on the coast of the Bay) to arrive 160kms later at Stari Bar via, among other places, Cetinje, the old capital, and Virpazar.
I had chosen ZalaZ as our support company, partly because ‘Acquainting local people is a natural consequence of any ZalaZ tour’, partly because ‘walking by rare explored trail, observing all on historical Montengrin sites’, and partly because of the direction and length of the route.
Before our arrival I had had an extensive, cheerful and confidence-inspiring correspondence with Vlatko of ZalaZ and Jadranka his do-everything sidekick. The only issue was his warning about how hot it might be. 30s. Didn’t sound too bad. We had walked in heat before.
We left Tel Aviv at some ungodly hour (2.30am on checking) and shared a jammed plane with a barely semi-godly throng of Jewish holiday-makers who until expiring with exhaustion were happy to begin the holiday on the plane. At Tivat, one of the postage stamp size bits of flat land in Montenegro, the transfer car wasn’t waiting. And that was sort of it really. After the hustle of Jerusalem, Montenegro was going to be a study in patience. Things, good things, excellent things, would happen but perhaps not as you might have arranged. And anyway it was hot, glaring white calcium rock hot. Exasperating hot.
The soccer World Cup was on, and that will become evident as the story unfolds. The finals ran through this ten days with lots of upsets, and the excitement machine that was Luka Modric and Croatia doing its business. Huge.
Why Montenegro? We had tried to get there once before and were thwarted by illness. I had looked at the vast limestone scarp along the Dalmatian Coast and thought that would be good walking, … once you got up it would be anyway. The Bay of Kotor is sometimes considered the southern-most fjord in Europe, and therefore an oddity. The fact that it’s actually a drowned river valley doesn’t make it any less impressive up close. It’s a marvel. And so Montenegro … well, why not?
Mary Durham would add, at some length, the resilience and nobility of the stoic Montenegrin people, their honour, their decency, their patience, their individuality and yet their cohesion as a nation, a nation that over 500 years remained unconquered by the Ottomans no matter how hard they tried. (See also below in Black Mountain #2.)
Old Kotor is a walled city jammed up against the base of Black Mountain and consists of a higgledy-piggledy aggregation of lanes and squares. That’s what the tourists come for.
That said, it’s quite small and it didn’t take long for us to get the hang of it. But when we arrived we simply could not find our accommodation. We had risen very early and were keen for a snooze. Eventually someone told us to go to the camera shop near the Sea Gate square and see if we could find Mr Porteli. We did, and he was charming and very relaxed, including about the absence of the promised and paid for transfer. But you must move on quickly.
Our rooms wouldn’t be ready till later and we hadn’t had breakfast. So we slumped into a couple of the very comfortable wicker chairs above and counted the number of tours going past (17 in the first hour). As I drank my third cup of very good coffee I thought hmm that must be what Kotor is, a large-ish playpen for (as it turns out predominantly English and Russian) tourists. They were out sunning themselves in what felt like 40 unmediated degrees of radiant heat. When we found the pool it was just a bit of the coastline fenced off in concrete, albeit decoratively, water in water out with the tide, but entirely swimmable. After nightfall we watched a crowd of athletic young men practising water polo there (a pic appears below) but I fancy no members of Primorac Kotor, occasional superstars of the Montenegrin version of the sport who train in an indoor pool in another part of the valley to which newer Kotor has expanded.
To pass the day we walked, we swam, we snoozed in our very comfortable quarters. In that time Brazil had beaten Mexico 2-0 and Neymar had proven himself to be one of the genuinely great divers of all time. Not just a bit of diving, but powerhouse diving, straight into the turf howling with pain, possibly without an opposition player even being on the field.
At night we had dinner in the Tryphon Square with hundreds of others. And then the orchestra played. Just how delightful is that. One night only: 10-14 year olds from a Slovenian music school. The two soloists played cello and accordian, and that alone was just about worth going to Montenegro for. Their version of ‘Hallelujah’ left not a dry eye in the house. So good. There were two momentary interruptions as Spain came back from 2 nil down against Japan. But then Spain’s extra-time winner coincided exactly, precisely, with the last note of the encore which led to an enhanced and prolonged roar. It was all glorious. Everyone and everything was forgiven.
We had set ourselves for collection at 10am at the Sea Gate — no cars in the Old City, decidedly one of its attractions — and duly Vlatko appeared. Only one or two readers of this blog will understand this, but a sort of Montenegrin Chris Dewhurst.
I can see him running up these cliffs, strong, fit, a giant with a particular sort of masculine invulnerability and a great willingness but only a modest capacity to understand the frailty of others.
His mind was elsewhere. He had just bought a new property, a small farm out of Sremski Karlovci in Serbia where, strangely enough,we had beenand where his family was waiting for him.
He had all the gear for us, and all the gear wasn’t much. You’re looking at it. Three laminated army ordinance maps on a some huge scale — I think Los Angeles might have been on one of them — an envelope of accommodation vouchers, and a laminated booklet of notes. The latter unfortunately was written in Montenegrin English, something you don’t think will matter till it does. Lamination was so they could be re-usable and yes they had. Oh and a phone, yes a phone, which I just could not figure how to work. I lucked in a few times, but the antediluvian combo of buttons was beyond me.
I liked him, found him plausible and interesting, but he was thinking how long it was going to take him (ages, a complicated and tiring drive) to drive over the mountains to northern Serbia more than 700 kms away.
He left us in Perast to stay with some friends of his, the first night’s accommodation in a room so small our cases had to be left outside in the hall in a household with a three year-old and a whopping but fairly new baby with a great set of lungs. Dad had a quite high-powered government job in Podgorica; when she was working, mum was an English teacher. And, besides accommodating Vlatko’s customers, they were renovating this their holiday house. It was an experience, and that’s what you go for. ‘Acquainting’.
Perast (above) is one of the many towns besides Kotor that cling to the side of the bay. Our Lady of the Rocks in the middle of the Bay (at right) is its principle attraction although it is a most picturesque hamlet with options for very good eating. Fish, straight out of the Bay. That’s what they say anyway.
That’s Perast. To fill in our afternoon we found a place to swim round the far corner. And I have just noticed that in this photo at right you can see the important part of the next day’s route, the one that caused all the bother.
At night the whole town was watching the soccer at the Montenegrin equivalent of a pub. Round of 16. England dead lucky, 4-3 over Columbia in a penalty shootout. More diving than the Great Barrier Reef.
We were collected by a boatman first thing-ish from this very jetty in fact and taken over to the village on the other side, Donji Stoliv before climbing up to Gornji Stoliv (Lower and Upper Stoliv I’d guess), the roofs about half way up that you can just see in the pic above if you look closely. Then more or less straight up over Vrdola Pass, the saddle you can see, along the top of Vrmac Peninsula, the other side of the Bay, then down down down back to Kotor: 800m up and 800m down.
It all looks so obvious now. Prosaic even. You can see it all in the photo. If you’ve been there before even once, the shape of the walk would be embedded, the way clearly evident, maps not much more than a nuisance. All you’ve got to do is find the entrance, and the boatman did that for us. Tamo, tamo. There. There.
And while it was a bit of a push — quickly passing over the fact that, if there were any left in the scattered houses, this is the way five year-olds would daily get to school and home again — the track was unambiguous. But then we got to Gornji Stoliv.
When you do this walk here are the appropriate instructions from this point. It’ll take you less than five minutes to pass through.
At the T-intersection entrance to Gornji Stoliv you will find a sign post near a large cross. One sign pointing right (west) says to ‘Vlaka Vdrola’. Ignore this sign. After turning left, 100 metres further along the track into the village you will come to a small alcove built into a stone wall. To its right is a narrow flight of stone steps which is the entry to the next phase of your walk.
At the top of the steps the track immediately turns right. You will see waymarking of a white dot in a red ring which continues. The next 3-400 metres is an area covered in goat tracks and locating the waymarks is something of a challenge but essential. After 500 metres or so this problem is resolved. The track becomes very hard to locate but the waymarking is reasonably consistent every 50m or so and will take you to the Pass.
That’s not what happened. Our map at this point sort of dissolved into unintelligibility due to the size of the scale. The notes said ‘walk to centre of town to cistern and pump. You may pump water. You may buy some goat cheeses from the locals.’ Have I mentioned that it was really hot and that we’d been climbing for 90 minutes or so? I think I may also have passed over the fact that there was bitter dispute about the next course of action.
We went into the town, which didn’t actually exist, just a scatter of empty houses, searching for a cistern. What could a ‘cistern’ be? Down into the town via a waymarked track which might eventually have taken us back to the coast, and back again and then back right up to the church this time which you can see in the background in the photo below, quite a climb up steep stone steps, to find someone cleaning up a grave who roared at us when we tried to get directions. Water? No water here! NO water. I became confident that if we followed the sign to Vlaka Vdrola we’d get there for sure. So we did about 30 minutes in a direction 90 degrees wrong which eventually petered out into a goat track of limited interest covered in blackberry vines.
Myrna 50 metres after the problem signpost and 50 metres before the flight of steps we needed to find. Meditating on what idiots men are.
I had started hating the track notes at this stage. ‘Cistern’, pump’, ‘centre of town’. What on earth could they mean? Later Vlatko asked why I didn’t ring him up at this stage. Apart from not really being able to work the phone, I imagine he would have repeated exactly what was in the notes because when you know a track so well how do you explain to someone who is coming to it so raw. And so cross. And so keen to get the promised drink of water from the ‘cistern’.
For the umpteenth time we went back to looking at the stone alcove for a clue. We had presumed this was the cistern somehow, and I noticed there was a narrow, perhaps 30 cms wide, flight of steps going in what I knew to be the right direction but apparently into a house. We climbed them and avoided the house with a sharp right turn. The waymarks which were everywhere started reappearing in an encouragingly systematic way which was just as well because this area was thick with goat tracks, and after another 60 minutes or so we were at top of the Pass (below). Still faintly furious. We had wasted 90 minutes getting through Gornji Stoliv.
Once we climbed the steps we did pass a plastic tank in a wire cage (well out of sight from below). That would be the ‘cistern’ I assume, except that cisterns are either underground water storages or storage tanks for toilets.
I had offered to rewrite Vlatko’s publicity material in more conventional English. He was interested for a minute and then said no. He thought people found it enjoyable. So sure. Ok. Lovely. Loads of Balkan charm. In retrospect I think he might have been referring to the excellence of his style rather than the preponderance of half and three-quarter mistakes, strange vocab and weird constructions that disturbs a pedant like me.
But I was talking about his publicity material. The laminated track notes were considerably worse, in part less directions than ruminations on Montenegrin life and history and in part ‘walk the salamander back downwards’. And track notes matter. They really should be precise and clear. We never found the pump or the centre of the village, but we did find this view.
Perast is hidden to the right of the conical peak in the mid-ground. We are looking north-west out to the Aegean (eventually). Lovcen, a Montenegrin icon, is on the skyline.
And we found a sign and kept at it.
‘All trails in stone area/ solid sole boots recommended.’ There it is in black and white. I had chosen to wear my old walking shoes, very comfortable but the Vibram on the soles was worn thin and had softened in this heat and, as advertised, we were walking on tracks made of broken rock. There was nowhere much to get off and every step hurt.
Just here there was some shade. However for several hours in the middle of the day we had been walking in direct sun with massive glare coming off the grey rock, probably high 30s in the shade and, weak reed that I am, I had a touch of sunstroke. Sunstroke requires the lowering of body temperature. Pouring water over your head works quite well. Lying down in a cool room does as well. Neither were available. One reason was that I’d been counting on refills at the ‘cistern’ which hadn’t eventuated.
Low on water, we got to the end of the ridge and with all the errors we’d made we’d done about 15 or 16 kms, and we had to get down here via a process that wasn’t 100 percent clear.
This is Kotor and environs. The Old City is only the small triangle in the middle; the fancy pool patronised by the super water polo team is under the red roof.
Same thing but on the other side of the Bay.
We had to find the ‘salamander’ amid instructions about a grassy field and restored historic building that could have meant anything. The ‘salamander’ turned out to be one of those endless zig-zags with stone edgings and big drops (no possibility of hoon tracking) that we discovered Montenegro specialised in.
It was SO far down. When we did bottom out it was still a few kms through the suburbs, and shops that sold drinks were nowhere to be found. I had put my head under a garden tap to my great relief. But plenty of time was left for constructing my side of the next conversation with my friends at Zalaz. Even before we got onto the ‘salamander’, I had advanced the idea that I wasn’t going to do any more of this, and Myrna replied, yes, we might be intrepid but we’re not stupid.
I did feel slightly stupid. This was really a domestic walk, hardly out of sight of Kotor, up across down, what could go wrong especially compared to where we were off to next. But far more than stupid I was feeling aggrieved, if that’s a summative adjective for hot, tired and cross.
So, possibly looking like sweaty versions of death, we found Jadranka in her shop. Three things to tell her: 1) it’s too hot for us (our fault), 2) the materials are hopeless (Vlatko’s fault), 3) we’re quitting. Those three matters communicated, we (okay, I) limped off to the accommodation that had been arranged for us where we were welcomed by two stern man looking just a fraction like Serbian mafiosi saying, ‘You pay now. This company never pay.’ We got him to ring Jadranka who persuaded him otherwise and we collapsed onto the broken bed with the air con on high, and that night ate brilliantly almost by ourselves just outside the city walls at Bastion No.1.
It had been a big day.
Could be me pointing to my injured pride, but it is actually the patron saint of walkers St Jacques with coquilles and bubo, looking suitably surprised although I think he would have known. This statue is within whispering distance of the highly visible skull and bones advertised as being those of St Tryphon and a host of other religious art treasures.
I’d like to have a pic of Jadranka to insert here, a tall athletic type who ran a gift shop rather up the back of town as well as someone who tidied up after Vlatko. I’d like to insert a picture in simple gratitude. [I did! There she is at right.] There was the Montenegrin strongperson, but there was also the Montenegrin gracious host. She was both.
We came good after a sleep and a leisurely breakfast and formulated a plan. We would go back to Mr Porteli to see if he had another couple of nights available in one of his most satisfactory units in Kotor. Zalaz still had our money, so we would go back to Jadranka and see what we could negotiate. We agreed that after a couple more nights in Kotor she would arrange a driver to take us to Cetinje and to Virpazar where we would stay in rooms we’d booked and paid for, and then go on to the capital Podgorica from where we’d leave. And that’s what happened.
Kotor had at least a day’s worth of interest. We wandered to and fro, thoroughly investigating St Tryphon’s and the many and varied other churches in the Old Town, along with water polo practice at the town pool.
Can you follow the wall up this cliff? It is continuous even when the substrate is almost vertical. Imagine building it. Nah. Can’t. Imagine it being useful? Nah? Me neither. But at its apex is a fort, and if you stay at Kotor for more than half an hour and are in reasonable condition you get yourself on The Ladder and see if you can get as far as The Fort.
As it happens that was the next part of our walk and Myrna thought it would be a good idea. Did I? I am not at liberty to comment. Commercial-in-confidence.
It was furiously hot again. But we got going, perhaps in an effort to recover our dignity, and just as well because otherwise we would have missed this, an American from New York with, what, gosh, a seven-pack I would think. His equally muscular girlfriend could only do upside down. We just stood there. Applauding of course.
The Fort, I said. That’ll do. Hmm just a bit further, she said. We are less than a third of the way up The Ladder. So of course it was just a bit further. A bit further which began by having to find and climb through this window. Montenegro. Different to, say, Japan.
And then we went a bit further again. ‘How about we just go to …’, that type of thing. Before climbing again, this entailed descending through the ruins of an old town — goats and an old and highly picturesque church. How Montenegrin. Unmissable really.
By dint of a light breeze it was getting slightly cooler as we climbed but not much. A good deal of the vegetation on this track was herbs, fragrant with the sun beating down on them. Rosemary, sage and thyme were easily recognisable. Where they came from and how they survived are mysteries.
Our eventual destination is the peak here.
Just a bit further, just a bit further. To that hill. Round that corner. Another 15 minutes. There’s a mast up there. Three more zig-zags. It’s flattened out here … and we surprised ourselves.
Just in time to see one of fancier cruise ships evacuate a long stream of brown effluent into the Bay. The one at right actually.
I guess that’s what they do. But we can’t end on that note.
On the way up we had enjoyed large wonderfully sustaining glasses of pomegranate juice at this hillside establishment.
On the way down we did even better: bread, tomatoes, speck, cheese, pomegranate juice — and beer. Everything they had to offer really. Most gratifying.
This was most of the next day’s walk as per ZalaZ. As it happened we couldn’t have done the next day’s walk because there was a competitive car rally ripping up the tracks in the Lovcen National Park and it was closed — the manly side of Montenegro.
That night we had a pizza watching Belgium defeat Brazil 2-1. Brazil had four gettable chances in the last three minutes, but heck, you just never know how things are going to pan out do you.
There’s much more of interest about Montenegro to be found right here. And what an interesting place it is.
It may be self-evident but building roads in Montenegro is both difficult and expensive.
There are not a lot of ways to get from Kotor to Cetinje (‘se-teen-yer’) by car — in fact just the one. As the local Spotted Crake flies it is about 12 kms; by car 54; and because of the serpentine quality of the road an hour or more was spent in the company of our driver Alex, one of the great entertainers we met in Montenegro.
Alex spends his winters in Belgrade and his summers by the sea. He was born in Kotor but did his law degree in Serbia. This was not an uncommon pattern among the Montenegrins we spoke to. The links between these two countries, and Russia, are strong. On discovering we were Australian, he proffered deep state information about the current and past lives of Paul Hogan and the source and etymology of the word ‘kangaroo’ roaring laughing as he did so. (On landing at Cooktown in 1770 Banks asked a local, presumably in his best Georgian English, what was that? ‘Gangurru’, Guugu Yimidhirr for ‘I don’t know’, was the reply. That’s how the story goes and how Alex’s story went. It’s good. But awkwardly ‘gangurru’ is the Guugu Yimidhirr word for what we would call the Eastern Grey Kangaroo. His stories about Paul Hogan were probably just as apocryphal but a lot funnier.)
He had a lot to say about the ancient and more recent Balkan wars, a very considered history lesson really, registering considerable disgust about what ‘they’ had done to ‘themselves’. When we got to Mary Durham’s assertion that ‘[Montenegrins were] the hardy mountain race which … successfully withstood the gory onslaught of the Turk for five hundred years’ he snorted as only Balkan men can snort — and they practice it daily from a very early age. (Snorting): They say the Ottomans [Mary’s ‘Turks’] didn’t conquer Montenegro. They did. Three times. Every time they could be bothered. Then they left. What was there? Stones. Nothing but stones. Who wants that!? (Snort.)
It was in fact a great drive, captivating for more reasons than Alex’s commentary. We went via Budva (above), Montenegro’s St Tropez where Russians and rich Serbs have their beach holidays to the extent that they had caused a massive shift in property values according to Alex, and Montenegrins can no longer afford to live there. And we went across the karst ridges, calcium grey with strips of green hanging on tight to gullies and cracks, to Cetinje, the old capital, at the foot of Lovcen National Park where we would have arrived on Vlatko’s schedule and at about the same time. But instead of spending five minutes (or two hours) passing through we were able to stay most of two days at what was once the world’s smallest national capital.
Cetinje became significant during the rule of Prince Nikola Petrovic in the mid-19th century. The Biljarda, the ‘billiard house’, the first ruler’s residence and a place of great national pride, was built there then along with a hospital and some other public buildings. But in the 1860 census Cetinje still had only 34 households.
And, with apologies to Mary Durham, it was after 14 years of Ottoman rule that it became the capital in 1878. All credit to the Montenegrins for driving them out, but the Ottomans had become a decadent shadow of their former selves by that time, and just a few decades later the Austrians stepped into the role as landlord.
After 20 years as an ‘independent principality’, Montenegro was proclaimed a kingdom in 1910. As a consequence the Government House and several other major buildings including a street of embassies were built in Cetinje. Quoting from a Montenegrin document: ‘The population census from the same year recorded a massive growth in the world’s smallest capital, registering 5,895 inhabitants.’ It may make sense at this stage to note that the country’s current total population is 631,000 (or two and bit Geelongs). Podgorica, the current capital, is the biggest city with 150,000. The third biggest city, Herceg-Novi, has less than 20,000 people.
You can fit a lot of contemporary Cetinjes into Geelong (15 if you’re counting), but that only makes it more attractive. Despite the palaces, the monasteries, the museums and galleries, the embassies, and despite the fact that it’s a picturesque ‘past glories’ sort of spot with a lot to say about itself and its surrounds, and despite the wonderful tree-lined avenues and green swards, foreign tourists don’t go there. These chaps would be more representative of the visiting class.
I assume that these two would be locals. Ah youth, glorious youth! You can warm your hands from that blush.
We were hungry and headed for the square with a massive rain cloud gathering over our heads.
Along with most others who were out and about, we sat down at the Caffe Bar ‘Dvor’ (‘palace’) in the main square. And then it rained.
Mountain rain. Orchestrated with massive claps of thunder and streaks of lightning, I have never seen, or heard, such rain. It pounded ferociously for ten minutes, then it stopped and it turned into a lovely day.
We visited King Nikola’s Palace, a modest affair with a faintly Ruritanian feel.
The accessible parts of the ground floor had displays of highly-decorated pearl-handled pistols, highly-decorated swords and highly-decorated uniforms complete with medals, sashes, ribbons, epaulettes and jazzy buttons.
Fully dressed, one would have been a sight to behold, and I guess that’s the point.
Upstairs, the modesty was more evident. It’s a small show. This is the main state room for the conduct of diplomacy.
The main bedroom, nicely matched ornate furniture but tiny.
Out in the street we moved on past all sorts of intriguing architecture. Like most of the big buildings, the Blue Palace had seen better days.
The Russian Embassy has been one of the really grand buildings of Cetinye.
But after a fire in 2002 when it was an art school, its interior is currently derelict. You can read an interesting story about it here. (Keep going with the ‘Comments’ if you want to know what the plaque on the wall says.)
And this was the French Embassy until 1914. There is a wonderful run of tiles under the bottom windows which is hard to see just here.
All sorts of remarkable things really.
It was also incumbent on us to visit the monastery, ‘a spiritual centre for centuries’ but also for complex geopolitical reasons home to a fragment of the True Cross, the Right Hand of John the Baptist and the icon of the Madonna of Philermos. (See if you can work out the complex reasons. Clue: Jerusalem > Istanbul > Malta > St Petersburg > Belgrade > Ostrog > Cetinje **Answer far far below.)
I’m always keen to get a look at a good icon, particularly such auspicious ones. But despite the very high quality of the Orthodox decoration they weren’t to be found in the monastery. National Treasures, they were kept in the National Museum.
We found the National Museum. The third of it which was open turned out to be not where the icons were. However it was where they had THE great collection of Montenegrin art and, like many such things, it was terrific. There was the usual evidence of following larger movements (okay, let’s do Impressionist now …) but also of a great deal of originality ranging from St Genevieve who looks to be in big trouble (although the angel is on standby with a towel)
to a major collection of the very individual works of Vojo Stanic.
If you’re prepared to wander you just don’t know what you’ll find.
As recommended by our exemplary host we ate at the restaurant Kole. Tournedos Rossini: that night — not necessarily always — 6.8/10. We had already seen England beat Sweden convincingly and returned to watch a very tense game Russia versus Croatia. To my initial and unwarranted surprise all the locals were barracking emphatically for Russia, the home team and tournament host. One all after 90 minutes. Croatia scored late in extra time for certain victory. But then Russia tapped one in (Fernandez, brilliantly) just as the whistle blew for full-time. 2-2. The Croatian keeper Subasic had pulled his hamstring and was limping badly. Now defeat was looking closer to certain. But somehow he managed to stop the first penalty. Next up for Russia, Fernandez who had played so well, missed everything. And that was enough. 4-3 Croatia. My team. Ha!
Another drive, this time to Virpazar, along the two long sides of an isosceles triangle and through the outskirts of Podgorica which was a surprise, I wasn’t looking at a map at the time. Our driver assured us that Podgorica was a rubbish place, industrial, warehouses, run down, that sort of thing. We’d been told this several times, and that brief glance suggested it might be true. Myrna was becoming resigned to the idea that Montenegro might not be the place to plunder for wardrobe renewal.
‘Pazar’ attached to a name indicates a market or ‘bazaar’, something the Ottomans did leave behind. ‘Vir’ means ‘whirlpool’ and that’s what the locals called it. I might have this wrong but I believe Virpazar, today, is valued by Montenegrins as THE locals’ holiday resort — the one, the serious one, with its own iconic qualities. It is on the flood plain of the Morača which brings silt down from the endless mountains behind Podgorica and thus it is a remarkably fertile area in a country not renowned for its fertility. It is located within a national park. It is also the access point to a lacustrine boating paradise to the north of the bridge and to the south and east the rest of Lake Skadar, and although shared with Albania pretty much down the middle, a defining feature of Montenegrin life.
Huge and, yes, lovely …
Vir not so much.
My view was coloured by our accommodation. I don’t have a photo of our room but I have found this one of a luxury suite in our hotel. Our room was smaller, cases on the bed smaller, up six flights of stairs, no aircon, no TV, no hot water, no bath mat. ZalaZ accommodation in fact: of the people, living simply, learning about essentials, acquainting. No real reason for complaining which nonetheless my journal indicates I continued to do describing Bobo, our host, as ‘terrifyingly hospitable’. The hotel however did have a nice garden square in front of it.
And that’s Vir really … a boaty resort, and nothing much else going on.
We decided to complete our day there we’d go for a walk. Round the top of the lake to the hills behind the nearby town of Godinje seemed a suitable target, again where our walk with Zalaz would have taken us.
Godinje is in the centre. We followed the track up into the hills above.
This walk had several noteworthy features. The first was the constant presence of the lake and, although its moods didn’t shift much — too big, too grand — in navigational terms it was reassuring.
The second was just how astonishingly lush the gardens were. Flowers, vegetables, fruit, vines, just burgeoning.
We looked high and low for somewhere to eat and even went well off our track chasing signs that suggested there was a resort at the top of the lake presumably on the coast. I can find it looking now and, as I write, it is open. But that’s not much help is it.
But the third bonus was walking up the track inland to a collection of houses which might or might not have been called Lekovici where we met this guy whose name I was told but can’t remember. Perhaps Lekovič.
As I look now this might be the Organic Paradise Restaurant with a preponderance of 5/5 digital ratings. But I’d be pretty sure it wasn’t when we there. It did look like somewhere you might get something to eat and drink if you asked, as long as you were willing to listen to someone keen for a chat.
He was back in his home town. There was a strong suggestion that his aged father, who he had returned to care for after five years away, was the local seigneurial figure. As a rule he and his family (wife and 10 year old son) wintered in Novi Sad, a biggish city in northern Serbia not so very far in fact from Vlatko’s newly-acquired farm, but had spent most of the last five years in the Canary Islands living in a tent. Five years, and apparently the Canary Islanders had not taken to them. It was very important for us to understand that when his son got sick no one helped or even showed any concern.
One reason for living in the Canaries was that he was sick of the way Serbs and Croats were at each other’s throats, while in the meantime failing to realise that Germany was manipulating Europe’s economies and turning people into slaves, especially in weak countries like the smaller parts of what used to be Yugoslavia, read Montenegro.
Smart, articulate, well-educated, good English, but just slightly off-putting. I think we did look at the cellar where his forebears had hidden from the Turks, the Austrians, the Nazis and whoever else was inclined to do damage, but we declined the trip through the tunnel to show how you could come out at the church of Sveti Nikola a kilometre away and escape.
We drank a glass of his entirely presentable wine, ate some of his wife’s bread and salad, paid him €10, avoided his tour of the town and, shifting the route a bit, walked home satisfied. We ate dinner at a restaurant with an overwhelmed kitchen in a thick cloud of mosquitoes which later joined us for bed.
Podgorica had had a bad rap so far among our Montenegrin contacts.
‘Flat’ appeared to be one problem and, yes, it is on the Zeta Plain, silt deposited by the Morača, Ribnica and other rivers which meet there. But ‘Podgorica’ means ‘the area below Gorica’, a hill which has now been absorbed into the city. And what does ‘gorica’ mean? Little hill. (Rather better than ‘Titograd’ which was its name from 1946-92, a celebration of the Marshall who stuck the Balkans together with his own particular type of glue. Originally Titovgrad, it was recorded incorrectly in the public annals and common usage turned it into the mistake.)
But being a bit flat and very fertile made it a popular place to live from the Iron Ages on. The Roman Emperor Diocletian was born in a village on the fringe of the city still called Duklja. (‘Doclea’ not ‘Dioclea’: another name incorrectly rendered, by the Romans this time.) A centre for trade, it became a major Ottoman fortification (ah Mary …) and several thousand Slavs and Albanians were imported to populate it. The Albanians seem to have maintained a major interest in it. The Bushati family from Shkodra ruled for 70 years from the mid 19th century.
‘Industrial’. That’s another slap. Before World War I, most of Podgorica’s economy was in trade and small-scale manufacture, an economic model established during the long rule of the Ottomans.After World War II, Podgorica became Montenegro’s capital and a focus of the rapid and somewhat oppressive urbanization and industrialization that was typical of Yugoslav communism; economically good, environmentally less so. Industries such as aluminium and tobacco processing, textiles, heavy engineering, and wine production were established in and around the city. The Plantaza vineyard forming one boundary of the city is claimed as the largest in Europe. But with the dismemberment of Yugoslavia the command economy collapsed, and the UN/ NATO sanctions of the late ’90s just added to the pain.
Boris was driving us from Vir to Podgorica and he had a lot to say about this. He himself had 17 cars, but he was unusual. Most people weren’t rich he said. As we went past he pointed to the massive aluminium plant on the outskirts of town, secured for Montenegro during the late 60s via a profoundly dodgy tender process. ‘7000 people used to work there. Now less than 1000. All propped up with Russian money.’
Another critique. ‘It was bombed flat in the war.’ And so it was. First by the Luftwaffe in 1941, then the British in 1943, then the Americans in 1944 — 76 recorded bombing raids. (Also by the NATO forces in 1999 despite Montenegrins having very little involvement in the Balkan wars of the time.) About one-tenth of the civilian population was killed by this process, yet another reminder that ‘collateral damage’ is a euphemism pasted over a much nastier reality. After the war Tito promised he’d rebuild it and he did his best in a post WWII Eastern bloc way.
2000’s Millennium Bridge in the foreground, the post-war tower blocks in the mid-ground and the Plantaza grape vines beyond.
‘Nothing interesting is left.’ That too. We visited The Old City and it doesn’t seem to have been worthy of a photo. This is someone else’s. No it’s not. Can’t find one. It seems like no one else has thought much of it either. A few disembodied stone walls treated with limited compassion.
As we drove through the tree-lined boulevards to be dropped at the door of our hotel, it didn’t look, prima facie, like ‘boring’ was exactly the right word. It looked rather lovely.
Our very comfortable hotel was in the middle of an active street beer/ coffee/ food culture with hundreds of people (invisible in this picture) sitting outside, chatting and having their lunch.
I was hungry and as is often the case on arrival picked the wrong place to eat, a very strange idea of a croque m’sieur, but what the hell.
We reconnoitered. We found the Old City such as it was. The Art Gallery/Museum was closed, but we followed the river along and the famous monument was there. This is worth visiting right here. I know. Weird. Did you notice the silver skull embedded into the platform? A memorial to Vladimir Vysotsky, ‘a Soviet singer-songwriter, poet, and actor whose career had an immense and enduring effect on Soviet culture’, and a regular thorn in the side of the administration, donated by the Russian government. Why? Who knows.
And the famous Millennium bridge.
As well as this sort of thing …
Did you notice this bloke? Might be a bit Montenegrin.
And while it might be a bit down at heel, it was NOT boring as we ambled along. There was always something to see.
Suddenly, out of nowhere so to speak, this magnificent creature appeared.
The Cathedral of the Resurrected Christ. What a building! and about 10 years old when we saw it with work still going on in its surrounds.
The lower orders are these massive blocks of limestone — most roughcast, some carved — which are just so impressive, a wonderful amalgam of construction and art.
And then you enter …
WHAM.
Everyone gets a go.
We walked home down Vasa Raickovica through the rather scungy high rise and shops of Novi Grad (yes ‘New Town’) and discovered an outstanding patisserie where we made up for all the food we hadn’t eaten. Podgorica was developing a whole new glow.
No soccer that night: the break for the semis, but after an excellent meal at Laterna we sat in a pub watching a street orchestra play sweet and sour Balkan music.
A genuine Ottoman relic, in good order
Next day we set ourselves to find a mosque, an Ottoman clocktower, a museum, a pool and succeeded with the lot. Several mosques really via an interesting and little used route through the backblocks.
The clocktower sat next to Pod Volat restaurant, a Podgorican icon, and it was an authentic Montenegrin experience. Lord Rowland would have been proud of us. Among the heavy duty masculine throng who looked formidably tough and their several glamorous female companions, I had beer and cevapci, Mernz an omelette and some remarkable cakes to ease off with, celebrating the end really. We’d been away for six weeks and that’s enough for anyone.
Then, after waiting a mysterious length of time for it to open, we found one of the great pools: clean clear water, happy swimmers, perfect temperature and immaculately maintained and supervised.
And that was pretty much that. Podgorica … ooooo, tonight 8.9.
In the evening France, looking inspired, beat Belgium. But I was more interested in England v. Croatia.
Kieran Trippier scored from a free kick in the first five minutes — ‘IT. IS. DELICIOUS!!! PICTURE PERFECT!!!!! THERE IS NOT A BETTER STRIKE THAN THAT!!’ — and a note of supreme confidence entered the English commentator’s voice. ‘We’ve got this, and almost certainly the Cup itself. In fact hold on. I’ll just put a call through to the PM about arranging the victory parade.’ An hour later Perisic pounded one in and (slightly deflated) ‘Croatia’s cravings are satisfied. … At least for now.’ A number of threatening shots on goal followed. ‘PICKFOOOORD (the English keeper)!!!!. PICKFORD IS AN IMPENETRABLE BRICK WALL!’ But then Mandzukic poked one through the bricks. (A sort of a death gurgle, as he announced) ‘England are hurting.’
Strangely, impossibly, both destiny and fate had been thwarted, or at least re-imaged as we might say these days. Croatia was playing in the final. The revenge of the Balkans. Hardy mountain races!! Mary was right all the time!
(Perhaps I do not need to add that of course Montenegrins are not Croats, not Serbs, not Albanians, they’re Montenegrins — Mary’s point precisely.)
Proof of hardiness: a Montenegrin dance.
** THE ANSWER: ‘Although Cetinje has been one of the most important spiritual centers of Montenegro for centuries, three highly esteemed and miraculous Christian relics (namely a fragment of the Crucifixion Cross, the Right Hand of St John the Baptist and the Icon of Madonna of Philermos) found their way by a combination of unusual circumstances. The relics, which had been stored in Constantinople (Istanbul) for centuries, belonged, after the Turkish conquest in the modern 15th century, to the Knights of the Order of St John. Thereafter they were taken to Malta [Home of that Order]. The Knights of the Order, forced to leave their seat, took the Holy Relics to Russia and bestowed them to Russian Czar Pavel. The Russian Emperor commissioned his best goldsmiths to make the golden chests for these precious relics and the golden frame for the Icon, both which were then decorated with jewels. After the decline of the Russian Monarchy, the Relics were handed to the Yugoslav Royal Family of Karadjordjevic. At the beginning of the Second World War, they in turn entrusted the Holy Relics to the Ostrog monastery in Montenegro [built into the side of a cliff in the Montenegrin hinterland], where they were enshrined until 1952. Nowadays they are kept in the National Museum in Cetinje.’
For Bax and Deirdre. (and Myrna took a lot of the photos.)
Charles Conder, A Holiday at Mentone 1888 Melbourne. Oil on canvas. Held by the Art Gallery of South Australia. Look at it again. What IS he doing? Two lots of John Cleese in the one picture. But summer. Yes. Definitely Summer.
No one in my vicinity needs to be told it’s been a dud summer: a tragic summer, a horrible terrible summer. Coronavirus is making the running just now, but it was the bushfires that did the lasting damage. At one stage there was a report, now seared into my memory, that four percent of Australia was on fire.
This was the official estimate of areas prone to bushfire in August last year.
That is a pretty good description of exactly where they happened. Were we prepared? No WE weren’t. Scomo wasn’t. The Federal Government wasn’t. But the fire chiefs and emergency services were.
Not perhaps for the scale of what occurred, nor its intensity and the massive damage to the biota. Over 18 million hectares burned as of mid-January. Two billion animals are estimated to have been killed.
This occurred mostly in forested mountainous terrain. Just over twenty per cent of Australia’s forests burnt this summer.
This is a disaster of this type unprecedented at any other time or in any other place. Biodiversity is concentrated in forests: they are home to more than 80 per cent of all terrestrial species of animals, plants and insects. So, when forests burn, the biodiversity on which humans depend for their long-term survival also disappears.
For some reason, that seems to be a hard idea to get across. It’s not because animals are cute that there is cause for concern. Nor should we be grateful for the relative absence of insects. And, if you should need one, it is actually a VERY good reason to cancel the duck-hunting season.
But this is intended to be a [modestly] better news story.
8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8
We’d been spoiled by a very successful trip to Warrnambool but we still needed some eucalyptal air in our lungs. Nothing arduous, nothing too far away: just a taste of the Alps. So we decided to do the Baw Baw plateau walk or bits of it: Mt St Gwinear car park along ski trails to the top of St Gwinear, down through some boggy flats up to join the Alps walking trail, a climb to Mt St Phillack, lunch at Freeman’s Flat, then another kilometre or two to The Tors, and back to where we came from. On a most beautiful day.
The cairn marking the top of Mt St Gwinear, 1505m ASL from memory. St Phillack 1585.
Saint Gwinear? Celtic martyr, possibly apocryphal, probably named Fingar. Saint Phillack then? Irish (or British) martyr, not well enough established even to be apocryphal. Could have been named Felec or Felicitas. File naming process under ‘Mysteries’.
So, a climb up to the ridge in the background and following it for eight or so km. That’s the story. (But look at the form of the mountain ash in the foreground. Premier League material.)
I wasn’t sure whether or not we might run into large burnt patches. I had a vague recollection that Erica, close at hand, had been evacuated in a fire emergency.
But look what we could see on this lovely day.
In this photo the horizon would be 80-100km away and it was thickly forested all that way. The fires had been further east and north and, tragic though they had been, there are still mountain forests left in Victoria and we were in the middle of one at its very best, with plenty of radiant heat in the atmosphere and water under foot to sustain and encourage more growth.
We had begun the day at Peterson’s Lookout leaning over a pulpit of grey conglomerate to peer down at the Tyers River which looked like it had plenty of water in it. Hoorah.
It wasn’t Early early, but as the shadow indicates, about the time you might expect bird song. But the cacophony of bird noise as soon as we got out of the car was an encouraging surprise. They were all there. Kookas announced our presence and soon they were all joining in: yellow-tailed black cockatoos creaking away, magpies chortling and gurgling, Major Mitchells and Sulphur-crested cockies squarking, a lyre bird or two chiming in with copies and a chain saw on the other bank, flights of crimson rosellas careening through the undergrowth, tree creepers creeping on trees, finches foraging, grey shrike-thrushes just being their modestly glamorous selves. The point is that they were all there, all correct and in glorious disorder. They might have been migrants from the carnage elsewhere. But at least they were there.
As well as the remarkable fungus, this photo has got a fly and an ant in it. The March flies were tiresome, as they can be, but after I got into stride I couldn’t begrudge them their place and their role in it and if they were going to survive by nipping at my legs, then … just get on with it I guess.
Over St Gwinear (which has its own Facebook page!) you come to Gwinear Flat. It mightn’t look like it, but this is a wonderland of vegetation. You might be looking at 50 or 60 different species of vegetation.
Myrna is bending over looking at these: snowy white mountain gentians.
They are snow gums in the background, and these ones, so eminently photogenic, haven’t been burnt. (Scoparia after flowering in the foreground.)
They are ‘young’ (maybe 60-70 yo) and briskly healthy. Muscular in fact.
And this is one of these precious places that I have written about a number of times: an alpine mossy bog.
This one is full of all sorts of bits and pieces: mint bush, members of the Bossiaea family (pea bushes), Scoparia, sedges, heaths, but under all that there will be mosses and bogs holding water and allowing it to ooze into trickles which become creeklets constantly aggregating to find their way eventually into a river. What you are looking at is an example of the source of 30 per cent of all the water that flows into the Murray. And exposure to serial fires will kill them. But not this one. It seemed luxuriously healthy.
The flowers were not at their peak but they were out: trigger plants (below), Billy Buttons, alpine daisys, Everlastings in several colours.
But perhaps the best news. Regularly along the track, as usual almost always on some prominent feature, a protruding rock or root, a firmly embedded branch, we would come across these — fresh wombat scats.
Not Goat Island, Snapper Island, Shark Island, not Pinchgut nor Spectacle Island. It’s Cockatoo Island, the biggest island in Sydney Harbour, about 3.5 km west of the bridge: filled out to 18 hectares, carved into new shapes, three-dimensionally, from its original triangle. Great slices taken out of it for shipyards.
In the foreground of this photo is an old pump, a remnant of the island’s past — in this instance as a ship building site.
For three nights we stayed in the building on the top of this artificial cliff, what once were supervisors’ cottages, which have been refurbished for visitors.
The decks provided a wonderful albeit often rather smoky view down the Harbour.
And no. Don’t be silly. It’s not smoke. It’s night time.
The island has a resonant history which, as we toured, I couldn’t help but see as art.
Welcome.
Forever
The Sydney Harbour foreshore is rich in evidence of thousands of years of Aboriginal life, most evident in rock carvings and shellfish middens. But no such evidence has been found on Cockatoo Island, the Aboriginal name of which is Wareamah. The island is located at the intersection of the lands of the four tribes of the Eora nation which may provide one reason for this. But it also seems possible that the island may have been a place where women’s ritual took place, a special place not for domestic habitation. It is also possible that it was in reaction to what was observed in the 1839 Sydney Gazette: ‘It is without water and is said to abound in snakes.’
The current harbour foreshore: a jangle of tree roots, sandstone blocks natural and ashlared, remnant and contemporary infrastructure, 1950s ideas — usually rendered in concrete — about how the seaside should be, tenacious and lush sub-tropical vegetation. Patterns of both contestation and settlement, one strong line matched by another, both ferns and sandstone blocks supporting the play of light.
See what I mean? It’s art.
Convict prison 1839-69
Norfolk Island was bulging at the seams. In Tasmania Lieutenant-Governor Franklin was refusing to accept any more second-conviction convicts. ‘No place in New South Wales would be so well calculated [for an extension of prison facilities] as Cockatoo island, surrounded as it is by deep water, and yet under the very eye of authority,’ wrote Governor Gipps.
As can be customary, the execution didn’t always match the calculation.
‘Mr Inspector Lane … has paid much attention to the condition of the prisoners at night. He has often seen them at the iron gratings gasping for fresh air from without, and he “wonders how they live”. The brutalising effect on the prisoners is admitted by all, and it is described by some as terrible in depravity. Crimes of the deepest dye are committed.’ (Select Committee on Public Prisons, 1861)
There’s a silence about this image. It looks like deep breath, clear air. Your eye might be drawn by the yachts in the background or attempt (unsuccessfully) to locate the Drummoyne Pool. The implication is time past rather than any reflection on what happened here.
‘I saw Swan sitting in a recess … I thought it would be a grand opportunity for settling old scores with my tormentor. Walking quickly to where he was, I sprang at him, seized him by the two ears, and in death-like grasp, with the full strength of my powerful arms, dashed his head against the stone wall. The blood spouted in torrents from his mouth and nostrils.’ (William Derrincourt, Old Convict Days, published after long detours in 1899)
Rothko.
You can look into the blank entries to the oubliette chambers, isolation cells excavated recently after decades of disappearance, forgotten-ness in fact as well as name. These oubliettes were entered from above via a ladder which was subsequently hauled up, or you might be thrown in. No natural light. Just you and sandstone, its considerable natural attractions turning into an implacable torture.
‘From its roof I was placed in a cell, six feet by eight feet and nine feet high. As soon as the trapdoor closed I was besieged by an army of enormous rats’. In the morning not only had the rats eaten through his jacket, used as a pillow, where his food was stashed but they had also eaten the toes out of his boots.
The architecture seems to request acknowledgment of its symmetry. But it might also be a calmness onto which you can paste your own thoughts. Even though this evening the sky was celestial, the scabbling and weathering on the sandstone ensures that the symmetry is not clean, that it has character, that it prompts a response. They are gun racks (in the guardroom) and firing slits in the far wall although it is unclear where they might be aimed. But you don’t need to know. You can just appreciate the visual form.
Reform School 1871-88
In 1871 the island became an industrial school for orphaned girls and a reformatory for girls convicted of crimes. The Vernon, an aged ship, was anchored off the north-east corner as a training ship for as many as 500 orphaned boys.
‘ … Three girls came abreast of the ship, in a semi nude state, throwing stones at the windows of the workshops — blaspheming dreadfully and conducting themselves more like fiends than human beings. I was compelled to send all the boys onto the lower deck to prevent them viewing such a contaminatory exhibition.’ (The Superintendent of the Vernon to the Principal Under Secretary, 1871)
Shipyards 1913-1992
The island had been a shipyard for decades before 1913. Excavations, by convicts, often in leg irons, sometimes up to their waist in water, of the graceful slopes of Fitzroy Dock were begun in 1847 and completed in 1857.
How does this sort of thing work? (A graving dock, like a grave, right?) You drive the boat in (sail originally), shut the gate, pump the water out and then do whatever you need. Furiously maritime. In more recent years it was claimed that Cockatoo Island workers could dock a boat, clean and paint it and send it on its way in eight hours.
During the years between the reform school and the focus on shipbuilding and maintenance, the island returned to being a prison for petty criminals. However, in 1913 the Commonwealth acquired it to become the dockyards for the Royal Australian Navy. Busy during the First World War, it became frantic during the second.
Titan Floating Crane (20 storeys high, able to lift 150 tonnes); 2. USS LST 471; 3. HMAS Australia; 4. River Hunter; 5. TSS Nairana; 6. HMAS Hobart; 7. HMAS Bataan; 8. HMAS Arunta; 9. USS Glimer; 10. HMAS Barcoo
You will also note how the island has become almost completely covered in building. Perhaps half, by area, of these buildings have now been removed leaving big aprons,
one of which (below) has become a home for fixed tents. The friends who took us there played a significant role in setting this arrangement up.
But plenty of evidence of ship-building remains. In the photos above and below are four steel plate benders so heavy and unwieldy it was decided to leave them where they were, one of the island’s many sculptural wonders.
Close at hand is the slipway, a symphony in concrete and rust industrialised by the regularity of measurement markings, made art by sea air and abandonment — an installation, a major work.
Below, a wall of the design wing, one of the monster storage rooms for patterns (pattern makers: leading edge 50s technology, even in retrospect so impressive).
Acknowledging Mondrian, but better. There’s more work and life in the colour gradients of the panels than anything he painted. So much work has gone into creating an effect of harmony. The rusty grilles balance the white form in the lower quadrant; the vent at the top and the little black door play off each other. Even the rust on the corrugated iron works. Wonderful.
More than anything else it was this that set me off thinking about the island as a gigantic art site.
But once I began I couldn’t stop. Ships … mass, scale, weight, power, size.
And just look at these. Form follows function: folders, benders, stampers, presses, guillotines. From another world. What superb pieces.
Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer, eat your hearts out.
The machine room is the oldest workroom on the island. Built by convicts, again out of sandstone, it is left with some machines just sitting — creatures in steel, wildly complex but stationery, full of potential but not about to burst into life. Not without a figure present, a turner in overalls and boots with an oilcan and a big rag hanging out of his/her back pocket. Not without Kevin.
Static — but visually there is so much going on. The flavour of the way the paint is flaking off the sandstone, the soft light from the arched windows, the colours in the timber supporting the gantry, the offset of the variegated bricks in the middle of the background, the effect of the translucent but green-tinged fibre glass cladding. Suddenly those steel beams spring to life, and you become conscious that the joists above them are original: old, knotted and weathered but, as appropriate for a workshop and because of their herringbone strutting, now rarely practiced, still true and square.
A figure (thank you MM) adds a graceful sway to the squareness of the composition and the power of the gantry.
The wall to the right contains several works of abstract expressionism.
And finally a little bit of social realism: the entry to Dog-Leg Tunnel. Banksy (Very) Light.
‘The closure of the island as an operational dockyard was one of those events in the life of a city of region that signals the end of an era. For many it was a jolt to realise that an industrial site had run its course. The fraternity of Cockatoo Island workers and their families, generations of tradesmen, naval architects and administrators, felt the loss most acutely. They understood the depth of experience, knowledge and hard work that had been invested in the dockyard, the decades of achievement that had contributed to Australia’s economy and naval preparedness. They understood too, how easily this great legacy might slip from view.’
This comes from a history of Cockatoo Island from which I’ve borrowed heavily. The legacy is still there, if not in full view, readily accessible — made far more so by the efforts of the Sydney Harbour Trust and its hospitable and helpful employees. The island hosts concerts, art exhibitions, school excursions, film making, parties, openings and closings. It seems to me it’s going just fine.
If there is a niggle of concern it would be about the fortunes of the hundreds of tradesmen and, by the time of closure, tradeswomen, and apprentices and their knowledge and skills. This country sometimes seems just so willing to sell off capacity to make things. Maybe they’ve been absorbed into the shipyards of the present and future. I hope so.
We left the island having had an exceptionally good time, and because it’s an island we left by boat just as we had arrived. One of the key points I guess is that it is a maritime experience, foreign to but delightful for landlubbers like me. You take the ferry from Cockatoo Island to Circular Quay. Camera pointed, I continued with the idea of encounters with art.
A repeat pattern — regularity — suggestive of endless shoe boxes, set off by life boats with a ‘safe’ Hi-Viz roof along with decorative ribboned ‘handles’ of rope for floundering souls to grasp. Secure hatches and guaranteed flotation regardless of the size of the seas. It mightn’t be exciting, but it is orderly and secure. The Titanic, but so very safe.
It turns out that this ship is Ovation of the Seas, the ship from which on December 9th last year a party disembarked to visit Whakaari also known as White Island, just off the coast of New Zealand.
Cornelia Parker is a major figure in the British art world. It was a coup for Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art to mount the first major retrospective of her work. And a challenge.
Her most famous work is this one — a shed (full of shed-like material) blown up by members of the British Army caught mid-explosion.
Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View 1991 (with all the bits and pieces suspended from a grid on the ceiling).
Not everyone’s cup of tea. Among the bits and pieces here are the remnants of a violin. One observer at least has recoiled in horror at this discovery. You never know just how people will react do you, just what will catch their eye.
* * * * * *
I had never heard of Ms Parker and as usual didn’t have my brain quite in gear as I entered the exhibition. I saw this.
That looks interesting I thought. Bits of dirt suspended from the ceiling. Very carefully I should add. I rather liked it. It had a rather superior sort of stillness about it and the shadows provided another dimension.
I read the label. The name of the work is ‘Subconscious of a Monument’. The bits of dirt, ‘desiccated clay’, have been dug out from under the Tower of Pisa — dug out not for the purposes of art but engineering — which as a result leans less than it used to. One question, perhaps the first: Uh huh … so errr … why did she do that? The second: what should we think?
Immediately next to it is this video.
A Palestinian resident in Jerusalem speaks about his family’s work of making crowns from thorn bush cuttings. In peak months he sells several thousand. His hands and those of his son are pitted with the endless cuts and piercings that come from the work. They seem to be sitting on seats out of a wrecked plane. His son is completely impassive.
Self-described, the man himself is simply a businessman making a living. He sees no irony or complexity in what he is doing. But we can. It’s hardly possible to avoid. He’s a Palestinian/ it’s Jerusalem/ they are selling crowns of thorns to Christians/ it’s a business/ and so on and so on … There are a series of big stories attached to these ideas. And is THAT art?
I was getting more interested. There was the suggestion of a particular sort of British mind at work. British? Not British. English. The sort of Englishperson who loves games and unravelling webs of knowledge. Stephen Fry.
Round the corner is her ‘Magna Carta’, a 13m long embroidery for an Oxford College and the British Library to celebrate the 800th anniversary of its signing. In fact, a 13m long embroidery of the Wikipedia entry for ‘Magna Carta’ on 15 June 2014, the 799th anniversary, exact right down to the references (about a quarter of its total length) and the illustrations.
The particular section at left, about 200x150mm, took 400 hours, and a great deal of skill, to embroider.
It’s an interesting reminder that Pope Innocent III was involved in the advent of the very English Magna Carta. England was mixed up in Europe a long time before the EU came along.
So far so dramatic. Good, but just as people were doing, you could walk past it pretty easily without paying much attention. The idea of the Magna Carta mightn’t mean much on a Sydney summer afternoon.
But the more assiduous viewer then reads that, to rub in its theme of legality, most of the piece was hand-stitched by 33 convicts. All sorts of celebrities contributed bits and pieces. Germaine Greer did two sentences. Jarvis Cocker stitched ‘common people’ the name of one of his songs. Julian Assange did one ‘freedom’, Edward Snowden did one ‘liberty’. Several senior justices of the British High Court contributed (‘justice’, ‘denial’ and ‘delay’). One sentence was stitched during his visit to Guantanamo Bay by a human rights lawyer. The work includes a tea stain from a prisoner’s cup and a spot of blood from Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger (‘contemporary political relevance’) who accidentally pricked his finger while sewing.
Like the Pisa clay piece, an understorey (and an under story) has been built. Literality, but with a twist. Awaiting discovery. And embroidery.
* * * * * * *
From time to time Ms Parker likes smashing things up to reconstruct. (See, for example, the shed above.) ‘Re-Presenting’ she calls it, in the sense of looking at things in another way. She has described such things as ‘cartoon deaths’, the sort of thing that might happen to Tom or Jerry, while pointing that, even if this has been smoothed out and disguised in the finishing stages, sculptural practice usually entails a certain amount of violence.
For ‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ she drove a steamroller over items of silver — cutlery, food service, trays, musical instruments, vases … she’s ‘drawn to things with a past’ — to create what she now describes as thirty ‘pools’ which have ‘become almost natural objects’. They were there at the MCA suspended in patterns, ‘pools’ I guess, properly. Thirty of them.
In a 1992 piece, ‘Words that Define Gravity,’ Parker wrote a dictionary definition of ‘gravity’ out longhand, and then magnified and replicated each of the words in cast lead and threw them off top of the chalk cliffs of southern England. To complete the work, she collected the lead words, mangled by the fall and left with chalk impressions, and suspended them on threads just above gallery floor level. ‘The words were made illegible by real gravity’.
She returns to ideas to enlarge them. In 1997 Parker exhibited Mass (Colder Darker Matter), suspending the charred remains of a church that had been struck by lightning in Texas while she had had a residency there. Eight years later, Parker made a companion piece, Anti-Mass, using charcoal from a Kentucky church which had been destroyed by arson. She discovered when she went to look at what had happened that in the US the cause of burning churches is rarely lightning, especially when they have largely black congregations. She also discovered a group of white Americans who make it their job to help those churches get rebuilt. Strings of narrative attach to these pieces.
Her work is also often fun. She has made a collection of ‘faces of Jesus’ occurring in unlikely places, on a piece of tortellini and in oil stains found on the floor of car parks for example, or this one in the end of a Kit Kat. Something of a triumph. (And, it must be said, this is observation of the keenest order.)
* * * * * * *
So what do we have here then?
We know that she is absorbed by found objects. But she likes the back of things, the underside, what’s left when you take things away (like the War Room, at left, what’s left when you stamp out millions of poppies for Remembrance Day), what things are like before they’re constructed (the beginnings of a pistol in Sydney). She likes oppositions (embroideries with antonyms, one set of words on one side, the other on the reverse, both showing through); she likes comparisons and measurements (wire drawn from the silver in a melted teaspoon to the length of the height of Niagara Falls for example). She likes the attachment of stories and consequences (the Magna Carta).
She offers an invitation to join in these rather strange perceptual journeys. Things can be seen this way, she says. Fun isn’t it. And interesting. And challenging. And sometimes beautiful, or if not beautiful, at least deeply satisfying.
She describes herself as a grasshopper, but I don’t think any other creature, bird insect animal, has a mind quite like hers.
She is an original, an oddity that I can’t help thinking of as English, with the directness and confident self-exposure of an upbringing in the shires and, paradoxically, with feet squarely planted on the ground (while her eyes are darting round). It might be an unusual form of common sense on view.
The works can be easily read; you’re not tested by establishing the meaning but by the profusion of meanings. You can have a look at her (good, strong, immensely active) mind at work but you’ll have to bring your own game. In that regard they can sometimes seem a bit like a general knowledge quiz, (speaking as someone who believes emphatically in the general knowledge quiz). It might be that set of demands that make it art, the clincher anyway.
There is also a firm and attractive morality at work. It might seem political, but it’s not. Something far more fundamental is in play. I liked that.
The White Rabbitmust be one of the most interesting galleries in Australia.
It’s private. It’s free. It used to be a Rolls Royce showroom. It has a tea house attached which has recently extended itself to serving scones besides boa (dumplings). And it only exhibits contemporary Chinese art — in most instances owned by the proprietors of the gallery, Kerr and Judith Neilson, now divorced but still hopelessly rich (think billions).
I only mention this because the strong implication of many of the pieces we saw was that this might not be such a good idea.
Entry point. A bronze, covered in car duco, four metres high: Red Memory — Asking God. Tagline: ‘The pig symbolises the speed of growth of China today with its raw gluttony, greed and avarice.’ (Chen Wenling still lives in Fujian and he can still/ is allowed still make sculptures like that.)
Superfluity — having too much, abandoning traditional values, becoming immersed in materialism and commerce and the rapacity that engenders — was a recurring theme in this massive retrospective of the owner’s favourite works.
Like this.
And this.
But it wasn’t all consumed with consumption. Some of it was simply strange.
These are two separate works, but the combination adds a certain frisson. The balloon inhaled till it was fully inflated and then exhaled before inhaling again. A near life-size taxi nearby did something similar.
In a lot of the work there was an undercurrent of … what? Threat? Something to knock you off balance certainly.
Even in pieces as apparently anodyne as this.
The conventions of the portraiture are venerable, hundreds of years old: pale, calm, settled, face slightly tilted, expression only to be found in the half open mouth and the way her hands are clasped — perhaps a certain wistfulness. But her uniform indicates that she is a member of the Red Guard which, during the Cultural Revolution, was responsible for all manner of unspeakable violence. That might or might not be the point.
Life is considered a tangle where at least some of the threads will be unknown quantities. This is only a small portion of the work. And yes, they’re people — in the work as a whole perhaps several thousand. Wherever one can see an expression it is the surprised fear of calamity.
Perhaps this wonderful calamity …
A coloured bronze casting. Interest wherever you choose to look. Every face, every posture, contains a story, even that of the bloke we can’t see over the back having a pee. This is awash in circumstance: full of aspects, full of responses, full of well understood and imagined humanity. There it is — don’t shy away — that’s what life is.
Or this sculpture, a three-dimensional rendering of a school photograph. The artist is the woman far right third row. Is it the fact that it is drained of colour that makes it unsettling? White is the Chinese colour of death.
You look at it once and think, oh yeah. Wow. Very smart. Mmm actually so clever. Beautiful work. So smart. In fact how the hell did she do that? Then you look at it again … and you’re unsettled. And you look again to try to work out why. You peer closer. But they are looking at you with their blind eyes just as hard as you’re looking at them. They’re silent. But they’ve started whispering to you. And what is it they’re whispering? They’re saying you think you know what this is, but actually you’ve got no idea. Better go look at something else before you start freaking out.
* * * * *
My companions found these works generally ‘hard’ and ‘bloodless’, with little sign of the artist and their feelings. I don’t know that I disagree with that. But I felt far more positively about them.
One thing shrieking from each work is the quality of the craft. On the top floor there was a pile of stones about 3m. wide adjusting itself with occasional heaving motions. Not a great work, but you couldn’t argue with the capability and thoroughness of the construction. And the taxi crash is a bronze! From memory it is about a metre and a half wide, and yet all that detail has been captured in a casting.
They were remarkably inventive — although perhaps it might seem like that because they are generated from another culture — and there was very little cheap about any of them.
This might have been the most obvious of them all.
‘W’ Bush and Wen Jiabao, ‘vulgar officials who pretend to be refined and cultured’, surrounded by icons of China’s rural past (the flowers) and grand cars suggesting the industrial cashed-up present. But even these are stunning embroideries and there’s something rather remarkable about the cast and pattern of highlights in the faces.
But I look at the whole and think that these are works that have been done by grown-ups.
They seem to be built on vast mounds of digested experience of humanity, not simple, not clear, but digested with heedless Chinese juices. This is not the art of comfort or fellow feeling or admiration. There is a toughness about it all that separates it from easy looking. This is art where the nerve endings have been tempered, possibly quite harshly. (One formidable example, an installation with ‘slave workers’ hanging upside down as slabs of meat waiting to be butchered.)
Finally, there is the weird fact that these exist at all, that they can exist, and in such a sophisticated form.
The first time we went to China 32 years ago, we went looking for art in Beijing and found it, on the customary overwhelming scale — a national competition with 1000s of contributors from all over the country. There were lots of nods to scroll art: waterfalls, exotic rock formations, teeny-tiny old people with a wooden staff and a conical hat and loads of this or that, mist, cloud, a dragon. But really most of the pieces would not have looked out of place at the Camberwell Rotary Art Show. Horses, pretty girls, land and sea scapes, boats at anchor, wizened relatives or just random old people. (Not babies. Why don’t people do babies?)
Then six years ago we found 798, the new arts precinct in a middle ring suburb of Beijing — and the revolution had occurred.
This is party members holding up a huge bundle of yuan, renmimbi, ‘the people’s money’. That’s what makes a party! And there was this utterly memorable tank made out of leather …
It’s the fearlessness of the work that’s so surprising. The sedition in 798 — and at White Rabbit — was more trenchant and more obvious than the crowd behaviour in Xinjiang. But somehow, who knows how, they get away with it.
Maybe that’s what we are looking at. That’s the grown-up edge, the constant awareness that art really can be a very serious and adult business indeed.
Scott of the Antarctic. I have a fixed memory of seeing him years ago in Latimer Square over the road from where we were staying rather than next to the river nudging the CBD as he now does, and apparently always has. I remember how his gloves looked weird as though suffering from some sort of gigantism, and that there was an odd stump affair holding up his back leg. I do. Clear as crystal. Memory (shakes head), traducer …
Now I also discover that the statue, sculpted by Scott’s wife, Kathleen, was never finished. The ‘stump’ is helping to hold the whole shebang up. The gloves were to be reworked. (Good idea. They add a hint of jocular insincerity to what is clearly intended to be a serious work.) It was commissioned in 1913, started (in Italy, the war) in 1916 and the ribbon was cut in 1917 in the understanding (hers) that further work would occur. It never did. (1917?! During the war to end all wars. Just how far away from Europe is New Zealand, and for that matter just how big a deal was Scott’s expedition?)
I also remembered, correctly, that the inscription includes a late extract from Scott’s diary.
I do not regret this journey, which shows that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great fortitude as ever in the past.
May I suggest reference to Fintan O’Toole’s Heroic Failure for further insight into this specifically English form of masochism, that of building an identity out of the romance of defeat. Amundsen got to the Pole (and back, losing no one) 33 days earlier because he was better equipped, better organised, more experienced and less full of, what can I say, lordly self-engrossed bullshit.
Christchurch’s relevance is that Scott left from Lyttleton, nearly but not quite a suburb, and Kathleen was travelling there to meet him when she learnt of his death.
He fell off his plinth breaking both legs on the 22 Feb 2011, along with a lot of the rest of the city, in what could only be called a catastrophe. But now, … he’s back! Gloves and all. We were there, quite incidentally, for the re-installation ceremony.
The statue looks north to what was in 1917 the key civic buildings. And now eight years later? Everything back? Sorted?No. Still work to be done. Fortitude still required.
* * * * * *
A catastrophe.
The earthquake destroyed or rendered unusable 90 percent of the 600 or so CBD buildings. 12,000 other properties registered damage exceeding $100,000. More tellingly, 185 people died.
If you want an idea of scale, today’s papers are full of horror about the possible dollar cost of the Australian 2019/20 bushfires. Could be as much as $1.2 or even $2 billion. Horrific. But not long ago the NZ Reserve Bank estimated the total construction cost of the rebuild in Christchurch to be about $40 billion, $16 billion for each of residential and commercial construction and around $7 billion for infrastructure. And that is the construction cost. There are so many other costs involved. (I don’t want to spoil my point about the magnitude — and concentration — of what happened in Christchurch, but in Australia, for example, the unimaginable damage of what is happening this very day to the natural environment and its constituents can never be quantified.)
A lot has happened in eight years. We were there in 2015 and I thought then that it looked at least partly like a gigantic building site. The motifs were chain link fences, blasted heath car parks loosely covered with grey road metal, public art and shipping containers.That was then;this is now. It’s not over yet by any means.
On the more recent visit our favourite coffee shop, the C-One, was still there, still standing, but like a monumental outrider rather than a molar in a set of teeth.What was it serving? And this is important.
Top left below are Lamingtons w/- white chocolate, coconut and [I quote] ‘a hypodermic berry syringe’. But just below the Banoffie Pies and the Custard Squares and to the right of the Caramel Walnut Brownies and the Marshmallow Caramel Slice are the Hemp Raw Balls (bottom right): w/- walnuts, almonds, linseeds [sic], sunflower seeds, dates, apricots and prunes [the entirety, just in case it’s not clear] dipped in vegan chocolate, pumpkin seeds, cranberries and Kako Samoa (refined sugar free, dairy free, vegan, gluten free, contains nuts). By some lights extreme sure, but up to the minute, the very instant in fact. NZ scones might have gone off, and tragically we think this is possible, but there is no obvious impediment to the boundaries of innovative edibles.
Four years ago this plaque was embedded in the seats along the footpath outside.Is that what has happened? I don’t know. But the view from that seat in 2015 was this.And now it’s this.Back, and going: and I am pleased to say including corgius intactus. They survived.
Miro restaurant (a much more interesting chocolatey red than appears here), which had for several years housed squatters, is another example of fastidious restorationwith very stylish interiors.
There are some interesting new buildings but not as many as I thought there might be. Bouncing on huge isolators, this is an extension to the main hospital. The ‘X’ feature on the right is a structural member.
I thought this was wonderful.Ōtautahi: the place/home of (Te Potiki) Tautahi, the Maori name for the place where some of Christchurch is now, specifically near the fire station next to the river some distance from this building. But why this is so striking is that we are looking at a flat surface (with two obvious indents where the balconies are). It used to be a flat cream brick wall, and now it isn’t. L’oeil is certainly tromped. Just wonderful. And part of the new groovy area which was never far from here. Maybe that’s the Amundsen approach to recovery.
As might be obvious this was one of several beautiful days (i.e. before it got to -4C in Dunedin), and Hagley Park, undamaged by the quake, was as glorious as ever. Perhaps it doesn’t make sense to talk about a recovery from something that never happened, but this massive park in the middle of the city must be some sort of ‘recovery’ salve for the body politic.
Recovery is a complex notion. It might be assumed that it means return to a prior state. If so, there is no recovery and never will be from a natural disaster. Things will not be the same. The flavour of life, the form and colours of the background, social and economic as well as topographical, will have changed forever. I didn’t talk to enough people to get any idea about what they thought had happened but, even eight years after, the local paper ‘The Press’ still has plenty of column space for earthquake-related issues.
So over its centuries of life what has this magnificent tree seen?
The answer of course is nothing. Not a cracker. Trees can’t see. When SmoCo, the Australian Prime Minister talks about ‘the terrible threat that nature provides to this country’ he seems to be suggesting that, if not vision, ‘nature’ has agency and for that reason needs confinement, punishment even, a damned good thrashing! This is the sentiment getting a strong run in Australia’s Murdoch media — we must burn everything down to avoid everything being burnt down.
The real reminder should be that the only part of ‘nature’ that is capable of generating a threat is humankind. Only we can construct that as an idea. ‘Nature’ — if that’s what we call the climate, the vegetation, the landscape and its animal, bird and insect populations, the seas and rivers, the environment of which we are a part — may contain threats, but it doesn’t make them.
‘Threats’ come from the idea that humanity’s task is to subdue nature and ‘have dominion over it’. If subdue means damage we’re going well. ‘Achieving dominion over nature’, a very strange idea in itself, will never occur; and only people who haven’t experienced droughts, earthquakes, fire, wind or marine storms would assume otherwise. This is the irony of the anthropocene age: we can make a first class mess of things, but we can’t control them.
This is where Scott (of the Antarctic rather than the Shire) and his ilk come in handy. They have words for confronting the implacability of ‘nature’: resolution, fortitude, backbone, fibre, pluck, dauntlessness. And those words are helpful to some degree. Who could complain about someone displaying fortitude?
But in terms of recovery efforts, if I had to choose I’d be turning myself inside out to make sure Amundsen was in charge.
No. Still work to be done. Fortitude still required.
this is now. It’s not over yet by any means.
What was it serving? And this is important. 
Ōtautahi: the place/home of (Te Potiki) Tautahi, the Maori name for the place where some of Christchurch is now, specifically near the fire station next to the river some distance from this building. But why this is so striking is that we are looking at a flat surface (with two obvious indents where the balconies are). It used to be a flat cream brick wall, and now it isn’t. L’oeil is certainly tromped. Just wonderful. And part of the new groovy area which was never far from here. Maybe that’s the Amundsen approach to recovery.
and Hagley Park, undamaged by the quake, was as glorious as ever. Perhaps it doesn’t make sense to talk about a recovery from something that never happened, but this massive park in the middle of the city must be some sort of ‘recovery’ salve for the body politic.
So over its centuries of life what has this magnificent tree seen? 
mcraeblog 