Discovery of “Maree Man” Sparks Artistic Whodunit
Mark Whittaker; 12/7/08
When news broke 10 years ago that a giant figure of an Aboriginal man had been discovered carved into a barren plateau near Marree in South Australia, it looked to all the world like a wondrous mystery. Just over 4km tall, “Marree Man” was billed as the biggest artwork in the world. It had been created using a tractor and plough. But who was driving? And how did they get the proportions so right? Suspicion turned to locals keen to create a tourist attraction, bored US military intelligence officers at Pine Gap, mining crews and aliens. But to a few folks around Alice Springs, the figure was no mystery at all. When TV producer Glenn Adamus first saw the image in the news on July 16, 1998, his first thoughts were more like, “Ah, there it is.”
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Adamus says his old mate Bardius Goldberg had drawn the exact same figure in the sand for him about three years earlier. Adamus had met the sculptor when he was working on a BBC documentary about a 50×70cm dot-painting Goldberg was doing near Alice Springs. That project had stalled after Goldberg fell out with the traditional owner, Herman Malbunka.
In 1995, Goldberg told Adamus he was doing a big painting in the esert but needed advice: “I want soething 5km in length.” “What are you on about, mate?” “I want to put something out in the desert that can be seen from space,” Goldberg said, drawing the figure in the sand. Adamus told him he needed a GPS device and a good map, but Goldberg was a technophobe and it took a long while to teach him how to use it.
“He told me he got $10,000 funding from a businessman who was then living in Hahndorf in the Adelaide Hills,” says Adamus. Retired drilling contractor John Henderson says he loaned Goldberg the GPS and gave him 600 litres of diesel. “He’d had a falling-out with Herman and Mavis Malbunka. He always told me he was going to do this big painting in the desert as more or less a ‘get stuffed’ statement to them. He was the sort of bloke that nothing would stand in his way. If he said he was going to do something, he’d do it.”
Adamus says Goldberg phoned him in 1996, two years before the Marree Man figure was discovered, to say he’d fulfilled his promise: “I’ve done the painting. I’ve left my mark on the Earth.”
Around the same time, Goldberg had moved from Alice Springs to Hahndorf, where he met local Greg Brown at the pub. Brown used to bail him out of trouble every month or so after one of his benders. Goldberg’s creative juices, however, were still flowing. Brown says Goldberg bought 18 hectares on Kangaroo Island and had plans to plant eucalyptus trees in the shape of a giant kangaroo so that passing planes could see it. He also bought a house in Snowtown, SA, and was planning to give the town a lift by secretly building a Virgin Mary into a wall and having it appear and disappear from time to time by plastering over it.
“He also had dreams of building a butterfly house in Hahndorf for deaf and blind people,” says Adamus. “I took him to Melbourne to have a look at the butterfly house at the zoo. Driving there, he told me straight out that he was the guy responsible for the Marree Man. Everyone thinks it’s still a mystery, and it’s not a mystery. People just don’t want to recognise it.”
Alas, the wild artist, who made and lost two fortunes in his 61 years, got into a fight with a younger man in a pub in 2002. One of his teeth got dislodged. “He was scared of the dentist and would do nothing about it,” says Adamus. “From that injury he got septicaemia and died. End of Bardius.” The fading figure of Marree Man is reportedly still visible from the air.