Mission & Justice

Steve Dow, 27/7/08

On the Tanami Road in Central Australia, the distant western MacDonnell Ranges all pink and blue like a Namatjira watercolour, six wedge-tailed eagles surround their breakfast on the bitumen. The winged predators look up defiantly as a four-wheel-drive brakes to stop, slowly abandoning the bloody big red kangaroo carcass to flap away across the mulgas and spinifex. These powerful opportunists will be back. Some 290 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs - the last 100 a road of bronze sand and rocks - Warlpiri man Shorty Jangala Robertson, believed to be more than 80 years of age, sits cross-legged on a concrete veranda, all concentration as he applies light blue dots to a dark blue canvas. “Ngapa,” he says, looking up. Water.

See: The Sun Herald, The Sydney Morning Herald, No Internet Text.
Shorty’s painting interprets his Dreamings of water. He takes some tobacco out of a tin from his trouser pocket. His white beard is flecked with yellow paint. Shorty’s wife, Lady Nungarrayi Robertson, believed to be about 75, lies curled next to him, softly murmuring, a beanie on her head, her thin legs curled under her floral dress.
Lady is wife number three, the youngest and last surviving of three sisters promised to Shorty as wives under Aboriginal custom. No one is exactly sure which year they married. Lady’s minor painting career is over, having suffered two strokes, but her husband is among the top collectable artists of the 400 painters here in the remote Yuendumu yoo-en-doo-moo) community.
Born at Jila, a large soakage and claypan north-west of here, Shorty has told a bilingual English-Waripiri speaker that he met virtually no white fellas in his youth, and that as an infant he and his family had “to hide” to avoid being shot. It is thus believed Shorty must have been born some time around or before the 1928 Coniston massacre - the last recorded mass shooting of Aboriginal people in Australia, when at least 31 people, probably more, died.
Shorty’s solo shows - three at Melbourne’s Alcaston Gallery and two at Sydney’s Cooee gallery near Bondi Beach - have been well received. “I could have sold my first work from him six times over,” says Cooee director Adrian Newstead. “Its celebratory spirit is fantastic.”
Shorty’s canvases are held . in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of NSW
Remarkably, Shorty started painting only in his 70s. Robert Nelson, an art critic with Melbourne’s The Age newspaper, says Shorty’s paintings have the “gravity of the ancient tradition of the Dreaming but also the levity of contemporary colour and invention”.
Shorty’s brightly-coloured works combine subtle dots with curvy lines to represent the ngwarra, or flood waters, and bars to represent mangkurdu, or clouds.
Expat Sydney art critic Benjamin Genocchio, who now works for The New York Times, says Shorty’s first solo show -extraordinarily late in his career, in 2003 - was a “popular and critical success”. Yet Shorty and Lady live in a battered brown tin shed, his earnings divided among his extended family, as is Aboriginal custom, with almost nothing left over.
Such paucity of individual artists’ earnings is exacerbated by carpetbaggers - commercial gallery owners, backyard dealers and private agents who swoop into Aboriginal communities and snap up indigenous art at a fraction of its value, handing out tiny amounts of cash, say $50 or $100,
then reselling the work in galleries, on the internet and eBay at inflated prices.
Last June, a Senate inquiry into Australia’s indigenous visual arts and crafts sector, Securing The Future, found Alice Springs was the worst place in Australia for carpetbaggers, and its recommendations included a new $25 million infrastructure fund and a new arts centre be established in the town. Arts Minister Peter Garrett tells The Sun-Herald the Federal Government still intends to respond to the inquiry, but declines to say when. “There’s no doubt that carpetbagging and unauthorised copying issues, particularly in remote regions, are a real concern,” he says.
Shorty’s stature in the art wood has grown through the work of the respected Warlukurlangu Artists’ Aboriginal Association at Yuendumu, which pays artists a fair and reasonable 50 per cent of the retail price of an artwork, including an upfront advance when a canvas is completed. But even he has been victim of the carpetbaggers.
“One day”, says Gloria Morales-Segovia, the assistant manager at Warlukurlangu, “Shcrty came to the art centre and asked me, `Can you ask the man to give me the money?’ I asked, ‘Which man? Which money?’ Shorty said, ‘I painted these canvases, three canvases, and he took them, and he hasn’t given me the money’ “I asked, ‘Who is the man?’ He did not know, because the man had not given him a name or anything.” Shorty never saw his money.
“We try to get artists promoted to get well known,” Morales-Segovia says. “And then the carpetbaggers come and take the pick of the lot. They are very aggressive, targeting top artists.”
To Western eyes, the practices of some carpetbaggers would be seen as kidnap, coercing artists into motels or the carpetbagger’s own home, paying off family members with cash or cheap second-hand cars, obliging the artist to churn out cheap copies. The market is thus flooded, further diminishing returns for masterful painters such as Shorty.
But part of the complex issue is that community elders have cultural responsibilities, and painters such as Shorty must each provide for up to 50 extended family members, Benjamin Genocchio writes in his new book, Dollar Dreaming: Inside The Aboriginal Art World (Hardie Grant, $39.95).
Genocchio, who himself travelled to Yuendumu and met Shorty, recounts how the art centre manager had bought a shoeless and cold Shorty some shoes and blankets, “but when she saw him next, soon after, they’d disappeared: he’d given them away to his relatives”.
For decades, Shorty lived a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle with his parents, only settling at Yuendumu after the successful 1967 referendum to recognise Aborigines as Australian citizens.
As Shorty sits on the veranda and applies brush to canvas, with Lady by his side, money hardly seems the object, beyond having enough to buy soup, bread and meat at the local mining store, and beyond a few dollars for a family member or several. There is a much bigger Dreaming out there.

Tags: Aboriginal, Painting, Trade

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