Mission & Justice

Victoria Laurie; 12/5/10

Last year, archeologist Mike Morwood and rock art specialist June Ross took the ride of their lifetime across the northwest Kimberley. They hired a helicopter and flew across largely trackless territory, their pilot landing periodically in spots where he felt he could get his helicopter down safely and where they believed a good rock art site might lie. Their journey took them from Bigge Island, one of the Kimberley’s largest offshore landmasses, east to inland pastoral stations, and north as far as the rugged Drysdale River National Park, the Kimberley’s largest park that lacks an airstrip, ranger station or even a single road. The pair’s aerial reconnoitre recorded 27 locations in which they documented a total of 54 rock art sites. “It was an absolute revelation,” Ross recalls. “What struck us was how many rock art sites there are, and we developed a great admiration for the artists who made them.” Across the Kimberley, hundreds of thousands of paintings lie in rock overhangs and caves, often behind curtains of tropical vines. Dappled light plays over the surface of hauntingly beautiful images that have made the region famous: Gwion Gwion or Bradshaw paintings depicting slender dancing figures in mulberry coloured ochre or younger images of Wandjina spirits, wide-eyed and startlingly white despite the passage of years.

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Nicolas Rothwell; 25/3/10

How to track the rhythmic dotting of a desert artist, hand poised close above the canvas? How to convey the smooth, floating line of an East Kimberley master or the fine, cross-hatched brushstrokes of a bark painter from north Arnhem Land? Such questions, intriguing points of theory for art curators and collectors, loom with fierce immediacy in the work of Darwin printmaker Basil Hall, one of the more unsung alchemists involved in Aboriginal art’s unfolding renaissance. Hall, now in his early 50s, came north 1 1/2 decades ago after years of teaching and working in Canberra, where he learned his craft at the hands of German master printmaker Joerg Schmeisser. At first he was based at the Northern Territory University campus and helped set up the Northern Editions print studio before striking out on his own.Soon he realised traditional indigenous artists do their best work on their own ground and he and his printmaking collaborators began travelling out to the remote bush. They set a punishing pace: Turkey Creek, Yirrkala, Elcho Island, the desert communities, east and west. By now, Hall has conducted more than 100 print workshops in the bush, and he still averages 10 or 12 a year.

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Tiom Elliot; 20/3/10

It was meant to be the Dreamtime set in stone, a celebration of reconciliation and a “revival of Aboriginal spirituality”. But Wanjina Watchers in the Whispering Stone, an 8.5-tonne sculpture in Katoomba, has sparked vandalism and death threats. “This is the most beautiful thing that has been done for Aboriginal people,” a Blue Mountains gallery owner, Vesna Tenodi, says. “They should be thanking me, but instead I get yelled at wherever I go.”

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