Mission & Justice

20/9/08

A vast wall of more than 1500 Aboriginal rock art paintings has been found by archaeologists in north-west Arnhem Land, including drawings of European sailing ships and World War II battleships. First found in the 1970s, the rock art was lost to the world until a doctoral student at the Australian National University, Daryl Guse, rediscovered them with the help of a local elder. The 1500 works in the Djulirri rock shelter in the Wellington Range chronicle Aboriginal contact with Maccassan traders from Sulawesi, and Europeans from the early sailship days right through to WWII. Alongside paintings said to be more than 15,000 years old, there are works that depict the biplane, a bicycle and gun, Fairfax newspapers report.

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Leesha McKenny; 30/7/08

John Ioannou agrees he is one of the most controversial figures in indigenous art and his reputation has sometimes landed him in hot water. Last year police interrupted his initiation into an indigenous community north of Alice Springs and threw him into a paddy wagon after a new arts centre co-ordinator had called them. She had heard of a white man without a permit in the remote community and said it was “Ioannou”. “They handcuffed me, put me in the back of the van, drove me 20 metres across the road, basically just to humiliate me,” he says. “I was released on bail and given four hours to leave the communities … The next day I went to another community with all the major elders and they came out there again and were told I was on sacred grounds and I was initiated and they couldn’t do anything about it.”

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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.

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Vivien Johnson; 19/7/08, The Australian, No Internet Text; Vivien Johnson is professor of new media narrative and theory at the University of NSW, and curator of the exhibition Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert at the Australian Museum in Sydney.

Dollar Dreaming: Inside the Aboriginal Art World; Benjamin Genocchio; Hardie Grant

Much has changed in the Aboriginal art world since Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines pioneered the genre to which Ben Genocchio’s Dollar Dreaming is the latest addition. Chatwin’s best-selling chronicle of his travels in the Aboriginal art world was written in the more slow-moving mid-1980s. The boom in Aboriginal art sales had barely begun and the first few Aboriginal artists were just starting to throw off the shackles of collective ethnographic identities and emerge as contemporary artists in their own right.

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