Drawn Together: The Production and Collection of Indigenous Drawings
a two-day interdisciplinary symposium

Monday 28 and Tuesday 29 May 2007
Convened by Ursula Frederick

VERNON AH KEE AND DRAWING

Vernon Ah Kee

While drawing is clearly at the fore-front of his practice, for Ah Kee the portraits possess strong conceptual links to his text-works and the visual and conceptual juxtaposition of the text alongside the portraiture is a natural leaning that the artist perceives for the two major branches of his practise. The text/portrait dialogue is a comment as much about self-portraiture as it is about the position of Aboriginal people in Australia.

KEEPING TRACK – ICONOGRAPHY AND MNEMONICS IN THE ART OF BUTCHER JOE NANGAN
Kim Akerman

Nyikina artist Butcher Joe Nangan was possibly one of the most prolific indigenous artists of the 20th Century. From the late 1950s until his death in 1989 Joe filled numerous sketchbooks with pencil and wash images derived from his knowledge of west Kimberley cosmology and history. Joe was also renowned for his engravings on pearlshell and less frequently on boab nuts – drawing on the same sources of inspiration that underpinned his works on paper. In his lifetime Butcher produced more than a thousand works of art and, while his works on paper were directed at a non-indigenous audience, his engraved pearlshells could often be found in caches of ceremonial papraphenalia in Aboriginal communities across the Kimberley and into Central Australia.

In order to ensue that he did not lose track of the meanings of his images Joe developed a standardised iconography that allowed him to recognise the subject matter of many of his pictures even though he had not sighted them, in some instances, for a decade or more. In those instances where the subject matter was so superficially general or had much in common with other images, Butcher Joe developed the use of a unique aide mémoire to ensure that the correct identification and interpretation was not lost or forgotten.

This paper examines these strategies developed by Butcher Joe and presents a picture of an artist who consciously adopted a naturalistic style of drawing and engraving in order to reach and teach a non-indigenous audience.

ILLUSTRATING A PATTERN: INTEGRATING TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER DRAWINGS AND ROCK-PAINTINGS IN AN INTERREGIONAL CONTEXT
Liam M. Brady (Monash University)

One of Alfred Haddon’s many recording strategies used during his Torres Strait anthropological fieldwork in the late 1800s involved asking Islanders to provide him with drawings on paper illustrating subjects such as material culture objects, totems, and people engaged in ceremonial acts. This approach resulted in a significant number of drawings (many of which were authored) which Haddon subsequently used during his analysis of Torres Strait Islander culture. Yet these drawings have had a minimal impact in Torres Strait research outside of Haddon’s original investigations. Beginning in 2000, rock-art research from the Torres Strait region has sought to identify patterns of interregional interaction through patterning of shared design forms. Results have indicated that rock-art design forms alone are not adequate indicators of interregional interaction. An examination of Haddon’s collection of Islander drawings indicates correlations between drawings and rock-paintings. However, comparisons have also revealed unexpected discontinuities in design form patterning from across the Torres Strait region. As well as allowing contemporary families to relate directly to the drawings of known ancestors, I argue that Islander drawings can reveal new insights into research methods, artistic systems, and social boundaries.

JESUS WAS A TURKEY: MATTHEW GILL’S STATIONS OF THE CROSS
John Carty (Australian National University)

Nobody remembers Matthew Gill. Despite being a significant catalyst behind the Balgo Art movement, the first chairman of Warlayirti Artists, and one of its most successful and acclaimed early artists, Gill’s art sat uncomfortably with market perceptions of what aboriginal art should look like. His interest in and appropriation of other Aboriginal artists, Christian themes and figurative drawing saw his place in the canon of Balgo art increasingly marginalised in the 1990’s. In this paper I explore Gill’s oeuvre, and the categorical tensions it illuminates in ‘Aboriginal art’, through analysis of his extraordinary syncretic suite of ink drawings, The Stations of the Cross.

DRAWING AND THOUGHT: PROCESSES OF VISUALISATION AND ABSTRACTION AFFORDED BY THE MEDIUM OF DRAWING.
Wally Caruana

Am examination of the medium of drawing illustrated with images by Fred Mundraby (from 1941), Warlpiri drawings collected by Mervyn Meggitt in the early 1950s, Pintupi drawings from Papunya in 1971 and others.

MORE THAN ‘THE EXACT WORDS’, WILLIAM BARAK’S DRAWINGS AND THE RECOUNTING OF KULIN STORIES TO AW HOWITT
Carol Cooper (National Museum of Australia)

Following from my essay Remembering Barak ( National Gallery of Victoria, 2003, pp 15-38) this paper focuses on Barak’s drawings as illustrations of the stories that were recounted by Barak to AW Howitt as a way of explaining important aspects of Kulin culture.

Although Barak does not appear in the index for Howitt’s major work, The Native Tribes of South-east Australia (1904), he was Howitt’s primary source for the information he provides on the Kulin people. Indeed, Howitt quotes Barak no less than thirty-five times, and he states that he often attempts to record his information in almost the exact words used by Barak in telling me of it (1904:340). But more direct and compelling than these vivid word images are his actual drawings. Made in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, less than fifty of his works are known to have survived into the present. A close examination will be made of an intriguing group of Barak’s drawings to support the conjecture that they were originally created as a direct way of recounting and explaining particular incidents or stories from the past.

WILLIAM MONOP’S SKETCHBOOK AND DAISY BATES
Mary Eagle (Australian National University)

Things that are securely known include the name of the artist, the outline of his life (which can be traced in some detail), the name and circumstances of the woman who commissioned the sketchbook, and the context and perhaps even the precise occasion of the commission. Moreover, there was a second commission to another artist, Billingee, to serve the purpose of comparison. On the other hand, much less is known about the visual tradition to which Monop’s drawings presumably belong. I would like to know more about the visual tradition of the southwest of Australia.

SEARCHING FOR SCRIBBLE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF DRAWING
Ursula Frederick (Australian National University)

The paper sets out to consider how drawing practices have a deep historial trajectory. It gives an introduction to the material presence of past drawing practices in Aboriginal art and culture.

DRAWN TOGETHER ~ PULLED APART : ARTISTS TALK
Julie Gough (James Cook University)

Working from a circular history of removal and return from mainland Tasmania over six generations Julie Gough discusses how repetitive action, including collection and re-c/siting objects offers potential for reclaiming elements of place and past. Inscribing with found materials and a range of methods produces an emphatic sense of self, where constantly variant mark making offers an artist the temporally aware and necessarily mobile means to renegotiate often grim stories, fenced country, silenced voices.

DRAWING LINES IN THE SAND: CO-SPEECH GRAPHICS, GESTURE AND SIGN IN ARANDIC SAND-DRAWING NARRATIVES
Jenny Green (University of Melbourne)

Speakers of the Aboriginal languages in Central Australia use a range of semiotic systems. These include everyday language, spoken auxiliary languages, sign language, the language of songs and the symbolic or graphic conventions used in sand-drawing and in various forms of Aboriginal art. Arandic sand-drawing (called tyepety in some dialects) is a traditional type of narrative performance which incorporates a variety of communicative media including co-speech graphics. Some narrators of sand-drawings use objects such as the leaves of eucalypts to establish a visual field – like a miniature stage-set – in which the story unfolds. A stick or a soft bent wire may be used either as a drawing implement or to provide rhythmic accompaniment. The clearing of a space on the ground signals the beginning of a story. Erasure of the drawing space occurs when there are thematic shifts such as changes in time or location within a particular narrative. When the story is finished the space is wiped again but the story remains as a latent potential within the ground itself. The ground is like a palimpsest, retaining the essence of the succession of stories that have been inscribed on its surface. In this presentation I will provide an overview of the various forms of sand-drawing and discuss some of their dynamic and spatial aspects, based on my on-going PhD research in Central Australia.

GORDON HOOKEY AND DRAWING
Gordon Hookey

What is generally not evident in Hookey’s work is the level and quality of his preliminary drawing that underscores almost all of his work. It is this aspect of Hookey’s practice that he will be discussing along with the symbolism and compositional process that was undertaken in producing Conject Jar (2006) a major work that will feature in the National Indigenous Art Triennial: Culture Warriors exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Australia in October this year.

Conject Jar
In Conject Jar (2006) Gordon Hookey has chosen the medium of oil painting to construct a searing narrative that examines the peculiarities of Australian national culture that he feels are borne less of fairness and openness and more of racism and myopic isolation.

DRAWN IN TO JACK WHERRA’S CARVED NARRATIVES
Mary Anne Jebb

In 1964 and 1965, the Indigenous Kimberley artist Jack Wherra, carved a series of realist images in a collection of at least 70 boab nuts that he sold or gifted to the American anthropologist John McCaffrey. One of the boab nuts depicts John McCaffrey himself; drawn into the narrative history of the Kimberley and into Wherra’s life. What do we know of Wherra’s motivations for making McCaffrey one of the subjects of his carved narratives?

Can we interpret these images as an attempt by Wherra to constitute a personal relationship with McCaffrey that transcended the limitations of geography, culture and world view?

‘THE TRAJECTORY OF AN ANCESTOR’: N.B.TINDALE’S COLLECTIONS OF CRAYON DRAWINGS.
Philip Jones

From the late 1920s Norman Tindale assembled more than 2,000 documented crayon drawings, made by Aboriginal men and women during his field-trips. These drawings on paper depict mythological sites and associated Dreamings and can be linked to other field data relating to individual artists - encompassing sound recordings, film, artifacts, diary observations and anthropometric data.

It is not widely known that Tindale’s example inspired both C.P. Mountford and R.M. Berndt to make similar collections. Although Mountford and Berndt were more overtly concerned with aesthetic considerations, Tindale also made insightful analyses of the drawings within an art historical frame.

My paper examines Tindale’s motivation and modus operandi in obtaining these drawings, noting his awareness of earlier, similar records obtained by J.G. Knight, Daisy Bates and Herbert Basedow. I propose that while Tindale grasped the opportunity the drawings presented as individual documents illuminating his wider, secular project - the elucidation of tribal boundaries, he generally obtained the drawings within a ceremonial context. For this reason, Tindale’s ‘artists’ were mainly men, and the drawings were, during the 1930s at least, often linked to ceremonial performances. A later series of drawings obtained during Tindale’s 1952-53 fieldwork were more oriented towards his boundaries project.

Finally, I would propose that Tindale’s crayon drawing collecting served to shift mid-20th century anthropological paradigms relating to Aboriginal/land relationships, in much the same way that Spencer and Gillen’s photographs of site-related ceremonial performance widened anthropological perspectives of the 1890s.

THE CREATIVE SPACE OF CROSS CULTURAL EXCHANGE: DRAWINGS BY ABORIGINAL CHILDREN
Sylvia Kleinert (Charles Darwin University)

For both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences drawings by Aboriginal children represent an important aspect of Aboriginal creativity. From the 1930s onwards visitors and teachers in Aboriginal communities encouraged children to draw using crayons, pastel and paint on paper. More recently Indigenous artists and curators have facilitated publications and exhibitions of Aboriginal children’s art with a view to fostering cultural pride and to promote reconciliation. While this long standing interest in the art Aboriginal children has resulted in several major collections, there is a sense in which Aboriginal children’s art remains little known and largely undervalued. Relegated to the western category of ‘child art,’ drawings by Aboriginal children have been almost completely excluded from current debates concerned with redefining the status and significance of Aboriginal art.

In this interdisciplinary study I examine Aboriginal children’s art, its motivations, its various representations and its historical developments in relation to the broader framework offered by the anthropology of art. In so doing this paper explores a more inclusive model where Aboriginal children’s art is reconceptualised within a broader subjectivity, viewed from within Indigenous knowledge systems and the historical impact of a globalizing cross-cultural context. In my discussion I draw upon both historical and contemporary material from Hermannsburg, Ernabella and Papunya in central Australia; Carrolup Aboriginal Settlement (WA) and Lake Tyers Aboriginal Reserve (Vic) in the southern states; The Aboriginal Children’s History of Australia published by the Aboriginal Arts Board (1977) and the 2001 exhibition Thookay Ngaweeyan from the collections of Museum Victoria.

CHINESE WHISPERS: WANJINA DRAWINGS IN THE STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA
Susan Lowish (University of Melbourne)

Nestled within the personal papers of a former Victorian Secretary of Mines, Robert Brough Smyth, lie three hand-coloured drawings of Wanjina figures. How did they get there? Who are they by? And what were they for? This paper reports the results of an investigation into the presence and significance of these images, concentrating on information found in nineteenth century Australian publications. Notions of incongruity and displacement are challenged through this work. As an alternative, this paper argues that the Wanjina drawings form part of a localised hermeneutic with distinct trajectories subsequently reflected in the writing of Australian art history and relating to recent Victorian Aboriginal Native Title claims. In contrast with the broader circulation of this readily recognisable iconographic image – as part of the Sydney 2000 Olympics and 2006 Perth graffiti, this paper concentrates on the very specific discourse concerning Wanjina drawings in small but important folder in the Library’s archive.

DRAWING OVER THE LINES: CONTEXTS AND CAPACITIES OF INDIGENOUS ART PRODUCTION ON THE OVERLAND TELEGRAPH LINE IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
Ingereth Macfarlane (Australian National University)

Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen's 1901 research trek along the Overland Telegraph Line provided the substance for many of their influential representations of Australian Indigenous people. The journey was supported by the labour of two Lower Southern Arrernte men from near Charlotte Waters - Erlikilyika or Jimmy Kite, and Parunda or Warwick. Together they ran the day-to-day life of the camp. Erlikilyika also worked beyond this designated role, providing translations and interpretations for elements of the anthropological recordings. Evidently a thoughtful and observant man, he also seized on the opportunities that the journey offered to develop a lively representational practice of his own, so complicating the assumed relationships between 'camp boy', Aboriginal subject and anthropological observer. This paper explores Erlikilyika's interest in developing his capacities for representation in a non-Indigenous format, the various forms they took and how they changed in the following 20 years, in the context of life on the Overland Telegraph Line.

DRAWING OUT THE DIFFERENCE - THE PLACE OF THE BERNDT CRAYON DRAWINGS IN THE RECENT HISTORY OF YOLNGU ART
Howard Morphy (Australian National University)

In this paper I will place the Berndt crayon drawings in the history of Yolngu art. While undertaking fieldwork at Yirrkala in 1946-7, the anthropologist Ronald Berndt introduced a new medium to Yolngu artists - crayons on Brown butchers paper. The crayon drawings have recently begun to be appreciated as works of great aesthetic power. How was it that Yolngu artists became so proficient in an introduced medium in such a short time? How did they adapt their traditional techniques of art-making to the new medium? The paper will examine the differences between the crayon drawings and works in other media, in particular paintings on bark, and reflect on the significance of those differences to the subsequent trajectory of Yolngu art.

DRAWING IN THE PAST: DRY PIGMENT MOTIFS IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIAN ROCK ART
June Ross (University of New England)

Drawings constitute a significant component of the recent central Australian rock art assemblage. Amongst these, a distinctive group of roughly executed linear marks have been produced in numerous rock shelters across the region. An analysis of the form and distribution of these marks suggests that they are likely to have been produced in a ritual context. Ethnographic information and the oral testimony of present day Aboriginal people support such a conclusion. The differing structure of additional groups of drawn motifs may indicate complementary functions.

KUNINJKU PENCIL DRAWINGS
Luke Taylor (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies)

Luke Taylor commissioned 136 coloured pencil and pen drawings from Kuninjku living in Marrkolidjban outstation near Maningrida in 1983. This was an adjunct to his work with Kuninjku bark painters although the artists of the pencil drawings were not active bark painters. The drawings represent responses to site visits, responses to art work in caves at sites, as well as responses to bark paintings being produced in the outstation at the time. The drawings were used to educate the anthropologist about the Ancestral creation of country, particularly the complexity of life existing ‘inside’ sites. The pencils, pens, and cartridge paper provided new media and new means for the expression of these subjects and drawing techniques distinct from those of bark paintings were developed. The drawings reveal more complex compositions and narrative format than bark paintings of the time. There are new means for representing landscape. New colours are used to create iridescent aesthetic effects for some subjects. Aesthetic techniques appropriate to the new media were also created. The paper will expand upon the semiotic and aesthetic properties of this unique set of works.