My mind was buzzing, memories swirling and ideas flying towards a central concept in these few moments after reading the fly leaf of the paperback sent via a friend’s ‘declutter’!
Stephen Scheding’s “A small unsigned painting” brought my brother’s email about six months ago rushing, faster than the proverbial ‘cheetah’ back into my consciousness. He had attached an image, an old bark painting from Arnhem Land, now belonging to a Melbourne-based acquaintance of his, wondering if I might be able to help identify the artist.
I opened the attachment to enable a closer look. Mmm, Central Arnhem, somewhere between the Cadell and Liverpool Rivers was my initial guess. I immediately had an artist in mind, but for the moment wanted to keep my powder dry.
The rrark cross hatching, the condition of the bark and the subject matter – a single, Saratoga fish, found in the freshwater creeks of the stone country inland from Maningrida, confirmed in my mind’s eye a master painter’s work, late 1960s, maybe early 1970s. I used a magnifying glass to take a closer look at the paint, and while I knew I was only looking at an image probably captured on a mobile phone, it was still able to confirm that the paint remained well adhered to the bark. This narrowed the timeline down definitely before the mid-1970s.
I would like to see the painting. I emailed my brother and made arrangements to visit the owner at their inner Melbourne, Thornbury address.
It was only an hour’s drive from home “So where did you and the painting first meet,” I pose, as a cuppa and bickies were laid out. Her expression suggested she was wandering back through the years, and answered “We were on a trip to the Top End. We went to a gallery on Knuckey Street and that painting just leapt off the wall.”
Raintree Gallery – always a treat and proprietor Shirley Collins and her buyer, Dorothy Bennett both knew their stuff. I was a regular visitor and an occasional buyer, when I worked out of Darwin. I reflect for a moment and realise that the statue of the Jabiru in my hallway also came from Raintree. They carried a wide range of styles: the distinctive colours of the Tiwi artists of Bathurst and Melville; the finely delineated Rrark favoured by the East Arnhem painters; wonderful woven pandanus mats and baskets, statuary, the recently developing Western Desert ‘dot’ paintings, coming into vogue from Papunya, Yuendumu and other Central Australian centres. I often spent my lunch breaks admiring the offerings.
“I remember that the lady in the gallery admitted she didn’t know the artist. It had apparently come in many years earlier, part of a buying trip undertaken by the previous owner of the gallery.”
I could see through the doorway from the kitchen into a lounge where several barks were hanging and we took our coffees through. “It’s that large fish, the landscape-orientated bark. I think it is a barramundi.” It was a beautiful piece, with finely executed cross-hatching, or rrark, and the backbone, ribs and major organs depicted in what has been labelled as X-Ray painting. “I think it is a Saratogo, not a Barra,” I suggested. The sharply upturned mouth sets the two species apart and they are found in the rivers and creeks of the ‘Stone country’, the central Arnhem Land plateau.
I wandered over and stood below the bark. My earlier thoughts, when looking at the photo were undoubtedly correct – Central Arnhem, Upper Cadell river area, I reckoned. ”Can I get it down off the wall?”
I turned it over and there was still very feint chalked ‘U’ and what looked like an ‘N’. Dusty chalk might also be a ‘D’.
I had brought a magnifying glass with me and held it in front of the painting closely. The absence of the telltale pinprick-sized dots across the front of the painting confirmed that the work had been made ‘properly’, the artist using the crushed juice of the dendrobium orchid as the colour fixative and it would not need protection. I had witnessed the Curator, the AIM Missionary, Gowan Armstrong several times giving barks a solid smack on the back of the sheets to assess the fixative qualities. He had adapted an old manual fly spray pump, filled with water and Aquahere, applied where there were signs that the various ochre, kaolin and charcoal colours were flaky.
I sat on the settee with the bark across my knees and reflected back upon the many occasions of being with this old man and his large family, at several of his seasonal encampments: at Yaimini, at Nanggalod and at the Upper Cadell river crossing that I think is called Benebenemdi.
I told her briefly about the painter, Mundark, a man of many talents, a man considered by many to have magical powers, a medical knowledge, a bushman of high degree and a little about his country.
That evening my memory set off wandering back to those times, the early 70’s through until the early 90s, when I was living, working and then work-trips at Maningrida and my various interactions with that old man.
It’s amazing how the brain can sometimes set up a chronological set of memories. I remembered my first contact with the women folk of the family on an early Pension Day at Maningrida. Rosie Mialpi and her daughter Lena Rungawanga came in to cash their Social Security benefit cheques. A few weeks later I had reason to drive down to their encampment at Benebenemdi.
I dug out an old photo from that trip of the kids, I remember Lena, David Galbuma, a very young George Waduna, Hilda Rostron and several other youngsters.