Patricia Anderson April 08, 2012
Colour and history … Kunkun 2008.
An Aboriginal art exhibition puts the spotlight on a famous stock route.
When a group of Aboriginal artists in the western desert region of Australia began to transfer the stories drawn in sand on to hardboards using acrylic paints in the early 1970s, an art of great vitality and complexity came into being.
Contemporary Aboriginal art is the only art movement in Australia to have made a splash in the international marketplace, where seasoned collectors were quick to recognise a unique phenomenon when they saw it. Much of its mystique lies in the fact the artworks are an expression of thousands of years of knowledge of vast tracts of land - as though the painters carried around an aerial map in their collective psyche.
An exhibition of more than 100 canvases, called Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, at the Australian Museum demonstrates this. In 2007, indigenous artists were invited to paint stories that collected around the once-notorious stock route that threaded its way through 1850 kilometres of north-west Australia - from Wiluna, north-east of Perth, to Halls Creek. The route was first surveyed in 1906 by Alfred Canning, when the West Australian government set out to break the monopoly of the cattlemen of the Kimberley by establishing a route in one of the remotest parts of Australia, along which cattle could be driven in good health to markets in the south.
Aborigines, many of whom had never seen a white face before, were recruited (press-ganged would be a more accurate description) to seek waterholes and pasture lands along the route. They were also much in demand for their skill as stockmen (some readers will recall the television series Rawhide).
Thus, the ancient mythologies (Dreamings) densely imprinted on these lands were overlaid with new and sometimes alarming stories. The experiences of many different tribes, whose ancestral lands were crossed, are tales of survival, resourcefulness and the intersection of indigenous and non-indigenous histories.
These works were produced in small community art centres and co-operatives that have sprung up in central and north-western Australia, and a number of them are collaborations of four or more artists.
Many of the artists who contributed their painted stories are already well known in the art world, and others will now have a higher art-world profile thanks to the glorious complexity, colour and scale of their offerings.
The Canning Stock Route exhibition ends April 29.
Patricia Anderson is the editor of Australian Art Review.