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Rover Thomas 'Who's that bugger who paints like me?
by:
Wally Caruana
The sense of astonishment in the words was palpable. These were uttered by Rover Thomas upon seeing for the first time, and quite unexpectedly, Mark Rothko's 1957 #20 (1957). The common Eurocentric view of Aboriginal art often applied to Thomas' paintings was balanced, for once, by an Aboriginal-centric perception of Western art.
It was 1990, a few weeks before Thomas (c. 1926-1998) was due to leave Australia for Venice where he and Trevor Nickolls were to represent Australia at the Biennale, the first Aboriginal artists to do so. Thomas had travelled the length and breadth of the eastern Kimberley and he had been to the cities of Perth and Darwin. Venice was his first venture outside the country. His friend and agent, Mary Macha, had suggested he visit the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra for a few days to experience a large museum full of art from many cultures, in preparation for his Italian experience.
For a traditional man raised on cattle stations, Venice was a long way from Gunawaggi or Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route in the Great Sandy Desert1 where Thomas was born in 1926. He was raised by two fathers, Lanikan Thomas and Sundown, both of the Wangkajunga people. His mother was Ngakuyipa or Nita, a Kukatja woman. Thomas' origins are firmly rooted in the desert. At the age of 10 he and his family moved to Billiluna Station in the Kimberley where, as was usual at the time, he began work as a stockman. During the 1940s he was initiated into traditional law.
After working in the Northern Territory building the fences which run for kilometres around cattle stations, Thomas returned to the Kimberley to work as a stockman on various cattle stations, including Texas Downs where he spent many years.
Thomas' experience of growing up in the region was common to the vast majority of Aboriginal people of the Kimberley and adjacent areas. Europeans settled in the region late in the nineteenth century, first to mine gold and then to raise cattle, and after many years of conflict, Aborigines were forced to work for the recently arrived station owners. The men worked as stockmen, the women mostly as servants in the house, but for little or no wages, simply shelter, blankets, flour, tea, sugar and tobacco. Despite these circumstances, many Aboriginal people kept the connection with their ancestral lands, where they were able to conduct ceremonies and continue traditional beliefs. For those who had been displaced, such as Thomas' family, the extended kinship network allowed them to be adopted into the local indigenous social systems.
After the 1967 Federal Referendum which enfranchised indigenous people, Aboriginal workers on cattle stations were awarded wages equal to those of white workers. This, combined with falling prices for beef on the world market, saw Aboriginal pastoral workers expelled from many cattle stations in the Kimberley and forced to live in camps on the fringes of white towns. It was under these circumstances that Thomas moved to Warmun on the edge of the township of Turkey Creek in 1975.
Only months earlier, on Christmas Eve, 1974, Cyclone Tracy flattened the city of Darwin with the loss of fifty lives. Darwin is widely regarded by Aborigines of the north and north-western parts of the country as the capital of European culture in the region. Against a background of decades of cultural disruption and social change, Aboriginal elders across the Kimberley interpreted the cyclone as a manifestation of the ancestral Rainbow Serpent (Wungurr or Unggud)2 who had destroyed Darwin as a warning to all Aborigines, young and old, not to forego their culture and its ceremonies and beliefs: to keep their culture strong.
The whirlpool is the home of another ancestral Rainbow Serpent, Juntarkal.
Later, the spirit of the dead woman revealed to Thomas her journey across the Kimberley back to her home near Turkey Creek where she had witnessed Wungurr's destruction of Darwin. The spirit of the woman endowed Thomas with the songs, dances and images to be painted onto boards for a new public ritual performance (generically known as palga) called the Krill Krill.
As is customary in Aboriginal ceremonies, the owner of the designs instructs others in the painting of images for use in the ceremonies. Thomas himself did not begin painting the boards until about 1980. The Krill Krill was performed on several occasions before audiences that included non-indigenous Australians who expressed interest in the painted boards which were often discarded after use, again as is customary. This interest eventually led artists to sell their Krill Krill paintings. Interest in eastern Kimberley paintings began to mount and, while the Krill Krill provided the major theme for the painters, in time artists began to depict country and create images independent of the ceremony. The songs and choreography of the ceremony provided the context for the accompanying Krill Krill paintings. Thus, for example, the image of the cyclone over Darwin used in the ceremony, such as The Rainbow Serpent destroyed Darwin painted on board by Thomas in 1983, is stark and minimal. Eight years later, a painting on canvas of the same subject - Cyclone Tracy (1991) - but not used in the ceremony, is elaborated to set the visual context for the theme; here the black shape of the cyclone gathering intensity over Darwin is surrounded by images of dust-carrying winds feeding the cyclone.
The modern history of the Kimberley is marked by several significant events. Among these were the confrontations between white and black, often resulting in massacres of Aborigines, forced migrations of peoples, and the flooding of vast areas of country. Thomas' work re-interprets this history from the indigenous perspective - unlike the 'official' history found in school books.
Massacres provide the subject for several series of Thomas' paintings. In his canvases the landscape is the witness of the atrocities, bearing the marks of history. One series of paintings documents a massacre at Texas Downs, where Thomas had worked as a stockman several decades later. Texas Downs is also the site of the National Gallery's most recent purchase of his work, All that big rain coming from top side (1991).4
Thomas' work contextualises the history of colonialism within the ambit of the ancestral past; the environmental and social upheavals caused by agricultural development and mining are situated within an overarching, ancestrally-ordained system.
Development may have scarred the land but for Thomas, the spiritual forces of ancestral beings remain in the earth. In the 1970s, diamonds were discovered on Lissadell station - another place where Thomas had worked. This is a site of great religious importance where in the ancestral past an emu called Lundari carried a barramundi in its beak and dropped it to the ground. Thomas' Barramundi Dreaming (1989), shows three hills in plan view.
The central hill contains white dots representing the scales (or fat) of the fish. In developing this diamond mine, the mine owners were made aware of the spiritual significance of the site. As a result they entered into direct negotiations with the traditional Aboriginal landowners and reached a mutually satisfactory agreement on the development of the mine, with a share of profits going to the local community.
In 1995 Thomas visited the country of his birth for the first time in 40 years. The arduous trip through the Great Sandy Desert to Gunawaggi provided Thomas with the inspiration to paint ancestral subjects connected with this country. Among these works is Night sky (1995), which takes an 'inverted' view of the constellations. The image is based on the bright shining moon and the stars of the Southern Cross reflected in the life-sustaining fresh water of a rock hole, close to Gunawaggi.
Thomas' graphic style owes much to the traditions of the eastern Kimberley and the influence of desert people. Shapes are described by lines of dots, as found in body painting techniques both in the Kimberley and in the western deserts. The tactile nature of his painted surfaces, ranging from areas of wash to those of great visual texture, are reminiscent of the effects of body painting and rock art. However, unlike most desert paintings, which are usually composed of conventional sets of symbols, Thomas' imagery is more intuitive and free-flowing.
Some time after this event Thomas received a revelation through the spirit of a classificatory mother3 who had died from injuries incurred in car crash on a road flooded by the rains of Wungurr's cyclone near Turkey Creek. The woman passed away as she was being flown by the Royal Flying Doctor Service for emergency treatment in Perth, just as the aircraft was flying above a whirlpool in King Sound on the western Kimberley coast.
All that big rain coming from topside (1991), represents the epitome of Thomas's approach. The painting depicts a waterfall on Texas Downs Station in the eastern Kimberley. The upper half shows channels of water running to the cliff's edge and then cascading down as a waterfall.
So, what did Thomas recognise in Rothko's painting? The composition and even the combinations of colour are, on occasion, at least superficially similar to those in several of Thomas' works. In contrast to Rothko's elimination of gesture, the surfaces of Thomas works retain the evidence of mark-making. And whereas Rothko dispensed with line, in Thomas' work the line is essential.5
Perhaps Thomas reacted to the 'radical simplification'6 of imagery that is common to both artists' work, and the proportions of the divisions of the canvas, while apparently symmetrical in Rothko's work, are equally unpredictable. In each case, these elements add up to an expression of an 'immediate conviction of an enormous will'.7.
However, if Rothko's paintings mirror the human form, then Thomas' are firmly embedded in the landscape. And if Rothko's paintings encode a secret or personal narrative, then Thomas's abound with public narratives.
One of Thomas' most enduring images is Roads meeting (1987). Potentially an image of reconciliation, of the artist's belief that both black and white can live in harmony, the image of the black line symbolising a bitumen road crossing the red line of an ancestral path suggests an inescapable reality; the mixture of peoples sharing the same lands in the contemporary world. The need for artists to express the human condition may have moved Thomas to comment on 'that bugger' Rothko's painting, more so than the apparent formal similarities in his work.
This article is an abridged and adapted version of the chapter on the work of Rover Thomas in the catalogue to the exhibition, World of Dreamings, shown at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, in 2000. The catalogue is about to be published electronically by the National Gallery of Australia.
References
La Biennale de Venezia, XLIV esposizione internazionale d'arte, (general catalogue), Edizioni Biennale, Venice, 1990.
Michael O'Ferrall, Venice Biennale, Australian artists: Rover Thomas - Trevor Nickolls, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1990.
Nicholas Serota, et al., Mark Rothko, Tate Gallery Publishing, London, 1999.
Rover Thomas, et al., Roads Cross: the Paintings of Rover Thomas, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994.
Footnotes
1 The Canning Stock Route in Western Australia was Australia's longest, extending 1400 kilometres.
2 Rainbow Serpents or giant pythons are commonly associated with rain, storms, monsoons, cyclones. In the tropical north of the country they are believed to have brought the first monsoons.
3 In Aboriginal kinship systems distant and near relatives are classed according to generation. In this case the woman was the equivalent to an aunt of Thomas.
4 Purchased at Sotheby's Melbourne auction on 9 July 2001 for AUD$786,625, a world record for an indigenous Australian work of art.
5 Sandler in Nicholas Serota et al, Mark Rothko, Tate Gallery Publishing, London, 1999, p. 12.
6 Sandler, ibid, p. 11
7 Goldwater, ibid, p. 52 |
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