Aboriginal bark paintings represent a social history, an encyclopedia of the environment, a place, a site, a season, a being, a song, a dance, a ritual, an ancestral story and a personal history
Balanay u by Galuma Maymuru (1951–), earth pigments on bark, 1998. ANMM Collection purchased with the assistance of Stephen Grant of the GrantPirrie Gallery
Djon Mundine OAM
Aborigines, with historian Manning Clark describing him as ‘that great booby’. But more recent studies (including Stephen Scheding’s The National Picture) have shown Robinson in a more sympathetic light. In the idyllic view on page 6, both Robinson and Aborigines are shown fishing the same river. Colonial artists could exhibit their work at the various Mechanics Institutes, in occasional intercolonial exhibitions, or at the annual exhibitions of the fine-art societies which were increasingly common in the major cities from 1870 onwards. Artist Henry Short arrived in Melbourne in 1852 and specialised in rather grandiose still-life paintings in a 17th-century Dutch style. He exhibited at venues such as the Victorian Society of Fine Arts and the Victorian Industrial Society and his paintings were also offered as prizes in art unions, which was a way for the better-known artists to ensure income. In Still life with Fish Short has placed his Dutch-looking fish in the Australian bush. The tender genre painting, Fisherboy by Aby Alston typifies the best work being painted and exhibited at the end of the 19th century, just before the Heidelberg school of Impressionism stole the limelight. (Interestingly, it is hard to find an actual fish being depicted by an Australian Impressionist, although restful scenes of river fishing are not uncommon.) Alston studied at the National Gallery School in Melbourne for about five years before winning the school’s travelling scholarship in 1890. He never returned to Australia. From the beginning of the 20th century artists responded to rapidly 8
Signals 98 march to may 2012
changing social and political forces and developed new ways of seeing and expressing. Many artists left Australia to study overseas and styles were informed by international movements such as Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism. John Wardell Power was the first Australian-born artist to explore surrealism and his painting A wreck on the shore clearly shows a connection with British Surrealism, particularly the work of Tristram Hillier. Power had trained as a doctor in London, inherited a fortune from his father in 1906 and subsequently turned to art. In 1961 his bequest of £2 million was gifted to Sydney University to establish the Power Institute of Fine Arts ‘so as to bring the people of Australia in more direct touch with the latest art developments in other countries’. There were also home-grown developments in Australian art. For example Clarice Beckett’s tonalist paintings of the 1930s, like the exhibition’s Low Tide, Black Rock, were influenced by the controversial artist and teacher Max Meldrum who polarised a generation of Australian artists. Painting mostly in the early morning and evening around the shoreline of the Melbourne bayside suburb of Beaumaris, Beckett exhibited her work regularly from 1923 but often received harsh reviews and sold few works. In the late 1960s hundreds of her canvases were discovered rotting in a farm shed, but enough could be saved to stage a succession of highly-acclaimed exhibitions. Beckett’s biographer Rosalind Holingrake has described the artist’s ability to transform a mundane subject into ‘a pictorial poem, evocative of some eternal yet always elusive truth’.
In the 1930s and 40s the George Bell School in Melbourne produced many fine, but now lesser-known, modernist artists such as Yvonne Atkinson and Ian Armstrong. In 1951 Armstrong and two friends held a joint exhibition in Melbourne. One of the artists was Fred Williams, now regarded as one of Australia’s greatest painters. However, Arnold Shore, a leading art critic at the time, wrote that ‘Mr Armstrong is the most accomplished craftsman and possibly the most talented artist of the trio’. Armstrong’s Girl with Fish was bought by the National Gallery of Victoria. None of the works exhibited by Fred Williams sold. In the late 1930s a number of artists studying at the George Bell School, including Russell Drysdale, Peter Purves Smith, David Strachan and Yvonne Atkinson, cultivated an ‘innocent eye’ approach, producing colourful and somewhat naïve scenes that had the appearance of theatre sets, ‘all front and no background’. In Atkinson’s charming painting, Fisherwoman with cat (page 13), a ‘play’ about fishing is staged with a cat as the leading player. The Antipodeans, a group of artists who championed figurative art in the 1950s, included Arthur Boyd who is now considered one of Australia’s most important artists. His enigmatic work Ventriloquist and skate, with its painterly allusions to Rembrandt, was created in the artist’s studio at Bundanon on the Shoalhaven River. In an interview in the Independent Monthly in 1995 it was suggested that Boyd intended the skate to also represent ‘both a … symbol for wastage… and a nuclear mushroom cloud’.
Several paintings in the exhibition include goldfish bowls or tanks, and in each case the goldfish serve remarkably different purposes. John Brack’s fish tank (page 15) is placed in a 1950s suburban Australian house. His vision of suburbia has been described as monotonous and lifeless – ‘an existential wasteland’ exuding a sense of isolation and alienation. In The Fish Tank, the eternally balanced relationship between the three fish might suggest a holding pattern of bland suburban life. The goldfish confined in their bowl in Maximillian Feuerring’s Man with goldfish and nude (page 14) may have symbolic significance in terms of the artist’s traumatic personal story. Called up as an officer in the Polish army, Feuerring was imprisoned in a World War II prisoner-ofwar camp. Fifty-two members of his family, including his wife and parents, perished in concentration camps. After the war Feuerring migrated to Sydney. While Australian art forged its own identity it often looked back and drew on art history and on the work of the acknowledged masters. Margaret Olley’s Still life with pink fish includes references to both Renaissance and Roman art while Justin O’Brien’s Miraculous Draft acknowledges the work of Hieronymus Bosch. With growing community concern about the environment in recent decades it is not surprising to see Australian contemporary artists addressing such issues, including those relating to fish and fishing. A very direct example is Carole Wilson’s poster Plastic’s got us, hook line and sinker – recycle now. This was first produced on a large scale in 1989 and
displayed on 100 billboard sites around metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria. It won the prestigious Special Jury Prize at the 1992 3rd Chaumont Poster Festival in France before being reissued as a poster in November 1992. Brian Blanchflower’s large oil painting Nocturne 3 (Whale Rock) is one of a series of works painted by the artist following a disturbing trip in 1979 to the whaling station at Albany, Western Australia, which was the last to operate in Australia. The artist witnessed the flensing of a whale – where the skin or blubber is stripped away – and was horrified by the experience. Digital artists such as Craig Walsh work with multimedia technologies and popular culture to engage the viewer. Walsh’s Incursion (Water) documentation consists of filmed documentations of an installation originally constructed by the artist in Toronto, Canada, in 2007 and recreated at various locations since. In this work an empty restaurant slowly fills with water and is then occupied by giant barramundi and crayfish that take the role of consumers, rather than the consumed. In addition to the chronological overview of fish in Australian art, some works in the exhibition are grouped into six major themes:
Fish in Indigenous art Since the 1970s awareness and appreciation of Indigenous art in Australia has dramatically increased. A flourishing of art from communities around Australia has produced a variety of significant works, with many Indigenous artists now nationally and internationally acclaimed. Representations
of fish and fishing by Indigenous artists speak of place, spirit, community and connectedness. Inherent in many of these artworks are stories that reaffirm Indigenous people’s custodianship of freshwater and saltwater country. At the source are the Ancestors who gave their people designs, language and law that hold the secrets of country. Arising from these traditions is a richness and inventiveness to the way fish are depicted and stories are shared. Yvonne Koolmatrie’s woven eel trap is modelled on traps placed in stone weirs to catch eels during their annual migration through the south Australian swamplands. Koolmatrie’s signature style uses a coiled basketry technique, a tradition of Ngarrindjeri people living along the Lower Murray River in South Australia. Weaving was a social activity. During the warmer months women and children collected sedge grass and rushes that were dried and woven by men and women into a variety of objects. While the work has a practical heritage Koolmatrie’s artistry has been internationally recognised, and she represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Galuma Maymuru’s bark painting Balanay u tells the Yolngu story of Balanay u, the sacred rock in the saltwater country of Njarrakpi. The ancestor Muwandi of the Manggalili clan is depicted spearing Nguykal, the ancestral Kingfish. Nguykal swam away and left a path through the Yirritja lands that now connects the various kinship clans in north-west Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. This work is from one of this museum’s major collections: 80 bark paintings created for the Signals 98 march to may 2012
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