Exhibition Catalogue | Hunter Dreaming: Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri in WA

FAC would like to acknowledge it operates on the traditional lands of the Whadjuk people and that we respect their spiritual relationship with their country. We also acknowledge the Whadjuk people as the Traditional Owners of the greater Walyalup area and that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still important to the living Whadjuk people today.

Fremantle Arts Centre | 1 Finnerty Street, Fremantle, Western Australia | fac.org.au This program is available on FAC’s website and can be requested in alternative formats such as large print, electronic, hard copy, audio or braille via artscentre@fremantle.wa.gov.au Cover image: Hunter Dreaming (detail), 1979, ochres on canvas, 103 x 143cm.

City of Joondalup Art Collection. Donated by Ken Colbung in 1988

Hunter Dreaming: Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri in Western Australia Hunter Dreaming: Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri in Western Australia Tim Leura: an independent thinker Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri Ken Colbung Checklist Acknowledgements

Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Hunter Dreaming, 1979 ochres on canvas, 103 x 143cm City of Joondalup Art Collection. Donated by Ken Colbung in 1988

Hunter Dreaming: Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri in Western Australia Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri was an Anmatyer painter and protagonist of the men’s painting movement which emerged at Papunya in the Northern Territory in the early 1970s.

Tim Leura and his family visited WA at the time of the State’s sesquicentenary in 1978–79 as invited guests of Bibbulmun Nyoongar Elder Ken Colbung/Nundjun Djiridjarkan, staying at Ken’s home in Gnangara, north of Perth. Both men were leaders and agents of change in their respective communities and had cultivated a lasting friendship through their membership and activities of the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council in 1973–74. It was during this time that Tim Leura independently produced two extraordinary paintings in WA. According to Ken Colbung, in the six months that Tim Leura was his guest, they shared a rich and evolving exchange, with Tim Leura identifying an epic songline, an ancient link between central Australia and Northern WA.1 It was during this period that they travelled to numerous Dreaming sites in and around

Perth. In Albany they participated in a ceremony at the first site of European settlement in WA.2 During this journey to Southern WA in particular, they found a common bond and experience of the impacts associated with the ways of the Wadjela (white man) upon Aboriginal people, an experience deeply etched upon Ken’s early life.

Both paintings were initiated by Tim Leura and produced amid this extended period in WA. They were subsequently gifted to Ken in recognition of their accord. The artworks give voice to their private conversations, creating a tangible bond and cultural link between the men and their communities.

Hunter Dreaming describes Ancestral Hunters and recollections of paternal figures situated in a curious structure of topographical metaphors. The dark palette and veil of thinly coloured dots obscure the iconographic dimension of the painting from uninitiated audiences, a negotiated tactic that became synonymous with Papunya painting.

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Aboriginal people meeting first white settlers at the Swan River, is more explicit and perhaps conjures an interpretation of the men’s conversation about the connection Nyoongar people have with Walyalup (Fremantle). The work gives shape to traditional Nyoongar Kaartdijin (cultural knowledge). The figurative imagery relates to the misplaced interpretation of the arrival of white people as returning spirit ancestors, which incites an analogues reference to impending dispossession and survival of Nyoongar people, following establishment of the Colony. The Swan River (Derbral Yerrigan Beelu) is represented in the painting by the important figure of the spirit serpent (Waagle). It was recorded by City of Fremantle Librarian Betty McGeever, in conversation with Ken, that Tim Leura was determined to leave a painting of this local story with Ken 3.

In a recorded interview with Margaret Howroyd in 1988, Ken described the meaning of the painting.

Here we are with both feet on the ground and now we have only one, but we are still here, we are here in peace; we’ve laid down our Karlie (boomerang) and shield (Woonta), our protection.

Both paintings were generously donated by Ken Colbung on behalf of all Nyoongar people, to the City of Fremantle and City of Wanneroo during the Australian Bicentenary and coinciding with WA Week Celebrations in June 1988.

André Lipscombe, March 2020

1. The author interviewed Ken Colbung about the meeting with Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and cultural links across State borders in 2008.

2. Ken Colbung stated in an interview with Betty McGeever, Fremantle City Librarian in 1992, that the men attended a ceremonial Kobori at the site of the reproduction Brig Amity, after Albany’s sesquicentenary in 1976.

3. Betty McGeever interviewed Ken Colbung in 1992.

Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Aboriginal people meeting first white settlers at the Swan River, 1979 acrylic paint on canvas on board, 76 .5 x 109cm City of Fremantle Art Collection. Donated by Ken Colbung in 1988

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Tim Leura, Unknown photographer, gifted to John Kean, 1978

Tim Leura: an independent thinker Tim Leura was an unusual man, by any measure.

Possessed of an enquiring and artistic sensibility, he made deep connections with people from diverse cultural backgrounds. He was particularly attracted to fellow artists. Tim was a friend and confidante to all the Papunya Tula Artist managers with whom he worked, and as such, was critical to the stability of the Papunya painting movement.

While these notes are based on crowded recollections from an intense period in the late 1970s, as I struggled to manage a nascent painting company, Tim Leura’s foresight and agency remains crystal clear in my memory. Active as craftsmen since the 1960s, Tim Leura was not dependent on the company for access to the market for Indigenous art.

He was acclaimed as a carver of life-like polychrome perentie lizards, customary artefacts and tourist curios. He was confident selling his wares to cattle stations managers, settlement workers and at

various outlets in Alice Springs, where he was known as ‘Timmy Madjera’ (after his language group, the Anmatyerr).

Tim’s ease in diverse settings was recognised when, in 1973 he was selected to sit on the inaugural Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council. Here he came into contact with like-minded intercultural brokers from across the nation. David Mowaljarlai, Harold Blair, Wandjuk Marika, Dick Roughsey and Chicka Dixon were among the luminaries with whom he exchanged ideas at meetings in Sydney, Alice Springs and Perth. Ken Colbung, a Nyoongar activist, was also a member of the Board. I was therefore not surprised when Ken rang me at the office of Papunya Tula Artists to arrange for Tim’s travel to Perth and the offer of a bed on arrival. Later, when staying with his friend Ken in Perth, Tim was well equipped to support himself as ‘artist in residence’.

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Tim’s independence, as a traditionally oriented ex-stockman, making his way in a capital city, is remarkable enough, but the tenor and diversity of the work he produced so far from his home in Papunya makes his visit especially noteworthy.

His ‘Perth paintings’ provide an insight into his singularity as an artist and thinker.

On his return, and after a month in Western Australia, Tim presented me with two photographs.

One was a portrait of the artist in a brown corduroy jacket, looking debonair and well contented (it must be said that Tim Leura was a man of charismatic bearing and movie-star good looks), the other was a Polaroid of Untitled (Feeding the Children), the largest of the Perth paintings. The surface of Untitled is bisected by several songlines; a work in the lineage of Tribal Hunting Grounds (1974 Janet Holmes à Court Collection) in the current exhibition, and one that prefigures Michael Jagamara Nelson, Five Stories, 1984 (a seminal painting that featured on the cover of the book of Dreamings the Art of Aboriginal Australia (1988) exhibition at the Asia Society in New York).

Critically, two of the works that Tim painted in Perth have found their way into public collections, items that provide the kernel around which this exhibition has grown. These smaller works deserve particular attention, for they are quite unlike anything produced by his peers at Papunya.

Hunter Dreaming (1979 Joondalup Collection) recounts the sojourns of the artist’s father and grandfather in their ancestral lands around Alherramp (on Napperby Station). Here, Tim

Leura focuses on the father-grandfather dyad, foregrounding his connection to Country on which his patrilineal ancestors hunted. The painting asserts a subtly different emphasis to other Papunya Tula paintings that give prominence to the totemic ancestors of the ‘Dreaming’, or ceremonies associated with a particular site or songline. Hunter Dreaming is more like the vernacular stories, told in the sand than iconic depictions of the totemic landscape. Unlike conventional compositions typically based on strict bilateral symmetry, here the artist deploys an oblique axis, running from left to right across the composition. Although Tim never told me of the significance of the axis, I contend that in this instance it marks the transition from a remembered past (epitomised by the realistic figure) to the eternal present, the ‘everywhen’ of Indigenous time in Central Australia (signified by the skeletal figure).

The other painting, Aboriginal people meeting first white settlers at the Swan River (1979, Fremantle City Collection), is even more unusual. In an interview, conducted some years after the work was painted, Ken Colbung recalled that the owners of Derbral Yerrigan (the area depicted) laid down their weapons as a sign of peace on seeing ‘Englishmen’ for the first time. They mistakenly believed that the English were returned ancestors. He went on to explain that the pair of footprints in Tim Leura’s painting represents the Nyoongar people before European arrival, with ‘both feet on the ground’. The impact of the subsequent invasion is signified by a single black foot remaining, ‘in our camp’, to show that while profoundly affected, ‘we are still here’. The river winds sinuously across the painting, taking

the form of Waagle (the ancestral serpent) on his way to the sea. Calling on a typical reading of the camouflage pattern of dots, I suggest they evoke the vegetation of Derbral Yerrigan, adjacent to the beelu (waterway).

carried across the vast trade roots that reached from the Kimberley coast into arid Australia. Such a reading would complement the reciprocal exchange of ideas and cultural modes that underpin the painting.

I believe this work also hinges on the exchange between the men who formed a bond as fellow Aboriginal Arts Board members. I must caution, that the following speculative interpretation is based on information handed down with the painting and what I gleaned from working with the artist for three years. So with that proviso, I suggest that Swan River is informed by conversations between Ken Colbung and Tim Leura. Its subject reflects the significance of the Swan River and aspects of the totemic geography that persist despite the mantle of urban development, as explained by Ken Colbung (a caretaker of Country) to Tim Leura (artwa, an initiated Aboriginal man).

Despite its modest scale, The Hunter instigates a focus on Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri as an individual artist separate from the movement with which he is usually associated. The exhibition allows us to consider Tim Leura’s status as an independent artist and thinker. While Papunya Tula Artists early survival relied on Tim Leura’s role as broker and advocate on the national stage, he did not depend on the company he helped create. Armed with expansive vision, exceptional skill and charm to spare, I am confident that Tim Leura would have come to be recognised as an artist in his own right, without the rise of Papunya Tula art. Those of us, who had the good fortune to have known Tim Leura before his untimely death in 1984, were profoundly affected by his enquiring mind and recall, with melancholy pleasure, the hours we spent in his luminous presence.

The boomerang illustrated is unlike a typical Nyoongar karlie. Rather it resembles a returning boomerang crafted by the people of northeast Kimberley. The presence of the strange boomerang in Tim Leura’s portrayal of Nyoongar Country invites speculation about the origin of this anomalous object. Is it an artefact that Colbung acquired on his travels, and which caught Leura’s eye? Or does its inclusion suggest there is another level of meaning woven into the work? I offer the possibility that this boomerang (and associated shield) may have been a gift from Aboriginal Arts Board member David Mowaljarlai, an Ngarinyin man from the area to the west of Noonkanbah. Mowaljarlai often spoke of wunnan – the exchange of boomerangs for items

John Kean, March 2020

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Allan Scott, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri in the Men’s Painting Room, Papunya, 1972 black and white photograph John Kean Collection

Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri was born at Alherramp (Laramba) on Napperby Station, North West of Alice Springs/Mparntwe in the Northern Territory in 1929. His birthplace in the heart of the Central Desert was set within the significant songline of the Rrpwamper, home of the Possum people.

Tim Leura grew up as an older brother of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, as their mothers were sisters at a time when desert communities were dealing with extended periods of drought and continuing impact of the ‘killing times’ and Coniston station massacre of Aboriginal people in 1928. Both young men came under the influence of Clifford Possum’s adoptive father Gwoya Tjunggurrayi, a respected elder, guide and interpreter.

Both Tim Leura and Clifford Possum shared similar experiences and grew up working as stockman at Napperby and various other stations across Anmatyerr and Arrernte Country across Central Australia. It was at this time that both men began to understand the unbalanced cross cultural world which they inhabited. In late 1950 Leura moved to work on the construction of a new government

settlement at Papunya. Papunya was an outpost established by the Territory Government as a permanent settlement for the ‘assimilation’ of various clans from adjacent pastoral properties and the people (such as the Pintupi) from the Western Desert.

Tim Leura was one of 30 founding members from Anmatyer and Pintupi country at Papunya that formed the men’s painting group under the influence of their cousin and principal instigator Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, before the arrival of Geoffrey Bardon (1940–2003) in 1971.

Tim Leura was an accomplished carver of traditional tools and animals. He was also an independent thinker and fluent English speaker which lead to him becoming a spokesperson for Papunya men.

With the encouragement of Bardon, Tim Leura was a catalyst for establishing the pioneering Papunya Men’s Painting Room in the 1970s and prior to the influence of cultural change under the Whitlam Government in 1972. The activity of the painting room was an important economic driver for

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independence in the ‘whitefella’ world. Papunya Tula painting emerged to integrate traditional culture and arts practice into work for a new audience and market. Working with protagonists including Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Uta Uta Tjangala, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Anatjari Tjakamarra and Mick Wallangkarri Tjakamarra, Leura fostered an art movement that reshaped the visual language and trajectory of art history in Australia. Tim Leura was an inventive individualistic painter who encrypted inherited traditional iconography with metaphor to create vivid contemporary interpretations of Altyerr (Dreaming) knowledge in totemic landscapes.

He painted the Possum, yam, blue tongue lizard, sun, moon, and morning star Dreaming associated with Nurta, his custodial Country. His distinctive painterly effects, muted palette and delicacy of touch reflect, it is suggested, his concern for the erosion of the old ways of life. Tim Leura and Clifford Possum collaborated on a large topographical painting, Napperby Death Spirit (Possum) Dreaming 1980, which is revered as a masterpiece of the Papunya movement.

Tim Leura was a member of the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council in 1973–74. Here he connected with National Aboriginal networks, political figures and WA Nyoongar activist Ken Colbung, with whom he cultivated a lasting friendship. Tim Leura’s health declined in the early 1980s and when Papunya Tula was attracting critical acclaim, he died prematurely at the age of 55 in 1984.

Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Untitled, 1973 acrylic paint on cotton duck, 51 x 61cm Janet Holmes Ă Court Collection

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Ken Colbung Kenneth Desmond Colbung/Nundjun Djiridjarkan was a leader of the Bibbulmun Nyoongar people with family connections to Warren River and the SW of WA. He was born near Mogumber, at the notorious Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth in 1931. Moore River was associated with the cruel policy of the Native Affairs Office and the Stolen Generations, when Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families from 1910–1970. His young unmarried mother, Eva Colbung, was interned from Mt Barker in 1924. She died at 17 years of age at Moore River soon after Ken was born.

Ken grew up at Moore River and was later removed to Perth Anglican Orphanage, known as Sister Kate’s Home for Children. From an institutionalised upbringing he worked as a stockman before enlisting in the Australian army in 1950 at 19 years of age. He served in the army for 15 years and saw active service overseas in Japan and Korea, gaining the rank of Sergeant. The Army provided Colbung with life learning opportunities to complete his education, an experience usually not afforded to civilian Aboriginal men. He was discharged in 1965 at 44 years of age. Ken married his partner Betty Ridgeway, had a family, supporting six children.

Ken Colbung grew into a role as a committed activist, organiser and spokesperson for his community and held positions of influence in Nyoongar affairs. He was active in WA working with the Aboriginal Advancement Council and worked on Fremantle Wharves in 1971–72, which broadened his experience with membership of the militant Painters and Dockers Union.

Colbung was an articulate and outspoken speaker actively working for Aboriginal Rights, participating in the ‘Black Power’ movement and ‘Black Moratorium’ protest against the Vietnam War. He worked with the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs, connecting with Aboriginal communities in NSW, before returning to WA in 1970. He was appointed the inaugural Chairman of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Affairs in Canberra, and conducted the organisation away from the influence of party politics. He also advised WA State Government on Aboriginal Affairs at the WA Museum and WA Aboriginal Legal and Medical Service Councils.

Later in his career, Colbung was a leader in cultural conservation and education, establishing, with

Commonwealth funds, Nyoongar Community Inc. which operated the Aboriginal Community College at Gnangara in Wanneroo, an organisation he founded with his wife.

Colbung was also a longstanding member of the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council (1970–1980) and where he met senior Anmatyer artist Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, another community leader equally active in intercultural affairs. It was through this connection that the men shared experiences and knowledge of their respective Country, leading to an invitation for Tim Leura to visit WA where he subsequently made two paintings in 1979. Colbung later donated the artworks to City of Fremantle and Wanneroo in 1988.

Later in life, Ken Colbung took a leading role in the effort to advocate for the repatriation from the UK of the remains of Yagan, a Nyoongar warrior and resistance fighter.

Ken Colbung was awarded Member of the British Empire in 1980 and Order of Australia in 1982 for services to Indigenous Australians. He died in 2010.

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Checklist All artworks by Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri are from the City of Fremantle Art Collection, City of Joondalup Art Collection and Janet Holmes à Court Collection and listed chronologically by date. Image dimensions are in centimetres H x W.

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Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri Untitled, 1973 acrylic paint on cotton duck 51 x 61cm Janet Holmes à Court Collection

2|

Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri Tribal Hunting Grounds, 1974 acrylic paint on chipboard 91.5 x 122cm Janet Holmes à Court Collection

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Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri Hunter Dreaming, 1979 ochres on canvas 103 x 143cm City of Joondalup Art Collection Donated by Ken Colbung in 1988

4|

Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri Aboriginal people meeting first white settlers at the Swan River, 1979 acrylic paint on canvas on board 76 .5 x 109cm City of Fremantle Art Collection Donated by Ken Colbung in 1988

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Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri Possum Dreaming, 1980-81 acrylic paint on canvas 90.5 x 121cm Janet Holmes à Court Collection

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Allan Scott Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri in the Men’s Painting Room, Papunya, 1972 black and white photograph John Kean Collection

Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Possum Dreaming, 1980–81 acrylic paint on canvas, 90.5 x 121cm Janet Holmes à Court Collection

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Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Tribal Hunting Grounds, 1974 acrylic paint on chipboard, 91.5 x 122cm Janet Holmes Ă Court Collection

Acknowledgements This exhibition would not be possible without the contributions, advice and assistance of John Kean, a longstanding colleague and friend of FAC who has a close association with Papunya artists. Special thanks to Janet Holmes à Court for her generosity in approving important loans and Louise Dickmann and Laetitia Wilson from the Janet Holmes à Court Art Collection for their assistance. Thanks to City of Joondalup Art Collection for loan of a painting which is critical to the success of this exhibition. I would also like to acknowledge the support of Papunya Tula Arts Pty Ltd, City of Fremantle Local History Collection and the family of Ken Colbung AM in preparation of this exhibition.

Curated by André Lipscombe and John Kean

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