Seeing poverty in the North
Chapter 4 by ROD MOSS
I remember Dave Morgan venturing north, first to Darwin and soon, to fatten his wallet for prospective overseas travels, to work at Millingimbi off the Gulf of Carpentaria coast.
Amongst his initiatives, he learnt the printing trade. Eleven years on he was recruited to the fledgling independent school at Strelley, an hour inland from Port Hedland. Here he established the Literature Production Centre.
I remember September 1981 making the huge haul from Melbourne to visit him.
Soon I was illustrating a booklet of Molly Brown’s Pig Stories. The Nyangumarta dwelled in conditions I’d not known existed in Australia. How they seemed to accept their shelter and minimal amenities mystified me.
I wanted to know more. And that I wouldn’t find the understanding I sought in books. Having driven further north to Darwin and through QLD down the east coast to Melbourne, it was only a question of time before I uprooted and headed north.
I remember 1984 McLeod, with help from Strelley school principal, Paul Roberts, published his account of the Nyangumartas’ titanic struggle for independence, under the title How the West Was Lost. The script later formed the basis of Robert’s film of the same name.
I remember that year, my first November in Mparntwe / Alice Springs, by any estimate, a profoundly other country.
No passport required. Only openness. As I walked home from my new place of employment at the local TAFE, a heavy cloud perched above the MacDonnell Range. A teenage indigenous lad stopped me to point out the demarcation edge between the ink black cloud and the slip of luminous white over which it hovered.
"It be snake that one. Big rain soon." At first a few spits punctured the soil. Others followed, filling the vacant spaces. Soon, a wet sheet. Heavier and heavier it came. Full on. A universe of thunder. Big rain. I’d come to the right place.
Aborigines filled the streets, speaking various languages, moving with slow, graceful gait, a permanent reminder of my place in the scheme of unfolding colonisation.
However bedraggled or impoverished many appeared, their body language announced an unrivalled sense of belonging.
Though Aboriginals occupied suburban commission houses many preferred the camps fringing town at each point of the compass. Though existing long before, they were officially established in the early1970s, in the main each represented dominant language groups heralding from those directions. Whitegate was three kilometres north east of the CBD.
I remember the first time seeing an exhibition of desert art held in the hall built in the 1950s for the Buffalo Lodge.
The buffalo horns sitting above the Gap road entrance to a secondhand shop remain as evidence of the organisation. With growing respect for First Nations Peoples a distinctive desert art had emerged. Art centres were created, necessarily administered by non-indigenous staff familiar with art market practice. Today’s collectors would swoon over the modestly priced work on show.
Bright synthetic polymers, expanding the limited palette of traditional practice were introduced, freeing artists from learning messy, old master oil techniques and thereby avoiding transport of slow drying oils from distant places of production.
The art’s distinctive, and to Western eyes, abstract configurations of indigenous narratives gave no voice to what I met on Alice Springs streets and Arrernte town camps. Whatever benefits derived from the plethora of agencies implemented since citizenship, disadvantage remained conspicuous.
PAINTING at top: Fight, by ROD MOSS, 1997, 130 x 210cm, Collection of Broken Hill Regional Gallery.