We Are Tiwi: The art and artists of Munupi Arts

We are the Tiwi. Tiwi is we the people. Tiwi is my people, we that lived for thousands of years on these beautiful islands. Tiwi is different to mainland Australian Aboriginals. The Tiwi culture is different: the language is different. My people, the Tiwi people, we belong to this place – the islands – Bathurst and Melville Island – all these islands belong to my people the Tiwi. 

Pedro Wonaeamirri, Tiwi Statement in Tiwi: art, history, culture [i]

Sophisticated geometric design and meditative mark making, a balanced fusion of contemporary adaptation and classical tradition, and the strength of generations of culturally significant families underlie the Munupi Arts & Crafts Association. The art centre exemplifies what is unique about Tiwi life and culture: a distinct art style, a balance of male and female power and status, a variety of artistic skills: painting, weaving, craft, textile design, ceramics, sculpture, printmaking. The artists of Munupi are adept at all these forms of art.

Located in Pirlangimpi community on the large Melville Island, over the Aspley Straight from Darwin, Munupi Arts is now well into its third decade as a successful art centre. It has in recent years blossomed into a new life brought about through the art practice of older masters, bringing a renewed energy and traditional vigour to the art.
Foremost amongst these masters are elders Cornelia Tipuamantumeri and the late Justin Puruntatameri. I visited Munupi in 2012 to research the art centre as a curator, art historian and writer, and to interview Puruntatameri about the extensive Tiwi resistance at nearby Fort Dundas (Punata), the first British settlement in the Northern Territory. I found him waiting for me one morning at his spot at the back of the art centre, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. While we spoke, they listened attentively. He was a great teacher, a man of much knowledge. His extensive knowledge of local flora and fauna had been published[ii], he had been featured in The Australian newspaper as the most senior traditional leader in the small Melville Island community of Pirlangimpi, a great new artist drawing comparison to Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, a ‘distinct’ voice of the old Tiwi[iii]: indeed, he was the most respected ‘culture man’ on both the Tiwi Islands.[iv]
Puruntatameri was born at Kadipuwu, next to the miscalculated site where the British would build their short-lived fort.[v] His knowledge of the fort, which lasted from 1824-9, was extensive; he told me, during our visit there, of events and features not previously documented. Of a bakery, which I have not noted on any of the archaeological records[vi], of how the Tiwi believed the British were there for treasure, for gold, of his grandfather being shot in the knee by the British, the bullet wound healed by his people’s ‘bush medicine’[vii].  Together with Munupi staff we walked around the old fort and trenches, commenting on our amazement that the British would think trenches would be any use against the Tiwi spears (perhaps they were confusing the Tiwi with Maori?). He showed me the two tutini he had made, those famous sculpture headstones made in the final stage of the pukumani ceremony.

Previous scholars have noted the tutini made for a white woman’s grave at the fort; Puruntatameri told me his were for the doctor and officer, the famous Green and Gold, who had been killed by the Tiwi as retribution for the British capture of their warrior Tambu, an act of war[viii]. I asked him why he had made these beautiful works for outsiders who had settled on his people’s land in such a brutal way. ‘I felt sorry for them,’ he said ‘having no headstone.’[ix]
This is revealing of the Tiwi’s generosity and nature, as it is of their use of art to express the deep cycles of life; birth, creation, death, and to communicate with each other and with outsiders. Early scholars of this art described the immense symbolic detail involved, wherein every painted line and dot in a bark painting or sculpture denotes a symbolic hieroglyph[x]. This hidden symbolism continues in the contemporary art movement today: in paintings by Munupi foundational artists such Reppie Anne Papajua (Orsto), Thecla Bernadette Puruntatameri and Francesca Puruntatameri, the acclaimed, award-winning artists Susan Wanji Wanji and Nina Puruntatameri, middle-generation strong Tiwi culture women Carol Puruntatameri, Delores Tipuamantumirri, Fiona Puruntatameri and Paulina Puruntatameri, and the new generation artists Natalie Puantulura and Debbie Coombes.
It is significant that most of this exhibition’s artists are women; Munupi was founded in the 1980s as a women’s craft and printmaking centre, combined with the pottery established by Eddie Puruntatameri, first chairperson of Munupi. The pottery is continued by his son, the expert ceramicist Robert Puruntatameri.[xi] Munupi artists have experimented in a variety of painting mediums, including ochre, acrylic and gouache; nowadays most of their contemporary work is done in traditional ochre, that natural, wonderful, ceremonial paint. Ochre gives their work a strong sense of ceremonial tradition but also allows for contemporary developments and interpretations of classical themes. The pared-down black and white ochre, seen beautifully in the work of Nina Puruntatameri, Josephine Burak and Fiona Puruntatameri, highlights the graphic elements of their designs.
The subtle warmth of the often rare pink ochre is worked expertly by Cornelia Tipuamantumeri, a perfect contrast to her black ochre background. Her works produce an emotional response in the viewer; they convey a deep calmness, but also a depth of cultural knowledge, not simplistically understood. Perhaps their detailed dot and line design evolves from her background as a skilled weaver.
It is astounding the myriad ways Munupi artists can work with the three classic tones of red, black and yellow. Black and yellow are Pirlangimpi colours, their prized football team, Imalu, has its name from the tiger; these colours are theirs. The Kulama ceremony, one of the most significant ceremonies on the Islands, features with these colours as the theme of many of these works. Nina Puruntatameri’s paintings of this semi-secret-sacred ceremony are an example of expert contemporary rendering of this ceremony: they illustrate its significance in their impressive power and beauty, giving us a glimpse of hidden depths involved in long and extensive ritual and religious ceremony.
The works in this exhibition may have a commonality in their mythological underpinnings but display a surprising array of stylistic variation. Carol Puruntatameri’s works depict organic-like forms in an earthy gentle palette of rich deep yellows and light browns. A painting by Daphne Wonaemirri is striking in its geometrical patterning, a clever, classic hallmark of Tiwi design. Debbie Coombs’ whimsical works are a great example of Tiwi anthropological observation, depicting the travels of peoples in vehicles and boats, more modern day realities that have become Tiwi through marks in their design. Delores Tipuamantumirri, daughter of Cornelia, paints strongly traditional designs and also more abstracted developments.
In complete contrast are the linear design graphs of Fiona Puruntatameri, perhaps the painter in this exhibition who most recalls the notable genre of Tiwi textile art. Her balanced compositions in black and white are intricate and aesthetically pleasing. Josephine Burak shares this reduced palette and geometry but her works are more fluid; they contains joyous explosions of light, perhaps evoking the great expressions of Tiwi ceremonial dance.
Only one artist, Natalie Puantulura, works in a multi-coloured palette. Yet her paintings lose none of the Munupi focus on balance, composition, and graphic elements. The beauty of the environment on the densely forested Melville Island is recalled to me by the evocation of natural beauty as seen in the works of Sheila Puruntatameri, Paulina Puruntatameri and Marie Simplicia Tipuamantumirri.
Thecla Bernadette Puruntatameri’s work is completely different again: joyous energetic shapes surge upwards in a dance-like movement; their combined design recalls the famed Tiwi barbed spears yet represent fire which is vital for both hunting and regeneration of country.
Justin Puruntatameri passed away just several months after I visited and interviewed him. His passing has left a great gap in the Tiwi world and the Australian arts. It is wonderful to see his legacy continuing on through the work of Munupi artists, and I think he would have been most proud of this exhibition, another great addition to the magnificent cultural lexicon that is the artists of Munupi, and a proud continuation of their fundamental assertion of their identity: ‘We are Tiwi’.
Emily McCulloch Childs

The name of the late artist Justin Puruntatameri is used with his family’s permission. The author wishes to thank the staff and artists of Munupi Arts for their generosity and time.

 

[i] Pedro Wonaeamirri in Jennifer Isaacs, Tiwi: art, history, culture, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing, 2012, p.viii.

[ii]Justin Puruntatameri et al, Tiwi Plants and Animals: Aboriginal flora and Fauna knowledge from Bathurst and Melville Islands, Northern Australia, Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory and the Tiwi land Council, Darwin, NT, 2001.

[iii] Nicolas Rothwell, Old memories from a new master, The Australian, 4 November 2011.

[iv] Jennifer Isaacs, Justin Puruntatameri biography, Tiwi: art, history, culture, p. 273.

[v] ibid, p. 272.

[vi] Several archaeological digs have been carried out at Fort Dundas/Punata, with the support of the Tiwi Land Council, the most extensive being by Eleanor Crosby, 1975, and Clayton Fredericksen, 2002.

[vii] This may have been the young boy who was shot as noted in Fredericksen and others, Clayton Fredericksen, Caring for history: Tiwi and archaeological narratives of Fort Dundas/Punata, Melville Island, Australia, World Archaeology, Vol. 34(2), Routledge, 2002, p. 288-302.

[viii] The story of Tambu’s (Tambu Tipungwuti) capture and subsequent escape is detailed by Tiwi people themselves and features in most writing on the events at Fort Dundas/Punata. It was also described to me in detail by Puruntatameri, who showed me the geographic locations of Tambu’s escape: he swam over the Aspley Straight from Fort Dundas/Punata to one of two small islands (regardless of crocodiles and sharks). From there he rested a while before swimming across to the other island, then back around to Melville Island proper, where he travelled around the back of the British and gathered his people, at his place called Ranku, who then warned the Munupi people, and they all planned a stealth attack on the British. This was a carefully planned, stealth ambush. One of the British escaped and alerted the Fort. The British then descended with guns, so the Tiwi ran into the mangroves. The famous barbed Tiwi spears, some up to 16 feet long, are impossible to get out. The Tiwi shot their spears through the windows of the hospital, and then they speared the commissariat officer John Green and Doctor John Gold, who were, Puruntatameri said, walking from the Fort to have a shower. They speared the doctor in the back. I believe this was a strategic attack on the doctor, for the British then had no medical help to deal with malaria, scurvy and the like, became ill, and the fort was abandoned. Puruntatameri also told me the Tiwi wondered why the British decided to establish their fort where they did, as there was little fresh water.

[ix] Justin’s daughter Paulina Puruntatameri, known as Jedda, accompanied us on our visit to Fort Dundas/Punata. A strongly active preserver of her people’s culture, she is current Chairperson of Munupi, and working towards creating a cultural museum there, and on digital archiving and on the repatriation of Tiwi artefacts. When visiting Fort Dundas/Punata she wittily commented to me ‘The British believed in terra nullius, because Tiwi hid in the bushes, they couldn’t see us, so they thought there might be no one here.’ We then discussed how that situation must have quickly changed when the first of the barbed spears flew from the bush.

[x] See Charles Mountford’s classic work The Tiwi, their Art, Myth and Ceremony, Phoenix House, London, 1958, which documents the intricate symbolic detail of mythology, landscape, religion and law particularly in Tiwi bark paintings of the people of Melville Island.

[xi] Isaacs, p.260.

Fred Fowler ‘New Landscapes’: Catalogue Essay

Recently I was at an exhibition opening of art from the APY Lands, a vast, stunningly beautiful and largely unknown (to outsiders) area of Australia[1]. A region of big skies and open land, hidden rockholes filled with creation beings, occasional mountain ranges and desert oak forests, a land still alive and still sung. An Aṉaŋu[2] cultural leader[3] who had made a particularly moving speech during the opening spoke to me afterwards of the ecological catastrophes affecting his people’s lands. This was the first thing he spoke to me about, with a sense of great urgency and despair. To those not so familiar with the only true Australian art[4], this may have seemed just one aspect of the arts’ subject matter or of the exhibition itself. But it wasn’t: it was the central theme: underpinning all the complex law and religion, the colour and beauty and humour and creation stories. The man was reaching out to me as a writer and curator who could perhaps help educate the rest of Australia, and the world, about the battles against the areas of a death, spreading, a formidable disease. Its name? Buffel grass. Brought in on the hooves of cattle, it is devastating large regions of fragile, beautiful Australia.

Due to previous art research trips through The Lands, I knew first-hand the devastation brought about by introduced camels, feral cats, rabbits and other pests. The feral camels, over a million of them, kill everything: they strip leaves and bark from trees, effectively ring barking them. They die in the waterholes, the lifeblood of these areas, destroying the entire eco-system for everything from the little marsupials, like the ninu (bilby) and the little birds, right up to the malu (kangaroo) and kalaya (emu).

Aṉaŋu are ethno-botanists, they know complex connections of plants, animals, water and land; the ways in which birds and animals spread plant seeds. So when animals die, plants die. Everything dies. But the buffel grass: this was something new again. Traditional, highly developed Aṉaŋu land management techniques weren’t working. ‘You can’t burn it; it doesn’t burn.’ the leader said to me. It was destroying the native grasses, another major life source. His words stayed with me.

Speaking with him, I was reminded of a dear Aṉaŋu elder and artist I had the privilege to work with, the late Tjilpi R. Kankapankatja. He was a genius level ethno-botanist, whom scientists from ANU travelled to study with. He knew the names, medicinal and other properties of thousands of plants. He painted these, in paint on canvas, with love and joy. His works were delightfully, superficially naïve, but underlying their directness were decades of extensive complex botanical study and knowledge. He was an example of how art can encompass and communicate many seemingly disparate modes of knowledge.

The title of Fred Fowler’s exhibition, New Landscapes, is simple, but telling. Australia is one of the oldest continents on earth, with the oldest continuous cultures. But for the Europeans who arrived here in the eighteenth century, it was a strange and new land. For their descendants, it still is, in many ways. The land of Australia is written in our historical literature as being ‘strange’ ‘foreign’ ‘other’, most of it ‘desert’ ‘dry’ ‘arid’ ‘hot’ and uninhabitable. Its ‘remoteness’ is commented on: but it is ‘remote’ only depending on where you stand, where you come from. If you are Aṉaŋu, the APY Lands are in fact the centre of the universe; Melbourne and Sydney are remote, strange, foreign and often harsh and unforgiving places. This land has been demonized as much as its original inhabitants, in a way that is inescapably linked.

It took European-Australian artists over a hundred years to even begin to capture some of the reality of the Australian landscape, and to cease to see it through overtly European eyes. The landscapes of Heysen, Roberts and Streeton were groundbreaking in their evocation of the bush, its misty blue palette, or dry red earth under a blazing blue sky. Yet their work was of the heroic bushman; an Anglo-Celtic or Saxon male hero, against all odds, surviving in a harsh environment. Man sought to dominate and tame the bush, not to live with it (although Streeton, to his great credit, was an early environmentalist and protector of Australia’s old-growth forests).

It wasn’t until the Antipodean school that such a tranquil, and rather mistaken, telling of settlement and environment began to be challenged. Boyd, Nolan, Williams and Drysdale in particular broke with the conventions of Australian landscape painting and painted a more accurate reflection of the world around them. Boyd included Aboriginal women and their plights in his landscape in his pioneering 1950s ‘Half-Caste Bride’ series. Nolan explored the interior of Australia and revisited the heroic myth, and found that it wasn’t so heroic after all. Williams and Drysdale pushed the boundaries of landscape painting at the time, reflecting the often abstracted character of aspects of the Australian landscape; its angular trees and un-European palette, its rounded, often amorphous red rocks. They introduced black into their landscape palette, evoking the true contrast of the land and its forms, far from a perpetual gentile muted European softness.

Fowler’s approach, whilst this series, he says, cannot be understood as conventional landscape painting, reflects the changes that have occurred in our understanding of our environs and the past as non-Indigenous Australians since then. Fowler has, as he says ‘used the vessel of landscape painting to explore ideas about native and invasive species, both animal and human’. His work is subtle, didactic and articulate: the works are neither brutal expressions of a self-aware artists’ frustration with the present state of environmental destruction occurring in this country, nor harshly realistic depictions of racial oppression and the inequality between the colonisers and the subaltern; and yet, nor are they superficially pretty, decorative paintings of trees and bush. They are aesthetically intriguing paintings containing a subtle yet intellectual and empathetic message, with careful composition of colour and form. Strange shapes hover in a colour field, they are animalistic, but not always animals. Some recall collage, parts of skulls, crystals, buildings, trees, birds, ghosts, or abstracted tribal designs.

Despite his good length of time as an exhibiting artist, these new works continue to explore some of Fowler’s background in street art and graffiti; some of the raw, urgent shapes revisit Basquiat whose influence upon the world continues. Often painted in oil stick, occasionally shapes appear like watercolour; the artist’s methodology of his technique reflects his subject. A variety of surfaces are created, some multi-hued, some rough, others smooth. The collage-like shapes often appear either floating or behind the canvas, giving us hints of other worlds, of depths beyond our immediate perception.

The titles reflect the wide-range of Australian environments: ‘Fire Coral (Colonial Marine Organism)’, depicts the fragile, threatened seas, Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef with its vast coral systems, the colonial sea trades (fishing, pearling, whaling, trepanging) which brought with them the violent underside of Imperial trade: slavery, prostitution, disease, violence, colonial sea trades which developed into modern day incursions: dredging, mining, over-fishing, shipping, polluting.  And the seas as a modern day, unequal battleground over borders.

In creating this series, the artist had considered the work of several other artists working in the field of colonialism and identity. Paola Pivi’s work ‘One Love’, with its depiction of white animals in a colonial type landscape, shown at Queensland’s GOMA, ‘contains the resonance of eighteenth-century European paintings which depicted ‘exotic’ species from disparate geographies, brought to Europe via colonial trade routes for the entertainment of the wealthy. Pivi also underlines the connotations of ‘white’ identity and racist histories.’[5]
The late Yorta Yorta-Scottish artist Lin Onus, one of the most significant artists of his generation, also resonates with Fowler: his work exploring both issues of colonialism and Australian identity often used the symbolism of animals. Onus’ famous depiction of himself and his good mate, gallerist and artist Michael Eather, as ‘X and Ray’, a dingo and a stingray, are amongst the most positive depictions of the mateship across Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples made to date. But it is Onus’ famous ‘Fruit Bats’ that Fowler says has most influenced his current series directly. Defiant statements of anti-colonialism, these clusters of bats, their bodies painted in the rarrk Onus was given permission to use by Arnhem Land artists, take over the most suburban of all Australian signifiers, the Hills Hoist. In typical Onus fashion, the intellect of the artist drove him to conceive the installation using humour, wit and whimsy to catch the viewer off-guard and suspend their political defensive disbelief.[6]

Significantly, Fowler’s New Landscapes series has an engagement with these complex issues of colonialism, identity, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous interactions and issues, without feeling the need to do as so many non-Indigenous artists seem fit, to appropriate Aboriginal art, as a perhaps well-meaning but inadvertently offensive sort of homage. The works in this exhibition are painted in the artist’s own stylistic oeuvre, he has felt no need to cheat, by lifting designs used in paintings from the great artists from the Western Desert or other areas, to give us easy clues as to what they are about.
His landscape subjects comprise broad-ranging themes: ‘The Ecological Society of Australia’ ‘Merging of Diversification’ ‘A Brief History of Colonisation’ which evoke these questions of identity and concerns for the impact of colonising powers upon Indigenous people and lands.

Some works are more site-specific, the border of New South Wales and Queensland, a border which brings to my mind the towns of Moree and Boggabilla, as seen in the films of Ivan Sen, who explores the complexity of Indigenous and non-Indigenous identities, particularly amongst youth, and issues of racism. The Bournda Nature Reserve, a national park in New South Wales. And the most famous of all Australian natural landmarks, perhaps with the exception of Uluru or the Great Barrier Reef, one so familiar for its settler architecture that it is almost easy to forget that it is even a site of nature, Sydney Harbour.
Fowler’s new landscapes evoke all that is ancient and beautiful about this land, and simultaneously, subtly, that which is more recent, brutal and confronting. They are a much needed, thoughtful exploration of these issues of land, animals, plants and humans, adding much to the discussion of Australia’s past and its present condition.

 

Emily McCulloch Childs

Fred Fowler, ‘New Landscapes’, Backwoods Gallery, Melbourne, 20-29th June, 2014

 

[1] The APY Lands are the Aṉaŋu (human being, person) Pitjantjatjara (language group) Yankunytjatjara (language group) lands, in northern South Australia. They comprise some 103,000 square kilometres; have 7 art centres, a wealth of brilliant artists practicing in many mediums from craft to painting, and a richness of unique and delicate flora and fauna.

[2] Aṉaŋu is the word for ‘human being, person’ in Pitjantjatjara, which is how these people identify themselves in the contemporary age.

[3] Cultural leader Lee Brady.

[4] Art critic Alan McCulloch used to say ‘the only true Australian art is that which is made by Aboriginal people’, and reflected this belief in his writings in Meanjin, The Herald and other publications.

[5] Paola Pivi, http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/past/2010/21st_Century/artists/paola_pivi

[6] Lin Onus, Fruit Bats, sculpture, 1991, held in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, see George Alexander in Tradition today: Indigenous art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004. Rarrk is the unique style of cross-hatching used by Arnhem Land artists, and is owned by them, which must not be used without permission. See also Margo Neale et al, Urban Dingo: the art and life of Lin Onus, 1948-1996, Queensland Art Gallery, 2000.