Sand, Stars, and Crocodile Skin
Australian First Peoples' art and the Papunya Tula Art Movement
I visited Australia when I was too young to remember it, so before last week my visual and historical referents for the country were Kangaroo Jack, British author David Mitchell’s Bone Clocks Noongar colonization story, and his Aboriginal character Esther Little in the same novel. But when the free traveling art exhibit Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia came to the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (July 29 - October 29), I decided I wanted to learn more about Australia’s First Peoples and spent a week studying it.
Australia’s First Peoples (interchangeable with the term First Nations peoples) encompass over 300 different cultural language groups in Aboriginal Australia and Zenadth Kes / The Torres Strait Islands between Australia and Papua New Guinea. The National Gallery of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art curator Tina Baum writes that “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the world’s oldest continuous living culture,” and that they “believe [they] came from this place, now known as Australia, not from over land or sea,” in her essay on the exhibition. Ever Present contains work by more than 150 artists from the region which range across topics like Dreamings, which are similar to creation myths, Country, which refers to the traditional familial homelands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, family, community, culture, trade, and colonization. Ever Present contains lots of work from the Papunya Tula artist cooperative in particular. Papunya was originally a settlement for Pintupi, Luritja, Walpiri, Arrernte, and Anmatyerre Aboriginal people whom the government forcibly moved from the Western Desert to the Northern Territory in the 1960s and who painted their Dreaming stories with schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon’s encouragement. The settlement formed an artists’ cooperative in 1972 and their work became internationally successful in the following decades.
I initially found First Peoples’ art difficult to understand. My art history training was mostly in American and European work and I didn’t know anything about First Peoples’ Dreamings prior to the exhibit. Some of Ever Present’s work is self-referential in a visual language I don’t speak, and other works are shrouded in secrecy. First Peoples’ Elders worried their paintings might reveal sacred stories and sites to uninitiated or unauthorized viewers and layered screens of painted dots over sacred images. I decided my best point of access would be to examine First Peoples artists’ depictions of things I have my own visual referents for: sand, stars, and crocodile skin.
In Dorothy Napangardi’s Sandhills of Mina Mina (2000), she put thousands of stippled white, burgundy, light-yellow, amber, grey, and brown dots on a black canvas to imitate Mina Mina’s sandhill undulations and depict the desert from above. In Doreen Reid Nakamarra’s Untitled (2007), she depicts Wirrulnga’s tali (sandhills) with alternating dark and light horizontal lines in layered, snaking vertical formations that resemble both feathers and the desert. George Tjungurrayi’s Untitled (2002) consists of thousands of light-red lines that form three central geometric diamonds to depict a topographical view of his Country’s major claypans and imitate “the bright sun” hitting “the rippling red sandhills shimmering in the midday heat,” per the painting description. Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri’s “Untitled (Rain Dreaming at Nyunmanu)” (1994) features pink bars over a desaturated yellow sandscape: a wet, vibrant color imposed on a bleached dry expanse.
These four paintings use limited color palettes and repetitive elements to convey the feeling of staring at sand better than a photorealistic image ever could. The artists’ use of stippled dots and alternating lines capture how sand grains refract light and depict their deserts’ unique features far more effectively than Albert Namatjira’s European-style watercolors of Central Australia, which distinguished regions by their mountainous topography rather than their sand patterns. The paintings’ repetitive elements triggered the hypnotic absorption I experience when I stare at real desert expanses. I found myself spellbound by Nakamarra’s Untitled (2007) as my eye followed its undulating lines that demarcated the high sand’s separation from the low. Tracing them with my eye felt as meditative as repeating the Gayatri Mantra or counting rosary beads. The more I looked at Untitled (2007) the more I realized how remarkable Nakamarra and the Papunya Tula artist cooperative’s work was. They discerned the patterns that differentiated their Countries’ tali (sandhills) from other regions’ and created a new visual idiom to depict it. It’s work that can only come from artists who love their land so much they devote their lives to studying it.
I was similarly fascinated by First Peoples artists’ depictions of the stars. In Nyanpanyapa Yunupingu’s Djulpan – Seven Sisters Story (2011), the stars resemble white sunflowers, each about the size of an open hand and radiating into each other. Gulumbu Yunupingu’s Ganyu the Universe (2008), depicts the Milky Way as thousands of white, mustard-yellow, and brown dots linked by lines and grouped in shapes that resemble continental plates bumping into each other. Gulumbu Yunupingu’s other depiction of stars, Gan’yu (Stars) (2005), which she painted on a thin tree trunk, makes them look like thousands of tiny white yarrow flowers packed together over a field. Timothy Cook’s Kulama (2020), by contrast, depicts fewer stars than the Yunupingus’ works. He renders his heavens in white, yellow, and red earth ochres against a more imposing black backdrop.
When I look at the night sky, I see thousands of white pinpricks against a blue-black backdrop. My narrative referents are Greek: I can identify Orion, Ursa Major, The Big Dipper, and a few other constellations. My trips to less settled areas, like the Milford Sound / Piopiotahi, remind me I see far fewer stars than my ancestors would’ve due to light pollution. The stars I do see seem swamped by a greater, vaster darkness: they resemble tiny lighthouses in a mostly empty universe.
The Yunupingus and Timothy Cook depict a different universe. In theirs, the stars radiate light and the night sky bursts with as much color as desert topography seen from a plane, algae blooms on water, and sediment drifts on creek bottoms. Their heavens are as alive and fecund as Emily Kam Kngwarray’s fertile plant mulch in Anaty Inger (Bush Potato Dreaming) (1995). It’s a radically different depiction of the night sky than any I’ve ever seen before.
First Peoples artists’ unique visual idiom extends to how they depict animal textures, too. In Ivan Namirrikki’s Hunting crocodile by moonlight under the Milky Way (2010) and Lorrkon (2010), he uses 84 squares and diagonal lines to create a tesselated formation that abstractly represents crocodile skin glistening in the moonlight, shining in water, and reflecting a starry Milky Way. Jean Baptiste Apuatami’s Yirrikapayi (2007) does something similar and uses small, alternating square and diamond shapes to depict the texture of a crocodile’s skin. Both replicate the feeling of seeing a crocodile in motion: the way light moves and refracts across its glistening skin and how that impressionistic flash is all we see if they move fast enough. Namirrikki and Apuatami’s abstract representations of crocodile skin communicate the animals’ speed, ferocity, and vitality far better than Disney’s ostensibly lifelike but spiritually dead animatronic versions ever could.
In short, I found learning a different culture’s visual idiom from scratch to be surprisingly invigorating. The novelty lit up my brain in exciting ways: it reminded me of my first time memorizing Spanish conjugations or the first time I traced Devanāgarī script on paper. I left the exhibit feeling like a new world of possibility had opened before me. I’d learned a new way to look at the sand and stars and a new way to communicate how light moves across deserts and animal skins. It was one of the harder but more rewarding artistic experiences I’ve had in years. I recommend going to the free exhibit yourself and trying the same if you’re able.
Reading Recommendations
A few years ago, I used to select magazine stories for a recommendations website called Longform.org. I’d read between five to twenty magazine stories a week to select some for the website. Over time, I developed an instinct for distinguishing between technically masterful but emotionally lifeless writing and writing which had what writer Emily Gould called “a quality of aliveness... that’s the opposite of trying to get an A+” in journalism. I still read a lot and I’ll post work I particularly liked here.
I first got interested in Fran Hoepfner’s work through her Bright Wall / Dark Room essay on Charli XCX’s “Boys,” which is still some of the best writing on a pop song I’ve ever read. Lines that stuck with me include: “I worked with mostly boys—nice ones, but not kind ones, if that makes sense to you,” and “Let us thirst again, we beg. It’s one of the few things we have left.” The essay was smart and funny, and I left with the impression of someone who really thinks through their obsessions to better explain them to others. Her 2018 essay on Tom Cruise’s stunts in Mission Impossible and Alex Honnold’s ropeless climb up El Capitan also remains one of the best explorations of death wishes and our collective attraction to them I’ve ever read. She and I are friends now and her more recent work is great too, but I thought I’d write about the essays that first gripped my attention. You should also sign up for Fran Magazine: the number one news source for all things Fran.
I really enjoyed this Jeffrey Eugenides essay on how he wrote The Virgin Suicides in the early ‘90s. I liked that he admitted he “didn’t have the capacity as a writer back then to go into the girls’ heads and present their inner lives,” and that “by renouncing omniscience, [he] reduced the complexity of what [he] needed to know.” Per Eugenides, “the collective narration of The Virgin Suicides is an all-male affair. The boys who obsess over the Lisbon girls know little about them. Their cluelessness is the point.” His description of actually writing the book “in snatches at his desk at his nine-to-five office job, for two hours each weeknight, and for four hours every Saturday and Sunday” as he “discover[ed] things inside himself that he didn’t know were there” reminded me of B.D. McClay’s description of art-making: “When things are really working, you do not feel that you are doing them. Something is working itself out through you and coming to be through you. Your job is not to get in the way.”
Bone Clocks jumpscare