Kngwarreye

Death of an artist (Lands of the Anmatyerre people)

This poem previously appeared in "Spinifex"(Five Islands Press, 2001) - my little book of desert poetry. When I first put it on Substack, months ago, I added 3 points of clarification, (you will find them further below), but I did not do anything to explain the context of the work. The wonderful responses I have just received to “Lajamanu Morning” make me realise that many readers do need and want that contextual explanation - so here we go. Feel free to skip to the poem if you know who Emily Kngwarreye was.

For everyone else:

Emily Kame Kngwarreye was a senior woman of the Anmatyerre people - an Australian Aboriginal/First Nation language group, whose traditional lands are in a vast stretch of semi-desert woodland and grassland North-East of Alice Springs, in Central Australia. Born in 1910, as a child and a young woman she lived a traditional desert nomadic life - increasingly impacted by Europeans from the 1920’s onward when the land of the Anmatyerre was taken over by European cattle stations - the most well known of them being named “Utopia Station.”

Disease and colonial frontier murders killed many of the Anmatyerre. The survivors ended up living in cattle station camps as forced labour, and then in Government established communities - eventually surviving long enough for law and public sentiment to change - finally receiving full citizenship and eventually regaining ownership of much (not all) of their traditional lands, while also - with incredible resilience and determination - managing to retaining their language and culture throughout.

In the late 1970’s Kngwarreye - now a senior knowledge holder for her community - was living on the lands previously known as Utopia Station but deeded back in 1979 to the Anmatyerre.

The remote Aboriginal communities have a chronic lack of independent income - but in common with other First Nation peoples Aboriginal art and craft has been seen as a way of using culture to produce an income - whilst at the same time reinforcing that culture. However traditional Aboriginal “art” is not (in its original form) suitable for sale. Central Desert art traditionally takes the forms of unmovable art such as cave paintings and sand pictures (designs modelled into the earth/sand, decorated with feathers, plant material etc), or very temporary/non durable art - decoration of wooden tools or the body, with designs created from ochre mixed with animal fat.

The traditions are incredibly rich in design and meaning - but not “saleable” in their original form.

As a possible solution, in 1978 a Batik printing project started at “Utopia” (the name of the old cattle station has persisted in use). The Batik printing enabled the reproduction of traditional designs onto an easily transportable and quite durable “product.” Batik clothing - and particularly batik silk scarves and wall hangings - also proved to be very saleable, and soon achieved art world notice as well.

Along the way, the Anmatyerre women (Utopia Batik was a women’s initiative) also had to evolve their designs - avoiding sacred/secret designs and then increasingly experimenting with colour palettes and design styles that are not available with traditional materials. It is a form of art which appears entirely abstract, whilst also containing and referencing information about the land, the people and their beliefs.

Kngwarreye, by now almost 70 years of age, joined the Utopia Batik group and became very skilled. Then in 1988 the artists were introduced to acrylic paint and canvas. Kngwarreye seized on this as her preferred medium and by the time she turned 80 she had developed a unique style and a passion for painting which made her extremely prolific.

Starting at that advanced age, in a painting career that was just the final 8 years of her remarkable life, Emily Kame Kngwarreye achieved widespread fame in Australia and worldwide. At the time of her death she was already regarded as one of Australia’s greatest artists, and her fame (and the dollar value ascribed to her work) has grown ever since. Her painting titled “Earth’s Creation” sold for $1 million (AUD) in 2007, and then again for $2.1m when it was resold in 2017. There is a painting up for sale currently (November 2024) with an asking price of $3.35 million….

You will see that this is a narrative poem. The narrator is me. The events are actual.

The poem is not about me, but you may wonder how and why I was there. The short answer:

It was 1996. After 12 years living and working in the Northern Territory - mostly in the desert lands - I had a travelling job helping to coordinate tertiary education programs in remote Aboriginal communities across Central Australia (training local Teachers, Health Workers, technical workers etc). We had staff members and students in the Utopia region and I was trying to arrange facilities for our staff to operate from. I was based in Alice Springs, but sitting in the office there was not going to help build relations with the Anmatyerre so, on a day when massive dust storms were rolling in across the desert, I jumped in a 4wd and headed out bush:

Destination …. Utopia.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye
Who died in  hospital in Alice Springs of pneumonia, and extreme old age, and a sense perhaps, of all the tiny threads in her life undone at last, like canvas worn too thin, like paint left peeling in the sun.

On the day I reached Utopia the wind was blowing,
raising curtains of dust across the stage of the sky
so that even the sun was dimmed, 
a faint brown disc of light,
and vehicles approaching down that long road loomed up surprisingly, 
close at hand, like actors appearing from the wings, then gone.

Even the engine seemed to choke,
rattling like a smoker’s cough
as I crossed the Sandover at Homestead,
where the huts and houses cluster
by the river red gums haphazardly, apologetically, 
as if afraid to be seen together.

 It was not a day for work - even I could see that,
though I’d come there anyway, as planned,
knowing no-one cared about my plans,
or should.  Knowing it would make no difference,
to the people, if I came or not.
In the end, I came because I could.

Because the dust blowing over Alice Springs
made me think of where it comes from,
of all the empty lands so full of tracks,
and patterns, and people, and the history of people
and all the places people are,
or once have been.

So I headed out of town to see Utopia,
on a cold day of winter when the wind
stirred patterns in the sky
like all the dust clouds stirring in my life -
all brown and strange and made of the substance of life,
and all that living brings.

 I had never met Kngwarreye
though I was curious about her
and passed her camp from time to time
and once just missed her shopping at the store.
I came to Utopia in search of other things
and never sought to hang it on my wall.

But when her niece at Homestead asked me for a lift
it was easy to agree.  I was heading that way -
drove back across the river silently
as the sand whirled up around me;
wondered, maybe, if this was what I’d come here for,
unintentionally.

At her camp I stopped well back, 
turned off the key,
looked up to see 
a man I did not know -
European, middle aged, 
climb quickly in a car and go.

 And then I sat  alone watching red sand
and dust blow horizontally at waist height,
so that Kngwarreye’s niece, 
returning, looked like Mawson 
in some red Antarctica,
in a blizzard struggling home.

“Old woman sick - 
pneumonia might be.
That roadhouse man ‘e run away -
‘e was ‘opin’ to buy a painting, maybe,
cheap,  but she got nothing,  
not even clothes.”

So we left her humpy set amongst the trees,
a feeble shack of old roofing iron, 
flour drums and earth,
branches and leaves,
a tattered blue tarpaulin 
flapping in the breeze.

And we stopped at the clinic
and they called the flying doctor,
and they took her into town,
lifting high above the red brown land
stretched like a canvas far below,
like a painting put on show.

A few days later she was dead,
and as the word spread out across the land
I lost the thread of who she was, had been or seen,
until in Adelaide months later I saw her paintings.
The day was warm, the gallery cool
and clean.  There were fountains and glass.

No spinifex grass just
marble floors and music
and water in a pool.
No flour drums or tarp,
no smell of campfire and
no-where to sit.

 
And  the paintings did look good -
there was no denying it,
but I wanted to lift them off the walls
where they hung so straight,
and so at variance with tangled lines of paint.
I wanted to take them outside 

into the sun where they were made,
into the wind which dried them.
I wanted to lie them on the ground haphazardly
where the people would have to bend over them,
as Kngwarreye did when painting,  
looking down upon the land.

I wanted children 
playing among them,
I wanted sand beneath them.
I wanted hungry dogs
pissing on them.
I wanted dust in the air

and clogging my hair.
I wanted people to care 
where they came from.
I didn’t want to stare at something
hung upon a wall -
I wanted dirt between my toes.

I wanted old billy cans and honesty,
kangaroo bones,
dusty swags and dirty blankets.
I wanted flies and perspiration
and the smoke of camp fires,
old corned beef tins full of 
paint and desperation.
I wanted heat and poverty
and the hesitation of knowing
this is not my land!
I wanted to see 
her old hands
which tried to teach a nation.
 
And I thought of Kngwarreye, 
whom I’d never met,
lying there with all of that and more,
and breathing in the dust upon the air,
and becoming at last a part of what she painted,
in her dusty swag, in her ragged camp,
on the earth near Utopia store.

David
*	*	*	*	*

Emily Kame Kngwarreye – one of Australia’s foremost painters – a senior Anmatyerre woman from Utopia Station, in the Northern Territory.  
    c. 1910 – 1996
            Returned to country.

---

I have had quite a bit of comment on this poem in the past - nearly all positive - and in general I believe that a poem should not require additional notes, but there are three points I would like to clarify here: 

First - it is my understanding that Kngwarreye's family has granted general permission for her name to be used, if done respectfully, on the grounds that her fame as an artist and as a senior woman of her community makes that appropriate (even though, in normal circumstances, by cultural tradition the names of the dead are not spoken). 

Second - my words do describe the harsh physical conditions and grinding material poverty under which many people in the remote desert communities lived at the time of writing, and still live today - and I contrast that with the antiseptic abstraction of the "art gallery world" where her work lives on. Please do not think that I am in any way romanticising the conditions under which Kngwarreye was living, and which persist in so many parts of our otherwise wealthy nation. Collectively, we must do far better, and we can. 

Third and last - I write as an observer. It is not for me to speak for Kngwarreye or for her community- her work speaks for itself. 

I do imply - and certainly feel - contempt for those who tried to exploit Kngwarreye by buying her work for very little and selling it for a very great amount. I hope my own words do not feel like a different kind of exploitation - they are not meant to be - but that is an ethical question all writers should ask of themselves, when they write of any actual person or event.

You can read more about Kngwarreye here:

https://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/utopia/emily-kame-kngwarreye#:~:text=Emily%20Kame%20Kngwarreye%20is%20one,world%20that%20sought%20her%20work.

https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/kngwarreye-emily-kame/