Life at the edge of Kimberley painting
2020, 278 pages, Quentin Sprague, Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne.
Reviewed by Margaret Cassidy
The rise of the Aboriginal art industry in the 1980s and 1990s is full of characters, myths and legends. For art lovers living in the coastal cities of Australia or around the world, great indigenous art was both startlingly refreshing and contemporary and also mysterious with its subject matter based on stories from the world’s oldest culture.
In this book, former art coordinator and curator for Jirrawun Arts, Quentin Sprague brings to life the creation of this independent and Aboriginal-owned art centre and social enterprise and the complex collaborative relationship in particular between the young art advisor and curator Tony Oliver and the Gija elder and stockman turned artist Paddy Bedford. The bare bones of this book were originally laid out in his article “Two painters in the Kimberley” published in The Monthly in the summer of 2013-2014 and forms one of the case studies for Sprague’s PhD thesis on the role of what he calls “intercultural brokerage” in the production and mediation of indigenous contemporary art in Australia.
Tony Oliver was one of Sprague’s predecessors at Jirrawun Arts, an alternative model to the government funded indigenous community art centres found in other remote communities. Oliver was invited by Jirrawun’s Chairman and artist Freddie Timms and other Gija elders to establish the centre in 1998 and for nearly ten years he remained working with the artists in locations from camping in the bush on outstations to a house in Kununurra and finally in a purpose built studio on the outskirts of Wyndham. Under Oliver’s direction and with the benefit of the rise in international interest especially in Bedford’s art, Jirrawun Arts was a financial success.
Sprague also provides rich detail to the tragic and often violent history of the Gija people in the colonial period incorporating stories of local police based at Warmun (Turkey Creek) and life on the cattle stations including Bedford Downs where Paddy Bedford was born. There are many aspects to this book including the unpeeling of the complex personality and the role of contemporary-art lover Tony Oliver who moved to live in one of the most remote areas of Australia, often camping on the red dirt beneath eucalypts or in the shade under stilt-houses at remote outstations, observing culture and ceremony and encouraging and championing artists. The incorporation of aspects of Gija culture, especially the creation stories, is one of the richest aspects to this book. However, Sprague’s rich descriptions also capture for me the landscape, particularly the journeys from Kununurra to Warmun and also the dirt roads to the outstations surrounded by raw and red ranges and hills. It is that landscape and the pared back interpretation by Paddy Bedford and his fellow Gija artists that is so central to this intriguing tale of improvised studios, clashes of culture and the ever present rawness of historic and contemporary town violence.