How Art Made the World

by Nigel Spivey

  The term ‘myth’ is inappropriate here if it suggests that the stories associated with the images convey anything less than truth; and we shall see elsewhere in this book how Aboriginal mythology is radically fixed to aspects of terrain and topography. No wonder the first Europeans who encountered Aboriginal art were reluctant to acknowledge its complexity: the extent of their colonial intrusion would have become all too evident.

  ‘Charms against injury and sickness … charms to hurt enemies … charms to revive persons who had died by violence; songs sung during totemic increase ceremonies … initiation songs … charms to control weather; songs of human beauty, love charms; songs celebrating love of homeland … death, the sky dwellers … ’ All these occur in an inventory of themes to be found in the songs of the Aranda people living around Uluru (Ayers Rock), first documented in the late nineteenth century by Baldwin Spencer (with Frank Gillen), and more thoroughly several decades later by Theodor Strehlow (see above). Strehlow’s work showed how myth among the Aranda amounted to a sort of historical, religious and legal charter, elaborating in scrupulous detail the precedents set by ancestral beings. Researchers elsewhere – notably Ronald and Catherine Berndt, and C.P. Mountford, who all did fieldwork in Arnhem Land – confirmed the rich and highly localized variety of Aboriginal mythology.The Milky Way is a very conspicuous constellation in the southern hemisphere, but different communities along the East Alligator River might have quite different stories about how the Milky Way was formed.

  THE SONGLINES OF ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA

  TO THE FIRST European settlers the interior of Australia appeared like a vast wild expanse, dauntingly barren and featureless. Looking down from an aircraft window today, the red-baked outback can still seem that way. But for its indigenous inhabitants, this continent has for ages been criss-crossed with trails of stories left in the ‘Dreamtime’ by the movements of totemic ancestors; these ‘songlines’ as they are called, serve not only as routes for wandering, but also invest the land with ritual and spiritual significance. The concept was popularized by the charismatic English writer and traveller Bruce Chatwin (1940–89); who in turn was much influenced by the work of Theodor Strehlow (1908–78).

  The son of a Lutheran missionary, Strehlow was born and raised in the arid centre of Australia, not far from Alice Springs. This was the territory of the Aranda clan-group. Strehlow so immersed himself in Aranda customs that he could eventually claim to be not only an initiate, but a ‘wise man’ of Aranda ceremonies. Ultimately, his betrayal of ceremonial artefacts and sacred secrets brought him disgrace. But Strehlow’s close understanding of the Aranda language enabled him to convey something of the resilience and delicacy of song cycles among this Aboriginal society. The results of over three decades’ work are published in his Songs of Central Australia (1971), a passionate account not only concerned to explain Aranda poetic culture in its own terms, but also, by transcribing an oral tradition, to relate Aboriginal storytelling to the canon of Western literature. Any notion that Aboriginal songs were simple was conclusively dispelled. Strehlow showed, for instance, that the Aranda had no fewer than 27 particular expressions used to measure different stages of day and night. These included the point in twilight ‘when the tufts of grass cannot any longer be distinguished apart’; or a portion of dawn ‘when the eastern sky is all aflame with the fingers of the rising sun’. This, for Strehlow, was poetry to match Homer.

  Historical recordings made of Aboriginal storytelling sessions – which can last for hours, even days – indicate that the oral transmission of this or that story may scarcely alter over a hundred years of its telling.Word for word, the tale is passed on from one generation to another. So just how old are these stories? Here the art can help us because it is, of course, an integral part of the tradition. Around Oenpelli – in fact across Arnhem Land and beyond – many stories feature a composite creature known as the Rainbow Serpent. Its composition varies, but usually shows a snake’s body combined with crocodile jaws (Fig. 52). Stories about the Rainbow Serpent often locate its presence in a particular place, and attribute it with punitive powers. At Oenpelli, for example, the tale is told about how a small orphan boy was continuously crying because his adoptive family had been feeding on yams and given none to him. A sympathetic older brother then summoned the Rainbow Serpent (here known as Ngalyod), who rose up angrily, devoured the greedy family, and turned the little boy and his brother into rocks, which can still be seen by a local water-hole.

  Dates, as ever with rock art, are speculative, but archaeological contexts for images of the Rainbow Serpent in Arnhem Land suggest that stories such as this go back some 4000–6000 years.

  STORY AND SOUNDTRACK

  So what is the secret? How is it that this Aboriginal tradition of storytelling has endured so vigorously over such a long time?

  The answer, surely, is that in this tradition neither images nor written words have detached stories from the performance of telling stories. Spencer and Strehlow bore witness to the essential cohesion of music, dance and recital in Aboriginal culture. Many of the images that accompanied this process will never be seen because they were traced in the sand where a ceremony took place, or painted on the bodies of those who took part. And many of the images ought not to be seen because the occasions for which they were created were sacred events, not intended as a general spectacle. Some anthropologists have been privileged to view such ceremonies. In the early 1960s a young David Attenborough was able to record one ceremony on film – a film that cannot be screened today because it disturbs Aboriginal sensibilities about the public exposure of closed ritual. So there is a sense in which no outsider should even hope to understand the particular potency of this tradition.

  For thousands of years, Aboriginal artists painted not for the sake of museums and collectors, but to provide images that were cues for the storytelling performance, and a means of passing on stories from one generation to another. Now resigned to the world’s commercial demands, they produce ‘works of art’ more or less related to the traditions of the past, but intrinsically removed from them. Similarly, Aboriginal groups will stage dances for the benefit of spectators, choreographed according to tradition, but again deprived of their original encoded and sacrosanct purpose (Fig. 53).

  Yet we, the onlookers, gain an inkling.We see and hear how the dancers are truly grounded in their moves, emphatically stamping the sand and raising dust with their heels. We sense the energy of repetition and chanting underscored by the low rumble of the didgeridoo, or beaten out on clapsticks.We observe how the young ones follow the elders, and how the symbols of yams, honey ants and goannas quiver on their bodies as they dance. And we realize that at the heart of this storytelling there lies a soundtrack.

  Film-makers got wise to this around 1894.What movie epic would be without it?

  53 Dance performed by associates of Injalak Arts Centre, northern Australia, 2004.

  5

  SECOND NATURE

  CAPTAIN JAMES COOK was not a bad man.The private journal of the British navigator reveals an essentially decent, well-intentioned individual, reluctant to cause ill feeling or harm among the indigenous peoples he encountered on his voyages in the Pacific region. (From the European perspective, it was Cook who ‘discovered’ Australia and New Zealand in 1769–70.) But one entry in his diary is now terrible to read. It is the overture to a tragedy that the explorer would not have foreseen. His ship, the Endeavour, was making its way along the east coast of Australia. Putting ashore for fresh water and supplies, Cook tried to make friends with some Aboriginal people who came to see what was going on. All sorts of enticements and gifts were laid out, but these offerings were left untouched by the Aborigines. As Cook recorded, ‘all they seemed to want was for us to be gone.’

  Cook continued up the coast towards the Great Barrier Reef. As he went, he gave names to landmarks on the way. Partly this was to assist with making a map of his journey, but it was also an act of appropriation. Cook himself might sai
l away never to return (he was killed in Hawaii nine years later), but he had planted the British flag, claiming the territory for the realm of King George III.The British would be back.

  Cook described the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia as ‘timorous and inoffensive’, living very happily without the ‘necessary conveniencies so much sought after in Europe’. To later settlers, however, the Aborigines’ apparent disregard for property and material goods was proof of some subhuman state. So British administrators decreed the entire continent to be terra nullius – a Latin legal term meaning ‘empty land’, or ‘land belonging to no one’.

  Australia was anything but no one’s land. In the eyes of its nomadic population, the entire continent was everywhere marked by the shapes and signs of ancestral handiwork – a visible, substantial legacy from the spirit world.The genesis of all plant and animal life lay with totemic ancestors; so too the creation of mountains and sandhills. Every creek, lagoon and water-hole had a story of how it had come to be (see page). To the outsider, Australia en masse might seem a huge wilderness, but it was a place in which no Aboriginal wanderer was ever lost.

  The tragedy prefigured by Cook’s encounter with Aboriginals, who simply wanted him to go away, may be summarized in the phrase ‘blood on the wattle’: implying the near-extermination of Aboriginal communities across Australia and Tasmania as the process of colonization gathered momentum after about 1800. Even in the mid-twentieth century,Theodor Strehlow (see page) could sourly note ‘the ordinary routine shootings deemed necessary to make the country safe for cattle-breeding’. British and other European settlers did not care to recognize that this ‘new world’ had been not only occupied for over 40,000 years, but supplied by its occupants with spiritual significance for eternity.To this day, lawyers deliberate how far Aboriginal mythologies may constitute ‘land rights’ in particular cases of disputed property. At the heart of the matter, however, lies a conflict that is not unique to Australia.

  It is the conflict – referred to several times already in this book – between two modes of subsistence. On the one side there is the system of hunting and gathering by which humankind survived through most phases of prehistory. On the other side there is agriculture, the settled raising of crops and animals that began approximately 10,000 years ago in the Middle East and Anatolia (see page). For some archaeologists the diffusion of agriculture, with its capacity to produce surpluses of food, led to urban settlements and ‘the birth of civilization’. And because we are inclined to think of farming as a stage of chronological progress in human history, we tend to forget that hunter-gatherers still survive in certain parts of the world, such as the Amazonian jungle and around the Arctic Circle.

  Many generic differences could be outlined between hunter-gatherer societies and their agricultural rivals, and perhaps none is more conspicuous than the contrast in attitudes towards the environment. Broadly speaking, this contrast could be expressed as follows: hunter-gatherers work with the environment; agriculturists against it. Or, as anthropologists would confirm, hunter-gatherers tend to revere the environment, investing it with spirits of the place, while agriculturists regard it as a resource to be managed, a force to be subdued.

  To make this general paradigmatic opposition is not to deplore the many boons and benefits brought about by the intensive raising of crops and domestication of animals. Nor is it to revive the antique notion of a ‘noble savage’ – the fantasy of some supremely unfettered and virtuous human existence in the wilds. (This was a romantic notion made intellectually fashionable in Europe at around the time of Captain Cook.) Hunters have, in some places, hunted certain species to extinction, and the Australian Aboriginal practice of creating seasonal bushfires arguably qualifies as working against the environment. But beyond any ecological debate lies a simple distinction of lifestyle that demands our acknowledgment here.Why so? Because for all that agriculture has become the dominant mode of human subsistence, and human populations across the world are now concentrated in cities, we still reserve feelings for the land. Aesthetically, if in no other way, we respect the ‘natural world’. So, as a matter of sheer probability, it is likely that if readers of this book have at home any pictures on their walls, those pictures will fall into the category of landscape.

  Is this a guilty conscience – our primal instinct showing through?

  NOTIONS OF NATURE AND LANDSCAPE

  A photographic vista of the characteristic landscape of the Kakadu National Park in Australia’s Northern Territory easily earns the tag ‘an area of outstanding natural beauty’ (Fig. 54).The variegated greens of paperbarks and other eucalyptus trees comfort the eyes. Flocks of white egrets collect over stretches of water where pink lilies bloom.The limestone escarpment, warm and unthreatening, rings the horizon like some cosy theatrical backdrop.

  Visitors to Kakadu may be content to enjoy the scenery, spotting the birds, snapping the blooms, perhaps getting a glimpse of a crocodile. But even with earnest effort, they will never perceive the forms and features of this land as its Aboriginal inhabitants do. Leaflets issued by the park authorities emphasize that Kakadu, for its ‘traditional owners’, is a habitat shaped by the spiritual ancestors of the Dreamtime (see page). Not only did these ancestors create all landforms, plants, animals and people, they also bequeathed laws to live by – ceremony, ritual, language, kinship and ecological knowledge. Having taught people how to live with the land, the Dreamtime ancestors resided at certain sites of their own making.There they stayed, and there they were to be respected. If disturbed or angered, they would react.To define certain senior Aborigines – such as Bill Neidjie, who did much to make the park possible – as ‘owners’ is in this sense misleading.The land may have custodians, but it is no one’s property.

  54 View of Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory, Australia.

  The hunter-gatherer view of terrain without fences and title-deeds perplexes ‘civilized’ people with mortgages or even second homes, but we can at least try to imagine that view. And we need to do so, if we are to gain any understanding of the relation of images to territory.

  ‘It will be found that the decorative art of primitive folk is directly conditioned by the environment of the artists … To understand the designs of a district, the physical conditions, climate, flora, fauna, and anthropology, all have to be taken into account.’

  This was the message delivered to a late Victorian readership by the Cambridge anthropologist Alfred Haddon, whose monograph entitled Evolution in Art (1895) was based upon his own fieldwork in the islands of the Torres Straits, north of continental Australia. Almost too late, subsequent studies among the world’s few remaining hunter-gatherer societies have confirmed Haddon’s insight, while disproving his further conviction that ‘backward people have to be taught to see beauty in nature’.

  It is, rather, the civilized ones who need that teaching.

  A survey of sites deemed sacred by the Algonquian people in the Canadian regions of Quebec and northeast Ontario found that various factors may combine to render a place special: local acoustics, the shape of a particular rock, or some configuration of cracks and striations in a cliff, the feel of a certain stone. Ancestral spirits are deemed to reside in a tree or boulder, and offerings will be left accordingly – tobacco, biscuits, beaver bones. Other places are recognized and marked as shamanic venues. Disturbance of such sites entails trouble, even doom.

  This amounts to a sort of insider knowledge. And the hunter-gatherer understanding of initiation to such knowledge is curiously matched by a recurrent feature of Western art history: the ideal that those who aspire to be good or great artists must apply themselves to ‘study nature’. John Constable, probably the most widely loved of all English landscape painters, saw it as not only a matter of diligent apprenticeship to make close studies of trees and leaves and suchlike (Fig. 55), but also a near-mystical vocation. ‘The art of seeing Nature,’ Constable declared, ‘is a thing almost as much to be acquired as the art of reading Egyptian
hieroglyphics.’

  THE NATURE OF NATURE

  STUDY NATURE.’That command to the artist seems simple enough.There is the world and all ‘ its weathered texture; there on display are the facts of creation.Take the tools of recording, and look. See what nature reveals. But what is nature?

  To play with the word is immediately to expose its looseness.We may let it mean anything prone to be flattened by concrete and bricks. A nature trail will take its followers upon a programmed discovery of birds, bugs and botanical gems.Yet what is natural should happen of its own accord. Mother Nature is her own agency, free from the culture and contrivance of humans. When we hail a tract of scenery as unspoilt, we mean that maternal Nature has had her way; we may speak of ‘virgin’ territory, as if the possession and cultivation of land by human beings were an act of coupling or rape.To be ‘at one with nature’ is to imagine an easiness between our cultured selves and the natural world. But when hurricanes happen, or we watch a natural history film that shows a pack of jackals disembowelling a doe with their jaws, we allow nature a temperament too (‘Nature red in tooth and claw’).