hours to leave Australian airspace, and I spent most of that time just gazing out at the bush below. From above, the whole desert is a strangely mesmerizing shimmering orange. Whenever a friend was asked what his favorite color was, he would say it was just that: the red of the Australian center, when you flew over it in the morning. From this bird’s-eye perspective, the spinifex and other bushes made little dots on the landscape, just like so many of the Central Desert paintings I had seen. And from a plane the dried-up creeks and the curves of rocks turned into whorls and wiggles that no doubt had whole epic choral symphonies enclosed in them. But I had seen that before, and what I took back from this journey was something extra, something more complex.
It was a sense of ancientness, in a way—the ancientness that had so charmed me with that little yellow stone in Italy—but it was also a sense of the land as a conscious thing. And about how although on the top there is, along with all the beauty, a great deal of misery—alcoholism, racism, ill-treatment of women, and that terrible dull sense of boredom and pointlessness that I had seen in my travels—there was still a sense that below that ochre surface there is a different reality. It is a reality that the best red paint and perhaps the best art can give a glimpse of, but just a glimpse. Old Bill Neidje from Oenpelli had tried to explain its elusiveness. We don’t know what it is, he had said, in words that were recorded in his book Kakadu Man , “but something underneath, under the ground.” 23
Eight months after my journey to find ochre, Christie’s held an auction of Aboriginal artworks in Melbourne. “What a night,” art dealer Nina Bove wrote to me a few days later. “The atmosphere was electric.” There were a few big sales that night—of “Emilies” and “Clifford Possums” and “Ronnies”—but the biggest interest was when Rover Thomas’s 1991 ochre-and-gum painting of All That Big Rain Coming from Topside was brought onto the stage. It is an extraordinarily powerful depiction of something elemental: the white dots pouring down the ochre-brown canvas, seeming to settle for a moment in a ridge and then cascading to the bottom in floods. And that is a fair description of what happened in the auction room that night: a cautious start increasing in momentum until it reached an unprecedented high tide.
There were several big foreign buyers pushing up the price, but every time they did there was a phone bidder who matched them until it reached 786,625 Australian dollars and the hammer came down. As everyone was speculating on who the mystery buyer was, Wally Caruana of the National Gallery of Australia slipped back into the reserved seating section. He must have been shaken by his own actions, but from a telephone in the downstairs bar he had just paid more money than anybody had ever paid before for an Aboriginal artwork in order to keep the ochre painting (quickly dubbed by the local press All That Big Dough Coming from Topside ) for Australia.
The modern art movement that had started in a place that wasn’t loved, pioneered by people who weren’t valued, had come a long way from the early days of Papunya. People who buy Aboriginal art are looking for many things: for movement and texture and tonal hue and stories. But they are also, I believe (in this coming together of paint, canvas and of the patterns made by people sitting under humpies in the desert and surrounded by dogs and four-wheel-drives but with glory in their minds) looking for something else. They are looking for country. They are looking for the crock of earth at the beginning of the Rainbow Serpent. And yet they don’t have to look so carefully anymore to see how it glitters.
2
Black and Brown
“As has been said, you begin with drawing.”
CENNINO CENNINI
“Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust
It was a sense of ancientness, in a way—the ancientness that had so charmed me with that little yellow stone in Italy—but it was also a sense of the land as a conscious thing. And about how although on the top there is, along with all the beauty, a great deal of misery—alcoholism, racism, ill-treatment of women, and that terrible dull sense of boredom and pointlessness that I had seen in my travels—there was still a sense that below that ochre surface there is a different reality. It is a reality that the best red paint and perhaps the best art can give a glimpse of, but just a glimpse. Old Bill Neidje from Oenpelli had tried to explain its elusiveness. We don’t know what it is, he had said, in words that were recorded in his book Kakadu Man , “but something underneath, under the ground.” 23
Eight months after my journey to find ochre, Christie’s held an auction of Aboriginal artworks in Melbourne. “What a night,” art dealer Nina Bove wrote to me a few days later. “The atmosphere was electric.” There were a few big sales that night—of “Emilies” and “Clifford Possums” and “Ronnies”—but the biggest interest was when Rover Thomas’s 1991 ochre-and-gum painting of All That Big Rain Coming from Topside was brought onto the stage. It is an extraordinarily powerful depiction of something elemental: the white dots pouring down the ochre-brown canvas, seeming to settle for a moment in a ridge and then cascading to the bottom in floods. And that is a fair description of what happened in the auction room that night: a cautious start increasing in momentum until it reached an unprecedented high tide.
There were several big foreign buyers pushing up the price, but every time they did there was a phone bidder who matched them until it reached 786,625 Australian dollars and the hammer came down. As everyone was speculating on who the mystery buyer was, Wally Caruana of the National Gallery of Australia slipped back into the reserved seating section. He must have been shaken by his own actions, but from a telephone in the downstairs bar he had just paid more money than anybody had ever paid before for an Aboriginal artwork in order to keep the ochre painting (quickly dubbed by the local press All That Big Dough Coming from Topside ) for Australia.
The modern art movement that had started in a place that wasn’t loved, pioneered by people who weren’t valued, had come a long way from the early days of Papunya. People who buy Aboriginal art are looking for many things: for movement and texture and tonal hue and stories. But they are also, I believe (in this coming together of paint, canvas and of the patterns made by people sitting under humpies in the desert and surrounded by dogs and four-wheel-drives but with glory in their minds) looking for something else. They are looking for country. They are looking for the crock of earth at the beginning of the Rainbow Serpent. And yet they don’t have to look so carefully anymore to see how it glitters.
2
Black and Brown
“As has been said, you begin with drawing.”
CENNINO CENNINI
“Give me some mud off a city crossing, some ochre out of a gravel pit and a little whitening and some coal dust
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