Jacky Green: 'Nothing has really changed since whitefellas came. First it was horses now bulldozers'
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Version 0 of 1. Garrwa artist Jacky Green tests me the moment we meet. We shake hands, he looks at me, first quizzically, next with a glower, and demands: “Hey – you look like another one of them bastard mining execs come to wreck my land? Is that who you are?” So disarmed am I, so incapable of conjuring a sensible response, that he quickly throws me a verbal lifebuoy. “Ahh, you’re alright mate – siddown.” A smile cracks his veneer. And then he laughs. Green is here in Canberra, the epicentre of a whitefella government and a long, long way from his country in the south-west Gulf of Carpentaria, to talk about history, recent and distant, and how it consistently conspires to dispossess the black man. The national capital is in the throe of glorious autumnal transition for Green’s visit. The light is soft and golden, almost like milk with honey. Russet has seeped into the treetops as the darkness lingers further into the mornings and the air freshens. But against these gentle tones the Garrwa man contrasts sharply with his shiny, black skin, white beard and vivid green shirt, and the canvas on the table before him with its big blocks of cornflower blue, brushstrokes of vermillion and yellow. Green can’t read or write. But he knows how to tell a story, in spoken words and through pictures. He’s a big presence demanding of attention. He sits in the backyard of his friend, the Australian National University anthropologist Seán Kerins, and he talks about his people’s thousands of years of history, their stories incarnate in the sea and on the land, and everything – human, animal, vegetable, mineral – in and on it. He talks about the things he paints: the first wave of dispossession in the late 19th century when the explorers, then the cattlemen and the prospectors came; the mass murder of his relations and the refusal of white governments to punish the perpetrators and, now, the second great wave of dispossession as the big mining companies prohibit the Garrwa and others from their land, dig it up and poison the rivers in pursuit of massive profits. Born in 1953 at the Northern Territory’s Soudan cattle station where his father worked and where he, too became a stockman, Green grew up painting the stories of his family’s past. When he moved back to traditional lands near Borroloola at 19, and where he remains in a place called Two Dollar Camp, he painted with new intensity as “knowledge came to me through our ceremonies, hunting, fishing and gathering and travelling through our country with the old people – we sing the country”. He says: “I was born there in the earth in a creek bed under a coolabah tree at Soudan station – no mattress, no anything, it was just the bloody flat ground with a bit of bloody tarp over it and a blanket and a big camp fire. No school for the black kids. My [great] grandfather passed away in Robinson river fighting you know . . . when they got shot at, at Robinson river. That’s going back a long time mate. You know when the first settlers came, it might’ve been around that time and my old [great] grandfather was fairly young then,” he said. “A lotta people can look at it these days and say you gotta forget about the past. But it’s very hard for Aboriginal people to forget about the past. I mean you don’t hear ’em talk about it a lot but it’s still in our minds, you know what happened because our people are the ones that say: ‘Oh this is where your grandfather got shot’ or: ‘This is where your grandmother had thing happen’ or: ‘This is where your people got chased out’, you know?” The songlines that record the totemic animals’ creation of the land and then tell the stories of its creatures and trees, the sea and the stars, are replete with other events, too at places like Massacre hill, Massacre waterfall, Massacre creek, Cave Massacre, Uhr Massacre, Skeleton Creek, Flick yard, Dunganminnie spring, Robinson river where (by conservative estimates) 600 Aboriginal people in the south-west Gulf region alone (perhaps 10% of the Indigenous population) were murdered by settlers, cattlemen and miners or were hunted down and shot in police reprisal operations. The tragedy of the recent past is compounded by the unassailable truth that Indigenous and mixed-race people were co-opted – as trackers and native police – to help the colonisers conquer the “natives”. The ruin of traditional lands by mining and the associated isolation of his people from country is merely a continuum of the frontier violence of the 19th century, Green insists. Today Green, who paints at Waralungku Arts in Borroloola, is railing in his art against the impact on the Garrwa, Gudanji and Marra landowners of Swiss company Glencore Xstrata’s monolithic McArthur river mine, one of the world’s biggest open cut lead, zinc, and silver mines that is situated 60km south-west of Borroloola. Related: What became of the Mistake Creek massacre? Green said perhaps six mining companies were operating in his region, prospecting for gas, uranium, gold, diamonds and zinc. “And they aren’t talking to us properly – they seem to just want us to agree to things their way. They might talk to one or two people but not to the Minggirringi [owners] and Junggayi [managers] . . . look at the McArthur river mine. We’ve got three or four sacred sites in their area of operations, there’s songlines going through there, our artifacts are in there and there is burial grounds, too. We have to look after that land but we can’t always access it. And then there is the pollution from the run-off going into the rivers and the sea. These are places where we get food,” he said. Local people coexisted when the mine was underground. But last decade Glencore began converting the underground operations to open pit. This required a 5.5km diversion of the McArthur river, which is a major food source for the local clans. Traditional owners took their objections to the federal court and the Northern territory supreme courts, both which found in their favour. The territory government passed emergency legislation to override the supreme court decision and remove any further possibility of legal challenge. In 2009 the then federal environment minister, Peter Garrett, gave final approval to the open cut mine on the McArthur river. Last October an independent monitoring consultant, the Erias Group told local landowners in the Borroloola region that the McArthur river mine was having a major detrimental environmental impact – not least in the diverted section of the river where fish have tested positive for lead. In nine out of 10 fish caught in the channel in 2013 the lead levels exceeded the maximum permitted by Food Standards Australia New Zealand. “To white people it meant nothing I suppose, cutting that river in half and diverting it like that. The main thing was that if they could divert that river it would give them access to the minerals what they’re chasing. But to Aboriginal people where they cut that important snake in half you know – it’s the rainbow serpent – it’s the spirit of the land where they cut him in half. That matters to us in a way white people don’t understand.” The activism of Jacky Green and other Borroloola-region artists – including Stewart Hoosan, Nancy McDinny and Myra Rory – has become fundamental to an emergent, more intensely political genre of painting at Waralungka arts. Green and the others call them “history” paintings, even though many are as much about today as they are about the past. Green’s recent paintings include “Same Story, Settlers – Miners 2012”, depicting under tempestuous skies both dispossession at the end of the settlers’ guns and the miners’ new assaults on traditional lands. “Nothing has really changed since the whitefellas first came into our country. First time it was horses and now bulldozers,” he says. Another 2012 painting in acrylic on linen – “Lots of Money around over Aboriginal Heads” – depicts the Aboriginal traditional land owner standing between a man in yellow (symbolising the mining company) and another man in white (government) who has dollar signs over his head. A crocodile snaps at the face of the yellow man. There is a strong autobiographical narrative to this painting, as Green explained: “The crocodile represents me. I am the crocodile. I want to slow ’em down just like a crocodile can slow you down when it has a go at you.” Then there is his controversial “Fifo”. Riffing off the mining industry acronym for ‘fly in fly out’, Green’s title stands for “Fly In and Fuck Off”. He explains: “This top-down way of talking with us been going on too long. Things gotta change. We want things to be explained to us proper way so we can sit and talk about it amongst ourselves. We be switched on then and make our own decisions to say yes or no. None of this ‘gotta hurry up ’cos our aeroplane is leavin’. They gotta give us time. No more of the ‘fly in and fuck off’ stuff.” Exhibitions of the political paintings of Green, Hoosan and McDinny have been a sellout success in Sydney. But Seán Kerins – who writes the stories behind Green’s paintings on behalf of the English-illiterate artist – says non-Indigenous tourists who visit Borroloola tend to prefer paintings that depict traditional motifs and dreamtime stories. “Many of these history paintings are there. But what I saw going to visit Borroloola is that with these history paintings tourists just don’t want them and don’t really get them. It’s like: ‘Ooh what’s that? It’s too violent and confronting.’ They want dreamtime pictures,” Kerins said. Green, Hoosan and McDinny, however, simply refuse to comply. They will do only “history” paintings. In a recent edition of Art Monthly Australia, Kerins quoted McDinny: “Dreamtime paintings, we don’t do them because the old people wouldn’t let us. We can only tell history story.” Both Hoosan and McDinny have told the story of Mayawagu, McDinny’s great grandfather, one of the last resistance fighters against the pastoralists and police in the south-west Gulf country who was demonised by the whites and their history books as “murdering Tommy”. The stories they depict are intimate and poignant. For example, McDinny’s “Big Boss with Whip” (acrylic on canvas, 2006) is a perfectly composed, perplexingly beautiful painting that depicts a terrible incident involving her grandfather and grandmother, Jim and Dolly Ross, and her great uncle Munro. The station manager and four white stockmen attacked the trio with stockwhips in 1955, inflicting dreadful wounds, because Dolly Ross had been too ill to cook for the stock camp. In what became a watershed judgment in black-white territory relations, the Darwin supreme court convicted three of the men after evidence that the wounds inflicted on McDinny’s ancestors were “deep enough for part of an adult’s finger to be inserted in them”. During an earlier visit to Canberra, Green visited the Australian war memorial after hearing about the building – the equivalent of a secular shrine in non-Indigenous Australian culture – on the plane from Darwin to the east coast. “I wanna see that place that whitefella told me about. That whitefella sacred site. The place where they remember the fighting. You know? The fighting to protect country, protect family and way of life. We got stories like that, too. I wanna see them.” But he was disappointed. “They got none of our stories fighting for our country in there. No blackfella stories there.” It’s true. The war memorial refuses to tell the story of black warriors who resisted the white frontier settlers and the police. And under the stewardship of Brendan Nelson and the ultra-conservative advice of the current governing council, that’s not about to change. Instructively, however, the memorial recently brought one of Green’s “history” paintings titled “Good to Bad” which depicts the crash in 1942 of an American B24 Liberator aircraft and the eventual rescue of one survivor, Sergeant Grady S Gaston, by an Aboriginal man called Strike a Light. The Liberator crash and Gaston’s rescue is part of that country’s story now – another moment in the songlines that criss-cross the place. Indeed, the Aboriginal people of the south-west Gulf still perform “the aeroplane dance” (Ka-wayawayama) on ceremonial occasions. But it’s possible the war memorial has purchased slightly more than it bargained for. Green tells this painting’s story: “This shows the way we remember things through singing and dancing. The top panels tell of the time when people were still living on their country. In the bottom of the painting is how things are now . . . with the truck that brings grog and tucker into Borroloola. It brings big mobs of grog into town and then it goes back out again. The buildings in the bottom right of the painting represent the police station. With so much grog comin’ into town and not much work many people just sit about in the scrub drinking the grog. Police go there from time to time and arrest some of them for being drunk or to stop the fighting.” The past, for Jacky Green, is never far from the present. We shake hands and he laughs as I get up to go and leave him to sit in the Canberra autumn. He says: “You’re not a miner mate, eh? If you were you’d bloody end up in one of my paintings. You gotta keep people laughing mate, otherwise we’d just be crying all the time.” |