Kangaroo Tucker. Lorna Fencer Napurrurla. 2004

And a great artist.

Lorna Fencer Napurrurla, according to Chips Mackinolty, chairman of ARTBACK, the NT’s underfunded but-still-great-for-it visual arts touring agency, was the “most wonderful and marvellous ratbag of the Warlpiri Nation.”

She was non-conformist, original (and) abandoned conventions.

She was revolutionary, independent, mercurial, unrelenting, tough, funny, flirtatious (and) seriously dedicated.

She was go it alone, irreverent, talented, energetic, confident, irascible, feisty, loud, imperious, cranky and her imperial majesty.

She was prolific, chaotic and partial to intellectual stoushes.

…

She was wicked, impish, forcible and would brook-no-opposition.

She was a dab hand at getting others to do her bidding, tough, overbearing, born-to-rule, with a strong sense of self belief, a strong sense of self worth.

She was bossy, wicked, (with a) rapier sharp wit.

She was a loner, eccentric, individualist, over the top fearless, go it alone, against the grain, (and) very, very funny.

That was Chips speaking at the opening of Yulyurlu, a retrospective that opened at the Chan Contemporary Art Space during the Darwin Festival in August this year.

Yulyurlu opens at the ANU’s Drill Hall Gallery tomorrow (Thursday 10th) night. If you are in the big C it’ll be your loss if you don’t get along to see this show.

Untitled (Travelling Napurrurla & Nakamarra) 1996

Yulyurlu is a truly wonderful show that – if the accepted norms of retrospectives of contemporary Australian artists were applied – should be an abject failure.

On my first visit to this show I came away distinctly underwhelmed. A few great paintings, a few doo-dads and more than a few ordinary examples of her work. I went back with a camera and fell a little deeper in love with the great works, understood the mundane a little better and continued to be disappointed with much of the show.

Then I got a copy of the catalogue. That called me back for a third time and then Yulyurlu began to make some sense.

Untitled (Yam) 2000

Why and how so?

Firstly, this show rewards a repeated visit or three. Second, you need to read the catalogue and thirdly you need to realise that this is no best-of show. What it is is a brutally frank exposition of the life and career of a national treasure who didn’t practice her art, she lived it. See the show – three or four times – and get and read the essays in the wonderful catalogue.

Like Chips Mackinolty I can’t gush about art or artists as too many can and so tediously do. Paintings don’t “shimmer” or “glow” for me, though many of the works in this show burst off the wall with a physical or emotional force that a photograph just cannot capture.

And I won’t weave fantastic tales about the artist’s passing foretold or stretch a wafer thin veil of sanctity and cultural purity across her life.

Summer Yam (Wapirti - Little Bush Potato) 1999

If you walk into Yuyurlu expecting to only see Lorna’s greatest works, like me you will most likely come away disappointed. But, if you go to this show to see an artist at work – scratching for a dollar from wherever it will falls, always painting, painting, painting – then you will be rewarded in no short measure.

In her marvellous catalogue essay Barbara Amberg Pederson – who worked closely with Lorna for a number of years at the Mimi Arts cooperative based in Katherine – describes life with Lorna:

Lorna was a fiercely independent artist. She painted for anyone who would supply her with paint, brushes and something to paint on. She was driven to repeat, over and over, the stories of her ancestral Jukurrpa. Because of this, her work was prolific … She was moderately successful in her time, with various respected galleries demanding her work, as too, most unfortunately, did many unscrupulous persons. These people abused her friendly and magnanimous nature, treating her unethically, meanly and often very shabbily in their quest to take her treasures away with them. The old ‘whisky, red beads and mirrors‘ currency was very prevalent in the early part of the last decade.

Not that Lorna was entirely innocent in all this. Barbara Amberg Pederson again:

Lorna delighted in the drama, and the comedy, of the sometimes physically aggressive tussles over who was to ‘have her.’ So many different people skirmished for the opportunity to have her paint for them. Not only were there the local backyard entrepeneurs; after the wet season nameless people would travel into town from far-off places in station wagons or four-wheel drives laden with canvas, paint and brushes, seeking out Lorna and other Aboriginal artists. 

Chips Mackinolty first met Lorna 30 years ago at her home at Lajamanu – 500 kilometres to the south-west of his then base at Mimi Arts in Katherine, a town where racial tensions have never been far below the surface.

Then as now art and culture from the bush occasionally unite in impressively powerful political conjunction. One year the local pub, notorious for banning ‘full-bloods’ from the front bar was cursed by massed ranks of dancers and singers from the Arnhem hinterlands east of Katherine. Another year the Warlpiri came to town in numbers and with undeniable force and cultural power.

The sight of twenty men in full ceremonial attire – hair string headdresses, ochre and down body decorations, leaves strapped to calves – followed by thirty bare-breatested, painted Warlpiri women moving down Katherine Terrace was astonishing. The pounding street echoes of boomerangs clapping were as striking and powerful as anything I’ve witnessed. You don’t mess around with the Warlpiri – a fact that was on display, big time.

One of those women was Lorna. Later that night Chips arrived back at his Sydney Williams Hut (drop into ‘the best house in First Street’ he told me in the early while I was in Sydney thinking about heading north) to witness:

…half a dozen older women singing and driving off a young, drunken man, armed with just their voices and yukurrukurru (dancing boards), thrust in front of them. The man fled. At about the same time one of the Warlpiri women slipped a bloody knife to me, which I managed to back-pocket as quickly as I could. Another man was lying on the ground, surrounded by wailing women.

At the opening of the show Chips asked his audience a question:

So what sort of person was Napurrurla?

She was an artist, we know that: that’s why we are here.

But in no way was she some sort of ethereal, starry-eyed art-for-art’s-saker. She created her work for a living, for her, her family and for her countrymen and women. Living in the Top Camp at Lajamanu or at times fairly rough in places in Katherine or Bagot was no bed of roses. It was not the romantic life of the artist of Montmartre: it was tough, often a life of tragedy, largely one of hardship. It was a life that was both intensely communal and at times very lonely.

Yes, she was an artist, she lived through hard times and good times but above all she was Lorna Fencer Napurrurla wonderful, irascible and wicked.

The hard times that Lorna Fencer Napurrurla faced in her life are best illustrated by the one painting that has no dots, no Jukurrpa, no ancestral beings. Just the unalloyed grief of a mother poured onto canvas in a fury following weeks in the sorry camp after the death of her son. For mine this is one of – if not the most – powerful paintings in the show.

Grief. 1997.

Yulyurlu opens at the ANU’s Drill Hall Gallery, Kingsley Street Acton in the ACT this Thursday 10 November 2011 at 6 pm and runs to 18 December. The Drill Hall is open Wednesday to Sunday 12-5pm.

From there Yulyurlu goes to the Flinders University City Art Gallery in Adelaide from 13 April to 26 May 2012; then to the RMIT Art Gallery, Melbourne from 29 June to 25 August 2012; the Bathurst Art Gallery in NSW from 28 September  through 18 November 2012; the Noosa Arts Gallery, Tewantin QLD from 29 November 2012 to 20 January 2013 and finally to Artspace Mackay, Mackay QLD from 1 February to 17 March 2013.

You can also find out a lot more about Yulyurlu the show and the life of Lorna Fencer Napurrurla – including Yulyurlu Education Kits for Lower Primary, Lower Secondary and Upper Secondary students; Research Notes; an Artists Profile and photos, notes from the Exhibition Opening at the Chan Art Space in Darwin in early August 2012 and more at the ARTBACK website.

Digging Sticks and Bush Tucker. 2001.

Postscript: I don’t want to poke sharp sticks under anyone’s fingernails but I hope that by the time this show is hung at the Drill Hall that someone works out which way is up.

When I started looking at the photos for this post I noticed that several paintings were presented very differently in the catalogue than in the show. On my count the following paintings were upside-down in either the catalogue or on the wall: “Wapirti (White Bush Potato), 2002; Yarla, Yam, 1992; Digging Sticks and Bush Tucker, 2001; Summer Yam (Wapirti, Little Bush Potato) c. 1999; Boomerang, 1998; My Country, c. 1997; Untitled (Yam) 2000 and Kangaroo Tucker, 2000.

Post-postscript: As indicated above, Lorna Fencer Napurrurla was indeed a prolific artist. Five years after her passing you can still see – and buy – lots of her work on-line – see for example the Central Art – Aboriginal Art Store; the Aboriginal Art Coop Gallery; Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery;  Muk-Muk Fine Art and the err..interestingly named Original and Authentic Aboriginal Art site.

Hetti Perkins. Roma Bar, Darwin August 2010

This is the second part of a chat I had with Hetti Perkins over breakfast at The Roma Bar during the Darwin Festival.

Here Hetti talks about her recent work on a new 3 part series called art + soul to be broadcast on ABC1 in October – with an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and a companion book of the same name to be published by the Miegunyah Press. She talks about the state of the Aboriginal arts “industry” and her thoughts on what her father – the revered Aboriginal activist Charlie Perkins – might have to say about the current state of Aboriginal affairs in this country.

The Northern Myth: What are you up to now? You’ve been working on a project that will be screened on ABC1 in October…

Hetti Perkins: It is called art + soul, a 3 part documentary series. There is also a book that Miegunyah Press are publishing that will be available from October 1st and the Art Gallery of New South Wales will hold a major exhibition of work by the artists in the series from early October – when we have a great open weekend with talks, performances, music and so on – right through to February 2011.

These projects are really interesting to me because they are quite personal and allow me to show my own thoughts and points of view, which is very different to my usual work. In the context of a large arts institution like the Art Gallery of NSW we are trained to write and think in the third person.

Words like “I” and “Me” aren’t usually in our toolbox. We usually have to write using the passive voice – that objective voice of authority (laughs). And I’ve been very lucky to work on this project with a great team at the Art Gallery in Jonathan Jones, Cara Pinchbeck, Ashlie Hunter and Amanda Peacock. As well as director Warwick Thornton, producers Bridget Ikin and Jo-anne McGowan and a brilliant film and edit team. And of course, the artists!

TNM: Tell us a little more about the art + soul documentary series.

HP: Well, it is three episodes and each one has a different theme. The first episode is called “home and away”, the second “dreams and nightmares” and the third “bitter and sweet”. We try to link the artists by the common ideas and threads that come out of their work rather than by region or chronological order or language group or cultural blocs – which are often used to analyse Aboriginal art.

The first episode is all about asking “What does home mean?” for Aboriginal people today. We try explore what “home” – or “ngurra” as it is called for so many people in the western deserts – means to them. It is the place that people camp at, it is the place you were conceived, the place you were born, your mother’s country, your father’s country and where you are living at that moment in time. It is all these things.

And for an artist like Destiny Deacon, a contemporary artist living in Melbourne but who is originally from the Torres Strait and far north Queensland but lives in Brunswick in inner-city Melbourne. We ask her what home means for her.

TNM: There has been a bit of chatter about lately about how the Aboriginal arts industry is dead or just about dying and on its knees…

HP: I don’t agree with that – whoever would say that is poorly informed, just lazy or doesn’t know what they are talking about. In recent years a whole chain of new arts centres have sprung up. For an example just look at the new art centres in the Pitjantjatjara lands to the south of Uluru…

TNM: But is that a good thing?

HP: Yes, it is fantastic, When we look at the map of arts centres in Australia there is a particular density at some points but there are whole areas where there is no representation at all.

There are a lot of artists that are working independently with mainstream galleries and have developed their own careers but they also still work closely with other artists in cooperative groups.

One of my first jobs was at the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative. At the time Boomalli was the only urban arts centre in Sydney and since then many other collectives have grown up – like ProppaNOW in Brisbane. To me it is very interesting that the core principles – particularly of collective agency -  of the arts centre model that grew up in the bush are being applied and are as valid in urban areas as t hey are in remote or rural areas. For me this quashes the false argument that the arts centre system somehow represents a welfare-based model.

TNM: Where does your interest in art come from?

HP: Well for me it is a pretty personal exploration of a world that I’ve been lucky enough to be part of for a long time. I did want to be an artist when I was young but I realised pretty quickly that I was just so unbelievably crap that I just thought I can’t do this…to myself or anyone else (laughs).

My fascination with what makes people original and interesting and compelled to pursue their vision began when I was quite young. My mother had a gallery in Canberra in the mid-seventies while I was growing up. We lived in Canberra for dad’s work.

I spent a lot of time in the gallery looking at some of the beautiful work that came into the gallery. There was a lot of the early Papunya works, a lot of bark paintings out of Arnhem Land. All of these incredible artists that were relatively unknown at the time were being sold in Mum’s gallery. It wasn’t a profitable enterprise for her by any stretch of the imagination but she wanted us as kids and other Aboriginal people living in Canberra and working in the public service to have a place where they could see the work of our people…

TNM: This was when Aboriginal art was very much on the fringes…

HP: Well there was the Church Missionary Society that was selling art and crafts work at that time at Bathurst Street in Sydney and there was a small government-funded gallery in Harrington Street in the Rocks. But there wasn’t much else.

Mum having the gallery was fantastic because it was a way for people coming to Canberra – ambassadors and various dignitaries from overseas – they would all come to the gallery. I think I realised then what an important role art could play and in representing our people.

And when I was travelling with Dad we would go to places like Papunya and Yuendumu and we lived in Alice Springs and I realised that art was a very important way of furthering the political aspirations of our people.

TNM: Moving forward….do you have any thoughts on the state of contemporary community life in Australia? What do you think you father might have to say about what has been happening in recent times?

HP: Well, I often wonder what he would think. He was a very free-thinker in terms of doing things that were quite unexpected. I was at Mutitjulu when the Intervention first started. I just happened to be there on the day that all the Army boys turned up.

I was there with a group of international artists that were about to participate in the 2008 Biennale and I can tell you it was pretty weird to be in that community at that time with these people. They were asking me “What the fuck is the Army doing here?” Literally! The family of one of these artists was from Iraq! They couldn’t believe that the Army was in town…

TNM: Where when the Army turns up something has gone seriously wrong…

HP: Exactly! It was very embarrassing for me to try and explain to them what was going on. For me it was a shame job.

I think that Dad would have seen the “Little Children are Sacred” report…he would have been appalled that it had been manipulated by the government of the day for their own political means.

And to roll out this Intervention that has so seriously impacted upon the lives of many really good decent people and cast the rest of us…by association as being in this corrupt and unhealthy society…many of our people just see that as an unforgiveable lie.

TNM: What do you think your father would have done?

HP: He would have been straight in the face of the politicians from day one. I’m sure he would have taken direct action like that but I’m also sure that he would have been on the phone 24/7.

I think he would have argued that the resources were being misused and that the government weren’t listening to the people…that it was just a politically expedient way of shamelessly exploiting children to further the political ends of what we know was a very racist government.

And this myth, this absolute lie that our current government has adopted and perpetuated that all of our men are drunken sexual perverts and that our women are helpless victims…that disgusts me.

Shame on them all. When I was out bush recently visiting art centres some of the artists were telling me that they have effectively been shut out of their own schools…a lot of the women are asking why there are no bilingual programs anymore.

That is very upsetting for the old aunties and grandmothers that want to work with the schools to make sure…as they have done in the past…that their kids get a broad education that treats their culture the same as mainstream culture. Instead they are shut out.

Other things that disgust me are that we have these terrible health outcomes. Rheumatic heart disease is rampant, our people have appalling dental health, and the figures on diabetes and end-stage renal disease are catastrophic.

Our people have health statistics that make us the worst in the world in the case of rheumatic heart disease, and in the case of end-stage renal disease the worst in in any developed nation in the world. These are easily preventable diseases.

And what do we have now? Bureaucrats in new Toyotas…It is bloody criminal.

My dad spent so much time out bush and we barely saw him when we were growing up. He was always out on a community. And you know now when I go to the most remote little community place all kinds of people come up to me and say “Oh Kumanjayi sorry for your dad”. Just yesterday at the Art Fair here in Darwin someone said to me…and my Dad died ten years ago… an older woman came up to me “Oh I’m sorry for your father that Kumanjayi”.

For me it is really moving and I do feel a responsibility…it is an immense honour and incredibly humbling when people talk to me about my father as they do.

Hetti Perkins. The Roma Bar, Darwin August 2010

I caught up with Hetti Perkins while I was up in the Top End of the NT for the wonderful Darwin Festival a week or so ago.

I’d not met Hetti before and I spent some time distracting her from the very important business of breakfast at The Roma Bar (two flat whites back-to-back, toast on the side, Champion Gold rollies) long enough to ask a few questions and have a yarn about her work, the animals (human and otherwise) she shares her life with and the things she likes in life.

For those who are unfamiliar with Hetti she is the Senior Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales…and much more besides. She is the eldest daughter of the late and much loved – in many quarters at least – Aboriginal activist Charlie Perkins.

The Northern Myth: Good morning Hetti, how are you on this fine Darwin morning?

Hetti Perkins: Yes, I’m good. It is so nice to be sitting here at table 14 at the Roma Bar. It is an excellent time to be in Darwin, though it is a bit more humid than I like…

TNM: Cats, Dogs, neither or both?

HP: Both…and rabbits…two rabbits. Two cats, two dogs, two rabbits. Four kids.

TNM: Are the animals inside or outside pets?

HP: Inside of course!

TNM: On or off the bed?

HP: Off the bed! And off the lounge! Otherwise free-roaming. The rabbits live outside – they used to live inside but then they did unspeakable things like eating electrical cables and so on. So for their own good they now have the whole of the backyard to themselves.

TNM: Are the rabbits for meat?

HP: No! The rabbits are for…I like to think they are for our mutual pleasure.

TNM: Pen or pencil?

HP: Mostly pencil. I carry a sharpener and a rubber and a pencil with me at all times. When I use a pen I use a black, felt-tipped pen. One day when I’m grown up enough I’ll have a beautiful fountain pen with real ink.

TNM: Apple or PC?

HP: Definitely Apple.

TNM: What is your most treasured possession?

HP: Probably this ring. As you can see I don’t wear much jewellery but I always wear this ring, which I love. It was given to me by my late husband. It is a wedding ring. We didn’t actually have a wedding ring when we got married but a few years later he gave me this lovely ring.

TNM: Your Desert Island Disc?

HP: It would have to be Nina Simone. Anything by Nina Simone. I love all of her work. She was an amazing revelation when I heard her the first time. My favourite song of hers is “Wild is the Wind”.

Love me love me love me

Say you do

Let me fly away with you

For my love is like the wind

And wild is the wind

Give me more than one caress

Satisfy this hungriness

Let the wind blow through your heart

For wild is the wind

My son is in a band and they make fantastic music. At the moment they just have demo’s – which I play constantly. His band is called “The Future Prehistoric”.

TNM: And your Desert Island Book?

HP: I like reading, so narrowing it down to one would be very tricky. Apart from childhood books like Tolkein’s The Hobbit and Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals – that was another childhood obsession that I’ve read I don’t know how many times. Susan Sontag’s Volcano Lover and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. And anything by Toni Morrison as well. I read an excerpt from Toni Morrison’s Jazz at my sister’s wedding – it is a beautiful book that transcends it’s genre.

TNM: I only asked for one book – we are into excess baggage territory now. But what is it about those writers that captures you? Do they take you somewhere else, do they give you something to reflect upon?

HP: I think it is their individual styles of writing. Not only what they are writing about, but that they give you an experience unlike any you’ve ever had before. I just like their different styles and the stories are interesting. A lot of books have wonderful stories and are totally captivating but some just stand out from the crowd. It is just like listening to different styles of music.

TNM: Are there any Australian books that get their hooks into you like that?

HP: Yes, Thea Astley. Just about anything by her. And Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide.

TNM: What do you sing in the shower – if at all?

HP: No, I do not sing in the shower! (laughs) I leave that to my sister Rachel who has the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard but who hardly ever sings (laughs).

TNM: What is your Sunday morning record?

HP: My Sunday mornings are usually spent finding a coffee as soon as possible! What I have been listening to a lot lately is a great album by a Sydney band called The Mess Hall called For the Birds. That has been on high rotation around my place lately.

TNM: What was the first record you ever bought?

HP: I think that it was by someone like the Bay City Rollers or maybe an Abba album. The first record that I bought when I was a little more better informed, and using my own money, was a record by The Clash at an import record store at Civic in Canberra.

TNM: What about fiction – what are you reading right now?

HP: Right now I am reading a very interesting book by David Mitchell,  “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet“.

TNM: And non-fiction?

HP: Non-fiction? Oh god, I hardy ever read non-fiction, mainly because I don’t really have time. I dip in and out. But one book I have to catch up with is Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man. The other book I’ve been reading a lot recently is the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. It is a mix of fiction and non-fiction. There are a lot of early letters, letters from Bennelong to a Mr Philips, Lord Sydney’s steward and a wonderful pleading letter from an Aboriginal man from Tasmania-whose name slips my mind right now asking “What hope is there for us Tasmanian Aboriginals?”. The Anthology is a really fantastic book to dip in and out of and to pick up at any time.

TNM: When did you last break the law?

HP: Oh, just on my way here in fact. The sign said left turn only and I turned right. But I’m a good girl…really! (laughs)

In Part two Hetti talks about her recent work, her views on the Aboriginal arts “industry” and what her father may have had to say and do about the state of Aboriginal affairs in Australia today.

There have been a few Barry Browns about in our time – there is the American playwright and actor that passed away in 1978 and then there is the Jamaican reggae singer, who also died young – but this is the story of Australia’s – no, Darwin’s – very own Barry Brown of Barry Brown and the Getdowns, an eight piece band that has been getting around a few (selective) traps in Darwin for the past few months.

A vision in Brown - Barry Brown at the Lighthouse

This Saturday just passed I was lucky enough to scam a couple of ticket to see BB & the GD’s at The Lighthouse, an outdoor dunny-like venue stuck in the middle Civic Park, one of my favourite parks in downtown Darwin and where they were doing a rare gig as part of this year’s Darwin Festival.

For a bit of Darwin dry-season stew look no further than the horn section...

BB & the GD’s remind me (no diss to the King) of the King Curtis and the Kingpins’ song Memphis Soul Stew:

Today’s special is Memphis Soul Stew

We sell so much of this, people wonder what we put in it

We gonna tell you right now

Give me about a half a teacup of bass

(bass riff)

Now I need a pound of fatback drums

(drum riff)

Now give me 4 tablespoons of boiling Memphis guitars

This goin’ taste alright

(guitar riff)

Now just a little pinch of organ

(organ riff)

Now give me a half a pint of horn

(sax riff)

Place on the burner and bring to a boil

That’s it, that’s it, that’s it right there.

Now beat, well

(all instrumental hell breaks loose)

Barry Brown driving that old Devil outta the Bass playa...

And when BB & the GD’s hit the stage at The Lighthouse last Saturday night all hell – instrumental, vocal and dancestyle – broke loose from the first song.

I’m pretty crap at describing music but the pumping beats and rhythm these guys pump out made even my crippled legs and broken hips crumble and crack – and all around me (I was taking photo’s from the floor in front of the band), lots of other were similarly effected.

Barry "The Man" Brown in full flight

My mate Ben Langford got it pretty right in this review of BB & the GD’s first show in April this year in the NT News:

THERE’S nothing like that feeling you get when you’ve soaked up weeks of hype only to be left flat when the real thing finally rolls around – but there was nothing like that at the debut of Barry Brown And The GetDown. Not that there was a shortage of hype. These guys take it seriously and there were costumes, a video telling Barry’s back story, characters to play, even packets of branded biscuits to eat…It’s a bit strange to say after only one major show, but this is Darwin’s hottest band…They’re not the first band in Darwin to promise funk. But let’s be honest – they deliver it far better than any others have. And they do it with a classy and skilful horn section that makes the whole show…As for the music, this is the real thing. And I’m not just saying that to jump the bandwagon and get a quote on the poster. It’s all cool, all energy, all original.

Will we ever see his like again...and do we want to? Hell Yeah!!

You can see more of Barry Brown & the GetDowns at their Facebook page and hear – and see – a few of their unmatchable style on YouTube.

Barry Brown & the GetDowns – Live

Photos by Bob Gosford

My favourite songwriters tend write dog-eared sepia-toned three-minute postcards capturing the essence of a time and place.

Tim Freedman "Is that an 'E'?"

Their ranks have now been joined by a fellow named Perry Keyes who shared a Darwin Festival bill with Tim Freedman from The Whitlams.

Perry Keyes - as Sydney as Randwick, Redfern and regrets

Dressed in black from hat to boots, he caresses an acoustic guitar and weaves wry humour through streetwise lyrics that are as Sydney as Randwick Racecourse and the harbour bridge. In opening for Tim Freedman (or Timothy Pickles as he refers to him) he sets the scene for an evening of postcards with songs like New Years Eve, Kids Day (at the Royal Easter Show) and At The Speedway and a number recalling the old boxing stadium at Rushcutters Bay.

It’s a helluva long way from the grimy streets of Sydney’s Newtown to a balmy evening beneath the stars in Darwin’s Civic Park, a transition I made more than twenty years ago. Stories about heroin and amphetamines and train stations and rugby league are rarely part of the discourse in this part of the world. Nor are baby grand pianos and the challenge of keeping one in tune.

Tim Freedman - looking for Darwin's Julia Gillard

I’ve long admired Freedman’s lyricism and piano playing, but to see him live for the first time is to step back into another age, another place. Especially when the Tardis is a venue like Darwin Festival’s Lighthouse. It’s an open-air affair with recycled corrugated iron walls painted by half a dozen artists from the Tiwi Islands. The canopy is a big-top like array of low wattage red, yellow and white lights. The stage itself is engulfed in the waft of fog machines, a surreal throwback to the pre-punk excesses of the ‘70s.

Halfway into the show, Freedman calls for a ten-minute interval, saying “The humidity here is playing havoc with the piano” and giving the piano tuner “…eight minutes to polish a turd.”

Tim Freedman to Perry Keyes - this goanna sounds like a kicked cat...

And then it was back into the groove with The Day John Sattler Broke His Jaw (strange to hear a song about rugby league in an AFL town) and a scattering of postcards – Sandringham Hotel, No Aphrodisiac, I’ll Always Keep The Light On For You (a poor man’s version of Paul Kelly’s You Can Put Your Shoes Under My Bed), Buy Now Pay Later, a demonic version of Kate Kelly and a rollicking rendition You Sound Like Louis Burdett.

Mates since they were teenagers, Freedman and Keyes have a great rapport peppered with good humour and loaded with fabulously gritty songs.

Magpie Geese at Cooinda, Kakadu National Park

Geese are a favourite of mine because they taste great and are so plentiful across the Top End of this most beautiful country. The one sound that I most readily associate with Magpie Geese – apart from cracking bones and a pumping 12 gauge – is the sound of shotgun pellets, embedded in their flesh and discovered painfully against suspect teeth, as they hit a tin camping plate when you spit them out…ptingggg, ptingggg, ptingggg.

Goose Lagoon dancer...and Magpie Goose

And dancers? Well that romance has to do with lost limbs, broken bones and an appreciation of the necessity, utility and beauty of that most important muscle of mobility, the gluteus maximus. My friend the “glute” runs from a midpoint down the side of each thigh, up across each buttock and anchors somewhere in our lower back.

Basically they are what gives you “back”…

I’d already formed a fond appreciation for the glute during my time working with dancers and performers at The Darwin Entertainment Centre in the eighties and nineties. But it was the many hours of rehab that I spent after I was T-boned by a bitch from Queensland in a cheap four-wheel drive in Katherine in late June 1988 that gave me a real appreciation of the beauty of a good glute.

I was on a 500cc trailbike and you can imagine that was an unequal contest. She got the guilt and I got the pain, a few months in Royal Darwin Hospital and the dubious pleasure of leaving half a leg in the incinerator. That also meant that I spent quite a few months learning to walk again – and the glute is just about the quickest muscle to waste and the hardest to rebuild.

The last time I was backstage at Darwin’s Entertainment Centre was about twenty years or so ago. Back then I was doing front-of-house sound on an occasional basis – like all theatres that are built too big for a small town the DEC spent more time dark that alight and I would get a call every few weeks to come and do a show.

When the DEC opened sometime in the mid to late eighties – don’t ask me when, I can hardly remember what I was doing ten years back let alone a quarter of a century ago – I worked on the opening season and from faded memory we did a Gilbert & Sullivan show, complete with a rather drunken local chorale and the wonderful Tom Pauling QC – then the NT’s Solicitor -General and now our Administrator – sang the lead…

Over the next few years we did a lot of shows and it would be a pretty fair call to say that the crews favourites were the dance troupes that would wander north from time to time.

Anyway I digress at languorous length…

So…I was very pleased to be invited, in no uncertain terms (“Bob, you have got to see this show! It’s great and will run and run – and there is a technical rehearsal on tomorrow you’ve got to come to!”) when I was collared by Bec Allen, Goose Lagoon’s Creative Producer yesterday while we were standing around at the opening of Glenn Campbells Shrine - as sombre and daunting an exhibition of roadside memorials as you would ever want to see.

And I got the very distinct impression that when Bec commands, it is wise to follow.

That is how I wound up following her into the loading bay and the backstage of the Darwin Entertainment Centre at the 15 minute call for today’s technical rehearsal of Goose Lagoon. Once inside I met Gary Lang, the director and choreographer of Goose Lagoon.

Gary was busy and went off to front of house but I managed to spend a few minutes with Scott Wright, the puppeteer and puppet director of an essential element of Goose Lagoon, the remarkable creations that bring these ancient birds to life on the stage. I have an interview with Scott that I will transcribe and post here when I get the time – he has a remarkable story to tell.

Gary Lang is a Larrakia man and his forebears have lived with Magpie Geese in their country around what is now called Darwin for thousands of years. This performance is at once a blessing and an acknowledgment of the importance – economically, culturally and spiritually – of the Magpie Goose to Gary’s family and kin. Goose Lagoon is also a joyous tribute to the dogged resilience of culture in country that has been stolen from beneath the feet of his people.

Curtain call...

I cannot say anymore. If these few pictures can help to drag you through the door to see this most remarkable show then I have done my job.

Go and see it, it is one of the great shows of our time.

Chips Mackinolty by Colin Holt

You won’t get a room in Darwin over the next week or so and, as I found yesterday when I wanted to fly up from Alice Springs to Darwin direct, I couldn’t score a ticket and had to go via Melbourne and Sydney.

At least I had the time on the plane to read Singing Saltwater Country in a sitting. Singing Saltwater Country is a marvellous new book by the anthropologist John Bradley and the families of the Yanyuwa people of the south-eastern Gulf of Carpentaria that Jon Altman describes as:

A rare diary of devotion…sometimes humorous, sometimes very sad, revealing the extraordinary personal commitment needed to gain insight into Aboriginal connections to country…a moving tale of an urgent quest.”

I landed in Darwin early this morning and after a couple of hours sleep got up early for a few early appointments. I’ve come up to Darwin, a city of which I’ve spent a lot of time in since I ran out of cities that I wanted to live in down south in the mid-eighties, to spend a few days digging around in the visual arts gigs that form a large part of the annual Darwin Festival.

Sculptor Colin Holt tells me what he thinks of me

I have a love-hate relationship with this city, and some of it’s people, and today at least I was back in love with it…we’ll see if that lasts.

By mid afternoon I was at the Darwin Supreme Court where my good friend Glenn Campbell was opening Shrine, his exhibition of photos of roadside memorials that is a part of the Darwin Festival that starts tomorrow and runs through to the end of the month.

As Darwin-based author Andrew McMillan notes in the catalogue for Shrine:

In the Territory the stories are all too common…backpackers in vans swerving to avoid a wallaby of a basking lizard or a stubborn eagle feasting on roadkill, losing control in the dirt, overcorrecting, rolling over and over ’til they come to permanent rest in the the scrub…

I’ve had a look at a few of the roadside memorials that are scattered all too frequently along our highways before – see here and here – but for mine Glenn’s stark black and white images nail something that I couldn’t find. And he has a stunning 10 minute audio-visual presentation that runs alongside his pictures that will touch more than a few raw nerves.

Glenn Campbell and son at his opening

My apologies to Glenn – and his son – for forgetting the young fella’s name…

I’ve got a long interview that I did with Glenn a month or two ago where we talk about his workaday life as a news photographer for the Fairfax press where you will regularly see his photos spread across the front page. I hope to settle the edit for that interview over the next few days and post it here next week sometime.

In the meantime you can see more of Glenn’s extraordinary personal work at his blog, Geography is the Deciding Factor.

I’d caught up with my old pal Andrew McMillan at the Courthouse and we adjourned to the harbour-side for a cooling ale or two before setting off across town for the early evening opening of another visual feast at the new(ish) exhibition space at the Charles Darwin University, on Darwin’s northern fringes.

Djiya wiba-ngka koma, eh? (You're not from here, are you?) Therese Ritchie, 2000 © the artist.

The Charles Darwin University Art Gallery resident curator Anita Angel has put together a great retrospective of the work of two of the Top End’s finest public artists – Chips Mackinolty and his long-standing partner in artistic boundary riding, Therese Ritchie.

Anita Angel says that Mackinolty & Ritchie’s exhibition:

…highlights the best of a collaborative and creative partnership by two Territory-inspired, contemporary Australian artists. Drawn from a corpus of eight earlier exhibitions, and a large body of art created over four decades, this exhibition includes many works shown in Australia for the first time.”

I first ran into Chips around Sydney University sometime in the early seventies, where he was variously editor of the Honi Soit and a prolific screenprinter and visual artist at the Tin Sheds.

By the time that I wandered north in the mid-eighties Chips was already settled in the small town of Katherine, 300 kilometres south of Darwin where, as he’d told me a few months before, I could look him up in the “best house in First Street.”

Over the years I’ve enjoyed more than a few beers and glasses of red with Chips – and exchanged the odd mutually-surly silence and snarl – and I am more than pleased that his visual works continue to shock more than a few and pleasantly surprise – thankfully – even more.

Chips and his co-workers have always been good at sticking sharp hot sticks under our skin and wriggling them about a bit, and if our consciences bleed and scream, well all the better for it – particularly in Darwin where is is easy to fall prey to a sodden, slackened somnolence.

You can find a lot more words that do a better job of describing the work of Chips and Therese than I even will be able to in the marvellous catalogue that accompanies the show.

Therese Ritchie. Sculptures by Colin Holt

That’s about all you’ll be getting from me right now.

Its only day one of a long week ahead and I’ll be up early for a media call for the annual Telstra Aboriginal Art Award, then I’m off to the opening of the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair, then a rehearsal of Gary Lang’s new work, Goose Lagoon, followed by the opening of Djalkiri at the 24 Hour Art Space in Parap. And if I’m still in one piece after that I might go don to the Darwin Botanic Gardens to see a bit of music at the opening night concert of the Darwin Festival.

Then I get to do it all again on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The Top End – absolute hell one day, even worse tomorrow. And not a spare plane ticket or empty bed in town.

Suffer southerners…

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