JIDMAA THUWATHU - Rainbow Serpent Rising
17th June ~ 7th August 2005
Woolloongabba Art Gallery

Mornington Island, Gununa to its owners, has made art, danced and sung, for generations and generations and continue today. For why would anyone want to stop something as visually sophisticated, and splendid, that's filled with uplifting and heroic verse and a dance that makes the earth tremor. A landscape surrounded by water, filled with life and a sunset that could warm the coldest of any heart.

Maybe only artists really appreciate art, like Batterbee before him, the late Percy Trezise was a man who sat down with some men like, Goobala Dick Roughsey, his older brother Spider Lindsay Roughsey and Arnold Watt to paint.

Roughsey was a forerunner for his people and a pioneer of Gununa bark painting. It was not simply his art but his work as an author that educated many Australian children in the 1970's including myself. Why his story has yet to be dusted off is a sign of a unilateral history, a history selectively remembered since squatters moved their sheep across the Tweed. It is more than likely that, Goobala's Rainbow Serpent has become one of the most recognised Indigenous stories in our collective psyche. His tales of the Flying Fox Brothers, the Quinkins and the Giant Devil Dingo are histories, a bedtime history for children all over our country.

His slender fluent brushwork, ochry aesthetics and totemic imagery were not the only languages that Goobalathaldin had become accustomed to in his storytelling. The pictorial imagery of contemporary Gununa life was among one of Roughsey's favourite subjects. He captured, a rich history of his people by painting the social acts of their contemporary lives, from women playing netball to hunting and corroboree.

After thirty years of stomping the ground of other peoples country, many of the acclaimed Mornington Island Dancers have returned to where Dick and his brothers once sat under a tree painting. The attempt by many senior men, songmen and dancers to initiate a contemporary and vibrant dialogue with painting, is recognition of a spirit that missionaries could not extinguish from their youth. One that has not buckled throughout an adolescence and adult life under a constant pressure of a dominant culture and the constraints of an imposed democratic system, where justice is regarded as a legal matter.

Melville Escott is an old man now, he walks at a gentle pace and has a reflective pause between sentences. He is a man who makes you want to listen, cause there are many miles in his voice and a wisdom that echoes in his accent. During the project, over tea and biscuits he remarked.

"For a long time I was frightened to paint our body art, the sacred, but we are the old men, we have to make decisions and it is alright for us, to make a new economy. This is really our own painting, no one has this way. We got our law and it stays with us, that's our identity, we keep that, cause it was handed down by the old people, the traditional elders. They handed that law to us, we have to hand this law down to our younger ones now, so it can still be carried out, so they know their identity, who they are and where they come from."

The influence senior men like Melville, Reggie Robertson, Billy Kooraubabba, Gordon, Joseph and Arnold Watt have, as social directors ensures their families and community, are inevitably the greatest beneficiaries of their work. With four generations of Lardil artists contributing in a daily dialogue, influence ranging from school children through to other senior men of the community is evident. An art centre is a place of possibilities and an internal vehicle for the artist as much as it is a chance to travel any ocean.

However, to see these old men turn into glowing young men dancing in the presence of their boss and most senior man Spider Lindsay Roughsey is a performance to behold. Old Spider has found a reason to get up in the morning, pick up a paintbrush, begin painting again, begin walking again and continue to chat up any woman who is caught in the web of his external charm. Sally Gabori is a very old lady and a young artist. After relinquishing a prohibition on painting, Sally began to describe the fish traps of her Bentinck Island, a job she continued till her early thirties before being brought to Mornington Island. Her language has emerged through her palette and the mileage that painting offers. Sally's dialogue is of the oldest of languages, her mind, a place of so many memories.

A generation of men in their forties and fifties are behind an energetic attendance and interaction with the senior and most senior. For it is these men who are next in line to earn the responsibility of learning all there is to know in an old mans mind. Lance Gavenor's Tiger Shark is a bold dynamic produced from an intense concentration and methodical pace on the canvas. The Williams brothers of Birri, Darryl, John and Wayne, hold their country with solid beliefs and have begun to realise the benefits of a consistent painting practice. Whether canvas needs to be shipped up on the back of a boat to Birri or Wayne or Darryl is in the shed with Lance, this sub group of men represents much hope for the future aesthetics in Gununa painting.

Younger artists like Jolene Roughsey, Emily Evans, Renee and Bradley Wilson have followed in the wake of progress laid down by their fathers, grand fathers and uncles. With a confidence inherent through gaining a voice of cultural expression, these younger painters have taken a mature and committed approach to developing and extending the range of their newfound voices.

Gununa not only has a rich art history but a bright future. Mornington Island's artists have rallied around a chance and turned it into an opportunity, which they have run with till they hit the wall, a gallery wall. In many ways the results of their professional development workshops are recognition of how important these designs and stories are to their custodians. Designs they have carried on their bodies to countries around the world and to audiences from school children to heads of states are actively being used again as a metaphor of cultural identity, a symbol of the strength of Lardil cultures and the desire these artist's have to paint up country.

Simon Turner
Woolloongabba Art Gallery