Rover’s line: Standing on the edge of a song

I am standing on the edge of a rocky outcrop in Kununurra, WA, looking down at pieces of paper that I have wedged in between rocks and overhangs trying to activate soggy pieces of paper into a response to the land.  It is a process that I use in my hometown of Gundaroo in NSW.  I dampen paper in the local dam, drag it around the common getting traces of mud and manure.  I then settle under the shadows of the remnant forest and start engaging with the ground, drawing, smearing erasing the natural ochres and charcoal, allowing the grasses below to reveal their pathways by embedding themselves in the paper.

 Rocks at Kelly Knob, Kununurra, WA

I now find myself living in the Kimberley’s, the land of ochre painting!  My hero, Rover Thomas sometimes painted at the Waringarri Art Centre just at the bottom of the hill I am standing on.  I look up from my paper and feel severe vertigo as the flat plane of the land suddenly reveals its distance from the plane of rock I was staring at. I doubt my right to be here and my attempt at drawing ‘country.’  Everything seems to be fighting against me.  My paper has dried in the extreme conditions and the beautiful sparkling ochre colours tantalising me in the rocks are actually sandstone and any attempt to smear them on to the paper results in tears and shredded fingertips.  

I am teetering on the edge of Kelly Knob, a terrible misnomer for a rocky outcrop of significance to the local Miriwoong language group.  There is a view of the Kununurra area equal to an eagles hovering perusal.  The ground is unstable as layers of sandstone exposed by weathering form rocky cliff faces.  The water seeps into the stone and erodes the softer layers causing breakages and collapses.   The effect is of dry broken brush marks in a shifting range of colours from pale yellow ochre, soft downy grey galah pinks, rusty reds and a deep stormy sunset purple.

I have seen a painting of Rover’s about this site that had a broad line mapping around the edge of the canvas, swooping in to the middle and looping around a black rounded triangular shape.  Deep red brown ochre dominated the canvas with the line a deeper, muddier brown.  The white dots traverse the border of the canvas and the edges of the line, accentuating the subtle shift between the land and the path through that land.  The mesmerising dots force the viewer to keep following the track around the board and never coming to rest. It is both an aerial map and a landscape view.  Continuously shifting from the horizontal to the vertical, the viewer is left unnerved.  

Sugar Bag Hill (Ilulunja), c1986

Rover Thomas (Joolama) (c1926—1998)

natural earth pigments and natural binder on plywood

80.0 x 100.0 cm

The dark brown line is the road that circumnavigates the township of Kununurra and it continues up the path to Kelly Knob, surrounding and accentuating the hill.  It is a simple mud map to the site, a prosaic description of an everyday manmade path.  When I first stand on the Knob and realise that I can see this aerial mapping, I feel a sickening wrench in my stomach and disappointment seeps in as I realised the secular nature of many of Rover’s works.  Living in Kununurra, I now see the simplicity and obviousness of the subject matter and it jarred against my previous relationships with Rover’s work.

However, it is both a mud map and something far more.  It is part of a song, a dream and a warning that the land needed caring for.   This painting and site is part of the Kurirr–Kurirr (Krill Krill) song that was composed by Rover Tomas in the 70’s.  The song came to him after the death of a senior countrywoman, close kin to Rover.  In a series of dreams she took him on the path her spirit took after her death in a car accident down the road near Halls Creek.  She gave him many verses and showed him the destruction of Darwin by Cyclone Tracey from this very spot.  It took some time before this song was fully recognised by Rover’s community but eventually, ceremonial boards were painted up by his classificatory uncle Paddy Jumangi and taken around the country.  It was the start of a famous art movement.

So, on Kelly Knob I am standing on the edge of this song,  the destruction of Cyclone Tracey was shown to Rover by his kinswoman in a dream.  I can easily remember Rover’s painting of Cyclone Tracey with its large black vortices and bands of winds and country feeding into it.  It hangs in the new Indigenous Australian galleries at the NGA in Canberra where I taught art students each week.  Now I am in the place where Rover was shown the destruction caused by the Rainbow Serpent; a warning to keep country strong, a powerful dream that has captured the imagination of all Australians.

Cyclone Tracy 1991

Rover Thomas (Joolama)
Warmun (Turkey Creek), Kimberley, Western Australia, Australia
Painting, natural earth pigments on canvas
168.0 h x 180.0 w cm

The power of his work is to take everyday life events, the mapping of a highway, a car accident, a hill above a colonising township and make it into a cultural icon.  As I continue to think about the painting and its elegance, I realise the intelligence and insight needed to pare a story down into elements.  A mud map, ochres and a dream are just the beginning of the way his paintings work.  The sophisticated operation of the shifting viewpoints from the aerial view above the land to the ants eye view looking up at the hill from the place where he painted it.

So where do I start in drawing this place?