The Sydney Morning Herald 17/06/2000 The Baru bites back Saltwater expresses indigenous aspirations for rights over the sea country through an artform that may prove pivotal in the crusade to win them, writes Tim Bonyhady. The small town of Yirrkala in north-eastern Arnhem Land has been renowned for its art for 40 years. Kim Beazley snr, one of the Labor Party's great advocates of Aboriginal rights, was an early enthusiast. When the Menzies Government approved bauxite mining on the Aboriginal reserve in Arnhem Land without consulting or compensating the Aboriginal population, Beazley led Labor in making a "revolutionary" call for Aboriginal title to land. Then he flew to Yirrkala to see what else he could do. "Make a bark petition," Beazley advised the Yolngu Aborigines in July 1963. "A petition surrounded with an Aboriginal painting will be irresistible." Beazley was right. When the Aborigines glued their typewritten text to pieces of stringybark and painted the borders, the novel form of their protest made a difference. Although Beazley was probably typical in thinking of the paintings simply as decorations - little realising that they were totems representing the Yolngu's claim to the area to be mined - they helped to fix attention on the Aborigines' written grievances. "Aborigines Draw Up Bark Painting Petition," the Herald announced in August 1963. The House of Representatives had received "its most colourful petition". Beazley dwelt on the value of bark painting a few weeks later when he called in Parliament for a select committee to inquire into the Aborigines' grievances. Beazley argued that Yirrkala was "a very important community" because of the international acclaim and economic significance of its art. Picasso, he announced, had written to the Yirrkala artist Mawalan Marika: "What I have been attempting to do all my life and not succeeding, you are doing." The parliamentary committee, which included Beazley, was also quick to heed the testimony of Mawalan's eldest son, Wandjuk Marika, who was probably one of the artists responsible for the bark petitions. Wandjuk explained that the area designated for mining included a "special hill" where his people got the pigments for "special paintings". What, he asked, would happen if this hill were interfered with? Where would the Aborigines get their colours? The committee recommended that this area "be set aside as an inalienable reserve for their use and benefit". This unprecedented moment of political prominence of Aboriginal art lies behind Saltwater, the exhibition of bark paintings from Yirrkala now at the National Maritime Museum. Just as the bark petitions were part of a legal and political dispute over Aboriginal rights to land, so the bark paintings on show at the Maritime Museum are part of a legal and political conflict over Aboriginal rights to the sea. At stake are not just fishing rights - the key issue from a commercial viewpoint - but also the protection of sacred sites. One catalyst for these paintings was the discovery in 1996 of an illegal barramundi fishing camp, south-west of Yirrkala, which included the severed head of a crocodile. As Andrew Blake, the art co-ordinator at Yirrkala, recounts in the Saltwater catalogue, this area is "the ancient home of Baru - a primal force which took both human and crocodile form". Djambawa Marawili, the chairman of the Yirrkala Art Centre, responded to this "sacrilege of the dismembering of Baru in his own nest" by embarking on the earliest painting in the exhibition featuring the sacred designs of the area. Yet Saltwater is also part of the longstanding campaign by Aborigines for rights over their traditional "sea country". When the Whitlam Government established the Woodward Inquiry into Land Rights in 1973, the Northern Land Council argued that Aboriginal title to coastal land should extend 12 miles offshore. In 1974 Justice Woodward recommended that two kilometres would be sufficient to protect the Aborigines' "legitimate interests". When the Fraser Government enacted its Land Rights Act in 1976, it stopped the Aborigines' title at low-water mark. The first native title claim to test that issue - brought by Croker Islanders on the north-western edge of Arnhem Land - was on its way to court when the Aborigines of Yirrkala began creating Saltwater. When Justice Olney first decided the case in 1998, he held that native title existed in relation to 2,000 square kilometres of the sea and seabed but that it did not extend to commercial fisheries. In 1999 two judges of the Federal Court affirmed his decision. The third member of the Court, Justice Merkel, went further, holding that native title could include what are now commercial fishing rights. Most likely, the case will go to the High Court later this year. Like the paintings on the bark petitions, Saltwater is a means of publicising the Aborigines' cause, admittedly on a much grander scale. The two bark petitions - each a little over half a metre high - were seen only in Canberra, where they remain on show in Parliament House. Many of the 80 paintings in Saltwater are more than two metres high. One is almost four metres. Their national tour has already taken them to Canberra and Perth and continues, after Sydney, to Melbourne and Alice Springs. These aspects of Saltwater make it much more powerful than the bark petitions, which have attracted renewed parliamentary attention in recent weeks as a result of the Commonwealth asserting copyright over them without consulting the Yirrkala community. While the petitions are remarkable objects because of their bilingual, typed texts and painted borders, they have nothing like the impact of the giant barks which are spectacular, an extraordinary visual experience. Yet the impact of Saltwater may not be as great as that of the petitions because the status of bark painting has changed dramatically in the 37 years since Kim Beazley snr recognised its appeal. Where it had once been considered the stuff of ethnography, bark painting was embraced in the early 1960s as the pre-eminent Aboriginal artform, resulting in rapidly escalating prices. The Art Gallery of NSW was at the forefront of the shift. Twenty-three of the 94 pages in the gallery's annual acquisitions catalogue for 1960 were devoted to such paintings. Twenty years on, the Sydney Biennale continued to treat bark painting as the foremost Aboriginal artform. When the curators of the 1979 Biennale selected three bark painters - David Malangi, George Milpurrurru and John Bunguwuy from Ramingining in north-central Arnhem Land - they knew their inclusion created a "historical occasion". The exhibition was the first international biennale to include Aboriginal art. Increasingly, however, bark paintings have been challenged, if not eclipsed, in art museums and the art market by Western Desert acrylics on canvas. One factor has been the resemblance of those "dot" paintings in both appearance and materials to neo-impressionist and abstract painting. As Djon Mundine observes in The Native Born, the book that accompanied the exhibition of Yolngu Science at the Museum of Contemporary Art earlier this year: "Being more visually familiar, such works prove easier to read aesthetically, and thus to accept culturally, by non-Aboriginal audiences." The dot painters' use of the full spectrum of acrylic colour - in place of the traditional Aboriginal palette of natural ochres - has also been vital to their popularity. This outbreak of colour has, at least partly, been a response to European technology. But John Gage suggests in Restricting the Palette that it may also have been inevitable. Just as the use of colour has contracted and expanded in other cultures, so Gage maintains that the Aborigines' four-colour palette "was always destined to have a limited life". Yet the pre-eminence of bark painting has been shaken not just by dot painting but also by a host of other Aboriginal artforms from all over Australia. Beyond the Pale, the exhibition of contemporary indigenous art which was in this year's Adelaide Biennial at the Art Gallery of South Australia, provided one view of the great array of Aboriginal art. It ranged from the extraordinarily beautiful shell necklaces made by Lola Greeno, who comes from Cape Barren Island in Bass Strait, to the raw politics of Ten Point Scam, an oil painting by the Sydney artist Gordon Hookey. Just three of the 100 works, by Jimmy Njiminjuma and Abraham Mongkorerre from Maningrida in western Arnhem Land, were bark paintings. This prominence of many other forms of Aboriginal art and diminished status of bark painting is in many respects welcome. Despite the great depth and diversity of its culture, Arnhem Land is far from the only important source of Aboriginal art or the only preserve of Aboriginality. The new landscape of Aboriginal art is all the richer for embracing the city and the bush, the top end and the bottom. The marginalisation of bark painting is, however, also a result of the excessive appetite of curators, collectors and critics for the new. While there has been substantial innovation within bark painting in the past 40 years, the changes have been neither as obvious nor as great as those within some other Aboriginal artforms. The pressure on bark painters to change for change's sake is acute. As Mundine notes, one "cynical" suggestion is that they shift from bark to canvas so that their work looks more familiar and panders to the art world's preoccupation with innovation. Yet while the relative continuity of bark painting has reduced the attention it has received as art, it might have enhanced its legal significance. The key is the role played by Aboriginal sculptures and paintings as evidence of land ownership. Already in 1962 - before land rights litigation in Australia was even thought of - the anthropologist Mervyn Meggitt reported that the sacred boards which the Walpiri people of central Australia used in circumcision ceremonies were "maps" of their "dreaming-countries or dreaming-tracks" and hence formed part of their "title deeds" to their territory. The Aborigines of Yirrkala tested this dimension of their art when they resorted to the Northern Territory Supreme Court in an attempt to stop the bauxite mine on the Gove Peninsula proceeding. As part of trying to demonstrate their ownership of this land, they decided to reveal the emblems of their clans, their holy rangga, to Justice Blackburn. He accepted in 1971 that it was "a matter of aboriginal faith" that these effigies of the Aborigines' ancestral beings were "charters to land". But as part of dismissing the Aborigines' claim on the basis of terra nullius, he held that these effigies did not constitute evidence of land ownership so far as the common law was concerned. THAT finding has either been ignored or implicitly rejected in the past 30 years, just as Blackburn's reliance on terra nullius was overturned by the High Court in Mabo. Bark paintings have now been accepted as evidence in a number of subsequent land claims and native title cases. Art historians, anthropologists and the Yolngu themselves have repeatedly defined bark paintings as "title deeds". When the Aborigines of Yirrkala eventually test their sea rights in court, their drawings and paintings of sea country dating back to the 1940s will most likely be part of their evidence. So, too, will the paintings in Saltwater. Meanwhile, the Howard Government has done its utmost to undermine the Aborigines' sea claims, whatever the High Court finds in the Croker Island case. Two days after Justice Olney first affirmed the Croker Islanders' claim to native title, John Howard's 10-point plan prevailed in Parliament, providing that whatever native title might exist in the sea would defer to all other interests, including existing and future commercial fisheries. As Ron Levy, a solicitor with the Northern Land Council, has observed: "In theory the native title itself continues to exist, but in name only. The rights which flow from native title are ignored and have no effect." The measure would probably have been struck down as discriminatory had the 10-point plan not excluded the Racial Discrimination Act. Even so, it may be open to challenge in the courts. The only other possibility, which Saltwater may yet influence, is a political adjustment. While the Coalition Government has made plain that it will not reconsider, Labor is more receptive. In a recent statement, Kim Beazley jnr promised to remove the discriminatory elements of the 10-point plan. If Labor wins the next Federal election, he will have the opportunity to live up to his father's example. Tim Bonyhady is an art historian and environmental lawyer. 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