Saw a terrific little exhibition of Aboriginal art at the Mossenson Galleries on Derby Street, Collingwood recently. New to me were works by Loongkoonan, an artist who's nearly 100 and only started painting a few years ago. These painting weren't in the show, but are most like them of those images I could find on line. Many of her works, including these and those in the exhibit, are called Bush Tucker. (Tucker is Australian for food; bush tucker in this case refers to food gathered by women.) Did you know the supposed wilderness and desert (she's from the Kimberley) of Australia was so full of good things?It reminds me of a passage I've just read in a very iffy (if very well written) book which purports to be about the Aborigenes, Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines:
Le désert est monothéiste. Renan’s aphorism implies that blank horizons and a dazzling sky
will clear the mind of its distractions and allow it concentrate on the Godhead. But life in the desert is not like that!To survive at all, the desert dweller — Tuareg or Aboriginal — must develop a prodigious sense of orientation. He must forever be naming, sifting, comparing a thousand different ‘signs’ — the tracks of the dung beetle or the ripple of a dune — to tell him where he is; where the others are; where rain has fallen; where the next meal is coming from; whether if plant X is in flower, plant Y will be in berry, and so forth. (222-23)
Chatwin was perhaps more of a nomad than the Aboriginal people he met around Alice Springs in the mid 1980s, but here he's on to something. I've enthused about Rover Thomas' paintings before (and love them still) but I'm starting to wonder whether they don't appeal so to the likes of me because they're full of solid expanses, empty of detail or bright color - the urbanite's view of the land, not that of the person who's made it her/his own in bare feet and knows every crag and the uses of every tuft growing on or under it.
Glad I stayed around long enough to start to see the world which paintings like Loongkoonan's describe!
