Australia, or Invasion, Day, makes me think of geometric shapes. Black squares. White cubes. Me. In a gallery. A pink oblong. My own shape. Rosa Viereck: pleased to meet you.
I’m secure in my identity. But sometimes just the sound of the word Australia, let alone its abstraction, can make me question who I am. “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” was modernist artist Paul Gauguin’s heartfelt cry in ‘French’ Tahiti. His painting’s plea becomes an epithet to colonial identity confusion.
Here, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, it’s a black square screen-head. Atop a black rectangle. I am looking at the symbolic shape of what is known as an icon of Australian identity art. Sidney Nolan’s outlaw: Ned Kelly. Riding through a desert. Gun in hand. In reverse. A symbol of quixotic alienation: human form reduced to a black abstraction in the red heart. White settler alienation in a black helmet. What are we? What does it mean to be Australian? It’s a familiar refrain. Can we find ourselves through Art? I am here to tell you, yes, and lose ourselves as well. Look at me! And look at Nolan in the retrospective at the AGNSW.
Death of Sergeant Kennedy at Stringybark Creek by Sidney Nolan, 1946. Rippolin enamel on hardboard. Collection National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © National Gallery of Australia
Looks like he found out a thing or two as he lost himself in a hallucinogenic landscape of his own perception. About the shifting shapes of ‘settler’ identity. The outlaw. The colonial law enforcers.
But things have changed since Nolan painted his Kelly series in the late 1940s. The modern era has shifted to postmodernism. Multiplicity abounds. Polyphony rocks. In the new era of protest, outlaws are replaced by activists. Fighting for social justice for outsiders ‘othered’ by the ex-colonial law makers. Refugees in detention. Indigenous communities. Stranded in 21st century deserts. Deprived of health and education services settler society calls basic. When activists faced charges –later dropped – of helping refugees escape the country to a third country of refuge, writer and refugee supporter Tom Keneally wrote to those facing court: “The better angels of Australia are singing with you.”
My new favourite book. Another Country, writers in detention, edited by Tom Keneally and Rosie Scott. I open at random, and read:
In the midst of the parched desert
no one can come with us
We cannot journey hand in hand
There is no green place to rest the eye
and the scorching wind of destiny lashes at our backs
A call to DIMIA is like the smell of rain in the desert
Hope like black clouds, building in our thirsty hearts
turns quickly into grief
A cry from the heart from Mohsen Soltany Zand (pictured above). Persian poet, political exile. Four years in detention, in the desert; now a permanent resident.
More passionate words come into my mind. Aunty Shirley (pictured above), Aboriginal activist, speaking at a 2007 Human Day Rights Rally, in Sussex Street, Sydney.
“Aboriginal women are the backbone that has built this country. They have lain on their backs and been raped and given birth to white fella’s babies and had their children taken away and grieved for their children. And their blood is in this city and in these buildings. We won’t go away. Will we stay around? Come back next year...”
These voices know deep pain, and endurance. They are the voices of suffering and survival. They have travelled a long way through the desert to be here. We are all travelling through this country.
What does it mean to be ‘Australian’? Why not rephrase the question to: What does it mean to be here? Or not. Nolan knew, too. Look at his hallucinatory deserts. Razed red earth. Ribbed chasms like the chambers of a dissected heart. Filled with floating motifs. Falling horses. Leda; the swan. Aliens. Dislocating dreams. From a fractured world. Shifting shapes. Of being/seeing. Nolan said he hit upon the black square, after coming out of the army and the war. When he wanted to do “something that was opposite to the sunlit bush...and would explain something of what was happening to me”. In a landscape of cultural trauma, he saw something sinister and menacing in the gun toting black square. To do with shaken identity.
In the great southern land we are all at heart dislocated, invaded and invaders. Together, we can reshape the future. Through mutual acceptance of many colours and shapes. Reconciliation. Make Art not War.
© 2008 Ruth Skilbeck
Top picture: Ned Kelly, 1946 by Sidney Nolan. Rippolin enamel on hardboard. Collection National Gallery of Australia, gift of Sunday Reed 1977 © National Gallery of Australia