Art.
Nourlangie Rock, Kakadu, Northern Territory.
I went to see the L.S. Lowry exhibition at the Tate a few months ago. Room after room had paintings of various sizes displaying various takes on the same subject: little people in the industrial landscape of the North of England.
I never really ‘got’ Lowry while I was growing up. I could see the attraction, sure: it was uncomplicated Art; hung in uncomplicated hallways in uncomplicated homes such as my Mum and Dad’s; it seemed to ask nothing more than for the viewer to observe the wry observation of some man in a macintosh in a Northern industrial landscape, painting what he saw… i.e. the daily lives of the millworkers and their families played out on the canvas of smoke stacks and terraced housing.
But I get it now.
The landscapes impose themselves upon the in/famous matchstick men. The figures at surface level look indistinct, anonymous, quickly sketched. Then you see each is painted as an individual. And within each vast landscape are hundreds of individual stories, lost in the epic scale of industrial Lancashire.
Lowry’s familiar landscapes are a long way from the tropical wilderness of Kakadu. Here, there are no dark Satanic mills, but huge mountains, plateaus, and ravines. No cobbles, but limestone pavements millions of years old. No canals, but beautiful tranquil billabongs, and deep gorges that open onto wide plains, with almost biblical views across a teeming world.
Kakadu is a World Heritage-listed National Park on an immense scale. It’s over 19,000 square kilometres of floodplains, river systems, billabongs, escarpments and waterfalls. It’s Nature with a capital N in all its raw glory.
Man with a capital M has lived here for over 50,000 years. We can see that in the archaeological record. More vividly, we can see it in the Aboriginal people’s rock art.
We are here at Nourlangie Rock, a vast craggy mountain, the shadow of which gives some respite from the afternoon sun. It must be something like 36 degrees. Maybe hotter. It’s a wet-heat here. You get used to sweating.
We walk a couple of hundred metres to a viewing platform under an overhang. On the rock-face we can see, quite clearly, depictions of kangaroos, turtles, crocodiles, and human forms. There’s also a skeleton-white representation of The Lightning Man, one of the heroes of the creation stories.
I say ‘quite clearly’ though some are fainter than others; a result of the art-works being layered-up one upon the other over hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.
The art is thought to have been used as a teaching tool for countless generations of Aboriginal people. Where they would learn form their forbears how the world came into being; how to find food; what to avoid, and so on and so on. It is beautiful. Interesting. Mind-blowing.
Other paintings depict fish and beasts... a pictorial larder; there’s also one painting that seemingly depicts.. how to put this delicately? ... the physical act of love being shared by …. three? four? …several people.
But there are two impressions I am left with: one is the image of a hand print, made as a mark by some unknown artist, who-knows how many years ago.
The other, and you have to look quite hard to find it, is of a solitary figure painted in white. He stands among the images of kangaroos, and hunters, and fish, and creation stories: a simple white stick figure with a hat on his head, a pipe in his mouth, and his hands in his pockets. The first Aborigine representation of the White-fella. For all the world a Lowry stick-man.
The White fella.