Color Read online

  I knew there would be stories to be uncovered in many ochre places—from Siena to Newfoundland to Japan. But for my travels in search of this first colored paint I wanted to go to Australia—because there I would find the longest continuous painting tradition in the world. If I had been charmed by my five-thousand-year-old ochre, how much more charmed would I be in Australia where cave painters used this paint more than forty thousand years ago? But I also knew that in the very center of Australia I would find the story of how that ancient painting tradition was transformed to become one of the most exciting new art movements in recent years.

  Before I left for Australia I called an anthropologist friend in Sydney, who has worked with Aboriginal communities for many years. At the end of our phone conversation I looked at the notes I had scribbled. Here they are:

  It’ll take time. Lots.

  Ochre is still traded, even now.

  Red is Men’s Business. Be careful.

  I had absentmindedly underlined the last point several times. It seemed that the most common paint on earth was also sometimes the most secret. Finding out about ochre was going to be a little more complicated than I had thought.

  SYDNEY

  Hetty Perkins, one of the Aboriginal curators at the Gallery of New South Wales, described the secrecy of indigenous traditions most vividly, as we drank coffee in the gallery garden after the opening of a major retrospective of Aboriginal art that she had organized.6 “This is a blanket,” she said, putting her hand on a piece of white paper in my notebook, “and this is Australia,” she continued, touching the wooden table. “You lift the paper, and it’s all underneath . . . Many paintings are like the blanket . . . we don’t understand the full extent of the meanings, but we know that they mean country.” I was intrigued to know whether she had peeked underneath—at the table, so to speak. “It’s not my privilege,” she said. “That’s why I’m careful. It’s not my place to ask anyone what anything means. That will come later on.”

  So, effectively—I summarized for myself that evening—I was going to look for a pigment that in one of its incarnations I wasn’t allowed to see, and which was used to paint secrets I wasn’t allowed to know. And I respected that secrecy. But what then, under those rather rigorous conditions, would I find in the north and then the center of Australia to help me understand the appeal of ochre?

  DARWIN

  What I discovered was ochre itself. I found it immediately and I found miles of it. I had not quite appreciated how the Top End of Australia is a quarry of ochres—there is so much of it that people use it commercially for colored concrete. On my first morning in Darwin I went for an early morning walk along East Point beach, which is famous locally for its colors. The rocks were like raspberry ripple ice cream, as if some lazy Ancestral Being had been given the job of mixing up the yellow, white, orange and red ingredients into the brown color of proper cliffs but had been distracted by a passing possum and ended up leaving them to dry in unmixed swirls of color. The crimson hematite was splashed like spilt blood over the whiter rocks. When I ground the loose pebbles on the mortar of the rock, and added a drop of seawater, I found I could paint with them—on my skin and on the pale parts of the rock. But unlike my smooth Italian ochre these Australian pigments were gritty and flaked unevenly. You wouldn’t travel miles for this paint, I thought. Although, of course, I realized, I just had.

  To the east I could see Arnhemland being slowly illuminated by the sun. This was the Aboriginal homeland that outsiders can visit only if they are invited. When you look at some maps, it is almost a blank: a place you don’t need to know about unless you have your own map already. As I sat on the stone slabs and watched the sun painting the sky pink, I wondered about the colors of Arnhemland. Where they came from, and where they went to.

  TRADING OCHRE

  There was a time when the whole of Australia was a network of trading posts. 7 From Arnhemland in the north to the tip of southern Australia, from the west coast to the beaches of Queensland, groups would come together for corroborees and would barter prized items with each other. It was partly an important way of getting good tools and useful items; but it was also a way of articulating social networks in (mostly) peaceful ways. If you were accustomed to trading with your neighbors every wet season, then that was when peace treaties could be maintained, and rivalries resolved. People might swap a boomerang (boomerangs didn’t come back in those days) for a spear or an axe for a grinding stone—with a corroboree ritual to celebrate the exchange. And ochre—really good ochre— was one of the most prized items of all.

  Wilga Mia in the Campbell Ranges of Western Australia is one of the most sacred ochre mines in the continent. In 1985, Nicolas Peterson and Ronald Lampert8 described going there with some of the traditional owners from the Warlpiri tribe. They had to ask permission for entry—not only from the owners but also from the sacred beings who, it was believed, lived beneath its ancient chambers. “Don’t be unpleasant to us,” the men once prayed before they went in with their torches and metal axes, while on another occasion they cajoled the spirit of the mine, saying how they wanted only a small amount. Before the 1940s the ochre had been traded for spears with tribes to the south and for shields and boomerangs with those from the north.9 And—at least in the 1980s—it was still being mined and traded, although where once it had been collected in bark dishes, by the end of the twentieth century it was placed in plastic buckets.

  Another famous deposit is in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia. For possibly thousands of years Aboriginal expeditions headed south into the area from Lake Eyre. In Goods from Another Country, Isabel McBryde writes about Diyari men taking two months to travel the thousand-mile round trip to collect their red gold from the Bookartoo mine at a place called Parachilna. They used to return home with 20 kilos of ochre each, already formed into baked round cakes. These would be carried on their backs in bags made of possum or kangaroo skin, and on their heads they would have huge seed-grinding stones from a nearby stone quarry. There would be seventy or eighty men travelling together: it must have been an impressive sight.

  Then in 1860 the white farmers arrived, along with their sheep and their land registrations—and a series of skirmishes began. To the administrators in Adelaide these were known as the ochre wars, although the origins of the conflict had more to do with what happened on the way to and from the sacred mine than about what was found in it. The Aboriginals were not remotely interested in European notions of land ownership but they were interested in this new, bleating bush tucker. And when they made their yearly expeditions to Bookartoo they took what meat they needed for their journey. The white communities were quick in their reprisals (on the “hanging for a sheep or a lamb” theory), and these were followed by counterreprisals from the Aboriginals. A nineteenth-century settler called Robert Bruce, quoted by Philip Jones of the South Australian Museum in a paper written in 1983,10 wrote that “a solitary shepherd would have been about as safe [in the Flinders] as an unpopular land agent in Tiperary [sic] during the good ould toimes.”

  In November 1863 the ochre wars became an ochre massacre. Jones noted that, more than a century later, the Aboriginal people in the local area still knew the precise place where scores of Aboriginals were killed by the angry settlers. It is near Beltana, about 540 kilometers north of Adelaide. Throughout the 1860s there was terrible violence from both sides and eventually someone in the South Australian administration suggested a solution. If they couldn’t stop the men going to the mountain, perhaps they could bring the mountain to the men. How about moving the mine? he said, arguing that the black fellas wouldn’t know the difference. And unbelievably, in 1874, this is effectively what the settlers did. But they moved the wrong mine.

  The decision-makers in Adelaide couldn’t persuade any transport company to take the red rocks all the way from Parachilna (it was an almost impossible route for bullock carts then), so instead they removed four tons of ochre from a traditional mine owned by the Kaura people
by the coast, and organized for it to be carted up to Lake Eyre—it took weeks, but the roads were at least negotiable. Once they reached their destination, they persuaded the German missionaries to distribute it, in the hope that the resulting glut in supply would mean the ochre collectors would find other things to do.

  It was a wasted effort. All the Kaura red ochre in the world couldn’t dissuade the men of Lake Eyre from making their annual expedition—for three reasons. First it was a kind of pilgrimage. You can probably buy Lourdes water in London, but part of its appeal is the transformation that occurs when you make the journey yourself. The Aborigines had built elaborate ceremonies around collecting the red ochre and bringing it back. Trotting over to the mission to collect a little bag of free rocks rather missed the point. Stories can only be told by being told, and journeys can only be made by being travelled.

  Second, ochre was essential for bartering. Trading happens when one item is seen to be almost equal in value to another. What value did free paint have? It wouldn’t have bought very many precious pearl shells from the Kimberley coast, nor would it have bought much of the pituri tobacco the Diyari people were so keen to buy from other tribes. The recipe for making pituri leaves into a super-narcotic was a secret, kept only by the elders of certain tribes, so swapping ochre for pituri was swapping a secret for a secret and therefore appropriate. If the Lake Eyre tribes were denied sacred ochre then it would mean they were not able to play their part in the complex trading network that Aboriginal tribes depended on.

  Third, the ochre was used for painting ritual designs, and the Kaura red simply wasn’t either good enough or sacred enough: it did not contain the hint of mercury that made the Bookartoo paint so special. In 1882, a journalist called T. A. Masey wrote that: “the natives would not use [the Kaura ochre]. It did not give them that much-coveted shiny appearance that filled them with delight and admiration when contemplating their noble selves, and that also made them the envy of rival tribes.”11 For Masey this was probably an expression of a primitive urge for glittery things, but there are other explanations. The sense that light is a manifestation of the glory of the sacred—that the numinous is held within the luminous—is common to almost every faith. Perhaps by painting themselves with a color that gleamed, the Aboriginals were not only symbolizing the sacred; they were embodying it.

  “Oh yeah, pituri,” said Roqué Lee. “Tastes like shit but works like ten cups of coffee at once.” I met Roqué (who pronounces his name “Rocky”) at the Aboriginal Art Gallery in Darwin: he used to be a ranger at Kakadu National Park, but for the past five years he’d mostly been demonstrating didgeridoos. His father is Chinese-Australian and his mother is Aboriginal. “I’ve got three cultures,” he said happily. “You can see it in my cooking. I do cha-siu snake, long-neck turtle stuffed with ginger and stir-fry magpie goose.” He lives in Darwin during the week but likes going hunting on weekends. “It’s magpie goose season soon,” he said. “We build a blind on the edge of a swamp, and then make a bundle of spears. When the geese come over we just throw the spears in the air. No need to aim.” He often mixes white kaolin clay with seagull eggs, and uses it to paint stripes on his face while he’s hunting. “Just to let Mother Nature know we’re there.” They don’t do that for magpie geese, though: “They’re so fat, we don’t need luck.” But they always paint the ends of the spears with white paint. For luck? “No.” He grinned. “So we can find them more easily later.”

  He showed me around the gallery. Like many Darwin art shops, it has divided its paintings into two sections—the huge abstract paintings from the Central Desert, mostly in acrylic paints, with plastic as a binder rather than oil,12 and the paintings from the Northern Territory. The former I knew I would find farther south together with—I hoped—the stories of their bright colors. The latter are still mostly in natural ochres as they were when the explorer and ethnologist Sir Baldwin Spencer began to collect them from Arnhemland tribes in around 1912, although today the black, white, red and yellow earths are now more often bound with synthetic glues. The new binders are easier to obtain, and they last longer than orchid juice or seagull egg.

  The northern Aboriginal paintings were originally painted on the cut bark of the stringybark tree (which is more like paper than string) although they are now mainly on canvas—partly for ecological reasons and partly because that is what the buyers want, and because many paintings today tend to be created with the buyers in mind, rather than because they needed to be painted for their own sake. They are covered with patterns made up of diagonal stripes and cross-hatching. The latter technique was apparently brought in by Macassan traders (from the island of Sulawesi which is now part of Indonesia) several hundred years before white settlers arrived on the continent. It is a reminder that Aboriginal culture has never been isolated, but instead has been influenced by (and perhaps has influenced) outside forces from Indonesia, Polynesia, China and elsewhere. It also, curiously, works as an optical illusion, the finely drawn parallel lines creating a shimmer in a similar way to paintings by British twentieth-century artist Bridget Reilly. Howard Morphy, in his book Aboriginal Art, suggested this “quiver”—which looks as if it had been painted with a shaking hand—was deliberate, and a way of making the painting shimmer and appear to move.13

  The northern paintings tend to be highly figurative—showing, for example, the lightning-man Namarrkon, with his halo of electricity and axes stuck in his limbs (as humans stick them into logs), ready to be flung at humans who disobey the law; or the Luma Luma, who couldn’t keep his hands off women, and was killed by the angry men (but not until he had told them his best stories). Others show the animal totems—fish or wallabies or turtles or crocodiles—placed around depictions of the humans and ancestors whose stories they share. When I first saw one of the turtle pictures I thought the diagonal lines around it were simply decoration. But then I spent one long night watching giant turtle eggs being laid on a desert island not far from Darwin—for a research project run by the University of the Northern Territory. And when I watched the mother green-back returning slowly into the ocean after laying eggs on the beach she had been born on forty years earlier, I realized the painting was an uncannily accurate picture of the tracks she made with her flippers.

  Traditional Aboriginal life only makes sense in the context of the time when the Ancestors first arose out of the original mud or sea or sky and brought the first sunrise with them. In English it is articulated as the “Dreaming” or “Dreamtime”—a dream in the sense that it is not set in the past, but in a kind of parallel present universe, rather like the one we operate in while we are asleep. In Aboriginal lore, the Dreaming is the reason for everything that has ever existed and ever will exist. And its stories are told in layers, depending on how ready, or authorized, the listener is to understand them. It is said that your personal Dreaming depends on where your mother was when she first felt you in the womb. The Ancestors who live in that place have given you “anima”—they have animated you—and when you grow up their stories and songs will be in your trust, and you in theirs.

  There is very little that is gentle about the Dreaming; in fact a lot of it is very raunchy. Its stories often involve ancestral animals and people being killed or punished, or they include details of them moving through the land along paths that have become sacred tracks, finding food and allies and enemies. They are epic stories containing (as all the best epics do) universal truths. They are about the law of the land, but they are also the land itself, and only certain people are authorized to know them. So a story or song about, say, the Wawilak sisters—who set out on a journey at the beginning of time, and were swallowed by the Rainbow Serpent when one of them bled into his waterhole—works on several levels. It acts as a reminder of spiritual truths, as a warning to behave according to certain social rules, and as a map. It might—if you have been authorized to decode it—tell you to turn toward the east at this hill to find water, or to stop at that camp to find grubs, and it acts almost as
a key to the country, a way of finding your way through it safely even if you have never been there before. And similarly the material—ochre—with which these stories are passed on in rituals or on caves is not only from the land. It is the land.

  Red ochre has dreaming stories—there are probably as many stories as there are tribes, but most of them seem to hinge on the spilling of blood. Parachilna was said in some stories to be the blood of an ancestral emu, and by others to be the blood of the Marindi dog, which was tricked and killed by a lizard hanging at its throat. Wilga Mia was, according to Warlpiri legend, made by a man who stole it from a deposit of congealed blood. And another story of red ochre from the Calgoorlie area 14 tells the tale of Kirkin, a man with sun-bleached hair, whose beauty dazzled everyone—especially himself.

  At sunrise every morning this matinee idol of the Ancestral Age would stand on a high boulder, comb his golden hair and enjoy all the adulation and attention. But one person did not adore him. A healer called Wyju saw straight through Kirkin and laughed at him for his vanity. Naturally Kirkin hated him for this, and plotted revenge. He told Wyju he wanted to go out hunting with him to find a special bird that was wonderful to eat. The only problem was that a hunter could only catch it by jumping on top of it. The comedy of the chase was cut short by Wyju’s jumping into a trap of spiked spears that Kirkin had set for him. The wicked Kirkin laughed and left Wyju to writhe around the valley, spikes piercing the tender soles of his feet, staining the earth with his blood. And ever since that time, the myth goes, Aboriginals have gone to that valley for red ochre. They have smeared the “blood” of the young ancestral healer on their sons before initiation, to teach them to be good men.