The Red Highway Read online

  THE RED HIGHWAY

  The Red Highway

  NICOLAS ROTHWELL

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd

  Level 5, 289 Flinders Lane

  Melbourne Victoria 3000 Australia

  email: [email protected]

  http://www.blackincbooks.com

  © Nicolas Rothwell 2009

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Rothwell, Nicolas.

  The red highway / Nicolas Rothwell.

  ISBN: 9781863954211 (pbk.)

  A823.3

  Internal photos: Peter Eve

  Book design: Thomas Deverall

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  FOR AA

  omnia tu nostrae tempora laetitiae

  Contents

  EXILE

  BELIEF

  VISION

  RETURN

  Exile

  I

  IN LATE JUNE 1956, TOWARDS MIDDAY, after a swift flight through dry-season skies, the Czech artist Karel Kupka clambered from a prop-plane at Milingimbi airstrip and stepped for the first time into the elusive world of Arnhem Land.

  This arrival, which would have life-changing consequences for Kupka, and open a new chapter in Western appreciation of Aboriginal cultures, had been long dreamed of and long planned. Kupka, by then, had already lived in self-imposed exile from his own country for more than a decade. He had made himself into a virtual Frenchman, a Parisian, an aesthetic scholar. He was in pursuit of knowledge, but knowledge of a subtle, momentous kind, almost beyond the reach of words, although he spent weeks on end seeking to pin down the subject of his investigations, and years later, after protracted struggles to reduce his findings to a single statement, he would die with this formula upon his lips. That morning, though, his quest was just beginning, he was full of intuitions and excitement, and the mood is evident in his writings from those days, which are alive with a restrained joy and a sense of impending fulfilment.

  Kupka was born in the last year of World War I, in Prague, the capital of the new-formed Czechoslovak Republic, into a family with strong connections among the intelligentsia. The cubist painter Frantisek Kupka, well known in Central Europe, was a relation of his; his cousin Jiri became a prominent writer during communist times. During his schooldays, Kupka was dispatched by his art-loving father on brief study trips to Paris, where he began painting in his turn and felt the first stirrings of a lifelong interest in prehistoric man. With this background, his pronounced gift for languages and his liberal education, Kupka’s path ahead in life seemed smooth, and he was already well into his studies at Charles University when, abruptly, a shadow many of his fellow countrymen had long dreaded fell. The German army invaded and annexed Czechoslovakia; the occupiers shut down the university; there were protests; Kupka took part; they were harshly suppressed. His father was able to find him a mid-level post at Rolnicka, an agricultural insurance firm, where he survived the wartime years, painting, from time to time, small, sentimental landscapes of peasant huts.

  It was only late in 1945, well after the liberation of Prague, that Kupka was able to devise a strategy of return to a country that had grown sweeter in his mind with each new year of absence. He enlisted in an Army unit bound for Le Havre, transferred to a post in the Czechoslovak embassy in Paris and started to live a straitened life. He began a doctorate, rather fittingly on aspects of the law of international transport; but most of his time was spent at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he worked in the studio of the muralist Jean Souverbie.

  When Kupka turned to those days, in conversations with visitors in years to come, he passed over the politics of the time, and the communist takeover in Prague, which confirmed him in his choice of adopted home. Instead, he would remember his creative exploits: the watercolours he dashed off in the Place du Tertre for passers-by; the elaborate paintings he exhibited in the yearly salons for young artists; his translation of Fernande Olivier’s memoir of her time with Picasso. Some of his early Paris sketches survive: they are executed in pastel, with a tell-tale preference for deep hues of mauve or indigo, and a tendency towards a fragmentation of the visual field, for he had already come under the influence of the Left Bank avant-garde. Among the artists he most admired was André Breton, the master-thinker of the surrealists, and a man keenly receptive to the appeal of tribal art. Often, Kupka would make visits to Breton’s studio on the Rue Fontaine, where works from Africa and Oceania were hung alongside paintings from the surrealist circle, and it was under Breton’s tutelage that he began haunting the more obscure galleries and museums of Paris, above all the labyrinthine and silent Musée de l’Homme, at that time the centre of French anthropology. Impelled, doubtless, by ideas from these interlocking artistic and academic realms, in the mid-winter of 1951 Kupka left the tiny garret he had just bought on the Rue Saint-Sulpice and set off on a journey whose true purpose remains, even now, a touch obscure, although the large-scale collection of artworks was never far from the forefront of his mind.

  At Marseille he boarded a flying boat of Trans Oceanic Airways bound for Australia, a continent he had provisionally identified as the best place to find “evidence furnished directly by people whose living conditions and way of life most closely approach those of the first man.” But international air travel, in those days, was a slow, haphazard affair: the Star of Australia put down for a brief technical stop in Malta. Two days later, during take-off, it crashed and promptly foundered in Valletta Harbour. The passengers and crew escaped and swam to safety. Kupka sat alone on the rocky shore: all he had left was his passport and a sheaf of low-denomination traveller’s cheques – and it was hard, for a man of his strikingly imaginative cast of mind, not to feel at once that he had been spared from death for urgent tasks, and also that he had, in some sense, died and been reborn in the stricken aircraft, and that his journey to Australia spelled the beginning of a new and deeper life.

  Two months passed before he was able to reach Melbourne and make a set of quick visits to the other capitals of south-east Australia. While there, he met various members of the cultural class, including the painter Carl Plate and the photographer Axel Poignant, who had been strongly affected by a recent journey into Arnhem Land. These men helped refine Kupka’s views, and guided him towards the few collections of Aboriginal art then on public display.

  He returned to Paris transfixed by the memory of what he had seen: painted shields, rough barks, carved stones, sculpted heads. He had sketched and documented them in detail; he was sure he would be able to “transmit his emotions” on first encountering such works to the museum curators of Western Europe – and so, indeed, it proved. His travels brought him to the city of Basel, where he formed a close connection with the director of the Museum für Völkerkunde, Professor Alfred Bühler. This was the first in a series of professional bonds with father-figures that guided Kupka in his most productive years: the relationship between the two men, which is traced in the museum’s records, was one of serene, unbroken trust. It was founded on a broad conception of European culture as their shared patrimony, and on elaborate ideas about creativity and the evolution of art. At that time the Basel Museum possessed only a handful of north-Australian bark paintings, which had been picked up in the field decades before by an intrepid entomologist. Bühler commissioned Kupka to make a journey to Arnhem Land and create there, in concert with the artists of th
e country, a collection that would catch the spirit of that world.

  Such was the mission that had brought Kupka to Milingimbi Island, a place that seems always to hover between the sea and sky. It lies just off the mainland, north-west of the Glyde River mouth; its attendant reefs and sandbars slip away into the Arafura Sea. For centuries it has been a realm of meetings and exchange. Macassan trepang fishers made camp on its shores; Aboriginal clans from all along the coastline gathered there for negotiations; and in the 1920s the Methodist Overseas Mission placed its first regional outpost on the island’s eastern edge, close by an established Macassan well – and it was the mission’s staff who met Kupka that morning at the airstrip and drove him through the stringy-bark forests, past the swamps and salt-flats, to their little community of mud-brick homes. Nearby, along the shore, beneath tall tamarind trees, the native people kept their camps, segregated by family and by clan affiliations. Visitors of any kind were infrequent then at such remote mission posts; no one had ever seen or heard of an art collector.

  Kupka set to work. Within a few weeks he had forged close understandings with two Aboriginal men of high authority, both clan leaders, Djawa and Dawidi. These two became the central artists in his collections, all through his life he referred to them as his brothers – and their association survives in ghostly form today, for on trips out to Milingimbi Island I have often heard young children on the beachfront singing, in the most elegant of Parisian accents, stray snatches of French folk songs or nursery rhymes, imparted to their grandparents decades before by Kupka as part of some elaborate musical exchange.

  Djawa, whom Kupka liked to describe as the “chief” or “headman” of Milingimbi, held court beside the boys’ nursery, under the giant tamarind: the spot is named Rulku, after the gall bladder of the barramundi, which serves as the totem for the area. Even by the austere standards of the Yolngu tribes of north-east Arnhem Land, Djawa was a grave, impressive figure, much given to explaining the fine points of clan politics, and strongly involved in the domain of the secret-sacred – a realm that seemed ever-present on Milingimbi in those days, so routinely were ceremonies performed beyond the mission compound: initiations and funerals, and rituals for the morning star.

  Kupka also spent much time at the next-door camp with Daw-idi, who was younger and painted in a style rich with signs and symbols, almost a “painted literature,” ideally suited for decoding by the Western eye. These men filled his thoughts: he studied them, he watched them performing their mortuary dances, he took down their every word in his notebooks, and so much of them sank into him that they often seem strangely present in his ramifying, understated prose. There is a lovely, well-known photograph by Kupka, which hints at the bond between him and his subjects: he called it The Artists’ Workshop. The painters are all sitting cross-legged, bent over, drawing fine lines with tiny brushes on the surfaces of their barks. To one side of the group, a young boy looks up, smiling at the camera; on the other, an old man, his head resting on his hand, his face reflective, gazes up. Sunlight bleaches the background: the blurred leaves at the top of the image look oddly like encroaching, all-consuming tongues of fire.

  For much of that dry season, Kupka carried out his interviews at Milingimbi, questioning, collecting, tuning his mind to the thoughts of his informants – and he even made an early stab at capturing those experiences in English, in a brief, emotive piece “by Karel Kupka of Paris,” which was printed in a missionary magazine: “I shall always remember vividly my stay at Miling-imbi, which was not only the most interesting but also the happiest time I had spent for years.” He allows his thoughts to roam across the various challenges before the missions, and the role of ritual, and Christian religion, in Arnhem Land, he even touches on the artistic upsurge underway, before he finds himself retelling the mythological stories he had encountered: creation sagas, apocalyptic, full of deaths and re-animations, the flow of living matter between worlds.

  Soon Kupka began making wider forays, criss-crossing the far north, calling in at other missions; he travelled as far afield as Yirrkala, Port Keats and the Tiwi Islands, perfecting his distinctly romantic response to the Australian landscape as he went: “The continent itself belongs to the earth’s past. It is a land of strange beauty, so unlike other continents that the visitor sometimes wonders if he has not landed on another planet.” Every feature was ambiguous, and Kupka takes a quiet delight in the country’s failure to conform with European patterns: “Immense expanses generally end in a perfectly straight horizon. There are few mountains, and those that do exist are usually isolated. The ground is often rocky; the shallow rivers, when not dry, irrigate an apparently sparse vegetation.” The animals, too, were anachronistic; they were survivors, for the most part devoid of threatening force, and sometimes engaged in irrational alliances with man. The snakes, for instance, though represented by 150 species, from the most harmless to the deadliest, were “passably discreet,” and it even seemed to him that “they had a tacit agreement with their human neighbours, for they tactfully avoid each other.”

  After the first few of these side trips, a key turned in Kupka’s heart. He had pictured himself as an outsider, carrying out profound investigations – investigations which, as he rather tactlessly informed the missionaries, he would not be able to couch in terms simple enough to explain to them. He aspired, initially, to a kind of severe truthfulness; he mistrusted the subjective eye, he was a foe of individual judgment. “The appreciations of an observer would be superfluous, if not actually undesirable,” he wrote, in a stern note of reminder to himself. But once he had become more familiar with the far reaches of the Northern Territory, his thoughts about the travels he was making began to shift.

  “I refuse to call my journeys ‘exploration.’ There is a peculiar attraction in the Australian bush, the outback, in spite of its bareness – which in any case is amply offset by the friendliness of its inhabitants, whatever their origins.” No longer was he the solitary man of science. “I was warmly received and greatly helped, not only by the Aborigines but also by the white settlers, missionaries and government officials, who took an interest in a lone traveller virtually without baggage.” Without the support of the welfare branch of the Territory administration and the backing of the different religious missions, as he well knew, his expeditions would have come to nothing. In a brief note glancing back on his experiences – he published it only years later – Kupka expresses all he longed to find, and all he had been afraid of, in Arnhem Land: “Any fears I may have had of being considered as an intruder were soon forgotten: I was indeed looked on as a friend.”

  By now his idea of his task was gaining greater definition. He had travelled sufficiently to realise that the north was home to many styles of art. He knew he was the only Western artist, fully alive to the trends and experiments of the modern avant-garde, who had even seen these works. He had just paid his first trip to Croker Island, a slender spine of swamp and stringy-bark that juts out northwards from the Cobourg Peninsula: it holds a number of the region’s most potent sacred sites. At Croker’s Methodist Mission, Kupka met two artists from the mainland, Paddy Compass Namatbara and Jimmy Midjawu-Midjawu, who painted sorcery figures: writhing entities with twining hands and deformed bodies, alive with fearful energy. Often the creatures they depicted were Maam spirits, members of a spectral Dreamtime race, dead beings which could become dangerous if not properly appeased – for Namatbara and Midjawu-Midjawu were marrkitj, or witch-doctors, and were constantly engaged in acts of healing magic. Their art embodied this hidden field of knowledge, and Kupka was at once drawn to it and troubled by its intensity. He knew that of all the works he had collected, these figures, which teetered on the brink of the grotesque and seemed to inhabit the realm of gargoyles, or creatures from a hallucinogenic dream, would prove the most beautiful to European eyes.

  At this point in Kupka’s progress, near the end of his first, triumphant collecting season, it seems a simple thing to imagine the thoughts, and plans,
and hopes that enticed him on, that led him to believe there was a role for him in northern Australia and in the continued pursuit and explanation of works he saw as mirrors, reflecting from the dawn of time. He told himself that he was searching for the origins of art, its motive forces, the nature of the need that it was striving to fulfil. Such was his overarching idea, but it was also a compulsion: what was original, and pure, and untainted by the mark of Western culture could have redemptive force – could allow him to gaze beyond the veils of the world he knew. For Kupka was in the field at a time when Europe’s place as the emblem of beauty was newly overthrown: the continent was shattered, its cities had been bombed and broken; his own homeland was ruled by a collective of bleak dictators. What could be more natural than to turn from this spectacle and put one’s trust in an art free from the chains of history and besetting influences: an art that blew straight from the realm of myth to the viewing eye? There was an element in Kupka’s personality that welcomed this ill-concealed revolt against his tradition: in place of his own fine pastels and insipid sketches, he would give prominence to works of primal splendour; he would uncover them, and understand them, and – since he was one of those for whom self-effacement is a form of transcendence – he would ensure his own part in their revelation was soon eclipsed. Even as these thoughts unfurled inside him, though, he was also in the grip of an urge that gained a stronger hold on him with every day: it was the collector’s disease, that unsleeping impulse to acquire, to classify, to create a microcosm where order and pattern can be shored up against the world. In his trips through Arnhem Land, this was the instinct that came to dominate, and to goad him into spells of frenzied commissioning and buying, as if he expected every day of painting at the missions to be the last. Here was the core of Kupka’s attraction to the Aboriginal domain of north Australia, even if he could not yet confess this to himself: like many of his contemporaries, he suspected that it was passing, that it was vanishing before his eyes, and that he was the last man who would see it as it truly was.