The Red Highway Read online

  All these conflicting beliefs and attitudes can be traced in Kup-ka’s correspondence, and in his memoirs of his first collecting days, which are brief, and vivid, and which paint, for those who seek to follow in his steps, a picture of the artist in the golden moments of his prime – until he seems almost present before the living eye once more, poised, beside some red-dirt airstrip, waiting: tall, and thin, and somewhat out of place.

  As soon as the dry-season months were done and build-up clouds were forming in the sky, Kupka went back to Darwin, where he had a promise to keep. At that time the post-war reconstruction of the city was underway; plans were being drawn up for a new Catholic cathedral to replace the original church, which had been damaged beyond repair in the first Japanese attacks. The resultant building, St Mary’s Star of the Sea, stands today on the corner of Smith and Maclachlan streets. Its walls are made from white por-cellanite stone, cut from the cliffs of Darwin Harbour; its clean lines and parabolic concrete arches lend it the look of a crouching animal. The architect intended his creation to be neo-gothic, though to many eyes it seems like a species of tropical romanesque, with a distinct air of the military bunker about it, and some members of the local congregation needed years to come to terms with the harshness of its design. Many aspects of the new St Mary’s are unusual: it is a war memorial as well as a place of worship; its foundation stone is crystalline metamorphosed rock from the Rum Jungle uranium mine; beneath its floors are little cache burials: blades, spears, muskets, and other emblems of conflict from colonial times. While he was on the Tiwi Islands, Kupka had met Bishop John Patrick O’Loughlin, a man of progressive leanings. The two fell into conversation one night, and the bishop, on learning that Kupka was not only a Catholic, but an artist, made him an unusual proposition. Would he be prepared to paint an Aboriginal Madonna for the new cathedral? This dream had been with Bishop O’Loughlin for many years, ever since his time at the Yule Island mission in Papua, where he had seen how the natives were being encouraged to employ their tribal patterns for ecclesiastical designs. Together with the administrator of the Star of the Sea, Father Frank Flynn, the bishop showed Kupka the cathedral plans and explained what they were hoping for: something, they said, along the lines of the Japanese and Chinese Madonnas that had proved so popular in other missionary outposts of the church.

  Kupka accepted at once, and old-timers in Darwin remember his elation in those days, when he was newly back from the bush and full of stories of adventures, and when his grand ideas were taking shape. He set up a makeshift studio in one of the schoolrooms of St Mary’s Convent, surrounded himself with his haul of carvings and bark paintings, and plunged himself into the task. For months, he had seen beauty and painted nothing; he had been steeped in a world of worship and magic; his own faith had been subtly remade. Each day, after he had made a beginning, the bishop and Father Flynn would visit the studio and check on his progress; they were particularly touched by the solution the artist had found for the problem of the Madonna’s pose. Instead of cradl ing the Christ-child in her lap, the Madonna is carrying her son on her shoulders, in the fashion of Aboriginal women from the Tiwi Islands and the Daly River, with one of her hands clasping the baby by the ankle, and the other resting gently on his hip.

  They were also intrigued by the features of the virgin: she had a noticeable air of self-possession about her. They had asked Kupka to present an idealised version of Aboriginal womanhood, blending aspects from different models at the various Catholic missions he had visited. The Madonna’s face, though, was clearly delineated, and her character seemed precisely caught as well, much like the Madonnas of certain Renaissance artists, who have the look of a living individual – and there has been speculation about her story in church circles ever since: some think Kupka based her features on a Tiwi woman; others say she has the manner and the bearing of a young mother from Port Keats.

  Father Flynn, who prided himself on his sensibility, would often sit with Kupka in the studio, discussing trends in art, and in his memoir, Northern Gateway, he gives an account of one of their talks: “For weeks while painting the picture, Kupka was at a loss to find a suitable background for his finished figures. He experimented with a variety of tropical landscapes featuring ghost gums, pandanus palms – but he was not satisfied with any of these. He told me of this difficulty one day when I was in the studio with him after lunch. Around the walls he had hundreds of examples of native art displayed, which he was classifying during the moments when he rested from painting. I cast my eye around these and with a sweep of my hand I said: ‘Karel, you have the material for your background right here.’” As Flynn explained it, a combination of clan designs from all across the north would enable the Madonna to represent both the Christian dedication of the native peoples and their “new cultural aspirations as well.”

  Kupka absorbed this advice, which he had surely expected Flynn to give, and painted in a detailed background of totemic emblems. They shimmered, and lent the painting the gleam of an Eastern icon – and when it was unveiled in the new cathedral, long after Kupka’s return to Europe, the work was much admired, and even venerated, for several years. Its prominence, though, has passed. Other Aboriginal artworks are more celebrated today, the missionary focus of the church has dissipated, and a decade ago the Madonna was stolen from the cathedral, by an Aboriginal man, as it happens, who tried to ransom her back to the Darwin diocese; she was returned, a little bruised and damaged, and now she hangs, out of harm’s way, high on the east transept wall, where it is hard to see her eyes, or catch the expression on her face.

  Kupka travelled on to Sydney, where he endured a brief celebrity, giving interviews and writing newspaper articles about his explorations. A photographer for the Daily Telegraph took his picture during this stay: it is a strictly composed image, almost heraldic in its tone: Kupka is encased in a thick, stiff herringbone tweed jacket; his face is drawn, his eyes are hooded, they look aside, and down, at an incised spearthrower which he is clasping in his hands: it forms a sharp diagonal. Behind him hang rough barks from Beswick and Groote Eylandt, and geometric-patterned boards from Port Keats. Dominating the scene is a large painting by Midjawu-Midjawu, which shows the thunder spirit, encircled by lightning bolts and grasping a crocodile in one hand. The surface of the bark is oddly accented by faint dabs of mauvish colour; the neck of the spirit-being has been cut off by the photo-frame. Two exhibitions presenting some of the works Kupka had collected on his journeys were organised: at the first, held in the East Sydney Technical College, the opening speech was given by A.P. Elkin, the long-standing professor of anthropology at Sydney University, a former priest and a committed admirer of Darwin’s ideas on human origins. Elkin had already written Aboriginal Men of High Degree, the slender set of lectures that preserves his name today: it is matchless in its sympathetic account of Aboriginal witchdoctors and magic men, their acts, their beliefs and their moments of access to the supernatural domain.

  Pattern, ritual beauty and the quest for hidden insights made a strong appeal to Elkin. A connection was born between Kupka and the professor, who was then already sixty-five years old, and who would serve, for the remaining two decades of his life, as the younger man’s protector and confidant, as a consoling presence, an intimate and faithful correspondent – and it is chiefly thanks to this enduring tie that Kupka’s advance into the shadows can be tracked at all. That night, Elkin spoke with enthusiasm about Kupka’s European imagination and the works he had brought back with him from distant Arnhem Land: how pure they were, in line, and form, and colour: expressions of myth emerging into the present day. The crowd was made up of Kings Cross bohemians, many of whom knew Kupka; but in the gallery, beneath the lights, when his turn came to speak, he seemed a pale, transfigured creature, striking through with his words to some uncharted higher realm. In fact he was spreading before them, in the most tumbled, disordered fashion, the first shards of the quest narrative that was already taking shape inside his head. Un Art à l’Etat Bru
t, which appeared in print in Lausanne only six years later, is a strange production, with its meandering arguments, its retellings of Aboriginal myth, its deployments of theory and its little scene-setting anecdotes. It advances many claims, and yet it has an inert, silent tone, it leaves one with almost nothing; its words feel like the dusty antechamber of a tomb, as if Kupka could not bring himself to disclose the things he knew, or even hint at the lures that drew him on. “The Aborigines of Australia,” he declares, “live in a universe of their own, which has yet to reveal many of its secrets” – and this is the tapestry he chooses as the background for his treatise on the birth of art. Why does art exist? How can we know it? It is not merely the expression of our sense of beauty, nor is it a record of lived events. No: “One must see works of art in order to feel them” – and at once Kupka has touched the murky heart of his enterprise: speech, writing and reading are all very well, he argues, in so far as they help towards understanding – “but they cannot be enough in themselves, for it is indispensable to share the emotion of the artist creator, and this experience is too personal to be conveyed by words alone.”

  Best, in fact, to be an artist, to live the artist’s life, to dwell in primal splendour in the depths of Arnhem Land, the world he chronicles in the most dispassionate, objective style over the next nine richly illustrated chapters, before disclosing to his readers that this path to the stars is gone: for even if “today is the golden age for Aboriginal plastic arts,” they will not endure much longer, their disappearance is inexorably drawing near. The bark paintings may gain the attention of outsiders, they may even become known around the world; but ahead on this path danger lies, and Kupka is himself the agent of this threat. He is the despoiler coming into the garden: whatever he touches will fade and rot, for in his hands he holds the curses of reward and fame. Kupka drives his words on, he plays to the hilt his own appointed role in this story; he sketches the chain of events that his first arrival in Arn-hem Land set inexorably in train. For the prosperity that will follow in his wake is bound to be ephemeral, and, as he writes in his closing pages, “it implies the decline of the art, which, before dying, will become empty decoration, its profound meaning, the basic reason for its existence having disappeared as a result of changes in its creators’ life.”

  Freighted down with such dark conclusions, and guarded by its spare, resistant prose, Un Art à l’Etat Brut received only brief attention before it fell into obscurity, as did a later English version, Dawn of Art, which Kupka himself translated during a research trip back to north Australia in the following year. The book would have been wholly forgotten were it not for its blazing preface, “Main Première,” written for Kupka by André Breton after long talks between the two men.

  The composition of this text can be precisely dated: it was sketched out in Breton’s studio during the days of the Cuban missile crisis, when the master of surrealism was in renunciatory mood. Breton had never quite shaken off the sense of dread that filled him upon the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945; once again, he felt that he was standing on the edge of an abyss, and that “ours is a world in dissolution, shaken by the horror of the passage from one moment to the next.” Indeed he was somewhat puzzled that Kupka had actually returned to Paris from Australia. “How is it,” he inquired, presciently, “that he has not settled there permanently?” For Australia had a poetic magnetism all its own. Breton’s conceptions of the country were a trif le vague: “For ages, children’s curiosity has feasted on the unique nature of the land’s fauna – marsupials and monotremes – which seems expressly created to strengthen the idea or the illusion of a lost world.” But this did not stop him from admiring the barks, or developing a thought about the patterns underlying them in nature – a vertiginous thought, that even today sets the mind free to roam. “Their textures,” wrote Breton, “from the tightest to the most supple, correspond so perfectly to the restrained yet very rich range of colours that the immediate pleasure they afford is liable to be confused with that given by shells from that part of the world – cones, volutes, an infinity of shapes. It is as if these paintings borrow the entire panoply of the shells: even the underlying glow of mother-of-pearl is not lacking.”

  Before returning to Darwin and the north, Kupka, in gratitude, gave Breton one of the most sombre works in his collection, a large bark by Paddy Compass Namatbara, depicting two Maam figures – and for several decades those two spirit beings hung in their contorted splendour, like lonely emissaries at a foreign court, alongside Hopi masks and masterworks of high modernism, on the walls of Breton’s studio in the Rue Fontaine.

  II

  Midway through the build-up season of 2005, after a year spent in the war zones of the Middle East, I came back to Darwin and set about exploring the city, on the assumption that I would quickly be able to re-acquaint myself with my old surrounds. Each morning, in those first days of my homecoming, I would head off on long walks down the winding pathways of the Esplanade, towards the harbour, the wharves and trawler berths, always varying my route slightly and feeling brief stabs of pain every time I came across some new building or construction site that broke the pattern of my memories – something which happened often, for Darwin in those months was in the grip of a speculative development frenzy without any parallel even in its history of constant annihilations and rebirths. Elevated tropical houses and their untidy, luxuriant gardens were being bulldozed on all sides, and tall, angular structures, with metallic facings and pastel highlights, rose further skywards in their place each day, until the old town centre, with cranes and steel skeletons of half-finished buildings reaching high above its jumble, resembled, in the dawn’s hazy light, nothing so much as a vast offshore oil platform, its drilling rigs and superstructure suspended far above a murky, unmoving ocean.

  In the daytime, I found myself staring for hours on end at this unfamiliar scene, stupefied by the scale of the transformations taking place. But when evening came, and the humidity began to fall, it was time for more extended forays, and I would drive out, windows wound down so the noises and the smells of the streets could wash over me. Sometimes these excursions lasted for hours, or all through the night, and I ended up, hardly knowing how I had got to my destination, at distant outposts like Gunn Point or Fogg Dam. More often, though, it was the less glamorous parts of town, which were still largely unchanged, that attracted me: the wide, palm-lined avenues past Casuarina, running beyond the hospital, or the mazy and ill-kept streets of Moulden, beside the lagoons and winding swamplands of East Arm. On trips like these, I was struck repeatedly by the inconspicuous signs that pointed out buildings and remains of significance from World War II, when large numbers of American and Australian troops were stationed in the north, and Darwin, almost emptied of its civilian population, served as the front-line base for the Pacific campaign. Many of these structures had already decayed almost to nothing: rough access tracks led out to scrub blocks with no more than a scatter of grey concrete pads breaking the line of the bush. Others, though, had been restored with punctilious attention to detail, and garlanded with elaborate information boards, in an attempt to make them come alive – but the effect was quite different: the sense of time’s passage had been stripped from them, they felt like stage sets or counterfeits. More distressing still were the sites that had been wholly reclaimed by the harbour’s mangroves, or those that had been built over and were now lying, like ancient archaeological deposits, beneath access roads and recreational fishing ramps. I would come away from explorations to such vanished spots all the more convinced that the North offers us no permanence, nothing to hold on to, that our presence in these parts is only a flicker, a quick disruption within a grander, circling flow of growth and fall.

  And it must have been an intuition of this kind, as much as the spectacle of Darwin’s heart being razed to rubble and rebuilt again at lightning speed before my eyes, that prompted me one afternoon some days after my return to make a trip out to the military museum, a low-slung bu
ilding which I had never before visited, despite its prominent position at the very tip of East Point reserve. This peninsula forms the furthest extension of the claw-like outcrop upon which Darwin is somewhat precariously poised, and a tranquil spirit seems to mantle it. The wildlife there is docile and rare creatures abound: fruit doves, rainbow pittas, even stone curlews, those birds of grace, almost always to be seen in solemn poses, immobile, sheltered by the deep shade of mahogany trees. At the centre of the reserve stand the sheds and lean-tos of a riding club: its stable-blocks are full of retired thoroughbreds, their bodies broken down and pulverised by the rigours of racing on the northern circuit’s dusty tracks. Opposite, in the bushland, roam bands of agile wallabies, trusting animals, whose simplicity is sometimes ill-repaid, for every once in a while the butchered carcass of one of their number is found at some old campfire by the park rangers, newspaper headlines condemn the murder, and the Aboriginal long-grassers who drift through the reserve shoulder the blame.

  East Point is a place of constant comings and goings, yet I have often been struck by the brevity of the visits the locals make, as if there were some aspect of the reserve that acts to drive them away – and it may be that they are responding to a certain mood from the past that lingers there, a tone of agitation and unrest: for in the days of the Japanese attacks on Darwin, the Point served as the defensive front-line, it was “Port War,” its roads were lined with military camps, gun turrets and strong-points stretched along its coastal cliffs, and a boom net to keep out enemy submarines reached almost six kilometres across the harbour from its furthest-jutting spit of land.