Some Discussion of Wartuma Tjungurrayi painting: “The Trial”

The Trial, 1972

The painting titled “The Trial,” is by Wartuma Tjungurrayi – also known as Charley Tjaruru or Charley Tarawa – names he acquired more in his association with non-Indigenous people. This painting, as a number of scholars have noted (Johnson 2009) and I agree, is a painting about the place known as Tjitururrnga, a bit west of the Western Australia border. To understand this painting, I think we can benefit from an approach that engages particular works as part of a larger oeuvre, allowing us to interpret symbols and differing strategies of visualizing.

Like my colleague Vivien Johnson, I regard this painting as unusual example of Wartuma’s range as a painter and a communicator through visual means. This is a place with which Tjungurrayi was very closely identified, as it is his conception Dreaming, the place from which his spirit comes. He painted it often (I recorded 14 different paintings of the perhaps 30 he painted between 1973-75), and in many different ways, sometimes stressing one or another feature of the site and its associated Dreaming stories, what we would call its foundational mythology. The place itself has a variety of features in its rocky formation within the Dover Hills, a rock hole, cave, and other rock formations. In addition to the presence of water seasonally, the location is known for the presence of the edible yarla (pitjara) tuber plant and the witjirrki (wild fig tree). However, most significant in Wartuma’s many paintings is what he identified as Kuwarla or Nyinnga, Pintupi words for “frost,” “ice,” and the mist arising from the ground on cold days. Some commentators have referred to this figure as “the Ice Man,” but the title of Wati G’wala (Wati Kuwarla) applied to one painting, 1989, says this explicitly. This Kuwarla, a presence from the ancestral Dreaming, is Wartuma’s own Dreaming, it is – in a word – himself. An additional and significant further presence is the story of the Ninu (rabbit-eared bandicoot) and Mingatjurru – the golden bandicoot. Some paintings articulate this story in their iconography, a story in which Ninu, cold and tired, sees Mingatjurru with a firestick and asks for fire. Mingatjurru refuses, denying having fire while hiding the firestick in its anus. Denied the fire, Ninu moves onward for a bit, before returning to Tjitururrnga and “getting tired” and going into the ground as a permanent presence. One of the members of Wartuma’s family, a Nungurrayi woman, he said, was the living Pintupi who was born from that Dreaming.

   “The Trial”, however, follows a distinctive visual approach. The original documentation, from Pat Hogan, who ran the Stuart Art Centre in Alice Springs in 1972, is unquestionably influenced by the translation between Pintupi and Western European culture, as the terms of “trial,” “executioner” and so on suggest. What I do know is that one feature of Tjitururrnga, which is restricted to access for non-initiated women and children, is a distinctive rockpile outside the area of the waterhole. This, I was told, is a place from which custodians of the site may send punishment to those regarded as having transgressed norms and rights. The painting’s central black circle surrounds a set of concentric circles, a form often used by Pintupi in ceremonies, body decoration, rock art, and sand drawings, but which in this case is identified with something trapped inside, surrounded and enclosed. At the top and bottom, the two lines in white of semicircles, are men (“elders,” according to Hogan), sitting in “council,” in judgment of the transgressor. In other depictions of Tjitururrnga, Wartuma sometimes explained the iconography of “rocks” or “hills” (puli) around the edges of the painting as “all the men.” We must understand that the painting is not only a representation of a story but also of a place whose features were formed by the story and whose features, in another sense, also tell the story for those who would understand.

The figure trapped in the black circle, perhaps meant to indicate a cave but certainly an enclosure (and cave is identified with the placed), was identified by Hogan as the victim, and the lines extending out from the circles to the edge of the black enclosure, were identified as the fingers of the spirits of the dead…. It is, minimally, in this telling, a story of death and fear.

Thus told, the painting resonates with three other very significant paintings of Wartuma’s, very different in form from this one, and in this I follow Vivien Johnson’s essay

(2009). The first of these, also documented by Hogan and Bardon, was a work titled “Fear” or “Medicine Story.” The latter translation would fit with an interpretation of “sorcery” or magical death, which was usually what Pintupi meant by reference to “medicine story.” In that painting, black and white lines across the surface “represent the cold breath [of Kuwarla] and a motif of concentric circle with radiating lines represents the “spirit fingers of this ancestor.”

A second somewhat similar painting, emphasizing coldness, death, fear also differs formally from “The Trial,” emphasizing the cold wind.

In “The Trial,” which emphasizes the “sentence of death” and the cave enclosure, we are still in the presence of Kuwarla, whose “cold” is known to cut the feet of those who walk on the stones, and whose mist seems to raise Tjitururrnga up on the horizon in a sort of visual trick. The white dots that fill the space around the black circle are likely “frost” and “mist.” Frequently, Wartuma spoke of the cold mist rising in the morning. Is there an association between the coldness and mist of Kuwarla at Tjitururrnga and death? Ninu, the rabbit eared bandicoot, is said to have died, grown tired, and stopped in the ground at Tjitururrnga forever – after failing to get fire. Hogan identified the central concentric circles inside the black circle as the victim, but my own imagination also lets me think it might be the punishing spirit itself, not yet released, but kept in the cave….

The three alternate Tjitururrnga paintings I mentioned, depart from the style of “The Trial,” and only a few of them emphasize the sense of “enclosure” so prominent in The Trial. By 1973, other templates of representation of these stories for two-dimensional surfaces were becoming dominant, even when the items of the story remained the same. Some of the resulting paintings continued to communicate a sense of enclosure, but were often more able to indicate the range of features of the story and their interrelationship.

Sometimes, the form of the painting rather secretively resembled the shape of sacred objects and forms used by the ancestral figures. 

All of these were options for the visual representation of a place and its stories.  However, I have noticed in the much later work of his daughter, Eileen Napaltjarri, an emphasis visually on the enclosed space of the Tjitururrnga site and waterhole.

Water Stories

Children’s Water Dreaming (Version 2) [formerly Water Story], 1972

Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi’s “Children’s Water Story (Version 2), 1972” has always been of interest to me. Shorty was one of my closest friends when I was a PhD student doing research from 1973-75, and I spent many hours with him when he was painting. This painting was done at least a year before I knew him, when he was still living at Papunya and within the first year of the acrylic painting movement’s start.

   This painting was done under Geoff Bardon’s direction to paint work that was non-ceremonial – thus its title (created by Bardon) as “Children’s Water Dreaming.” This painting has some documentation available in the Sotheby’s auction catalogue of 1998 (as “Water Story 1972”), as well as that published in the catalog for Icons of the Desert (Benjamin 2009). It is (61 x 44 cm) painted with synthetic polymer on composition board. Dick Kimber, Alice Springs historian and long-time expert on Papunya painting, wrote in Sotheby’s catalog that this was “probably Lalpinga (a mishearing of Lampintjanya), the artist’s birth place. In this painting, the central roundel represents a big water hole with small creeks running into the central water hole” (Sotheby’s catalog 1998: 37). Further, Bardon’s original notes (see Benjamin 2009: 121) suggest the underlying black cross motif could be a sacred object, an item from Pintupi men’s ceremonial life, and thus associated with the Ancestral activities at this place. In a recent conversation I had with surviving Papunya Tula painters, the design was identified as “hairstring” (puturru)– perhaps a spinning of hair string on a stick as suggested by the circular shaping of the lines. This is a common way of disguising in public the presence of a sacred object by presenting its more mundane derivative, but the mundane derivative itself iconically resembles the circular patterns of the rippling water.

   Perhaps I can offer a note on my use of “mundane” here. Although Bardon asked the men to paint images and forms that were not ceremonial and available for anyone to see – in light of concerns about transgressing restrictions on showing sacred knowledge – in fact, some (or even many) of the early Papunya paintings contain images or references to stories that some custodians thought should not be shown. The Papunya painters themselves imagined that their paintings would circulate outside Papunya, far away from the Aboriginal domain, and were unlikely to be seen by members of the community who should not have access to them. That judgment, as I have discussed elsewhere, proved inadequate (Myers 2002, 2012). This became a problem for the painting movement and a spur to change how they approached the revelation of knowledge, but it is also clear that the aesthetics of doubling are so powerfully part of imaging in Pintupi practice that it is difficult to erase the restrictive reference entirely.

Obfuscation, or misdirection, is a central component of the management of different audiences, or publics, for the work as it circulated far beyond its production.³

   More than in most works, there is a kind of doubling, an “everywhen,” explored in this painting. It is itself a subject, an image, that Shorty painted repeatedly – in this case, version 2 of the very same. Lampintjanya is a place to which Shorty is connected to the ancestral activity that created the place and its shape, with the sacred object hidden in the painting as part of the form of the ancestral events. The semicircular patterns are identified by Bardon’s notes as “water running in the creek.” At one level, this is simply the structure of the landscape here, left behind by events of The Dreaming. Lampintjanya is a claypan, with water running down from a rocky hill above down into the claypan itself. But, as Bardon explained, at the time of the painting, Central Australia had been deluged with rain. Facebook postings by Aboriginal friends in Central Australia have reminded me of just how claypans and formerly dry waterbeds look when filled by water. Just that dimension of the present of painting is incorporated into the painting itself – where the black lines not only delineate the creeks but the semicircular patterns reflect the patterns of waves blown by the wind on the full claypan. Quite rightly, then, Benjamin and Weislogel describe this pattern as like “the radiating waves when a stone is dropped in a waterhole.” (121). Lampintjanya as Ancestral place, formed by the actions of The Dreaming and its marks, is also the lived place of flooding water.

   What we are seeing in Shorty’s paintings is not just any Aboriginal person’s perception of a landscape. Rather, for Pintupi people, a painting is (or should be) a particular, specified and identified person’s perception of his/her places, showing what they are entitled to manage or give. Such a perspective transforms one’s sense of the landscape as an undifferentiated scene for vision to a socially organized and “patchwork.”

   To go further, the experience of the landscape is organized through the social relations and activities – a practical logic — in which people engage it. Shorty Lungkarta’s “water story” paintings – of which this is one — are useful to discuss in light of his broader engagement with the land.⁴ The first point to recognize is that Shorty painted his country, which was most distinctively an area stretching south from Lake Macdonald, the general vicinity of Lampintjanya. Second, one gets an idea of what his country evokes for him through knowledge of his life-story, particularly in how he relates the places he visits – including their economically useful qualities, who he saw and lived with there, who died there, and so on. These points of contact offer the listener the sense of a landscape redolent with histories of movement, histories of residence, histories of resource exploitation and other uses, of burials and initiations, of conceptions – of living people. Such are the activities that constitute his relationship to and experience of the places as well as his rights to represent them. First and foremost, in the paintings, one must recognize his right to show them; second, his knowledge of them.⁵

   A significant feature of his discussions of movements involves the maintenance of a variety of activities with others around the landscape (from his and other countries) especially in the autumn. This is a time when the rains fall and allow travel along pinangu (small, temporary surface waters) in small groups. Many of these temporary sources were claypans and rock holes. It is also a time in which some relief is experienced from the tension of living in larger groups around the few permanent waters (yinta) during summer, at Walukirritjinya and

Turpalnga in the Turner Hills or further south at Pirmalnga. In autumn, Shorty would likely be found moving at some distance from these main, permanent waters, often to areas with large claypans – such as Lampintjanya, Kanamarapantjinya and Yiitjiringinya. At these claypans, supplies of the seed plant mungilpa (Tecticornia verrucosa) offered an attraction to gather together in relatively large groups including people from distant countries, especially as autumn makes way for colder time (yalta). In the cold winter months, the lizards were hunted in their burrows, largely by firing off the grass cover.

Lampintjanya, for example, is a claypan (maluri) in which mungilpa grew after the summer rains, becoming ripe and available in large quantities to support visitors and large encampments for ceremonies increased sociality in the winter. It is associated, therefore, with such experiences of sociality, intensification – marked by the visits of kin and friends from distant countries. Such resource areas and times were anticipated and scheduled as the sites in which gatherings (for initiation or other ceremony) organized by the logic of social relations could be articulated with other dimensions of people’s movements as bodies in the landscape. Mere mention of the place associates it with this time determined by the practicalities of food and water. Water rippling on the surface surely calls to mind these histories. As he once returned in the yearly round to this place, so also, he returns to it in painting, reiterating in various versions of “Water Story” or under other titles, his experience of the place, its stories, its relics.

³ I want to thank Howard Morphy for helping me find a way to suggest that Bardon’s intervention, around the concept of “secrecy,” does not do justice to the complexity of the Pintupi system of knowledge and representation in its articulation with the external world, and the intersection of the different domains of existence: the “noumenal” and the “phenomenal,” Tjukurrpa and yurti. Strictly speaking, then, I prefer to draw attention to the ways in which the paintings connect different domains of existence and how the perspective shifts from the individual frame to broader social frames connecting people to land and Dreaming. 

⁴ A fuller account of Shorty Lungkarta’s life and travels can be found in my monograph (Myers 1986:71-102 ). Shorty is identified in that book by a pseudonym, as Maantja. 

⁵ This discussion draws on a longer essay about Shorty (see Myers 2009). 

Caves: Interior Space

Big Cave Dreaming with Ceremonial Object [formerly Untitled], 1972

   However, the perspective clash – or pleasure – of doubling is not limited to this painting. For me, the aesthetics of “doubling” animates another kind of painting as well, such as the juxtaposition of interior and exterior spaces of caves. The exhibitions of early Papunya paintings over the last several years have offered an opportunity as still unexamined – the representation of interior space. Mick Namarari’s painting “Big Cave Painting with Ceremonial Object”, painted in late 1972, is a stunning work. Again, Bardon’s notes provide the basis of analysis, which we can find not only through Bardon and Bardon (2004: 444) but also in Benjamin and Weislogel (2009: 137) who had access to the original notes for the painting. The painting’s upper half represents the landscape as a cliff, patterns of rocks in the hill, bush tucker in the terrain and sacred objects, each with their own specific decorative pattern – presumably associated with the Ancestral Dreaming figures and their bodies. The other half of the painting exposes the cave as an enclosure – embodied in patterns and strata of rocks – surrounding an elongated ceremonial object inside the cave. On one side, semi circles represent “ceremonial men” arranged in order, while on the other side is the meandering line identified with a small flow of water. Thus, we have an outside/above and an inside/below, one way to represent an interior space, the physicality of the landscape, capturing something of the distinctive phenomenology of this place.

   But what place might it be? Bardon does not identify it. However, the description of this as a big cave and the form of the ceremonial object allows for some speculation. Mick Namarari was one of the custodians of the very important, Tingarri Dreaming site of Mitukatjirri, a cave painted over the years by other Pintupi custodians but very strongly connected to Mick Namarari and his brother-in-law Turkey Tolson (who painted famously its very closely associated Ilingawurrngawurrnga as “Straightening Spears”).⁶ Mitukatjirri is a site on the path of the Tingarri men travelling north from Tjukula – eventually to their demise. Mitukatjirri is itself a site of ritual performance of Tingarri ceremony, and one – in fact – that Pintupi men had recently visited as part of a salvage ethnographic film project. As I understand it, Roger Sandall (with Jeremy Long) filmed Pintupi men’s ritual performance at Mitukatjirri (which was then far from their residence at Papunya). This performance took place at least partly inside the cave, as the ritual prescribes, and involved the construction of a tall, decorated ritual object involved in the revelation to young initiates. This film was never edited into a film, but the visit and performance occurred before this painting was made. The painting incorporates this ritual experience, of moving from the outside to the inside, but no doubt also very recently mobilized and an event that had become very rare for the Pintupi who, at that time, were far removed from their own country. The revisit to Mitukatjirri must have been a moving experience, as young initiates had its mysteries revealed to them.

   Mitukatjirri is, of course, a place where people lived, a place of bush tucker and residence, water hole and resting place. Its outside, if you will, with rock face and cliffs gives way in the painting to another view, from inside the cave. This doubling, like the doubling of Shorty Lungkarta’s painting of the “Water Story,” does not subtract one exposure from another but combines them, overlays them, finds some way to put the different exposures together – a kind of everywhen.

⁶ Another painting in the collection, by Shorty Lungkarta Tjungurrayi – “Tingarri Ceremony at Ilingawurrngawurrnga, 1974,” represents another stylistic take on Tingarri gatherings for the site very closely connected to Mitukatjirri. Unlike Turkey Tolson’s rendition with its repeated numerous lines of spears, Lungkarta’s painting deploys the iconography of circles (for ceremonial grounds) and semicircles for the numerous men sitting at the ceremony.