Painting the desert
Katrina Lobley brushes up on Central Australia’s art scene – and comes away with a one-off souvenir
Here’s something I never thought I’d say: I’m now the proud owner of a Namatjira watercolour. The horizontal painting features a ghost gum standing sentinel over a semi-arid landscape. Behind the tree are the unmistakeable undulations of the West MacDonnell Ranges. The picture, however, wasn’t painted by Albert. Instead, it’s from the hand of his greatgranddaughter, Kerrianne Namatjira. I fell head over heels with it while flipping through a rack of small works at Iltja Ntjarra Many Hands Art Centre. This not-for-profit centre in Alice Springs supports Indigenous watercolour artists from the Hermannsburg School. Here, students draw inspiration from Albert Namatjira, a giant of the Australian art scene, who died in 1959.
The art centre operates as both a gallery and studio for the artists, which means you can have a stickybeak as they work, and even a yarn. Everyone is connected to Namatjira, as family member Marisa Maher explains on the centre’s website (which also contains a handy family tree). Marisa says these connections “can be complicated for people outside of our knowledge system”.
It’s easy to dive into this wellspring of creativity at Hermannsburg (Ntaria), 125km west of Alice Springs. Many visitors come to explore the Hermannsburg Historic Precinct (open seasonally), which incorporates what was Australia’s longest-running mission. Considered one of the Northern Territory’s most significant heritage sites, the precinct’s 16 buildings include a schoolhouse, church, tannery and a former dining room and bakery (now a gallery and gift shop).
It’s a fascinating place – especially if you take one of the Indigenous guided tours – and so is nearby Hermannsburg Potters. Here, you can see Western Arrarnta artists creating their globally renowned handcoiled pots as they sip tea and chat in a communal studio.
Hermannsburg pots are outrageously distinctive, thanks to their quirky sculptural lids – perhaps adorned with a bird, person or animal – reflecting whatever image is painted onto the pots. The lids are a link to the mission’s artistic history. Prompted by a mission gardener and Arrernte men Joseph Rontji and Pastor Nahasson Ungwanaka, several residents crafted small clay animals in the 1960s. The enterprise folded, though, as kinship groups drifted away after the mission’s closure.
After the community took over responsibility for the mission site in 1982, Nahasson remembered his long-ago pottery efforts at the mission and lobbied for formal instruction. Enter ceramic artist Naomi Sharp, whose three-week stint in Hermannsburg in 1990 turned into guidance that lasted 16 years. She and the potters soon learned how to overcome Hermannsburg’s high temperatures and low humidity. To stop their clay from drying out and cracking in a matter of minutes, potters shaped the coils quickly while dampening the pot with a cloth.
In 1991, 21 potters under Sharp’s tutelage showed off 76 pieces at an exhibition in Alice Springs. The show was so striking that Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and a Powerhouse curator snapped up five pieces – including Irene Entata’s My Pig is Looking for Food – between them. The rest, as they say, is history.
It’s all very well to see the artists at work – but how do you immerse yourself in the desert landscapes that inspire them? City-slickers can head out into the region’s more inaccessible areas in a Land Rover with Alice Springs Expeditions. Owner John Stafford has been tackling the off-road tracks and shapeshifting dry river beds here since 1998.
From Hermannsburg, we roll and bump 22km to Palm Valley – an oasis tucked into the Finke Gorge National Park. It’s the only place you can find the Central Australian red cabbage palm. Yet these trees aren’t the most arresting sight here. One lone ghost gum stands so starkly against the red sandstone that it reminds us all of a Namatjira painting. We snap a photo. It’s like he’s with us still.
The writer was a guest of Tourism NT. northernterritory.com