The Hard Light of Day: An Artist's Life in the Australian Outback

By Rod Moss

A rare glimpse into the Australian heartland and the interactions of black and white Australians through the eyes of an artist.

Two years after artist Rod Moss arrived in Alice Springs in Australia’s outback to teach painting, he met an indigenous couple who had set up camp in the gully beside his home. Over the next twenty-five years, his friendship with Xavier and Petrina Neil and the friendships that grew from it with the families of Whitegate, an Arrernte aboriginal camp on the outskirts of town, would nourish and challenge Moss beyond his imagining.

The Hard Light of Day offers a rare insight into the reality of life in the Outback, from the contours of the MacDonnell Ranges and the textures and sounds of Arrernte culture, to the endemic violence, alcoholism and ill-health that continue to devastate Aboriginal lives. In recalling the relationships and experiences that have shaped his life and work in Alice Springs, Moss reveals the human face behind the statistics and celebrates the enriching, transformative power of friendship. Illustrated with Moss's evocative paintings and photographs, The Hard Light of Day is an incredible journey into a world that is rarely glimpsed, and an artist's chronicle of the moments that have inspired him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Mar 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781510717220

Book preview

PREFACE

LEFT TO RIGHT

BACK ROW:

JOSEPH JOHNSON JUNIOR,

AMBROSE NEIL,

ERIC NEIL,

JAMESY JOHNSON,

NOELLY JOHNSON

MIDDLE ROW:

MICHAEL STEWART,

BARTHOLOMEW JOHNSON,

JUDE JOHNSON

FRONT ROW:

CHRISTOPHER NEIL,

MICHAEL DROVER,

XAVIER NEIL,

RICKY RYDER,

DAVID JOHNSON,

PETER YUNGI JOHNSON

I TOOK THIS PHOTO IN 1985. A football team photo, the men at Whitegate called it. Though no one looked like a footballer. Anyway, they lined up in three rows and I snapped them, with ten-year-old Ricky Ryder as mascot. You can see he’s got a swollen cheek. Had mumps at the time.

Going along the back row that’s Joseph ‘Amulte’ Johnson. He died suddenly in 1998. Then Ambrose died in a fight at Mt Isa. Eric ‘Bulldozer’ Neil’s eye exploded after rolling into a fire. I was with him when he died a few months later. Jamesy Inkadampe Johnson was ‘sung’. Then there’s his older brother, Noelly. Until recently, still puttering – the only male survivor in that generation of the family. But sadly Noelly passed away as this book was about to go to press, from a range of diseases of neglect, untreated diabetes paramount among them.

In the middle row there’s Michael Stewart, blinded four years after this photo by a kick in the temple with steel-capped boots. Bartholomew Johnson died of kidney failure. Gregory ‘Eyeglass’ Johnson, who’s not in this photo, was the first to go from the team. Then there’s Jude Johnson. Pneumonia.

Asthmatic, Christopher Neil is in the front row. Alcohol and Ventolin – fatal mix. Michael Drover is well and happy. Lives mostly in his wife’s homelands near King’s Canyon, hundreds of kilometres south-west of town. Then there’s Xavier Neil. He’s about fifty now. I look at him and am amazed that of all these guys, he’s lasted. Living out in the open, the drinking and the rest. David Johnson battled throat cancer for several years, but is gone. Lastly, his brother, Peter, had alcoholic dementia, wandered off in the bush. Presumed dead in 1995. Ricky, in and out of jail, was stabbed to death, April 2006. Terrible family business.

All these deaths of men in their prime.

This photo has been reprinted dozens of times on requests from the men’s families. But there’s been a lot of funerals, and not just for the families of those in the photo. In my twenty-five years in Alice Springs I’ve been to over sixty funerals of my Aboriginal family. Only three or four were for people over fifty. Only a war zone or plague would offer comparable figures. To some degree I’ve come to accept the fact of these premature deaths as much as the landscape, along with the shared pain and despair. But each death is razor sharp and stirs indignities, injustices that continue to be unacceptable viewed against the total demographic. How does our community normalise these frequent deaths? By wilful unconsciousness? By denial, ignorance or psychic numbing? There isn’t a war. And attempted genocide has been unfashionable since our early nineteenth-century Tasmanian experience. Have we sided not with survival, but with death?

I CHOSE TO LIVE IN Alice Springs, the only large town in the central deserts, located in the heart of Eastern Arrernte country. The lives of my Arrernte friends were crucial to my experience of this place. Edward Arranye Pengarte Johnson’s significance in my life was especially so and I sense him as the book’s presiding presence.*

Arranye asked that everything he recorded on video or audiotapes remain accessible, and he was relentless in facilitating records. ‘Gotta keep it rollin’, Sonny Boy. Younger mob might be pick it up,’ he used to say. He did not want his name removed from use. Nor did he want his humble humpy dissembled after his death. Both actions contradict Arrernte custom as I experienced it. This stands as my acknowledgment of the protocol in publications concerned with Indigenous peoples and their dead. Those immediately concerned with this book have been consulted and assented to Arranye’s wish.

While a little of what Arranye and I taped has entered these pages, this is not his story, not an ‘as told to’ story. His material deserves another publication with assistance from someone fluent in Arrernte language and thinking. This story is mine. It isn’t derived from or motivated by historical archives. It is about personal experiences, travelling and enduring friendships. While there is some historical research, mostly presented as footnotes, I want to be clear that this is a memoir, not an official history. Nor is the perspective related from the Arrernte claiming to be more than from the families themselves.

Arranye insisted his stories weren’t merely for his or my edification. Was it okay for him, this book, its reality and roll call of the dead? When I asked him this he stared back incredulously from his pillows. ‘What you think I been tell you all this story for?’ During his final months I read parts of the text to him for his pleasure and approval.

* Since the reader unfamiliar with Arrernte will encounter the name ‘Arranye’ frequently, I suggest that the sound ‘Ah-run-yah’ be adapted for the English tongue.

NEIGHBOURS

ARRANYE

IN EARLY 1986, UPON RETURNING to Alice Springs after my Christmas vacation, I discovered I had new neighbours. Over the fence, in a shallow gully 100 metres away, this guy and his wife were living on the dirt in the open weather with just a blanket, billies, a dog and a transistor radio. They didn’t even have water. I could see him each morning trudging off to fill their billies somewhere out of view. After half an hour he would be back.

I was coming back home from dropping a letter in the mailbox to my lady friend, Elaine, when he passed me with his wife and an older Aboriginal man. He asked for a light. I did not smoke, but delighted by his initiative, I asked him home where I had some matches. The couple, Xavier Neil and Petrina Johnson, followed me to my flat, while the more senior man, Kenny Rogers, kept walking the 3 kilometres into town.

I recognised Kenny from an earlier meeting, a few months prior, when Elaine had been in Alice Springs. We’d seen him standing alone by the post office one night. We were the only people on the street and asked him if he wanted a lift somewhere. We drove a few kilometres east along Undoolya Road and dropped him just inside a white metal gate. His belongings were hanging in three plastic carry bags in a tree. His dog’s eyes pinked up briefly in the headlights. This was his home, he declared proudly, under his mother witchetty bush. He was in his fifties. Apart from taxis, he said, he had never been in a whitefella’s car.

Xavier and Petrina were in their late twenties and both of the Eastern Arrernte language affiliated group. Robust, if gangly, Xavier was a fine-looking man, liquorice locks spiralling loosely to his shoulders. Petrina’s shiny, dark skin was spoiled by numerous scars on her face – not the kind of cuts that seemed deliberately struck upon her husband’s torso and arms. He quickly assessed the proximity of his camp to my flat and arranged to come in the morning for water. I went to bed excited, but thinking it improbable that he would come at six-thirty as stated. He came all right. Right on the dot, scraping a stick up and down the fence for attention. I pushed the hose under the fence for him to fill his billies. He told me he’d got the time from the local Aboriginal radio station, CAAMA. I first thought that he had watched the position of the sun.

This routine continued in the mornings and evenings, and we’d drink tea, quizzing each other along the way. I wasn’t sure who owned the land Xavier and Petrina were camping on. He spoke of ‘his country’, pointing to the ground at his feet, or he’d sweep the dust in front of where he squatted to draw a map of it. Though I had a pretty full lecturing timetable during the day at college, my mind ticked over with the prospects of developing a friendship with Xavier.

A week or so later, when just home from college, I heard a terrific argument ring out from the gully over the fence. It had to be Xavier and Petrina. I ran upstairs to look out the bedroom window. They were clouting each other on the head with rocks, both denouncing the other in Arrernte juiced with English expletives. I was shocked, fascinated and glad of the safety of my flimsy premises. Should I interfere in their domestics, I wondered, when they were in the middle of a flurry of blows. Or should I keep a cautious, respectful distance?

The decision was taken from me by Xavier’s now familiar sound of a stick scraping along the fence. The two of them were there and Xavier wanted the hose to wash the ugly gash he’d inflicted in Petrina’s scalp. Given their violence only minutes before, his tenderness amazed me. He told of how a bikie had ridden into their camp and inexplicably shot their dog right before them. What most appalled me was the impotence of their rage as they turned it on one another.

The next weekend I decided to photograph the rotting carcass and later made a painting. The dog had already deteriorated into a thin sack of skin, fur and bones. Ants and maggots had worked furiously. Next to the body was a thong that I included for scale and an indication of the human agency in its death. There was an elegant curve in its spine and tail and a massive hole torn through the chest. Something about its contradictory appearance in the silent dust attracted me.

LATE FEBRUARY, ONE MORNING AROUND 7 A.M., a police wagon pulled up, disrupting our morning chat. With me on the blind side of the fence, Xavier’s activity around my house had aroused the officers’ suspicion.

‘Are you Xavier Neil?’

Xavier looked nervously over his shoulder and gave a barely audible, glottal ‘yes’.

‘What are you up to?’

‘Just having cuppa tea.’

I chose to reveal myself at this point.

‘That’s true, officer.’

They were confounded, shook their heads and muted their tone.

‘Well, we want him for stealing a car, running the lights and being under the influence, as well as failing to appear in court. Better come along with us, Xavier.’

They escorted him to the back of the paddy wagon and drove off, Xavier sipping from my pannikin as Petrina waved goodbye.

I HAD BEEN INTRIGUED AND MYSTIFIED about Aboriginal culture since childhood. With access to acres of wild scrub and heavily treed range country in the eastern foothills of Melbourne, I spent countless hours with my buddies pretending to be bush natives, whooping in war paint and feathers. Stone axes, boomerangs and spears were lovingly improvised. Charles Chauvel’s movies fuelled our imaginations. As a nine-year-old, I took it upon myself to write a fictional piece about myself on holiday in the outback on a cattle ranch. The tension in the story was between pastoralists and Indigenous people on whose land the cattle grazed. My father rewarded my effort by having it typed up and submitted to the Sun News Pictorial.

I was in my mid-thirties when I summoned the courage to leave the pleasant green suburbs and strike into a place and a culture I knew next to nothing about. In 1980 I visited an old school friend, Dave Morgan, who was working in an Aboriginal community called Strelley, situated in the Pilbara of Western Australia. He had been recruited to operate Strelley’s bi-lingual book production centre. Then in 1984, I stayed in Batchelor, 100 kilometres south of Darwin, with Dave who by now was working in the printery of the Aboriginal Teachers’ College. We collaborated with students to produce bi-lingual books and a newspaper. This voluntary arrangement lasted three months before I sought paid employment and responded to an advertised position at Centralian College, Alice Springs.

As I winged in low over the MacDonnell Ranges for the interview Alice looked alluring from the air. I hadn’t anticipated that a desert zone might be a natural spectacle. When I originally left Melbourne, I fully believed I was gearing myself for work in a Top End community. Perhaps I would find myself on a lush, semi-tropical island such as Elcho or Millingimbi as an art adviser or school teacher. I never thought of living in the centre of the continent.

I soon began work at Centralian College as an art lecturer. After spending the first six weeks in a motel, I was allocated a little, two-storey flat in a complex leased by the Northern Territory government for their teaching staff. The blocks abutted the eastern boundary of town.

THE SAME DAY XAVIER WAS CARTED AWAY, Petrina moved back with her family at a camp called Irrkerlantye, known as Whitegate. She asked me to help her with her few things and I came after work with my car. As I unloaded Petrina’s stuff, her mother and two of her brothers introduced themselves with a gentle touching of the hands, not so much a handshake as a gliding on the surface of my palm. Then hands from other relatives were volunteered and names exchanged, too many too quickly to remember. I was delighted in the unexpected fuss made over me, though wary of where it might lead. There were about thirty people living there in crude shelters made of corrugated iron sheeting and star pickets among the odd car body. I couldn’t believe that slap next to this wealthy little town, the Aboriginal Hayes, Johnson and Neil families lived in such poverty.*

Xavier went to court and did his time in Big House, as the jail was commonly called, and was back in camp three weeks later. He was a regular inmate, both before our meeting and during the next five or so years, and the regime at Big House provided him with three meals each day and fresh linen and clothes. Most Arrernte men who speak to me of being on the ‘inside’ are quick to point out how much healthier and stronger they become while they are there. Quite often men with warrants would elude the police until the winter court sentences would give them refuge from the freezing nights.

MY DEVELOPING FRIENDSHIP WITH XAVIER quickly became a highlight in my life. His presence, though random, was frequent. He would come around for a chat or ask for a lift somewhere. When we glided around the few streets of town or rolled into one of the town camps, he would thump the side of the car or yell loudly to people with a selfsatisfied grin. He had scored a whitefella friend.

On one occasion he asked me to slow down by the Shell Todd petrol station to chat up this large Aboriginal woman. He coaxed her into the back of the car and made verbal advances from the front.

‘I’m a Jay Creek woman. Don’t you get cheeky for me, you black bastard, or I’ll give you this one.’ She thrust her fist between us. ‘Take me to taxi rank.’

He shut up, jamming his hands between his thighs. When we dropped her by the taxi rank, he shot me a wicked grin.

He scoffed at elderly tourists gingerly wandering the footpath near Anzac Hill. They were seemingly jolted by the brilliant light – and the novelty and profusion of blackfellas.

‘Arrernte don’t be let old people walk round town that way. Might be get run over. Old people gotta be stay in camp. Look after him.’

He would often drop by just to shove his carry bag in the fridge and ask me to look after it. Off he would go and return for the food five, six days hence. Sometimes he would be lying outside on the footpath by mid-afternoon, sleeping off his drunkenness. Or he would come sloshed to the door and I would say to him, ‘No drunks in the house, Xavier.’ I drew the line here, not wanting to encourage such a state. Nor was I willing to tolerate it.

What did my respectable neighbours think of my interaction with Aboriginal people? No one ever said a word. Not, at least, until the woman some doors down came and asked me if I would mind coming to her flat to help extricate my Aboriginal friend.

‘He’s taken off his shirt and I’m worried about his intentions,’ she said.

I followed her back to her flat. I found Xavier sitting comfortably in a beanbag in front of the TV.

‘Xavier,’ I said, ‘Clare has to mark her students’ homework. She needs to do this alone. You’re humbugging her.’

Xavier pretended not to hear and feigned sleep.

‘Xavier, come on now. Come with me. I’ll take you home. Or you can come to my place for supper.’

I could hear the school teacher voice in me, the parent. Reluctantly he got up and followed me down the stairs.

‘Rod, you spoil my fun,’ he said, momentarily crestfallen.

One morning he came upon me in front of the flat under the shade of the spearwood tree doing my tai chi. He stood and watched for a few minutes, then mirrored the routine of the complex gestures for twenty minutes. Over tea, he reckoned I might be Bruce Lee.

‘Or might be ninja, Rod. Might be do that dance for woman some time. You think it too much woman, like Elvis Presley.’

Xavier and I laughed as I struck up a crane’s pose and then broke into a parody of Elvis’s pelvic thrusts. Xavier’s own dreadlocks, he said, made him like the Rastafarian Bob Marley.

One sunset Xavier and Petrina brought witchetty grubs, still wriggling, as a gift. I fried those I could find the next morning in an omelette. One had crawled down the bench and was pursuing a course to the back yard. Another was snuggled up among bananas in the fruit bowl. What delicious nuttiness. And so rich.

I made a drawing of Xavier from a photo I had taken, which was a huge hit with him. I was fascinated by the scars on his arms and chest, shiny creases raised from his skin. He told me they were ‘sorry cuts’ made when his relatives had died. Three of his brothers and a sister had died. So had his mother and father.

‘But don’t cry for me,’ he insisted. ‘I’m too much crying already myself.’

He would bring relatives from Utopia and Harts Range to see the drawing when they were on town visits. Other people from town camps trooped along with him, expressing their excitement in Arrernte between themselves – and broken English to me – and ran their fingers over the graphite. They took to wandering around in the kitchen, curiously hand ling the gadgetry and appliances as if they had never seen them before. One man took me aside. Holding both my shoulders, he eyed me intensely and whispered close to my face.

‘I can see God in heaven any time. My time or yours.’

I didn’t really know what angle he was coming from. Nonetheless, I was disarmed by the power of his belief.

When Xavier visited his father’s traditional country in Harts Range, or was not in his usual haunts, Petrina would come and sit near the drawing. Often she would draw pictures of her ‘country’ and affectionately talk of it, and of her sisters, brothers and mother. Once she came drunk and argumentative and hit the drawing. I jumped from my seat and led her to the kitchen, trying to assuage her with a cup of tea.

Petrina and Xavier loved looking through my journals and coffee table books, delighting in the sight of earlier versions of me with family. I’d kept journals since I was sixteen, substantial quarto-sized books in which cards and photos were included alongside the written entries. One image of me dressed as a woman for a school play when I had long hair made both of them laugh until they fell over. It was a great favourite when they wanted to show other relatives the albums. Photos of dwellings that I had taken in Rajasthan in 1984 perplexed Xavier. He could not believe that people would live inside houses made of mud in case they were washed away in a slither of clay.

One day Xavier came across my copy of Geoffrey Bardon’s book Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, which documents the emergence in the 1970s of the Papunya Tula Aboriginal painting movement. When he came across a particular reproduction of a sacred painting, he hurriedly closed the book and walked with it to my bedroom. He laid it on the floor and scrutinised it. He summoned me.

‘Do women sleep in here?’

Elaine was in Sydney for a year studying pre-school education.

‘No, Xavier.’

‘This only for men’s eyes.’

Xavier also studied the collection of photographs by Frank Gillen and Baldwin Spencer from my 1912, red clothbound volume of Across Australia. It had been given to me, but I’d never spent much time reading it. Spencer’s racist paternalism was a deterrent and I found more appeal in recent scholarship and anecdotal writing. It was long out of print. Even an abridged, large-format version published in 1982, emphasising the photos, had been removed from local bookshops. This was due to concerns from conservative Aboriginal elders who, now conversant with the reproductive capacity of photography, considered its material too secret for general publication. On most occasions when he visited me during the following three months, Xavier brought other men from Whitegate to see the book.

* Their English surnames, taken from their earliest association with whitefellas, were commonly used, as were their Aboriginal names. Miners, missionaries and pastoralists were the outriders of settler culture, though the overland telegraph line workers, on the heels of the explorer Sturt, were the first non-Indigenous men in the Centre between 1870 and 1872. The cattle industry began at Deep Well with William and Mary Hayes. Hayes expanded his empire as other leaseholders failed. One of his sons, Ted senior, took up Undoolya Station, 10 kilometres east of the present township, in 1920. His descendants still live there.

THE SHEDDING OF SKIN

FAMILIES ON SAND HILL OF HOMELANDS

APART FROM THE PAINTING OF XAVIER, the artworks I made in the eighteen months after arriving in Alice Springs were surrealist, symbolic images about the tensions I had felt in coming to terms with the land’s somnambulant boniness. The lavenders, oranges and pinks were foreign to my palette. I stuck mostly with pencil. The open expanses were overpowering. And yet the colour and structure of the landscape made me feel that I was floating in a digestive system, all coruscated liver and fat. The intimate scale of rock forms and their interlocking geometry gave me a sense that they were playthings for capricious, creative hands.

The natural beauty was omnipresent. The valleys in the unsettled country near my flat looked more ordered, more garden-like in their self-propagation, than the efforts of suburbanites. An astonishing number of buildings had been erected as the population doubled through the mid-1980s. Buildings were not permitted to exceed two levels, and perhaps developers banked on the awesome beauty of the MacDonnell Ranges to distract the eye, as block after block succumbed to the most banal structures, resulting in an ugly confusion of colours and designs. This had its own surreal bent in an unintended way. But what kind of art might make a less offensive bridge? I was disrupted by the noise and the uncouth thrust of materials and men on the landscape. Making drawings from my flat of the nearby despoliation enabled me to express my uneasiness.

The desert lifestyle was also unfamiliar to me. What constituted an ordinary day? What was a regular chain of events? What of the weight of the air, the pressure of great radiance on the eyes? There were seasonal guarantees: the yellow-topped flowers pursing through after winter rain; summer migrations of kites and bee-eaters; the mournful trill of the curlew mid-winter wending his way up the creek beds from south; and the irritation of a trillion tiny ants with the initial heat of spring. As repetition gradually became meaning, these were fixed in my calendar as certainly as the advent of tourists filling the town’s few corridors after Easter.

UNTIL 1988, THE STUART HIGHWAY south of the Northern Territory–South Australian border was unmade and a formidable challenge. Abandoned auto-carcasses littered the road at 50-kilometre intervals. Coober Pedy, where garages profited on the fallout, was a halfway haven and a measure of one’s fortunes. Car stories were rife. All the teachers in the government flats had extraordinary tales. While these highlighted the difficulty of living such a distance from the nearest, sizeable population, they gave us a sense of camaraderie.

My first trip to Melbourne was during the winter semester break in 1985. It was a chain of events, not the long distance drive I had anticipated. I made the trip with an English