Albert Namatjira's home and Hermannsburg, Northern Territory: Legendary artist deserves a better memorial

Albert Namatjjra's house is humble, dilapidated, fenced off and neglected.Credit: Alamy

It's little less than a national disgrace. Many of Australia's most famous white painters - from Hans and Nora Heysen to Arthur Boyd, Brett Whiteley and Sidney Nolan have had their houses and/or studios canonised. But not Albert Namatjira: the first Indigenous Australian to be given full citizenship rights in the birth country of himself and his many ancestors.

Driving along the road from Glen Helen to Alice Springs, we almost miss the sign pointing to the house he had built when he was world-famous, around five kilometres from where he was raised in Hermannsburg. His house is humble, dilapidated, fenced off and neglected. Three rogue dogs stop us even getting out of the car, so ferocious are they to protect "their patch".

Namatjira deserves a better memorial (and certainly not the hokey statue on the other side of town).

A Hermannsburg Potters artist holding her finished artwork.Credit: Felix Baker

Some locals have been pressing for Namatjira's home to be heritage-listed for years. Instead he has a highway named after him. Such is modern life.

Fortunately Namatjira's continuing contribution to Australian art is well preserved at the Hermannsburg Historical District - the Lutheran mission where the young Albert was raised and learnt to paint.

Before Alice Springs was chosen as the half-way point between Adelaide and Darwin for the telegraph line linking Australia to the rest of the world, Hermannsburg was the biggest settlement between the two capitals.

The German missionaries who founded Hermannsburg arrived by bullock cart from Adelaide, exhausted after a 20 month journey in 1877.

The land was already occupied when the Lutherans arrived. The Arrernte language group roamed over an estimated 120,000 square kilometres of central Australia when the First Fleet rounded Sydney Heads.

But these specific Western Arrernte people who gathered around the new Germanic church the missionaries erected were ripe for converting. Namatjira was Hermannsburg's most celebrated graduate.

Born Elea Namatjira on July 28, 1902, a member of the Western Arrernte mob, he was delivered and raised at this mission south of the magnificent Tjoritja/West Macdonald National Park.

Today the Hermannsburg Historical District - roughly the size of the MCG cricket pitch - is much as it was it when Namatjira was growing up, though back then it would have been teeming with the noise of saddlers, tanners, dray horses, goats and children. By the time Namatjira was an adult, the saddlery had given way to a garage.

On this early Sunday morning, there's just silence. The self-guided map that comes with the ticket explains what each building was when Namatjira was a lad. There's the communal laundry, the meat house (cold and dark before refrigeration reached the Outback) and the school rooms (it's disappointing to learn white and black children had different classrooms and different teacher/pupil ratios).

But it was the tannery which allowed the mission to prosper, sending kangaroo and cow hides to market in Alice Springs 130 kilometres away. The tannery now is a clean, informative museum exhibit. But anyone who has ever visited a working tannery knows that hellish stench must have wafted into the picturesque church at every service, reminding all of eternal damnation.

Despite this, Namatjira learnt to paint European-style watercolours during his time at Hermannsburg. It was that which forged his reputation and made him an international icon. His paintings (increasingly using other media than watercolours) displayed the majesty of his traditional lands: the gums, the soaring chasms, the rock formations - and most of all that extraordinary harsh light of the central deserts.

It's impossible to write about Namatjira without acknowledging his tragic end, caught between two cultures - accepted by neither. But that's another story.

Here at Hermannsburg Historical District, most of the paintings in the art gallery are from the Hermannsburg school, which is Albert's lasting legacy.

Many are by Namatjira's descendants: children, grandchildren, cousins. They show the same sensibility towards country he did.

Some have branched out. Most notably, grandson Vincent Namatjira, who also grew up in Hermannsburg.

However the daily artistic routine is now embodied mainly by the Hermannsburg Potters - a group of female Western Arrernte artists whose terracotta clay creations celebrate the Namatjira landscape in ceramics.

THE DETAILS

VISIT

Hermannsburg is 120 kms west of Alice Springs via Larrapinta Drive on the way to Uluru or Kings Canyon. See hermannsburg.com.au and hermannsburgpotters.com.au

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Steve Meacham was a guest of Northern Territory Tourism.