Joining the dots

Hetti Perkins helps viewers understand the complexity and diversity of Aboriginal art

Hetti Perkins, right, with Judy Watson in her studio

Hetti Perkins helps viewers understand the complexity and diversity of Aboriginal art

'I THINK I initially imagined the series being able to satisfy my simple curiosity about what the dots mean," Hibiscus Films producer Bridget Ikin (An Angel at My Table, My Year Without Sex) says. She is talking about the new three-part series that explores what many call the largest art movement this country has produced. It is, of course, Aboriginal art.

Art + Soul is written and presented by the charming and erudite Hetti Perkins, senior curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the Art Gallery of NSW. An Eastern Arrernte and Kalkadoon desert woman, she's the daughter of political activist Charles Perkins and sister of film-maker Rachel Perkins (First Australians and Bran Nue Day). The director and cinematographer is Warwick Thornton, whose debut feature Samson & Delilah (made after several award-winning short films) won the Camera d'Or at Cannes in May last year.

As her sister did with SBS's documentary series First Australians, Hetti Perkins makes engrossing television. It's heartbreaking at times, always illuminating and often inspiring, as stories of courage, resilience and tragedy illuminate the indigenous experience. Some of the stories -- like many of the artists Perkins visits -- are funny, mischievous, sly and beguiling.

The series is especially fascinating for those of us who know so little of Aboriginal life and the art that so vividly represents it, and are just as perplexed as Perkins's producer about what those dots mean. Many may also be perplexed by the way paintings have become the darlings of the international art trade despite having been made in great isolation and filled with allusions to motifs we can never recognise or fully understand.

Watching First Australians, we learned of Aboriginal lives carved into our historical story, of battlegrounds marked by bones and, as series consultant Marcia Langton said, "the part played by indigenous people in the events that caught our imagination".

Art + Soul is a simpler, more laid-back journey than First Australians, without its hard-edged prickliness and occasional and understandable anger. But politics are never entirely absent and Perkins's father's story and his legacy are central to the way her narrative unfolds.

She calls the art "encrypted title deeds to country, written in a poetic, visual language", and presents not a regional or chronological history but an intimate journey of ideas, subtly revealing the way the past and present, tradition and modernity, converge artistically through a political prism.

Thornton says while he hates the carpet-bagging and exploitation that bedevils so much of the Aboriginal art movement, he has no interest in dealing with the often detestable commercial side. "It is a celebration, not a tragedy," he says.

More than six years in the planning, the project gained momentum in 2008 when Ikin, Perkins's producer of choice (and suggested by her sister) became available. "The idea of making a series on Aboriginal art was not a new one, and several one-hour documentaries already existed, made by whitefellas," says Ikin in the series' production notes. "But nothing had been made with the ambition, scope and curatorial confidence that I knew Hetti would offer."

After decades of acquiring and exhibiting their work, Perkins had access to the artists and was trusted and admired by them. "She was the key to the people and the places and the art," Thornton says.

To find what he calls "those beautiful things" through which to tell Perkins's story, Thornton took a small unit of six people on the road for eight weeks between June and August last year. They travelled more than 10,000km by air and over often treacherous roads in Australia's northwest. "You can see Aboriginal art in galleries or books but you don't know where it comes from, what it means, or anything about who painted it and what they look like and believe," the director says. Many artists are featured, including Papunya Tula painters Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri and Yukultji Napangati, two members of the family who came in from the desert in 1984, the so-called "last of the nomads".

Brisbane artist Richard Bell refers to the controversy surrounding Telstra's $40,000 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art prize in 2003. His winning painting carried the text "Aboriginal Art -- It's a White Thing". And the delightfully impish Destiny Deacon, famous for her constructed photographs, recalls spending her childhood in a housing commission estate on the Melbourne waterfront.

The series zigzags across the country between 10 remote-area communities from Alice Springs, Central Australia and the Kimberley to the far reaches of East Arnhem Land, as well as to rural and city studios. Thornton says his job was to provide the explanation behind the artworks, which he does in his characteristic loose, organic and engaging way. "I didn't want to make a series with a stick up its bum," he says. And one of the delights of the series is the way he so jauntily at times, with such good humour, takes us to places we would never see in our own lives, some of them sacred and many remote.

He also lets us take part in intimate conversations with artists we would surely never meet in any other way. "Most of it is filmed with a hand-held camera because I wanted people watching to feel like they were just standing there next to the artist or next to Hetti," he says. Just as he did so effectively in Samson and Delilah, Thornton uses music -- a lovely score by David Page using the songs of Archie Roach, Lazy Late Boys and the Warumpi Band -- and random ambient noise to counterpoint his visual style. You sense, as you did with Samson and Delilah, Thornton's camera writing the film as he shoots it: his long takes as Perkins drives and walks through desert and rainforest are like pages of descriptive prose.

His use of photographs, many dating back to the early 1800s, and archival film and TV footage, most of it sourced by co-producer Jo-anne McGowan, is arresting too. The stills especially support the narrative and illuminate the story on a visceral level in a way the images of people commenting on the same experiences do not. "I could see, like I never had before, the long shadow cast by colonisation over indigenous Australians' lives," McGowan says of the 40 minutes of material she collected not only in galleries and private collections across the country but in the dusty garages of painters.

Talked into her on-screen role, Perkins is an obliging, if at times slightly tentative guide. She's modest, deferential to the painters to whom she introduces us, and seemingly a little nervous of Thornton's cameras. There's no art-world grandstanding or what she calls playing "palsy-walsy" with the camera. In fact she's sometimes charmingly clumsy, often tripping slightly over steps or missing her footing as she tries to position herself for the interviews. "Oops, sorry," she says, covering up with a girly giggle. For all her scholarly and curatorial achievements, she's a delight to watch. The fact that she's not a polished TV performer, and doesn't even really try to be, adds veracity and dignity to what she does.

Perkins allows the painters with whom she talks to develop their thoughts without leading them. At times she seems overwhelmed with the power of the work she encounters in the same way she was as a young girl travelling with her father.

IT hasn't been a happy time for organisers of the Delhi Commonwealth Games in the lead-up to events starting on Monday, but that hasn't stopped the free-to-air Ten Network and pay-TV provider Foxtel planning comprehensive and aggressively competitive round-the-clock coverage. The games might seem increasingly outmoded and irrelevant, a mere sideline to the main event, the Olympic Games, but TV loves them.

Foxtel is screening the competition on six exclusive new high-definition and six standard-definition dedicated interactive channels (not Fox Sports), showcasing more than 500 hours of live events and more than 1700 hours of broadcasting.

On Ten, 200 hours of coverage will be confined to one channel, plus its HD equivalent One, but the network promises every significant event live or only slightly delayed. Many of us will be time-shifting anyway, avoiding the commercials and cherry-picking favourite events. It's hard to choose between the alternatives; both have wonderful line-ups of presenters, sports journalists and former champions.

It's exhausting just running an eye over both TV guides but certainly the opening ceremony at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium is a must for any casual viewer. Controversy still rages in India over Oscar and Grammy-winning composer A.R. Rahman's theme song, O Yaaro, India bula liya, a key element in the opening ceremony. Rahman promised the six-minute composition would be better than Shakira's Waka Waka, such a hit at the recent FIFA World Cup. While he's sold hundreds of millions of his recordings worldwide, Rahman's song has been ridiculed for juvenile lyrics and a sound that represents little of Indian culture.

Whether these Games will prove to be worth the enormous investment is hard to determine, given the ghastly planning, the withdrawal of drawcards and poor ticket sales. Australian journos have given the Games the motto "Stop laughing, this is serious", and it's possible the most interesting TV coverage will be of fiascos.

Still, it will be fascinating viewing, and not just of the sport. This complex piece of broadcasting will provide a way into India for many who have never visited. For all the possible madness, the event provides India with an opportunity to showcase its diverse attractions beyond the well-trodden Golden Triangle route of Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. Tourism authorities have in recent years presented alternative holiday lures, such as safari lodges in national parks, Ayurvedic spa tourism in the southwest, houseboats in Kerala and even wine trails in the southeast.

The way these are presented by the Australian editorial teams may well be more entertaining than some of the events, and the special reports will go some way towards challenging an atavistic xenophobia -- very much alive in this country -- that paints India as the preserve only of backpackers, terrorists, and intrepid travellers willing to imperil their digestive systems.

Far from being a destination mired in poverty and disease, India, with its 10 per cent annual growth and global software giants, has one of the fastest growing middle classes in the world. Five-star accommodation, luxury tourist trains with names such as the Golden Chariot and the go-ahead glitz of Mumbai are all contributing to a powerful new tourism image.

Even if the Games don't deliver, viewers will be able to reassess their expectations of the holiday potential of 21st-century India. And that's one of the main reasons many of us will tune in to this highly extravagant, potentially risky, extravaganza.

Art + Soul, Thursday, ABC1, 8.30pm.

Commonwealth Games, Ten and Foxtel, beginning with the opening ceremony, Sunday, midnight on Ten and later on Foxtel.