Yiwarra Kuju: Secret knowledge

ANDREW Sayers, the new head of the National Museum of Australia, is one of this country's most talented museum directors.

Martumili artists Rosie Williams, Dulcie Gibbs and Muni Rita Simpson working on Minyipuru (Seven Sisters). From the exhibition Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. Picture: Tim Acker

ANDREW Sayers, the new head of the National Museum of Australia, is one of this country's most talented museum directors.

After a distinguished career at the National Gallery as curator of Australian drawings and then the remarkable achievement of both creating and building the National Portrait Gallery, he seems destined, in due course, to assume the direction of the National Gallery.

In the meantime, taking on the NMA may seem like an odd detour in such a cursus honorum, or perhaps simply testifies to Sayers's energy and determination to expand his range of experience, both as art historian and as administrator.

You would have to think seriously, in the first place, before working for an institution housed in one of the most spectacularly ugly buildings in Australia. Architecture has an effect on those who live and work in it, and whether a building is humane and serene or sterile and alienating can make the difference between happiness and misery.

Canberra is full of bad architecture, from the banal to the brutalist, but the museum building is an example of a particularly repellent style of postmodern political symbolism in which the whole shape of the building is meant to convey a message and which inevitably falls into the most teeth-grating kitsch.

A young friend told me he thought the building poisoned the cityscape. The expression is doubly apt, because apart from the sheer loudness and ugliness of the structure, it is conceived as an ideological statement; the outside even has political messages encoded in braille, some of which have now apparently been covered.

Structurally, the interior is even worse than the exterior, a sequence of ugly and uncomfortable spaces, looking in parts like a disused airport in a banana republic, full of distracting and gratuitous design features, with a confusing and almost unintelligible floor plan. To Sayers, who oversaw the simple, economical and lucid design of the NPG, this architectural disaster must be particularly painful.

The exhibition design in the galleries that are open is also excruciatingly awful, without consistency, clarity or elegance; angular forms, displays looking through to other displays, a cacophony of objects, photographs and texts that leaves the viewer exhausted and dispirited within minutes. The original permanent exhibitions were widely criticised as tendentious and politically correct. Having managed to avoid entering the museum until now, I cannot comment, but it was interesting to find that the Nation display has been closed and will reopen close to Easter as a different presentation of Australia and its history.

A museum has to be political, as Sayers has observed, but it should not be ideological. Man, in Aristotle's celebrated dictum, is a political animal, that is one whose specific difference from other creatures is that he lives in a city or polis and develops what we think of as political institutions to make collective life possible. The structures of such institutions, their development, and the struggles between competing interests and ideals are proper subjects for non-partisan reflection. Ideological thinking, on the other hand, is inherently partisan; and it is intellectually dishonest because truth and complexity are sacrificed to the supposedly higher priorities of propaganda. In an institution of learning such as a university or a museum, ideology is intellectual pollution; and eliminating it can be as hard as restoring any site contaminated by toxic waste.

The new exhibition on the Canning Stock Route is not exempt from some ideological manipulation, which is unfortunate because it gets in the way of appreciating the historical realities in a more balanced manner. It is also something that comes out far more strongly in the display than in the catalogue, which suggests that some museum staff still may be unreconstructed history warriors.

The story of the Canning Stock Route is, in itself, one that certainly belongs in the museum. It is an important and revealing episode in Australian history that cannot be told without involving both the white and black perspectives; but truth does not benefit from distortion or bias in either direction.

The route originated a century ago, when the populated south of Western Australia needed more beef cattle. Animals raised in the north could not be shipped to Fremantle because of tick infestations; droving them overland would ensure the ticks perished in the dry heat, but a path had to be found through near-desert country.

Alfred Canning, who had already surveyed the famous rabbit-proof fence in the first years of the new century -- itself an extraordinary feat -- laid out what became the longest stock route in Australia, at a length of almost 1800km, in 1906 and 1907, and then directed its construction, which was completed in 1910.

The route had, of necessity, to be built around grasslands and waterholes. A sufficient source of water had to be located every 24km. To find his way through the land, and above all to locate sources of water, Canning relied on native guides, and this is the matter that needs to be dealt with in a spirit of scrupulous honesty.

The Aborigines were often afraid of venturing into enemy territory, or simply into zones that were ritually forbidden to them. Canning did not understand this and thought the guides ran away for no good reason. In the end he kept them chained at night to prevent them from disappearing.

The party's cook felt this behaviour was cruel and unwarranted, and on the party's return to Perth, his complaints led to a royal commission into Canning's conduct, in which he was exonerated.

Canning also found a way to make the native guides reveal waterholes in cases when, perhaps because they were sacred spots, they were reluctant to do so. Giving them salty water to drink made them thirsty and when they were released they would run to the source of fresh water, followed by one of the party on horseback. These are certainly distasteful and even reprehensible actions, and to them one may add an unintended consequence of the digging of deeper wells: the natives could not draw up the heavy buckets, which required three strong men or the assistance of animals. For this reason they initially destroyed some of the well structures and killed the cattlemen who first used the route in 1911.

Such things are important to acknowledge and must be included in a balanced view of the story, but the very small historical section within the exhibition deals with almost nothing else. Most conspicuously, there is a video of Aborigines in chains, with a voiceover of someone reading Canning's justification of this treatment, and then some further footage with an Aboriginal voice telling the story of the salty water.

This is repeated on a loop so that in the course of looking at the surrounding paintings, you are compelled to hear the same tendentious message repeatedly, whereas if you want to get some more objective idea of the historical events, you have to read the wall panels. But reading anything is not easy against the insistent sound of the recorded voice. While I was there, ironically enough, this very recording drowned out the voice of an Aboriginal woman who was attempting to explain her painting. The museum staff said that the audiovisuals could not be turned off or even down.

Nor is this the only distracting noise in the exhibition. It is simply part of a general hubbub of recorded voices that, as I have observed before, seems to be a bad habit of museums across the country; in art galleries, we can generally look at pictures in silence, but in museums there is compulsory didactic chatter, not to mention ambient soundscapes.

Next to the video screen, incidentally, is another picture of chained Aborigines. A lamentable sight, but then one reads in the caption that they are prisoners, and that the picture was taken in 1905. They cannot have anything to do with Canning, whose survey began the following year; thus ideological overstatement not only leads to misrepresentation but contains the seeds of its own deconstruction, as you begin to wonder what is true and what is false.

A more subtle point of cultural conflict lay in the way Canning's route crossed and often disturbed the invisible network of pathways the Aborigines established over the desert in the course of thousands of years. Their paths also joined waterholes, of course, but in all directions, while Canning's made its way broadly in a straight line through waterholes that were all given numbers in a sequence.

The exhibition's main focus is on the Aboriginal communities that still live along the route, and particularly the paintings made by members of these communities as part of a recent project. The paintings relate to dreamtime stories, and sometimes personal experiences, associated with each of the areas.

The overall impression is very striking, with a large number of big, colourful works brightly lit against a black wall in order to make the greatest visual impact. Some of the pictures are better painted than others, some are more resonant, and a few have a rather uncomfortable mixture of traditional Aboriginal and European styles.

Each painting evokes a particular location, and the dominant motifs, as one would expect, are the waterholes that make it a place where life can subsist. Other motifs include hills, sand and saltlakes, campsites and symbols of human activity.

Aesthetically, the interesting thing is the relation, or boundary, between motif and decoration; sometimes it seems that a couple of identifiable motifs are simply surrounded by patterning. The love of pattern is a deeply ingrained human instinct for making something symbolically our own.

At other times, though, what seems to be pattern may also contain allusions to motifs we do not recognise; and in any case, the patterning, dots or lines, also evokes the ubiquitous life force the Aborigines feel in their desert homeland.

Circles and rings are a point where motif and pattern coincide: some paintings are covered with an almost psychedelic profusion of concentric rings, like target patterns. Yet these are anything but abstractions, since there is always a vivid sense of living reality as the object of reference.

What that reality is remains unclear, as the pictures relate to myths, rituals and magical ceremonies that are secret and may only be shared with initiates; thus only the exoteric aspects of the stories are published, while the esoteric is concealed.

Knowing what is meant by these pictures, however, would not greatly alter our experience of them, since the stories in question only have significance for members of particular tribal cultures, and for those who live in the lands to which the stories pertain.

For the Aborigines who know these topographies, the paintings are like symbolic maps and mnemonics of the myths that underpin their sense of identity. For others, they are inherently obscure, if not unintelligible. Their primary interest is not the quality of execution; what speaks to the Western viewer is something completely different, a sense of the numinous that modern art has largely forgotten.