This was published 3 months ago
Opinion
By resisting exposure, Gina Rinehart painted a portrait of the ‘Streisand effect’
Jacqueline Maley
Columnist and senior journalistRenaming rights, please, to be extended promptly to Gina Rinehart – not for one of the swimmers she sponsors, but for what is known as the “Streisand effect”. That is, the phenomenon of famous, powerful figures trying to suppress information about themselves, but in the attempt, attracting far more publicity of the very thing they wanted to be hidden.
Barbra Streisand inspired the term in 2003, when she attempted to stop publication of an aerial photograph of her house, taken to document coastal erosion in Malibu, California. The result was that the photograph was widely circulated for the world to see.
Double or nothing: both of Vincent Namatjira’s portraits of Gina Rinehart have now been given publicity.
According to Wikipedia: the Streisand effect “exemplifies psychological reactance: where the desire to hide information instead makes its propagation more likely”.
Rinehart kicked an analogous own-goal on Wednesday when the Herald and The Age reported that she “demanded the National Gallery of Australia remove a portrait of her from an exhibition by Archibald Prize-winning Indigenous artist Vincent Namatjira”.
A follow-up story reported she enlisted a group of 20 elite Australian swimmers to lobby the gallery to remove the portrait as it was “offensive to a great Australian”. Yet another report on Friday revealed that Rinehart was trying to have removed a second portrait of her from the same exhibition.
The first portrait, which you wouldn’t dare call flattering, was splashed across the front page of the Herald and page three of The Age. “The picture Rinehart hates” ran the headline, and you really can see why – you wouldn’t wish that portrait on Dorian Gray. Rinehart looks a bit like a bewildered fish. Mona Lisa it ain’t.
That Namatjira happens to be one of Australia’s most important artists seems lost on Rinehart. He has won the Archibald Prize. His style is high caricature, and his wit is integral to his work.
It’s supposed to be satirical – some of his most famous pieces include portraits of himself (often wearing an AC/DC T-shirt), hanging out with the late Queen Elizabeth, or taking a newly wedded Charles and Diana on a tour of the outback.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott may also like to take out an injunction – Namatjira’s 2016 portrait of him does no favours. (As the art critic Wes Hill put it: “Namatjira’s political leaders all look frozen, dull behind the eyes, whiter than white, and as if battling an internal war with their fakery and greed.” Ouch)
Namatjira was gracious in his response to the attempted Rinehartian cancellation of his work. “People don’t have to like my paintings,” he said in a statement. “But I hope they take the time to look and think, ‘why has this Aboriginal bloke painted these powerful people? What is he trying to say?’ I paint people who are wealthy, powerful, or significant.”
Rinehart’s wealth, power and significance are undeniable. She is Australia’s richest person, worth an estimated $37.6 billion, and has been reported to be among the top 10 richest women in the world. She donates to the right-wing Institute for Public Affairs (tagline: “The Voice for Freedom”, but maybe that doesn’t include artistic freedom), and she has made public statements questioning climate change.
In 2012, Rinehart wrote an article in a mining magazine saying that if people wanted to be richer they should “stop whingeing” and “do something to make more money yourself − spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working”.
Rinehart has made her money skilfully reversing the fortunes of her father’s ailing company, mining Australian land that many Aboriginal people regard as stolen.
In 2022, she pulled a proposed $15 million in funding from Netball Australia, after some players expressed discomfort with the prospect of wearing the Hancock Prospecting logo on their uniforms. Indigenous player Donnell Wallam was reported to be at the centre of the players’ pushback because she objected to comments made by the company’s founder, Rinehart’s father Lang Hancock, in the 1980s. He said sterilisation should be used to solve “the Aboriginal problem”. It doesn’t get much worse than that.
Namatjira is, of course, one of those “problem” Aboriginal Australians. He was born in 1983 in Alice Springs, in the Central Australian desert. As a child, he lived at Hermannsburg, on Ntaria country in remote Northern Territory, but when his mother died, he and his sister were placed in foster care in Perth.
In other words, his was a common story for an Aboriginal person – displacement, family separation and removal were rooted in his childhood.
But his ancestry was uncommon – he is the great-grandson of the legendary landscape painter Albert Namatjira, who was the first Aboriginal artist to take on the conventions of Western art and use them to depict Australian landscapes. Albert became a household name. Reproductions of his paintings were collected by white people, and hung in their homes. He was embraced by the establishment. Up to a point.
Vincent Namatjira with “Self-Portrait” (2022).Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
In 1957, he was the first recorded Northern Territorian Aboriginal person to gain citizenship, but it didn’t stop him from being unfairly jailed, and it didn’t give him land rights.
Albert’s great-grandson has done something different with his art. He is wilfully anti-realist, and his work is full of savvy irreverence to the canon and, by extension, the establishment forces that have harmed and discriminated against Aboriginal people since colonisation.
Cara Kirkwood, a consultant cultural strategist who used to work in First Nations engagement at the National Gallery, says Namatjira is “proof all Australians have something to say”.
“It’s not just about him being an Aboriginal artist,” Kirkwood says. “It’s about him being an Australian artist with something to say. No one anticipates someone from the bush who lives out in a remote place to have any kind of lens on what tricks modernity plays on us. He does.”
Rinehart seems to want to use her money for cultural influence. Namatjira uses his talent to the same end.
She wants to control her public image, and will deploy people financially dependent on her to that end. His art is a subversion of that control.
Rinehart’s attempts at censorship have only elevated Namatjira and brought his work to a new audience.
Life’s best things are priceless, and artistic freedom is one of them.
Jacqueline Maley is a regular columnist.