The Landscapes of Eddie Burrup

Elizabeth Durack’s art has been an integral part of the Australian art narrative for seventy years. Her first exhibition, “Time and Tide”, was held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1946. Her work evolved from simple line drawings, through lyrical watercolours, to part abstraction and allegorical paintings. It is said that Durack’s work reached its peak in her last creative phase—the art of Eddie Burrup—and that this work transcends all that went before it.

Landscape is the defining focus of Australian art. It is distributed across the literary and visual disciplines, described over and over again in our paintings, novels and poems from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It is the overwhelming subject explored continuously by painters from Streeton to Arkley, from Heysen to Whiteley. It was the core subject of last year’s show “Australia” at the Royal Academy in London, and yet it remains an elusive enigma which drives the possibilities of our people. The landscape here is significantly different from that in the rest of Western civilisation, yet our culture is based in the Western tradition and confined somehow to a process of enlightenment and development which requires us to see our landscape before we can see ourselves.

Landscape is also the defining focus of Australian Aboriginal art for the last 40,000 years. The cave paintings, the sand paintings, the body art, the Dreaming and the legends always circle landscape, as do the Tula Pintubi paintings. Landscape is a theme that Australian Aboriginal art and Australian Western art share. We believe that if we know who we are, then we might better know where we are going, and we seem to agree that the landscape will define who we can be.

Of course, landscape is a big word—it travels from the gum trees and droughts to the locked wards of the psychiatric hospitals. It describes our dreams as well as the Dreaming. It is seen from the air and travels in song cycles. We hear landscape in the songs of “home” as we yearn to be accepted by “country” and thus to become. There is a landscape in the faces of outback sun-dried bush people as there is a landscape in Smith Street, Fitzroy, on a Friday night. It is such a big word, it is in danger of dispersion. Yet still we know the sort of country we are seeking to inhabit or which is seeking to inhabit us. The indigenous search for landscape is no less fluid than the Western search. Here artists differ in their descriptions because the traditional Aboriginal mind believes that the land owns us yet the Western mind believes that it owns the land.

If you are owned by the land you cannot stand still. You must move with the seasons and the water. You do not build houses when the land owns you, when you are part of the landscape, the country, the Ngarangani, the Dreaming. However, if you own the land, you build fences and farms, houses and towns. You are the product of the feudal system, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, Magna Carta, slavery, emancipation and the Enlightenment.

The poet Barry Hill likens The Songs of Central Australia (translated by T.G.H. Strehlow) to the Book of Genesis. Elizabeth Durack composed images of the Ngarangani using the physical and political landscape to describe the Aboriginal spiritual afterlife. Influenced by Dante, and perhaps Doré and Goya, she created a series of works on paper and canvas which could be seen as translating the Purgatorio into Miruwung Gajerrong. She used only the earthen colours of the Aboriginal palette. She used her knowledge of Aboriginal lore and landscape.

The Eddie Burrup paintings are images of the landscape which owns its people, by a woman who owned the land of her pioneering forebears. They are a unique and valuable interpretation of the familiar yet isolated places of her upbringing. This is the landscape in which the Aboriginal Dreaming excludes those who own the land, yet includes a wild landscape of human figures, x-rayed animal spirits, plants, water holes, the subterranean and the sky-borne, all whirling about in colour and line, like no other landscape ever painted in Australia.

The colours of these paintings seem to be electric and yet molten. There is something of Ian Fairweather, perhaps the Chinese calligraphy. Donald Friend is there somewhere, along with Sidney Nolan’s “Leda and the Swan” and probably some of the stylists, Drysdale and Dobell. Yet these are wastelands set in the Aboriginal world, with Aboriginal images, seen from the air, map-like, detailed, abstract—the Ngarangani—Dante’s Purgatorio with Eddie Burrup as her guide—Elizabeth Durack’s Virgil. She painted places where few whitefellas had ever been, as if Dante were guiding her hand. They are wastelands and not wastelands, depending on what you know and who you are. Eddie Burrup loved Joyce; he was climbing on the shoulders of giants.

These landscapes are not paradise but they are survivable with small amounts of water and lean gathered food. They may redeem you and they are beautiful. I could see a Qantas jet wrapped up in Lament for the Princess—it would look sensational. I would choose Signals from Howling Dog Rock to be projected onto the Sydney Opera House during the next major celebration of our freedom.

The righteous who judge history make silent decisions about landscape and some may believe that human beings are anathema to earth, that they are alien and do not have the same integrity as other animals and plants. Yet because we are the most successful species, we have decided to make ourselves gods. We seem to have agreed to take control of the world. We believe we can control the landscape to prove to ourselves that we do not believe in gods or even God—we only believe in science and the science is settled. Durack’s Eddie Burrup landscapes were painted at the confluence of where Aboriginal spirituality—the Dreaming—met Western lore, Western law and the Western environmental enlightenment. They are painted at the point where modern Aboriginal art met traditional Aboriginal art and also at the point at which Aboriginal art met Western art.

Durack painted under the pseudonym “Eddie Burrup”, defining a point where both gender and race met. She had first-hand knowledge of both cultures to achieve this with some integrity. This is an archipelago of human thought and art which is profound and worthy of serious consideration. These are landscapes of the afterlife constructed through an Aboriginal, Miruwung Gajerrong, perspective, through the mind, heart and hand of “Eddie Burrup” depicted as a vision of an ancient ontology, in a series of works on paper and canvas.

You could look at some of the Eddie Burrup series as paintings of powerlessness and doom. Yet perhaps, in others, the earth is attempting to take us to paradise. Perhaps the earth is adjusting to our confluence, our success, our racial perspectives, oeuvres, styles. The landscape would be far less a thing if there were not people to see it, to interpret it, to communicate across the centuries their visions of what they see. It is worth remembering, briefly, amongst all the clever misanthropy those who claim to love the landscape effuse, that we human beings, of all races, are also magnificent. Only a skilled painter with a highly intelligent mind and a knowledge of Western art, law and religion could have attempted to translate the fluid concept of the Aboriginal Dreaming into Western art. It was a brave and important thing to do.

It was brave because Durack  painted under an Aboriginal name, and she knew this was “cheeky”. “Cheekyness” is a much-admired Aboriginal virtue and Durack wanted to see if the Eddie Burrup paintings would stand up in the Aboriginal market. They were not only accepted but applauded. Durack then publicly revealed her pseudonym to Art Monthly and was subsequently vilified. The work, however, was not copied from another artist. The landscapes she explored and painted remain unchanged in the historical record.

The traditional Aboriginal artists who painted the original cave paintings, the sand paintings, and developed the body art, were not known, because this work was done by the spirits, not men or women. So we have the paintings but not the artists. Aboriginal people could not have maintained faith in their song cycles and images if they had been created by mortal men. Aboriginal culture valued the art and the songs, but the artists and the poets were spirits, not human beings. What is more important, the painting or the painter?

At the centre of art is landscape and at the centre of landscape are the literal and abstract images of humankind’s search for itself through narratives of what the ancient Greek philosophers called the first principle. Durack’s Eddie Burrup paintings can be seen as a cross-cultural spiritual narrative with the stated intent of achieving reconciliation. They describe the penance and the purgatory and they describe a form of redemption for everybody. Reconciliation is a central aspect to Durack’s Eddie Burrup series. The survival of the paintings fills the heart with hope.

A species which does not know where it is going and does not believe in God, could believe it is the master of the universe. Yet we fear that the landscape, the environment, nature, may consume our consciousness as a rising sea consumes a house. The destination of human consciousness seems caught in either transformation or apocalypse. Is it possible that paradise seeks us as much as we seek paradise? What would paradise be without human beings, without consciousness, without a witness to its landscape? Our landscapes describe our knowledge of ourselves. Like magnets we attract each other, paradise and human beings. Through the maelstroms and the catastrophes, heaven seeks us.