During the stamp saga a new image-making regime was gaining prominence in Walkabout. This group of writers and photographers was united in a belief that relationships with Aboriginal people were a necessary component of more respectful and realistic representational practices.[140] They sought to convince tourists that Aboriginal people were not ‘naked, howling savages’ eking out a dull and brutal existence,[141] but a ‘cultured and courageous people, living in harmony with their environment and with a spiritual and moral way of life that the Western world could well envy’.[142] The contributions of Bill Harney[143] and Ainslie Roberts[144] combined to discredit earlier representations of Tjungurrayi and promote a new understanding of him. They identified Tjungurrayi as an extraordinary man who was capable of leading a complicated life and juggling multiple identities. These included the celebrity ‘commemorated on a stamp’, a cattleman, a cultural intermediary, a Warlpiri-Anmatyerre lawman/custodian, and a committed family man. Harney incorporated Tjungurrayi’s personal voice and standpoint into Walkabout for the first time, and Roberts presented him pictorially as he wished to be seen.
Both Bill Harney’s Life Among the Aborigines and Charles Mountford’s[145] journal — documenting an anthropological expedition undertaken with Roberts and guided by Tjungurrayi — record an awareness of Tjungurrayi’s commitment to his cultural inheritance and desire to assert his lawman/custodian identity.[146] These men promoted the idea of human mutuality rather than racial alterity and Harney in particular, sought to reverse the former Walkabout focus on Aboriginal difference and inferiority. Two of his articles sought to show how Tjungurrayi was working with settler Australians to overcome shared concerns and advance common aims and interests.
Harney described his travels with ‘Djugadi’ [sic] (Tjungurrayi) near Central Mount Wedge in a writing style that was new to Walkabout. He told stories of cooperative cohabitation rather than the segregation of two discrete worlds and organised them into two major themes: the resolution of the common problem of accessing water resources, and the belief systems used by both groups to explain the origins, rituals and taboos associated with them. Harney gave equal measure to rationales used by desert ‘blackfellows’ and pastoralists: Tjungurrayi’s explanation of rainbow serpents, culture heroes, rituals and visitation rites was interwoven with geographic explanations given by Bill Waudby, the station lessee. Harney demonstrated Tjungurrayi and Waudby were conversant with each other’s logic, and explained both combined to form one chapter in the book of humanity dealing with the means to survive in arid conditions.
Both Harney and Roberts first hooked tourist attention by highlighting the fact that Tjungurrayi was the man known as ‘the head on the stamp’. It is also possible these references to the stamp saga were an editorial flourish by Holmes himself.[147]
Harney outlined how Warlpiri men, including Tjungurrayi, used ‘traditional’ knowledge of country to help Waudby ‘open up’ Central Mount Wedge for pastoralism. He recounted how they had eventually led Waudby to their sacred wells after acting ‘dumb’ for months with statements like ‘nothing water longa this land’, and had only revealed them after they were satisfied Waudby was a worthy recipient of the knowledge. Harney described Waudby and Warlpiri working together digging wells, sinking bores and erecting windmills to establish cattle runs and the homestead. He identified Tjungurrayi as Waudby’s valued gardener who cared for the precious lawn and garden-beds in challenging desert conditions.
Harney highlighted Tjungurrayi’s acumen in acting as an agent of understanding between two cultural groups. He described him resolving cross-cultural misunderstandings, grounding new relations on positive footings by making appropriate introductions, and translating English into Warlpiri and vice versa for people living on the station and travelling through it.
Both writers acknowledged Tjungurrayi’s skills as a custodian of knowledge and teacher who could make sense of a ‘place of misunderstanding’. Harney drew on Tjungurrayi’s teachings to explain how desert men located native soaks, sank wells, maintained ritual relationships that bound them to their country, interpreted the sound of wind droning around Mount Wedge as the ‘singing of a ritual chant of the Dreamtime’ by the ‘Earth Mother’, and read landmarks as symbols of the ancestral creation figures. These included Kumalba (Emu Springs) as a ‘dreaming place’ that commemorated the ‘legend of the Buk Buk owl’, Mount Wedge as a ‘symbol of the culture hero’ ‘Kurinya’, and engraved circles on flat sandstones at Kumalba as symbols of women’s breasts. Harney explained how Tjungurrayi taught him to imagine ‘scenes of ochred black men grinding spears for hunting, chanting their [Kumalba] … song, and rubbing hands over the symbolic circles of the women’s dreaming’. Further, he included the following English translation of a chant used by Warlpiri to teach young males about women’s business: ‘a woman’s breast is like the Witaraga tree that grows on the hill’.[148] In so doing, Harney used Tjungurrayi’s lore to educate tourists to see Aboriginal men as sensual rather than brutish beings and Warlpiri practices as a ‘[f]ar cry from the old days of cave-man getting his girl with a knotted club’.[149]
Harney identified Tjungurrayi as a senior lawman committed to the continuity of tribal law and introduced tourists to the Warlpiri philosophy of custodianship. He recalled Tjungurrayi’s statement that ‘true ritual [was] the will to live’ and explained his stories set out how ‘desert blackmen’ should use the things ‘nature or tribal heroes’ placed on ancestral lands for them in a disciplined and orderly fashion that was both life sustaining and respectful of all living things. Harney identified contemporary Warlpiri station life as a continuation of traditional ways, in that it sought to both maintain ancestral culture and devise survival strategies to cope with changed circumstances. Further, Harney relayed the despair experienced by Tjungurrayi when new conditions prevented him from living according to ‘true tribal law’, and sacred sites were desacralised by cattle or reduced to ‘just nothing’.[150] It is possible the latter reference was Tjungurrayi’s response to a trend amongst young Warlpiri men to reject the mores of desertmen, resist tribal authority and adopt modern cowboy culture.
Finally, writers presented Tjungurrayi as a family man with cross-cultural family networks. Harney described the ‘chanting of contented natives’ coming from the ‘Aboriginal camp at night’. This was unusual given Barry Hill’s observation that ‘many station owners’ had, by this time, ‘banned the old ceremonies’.[151] Roberts however introduced a further note of loss and despair. He described Tjungurrayi as a grieving father seeking solace from his extended Warlpiri-Anmatyerre family in the desert for sorry business after his daughter Joycee died of pneumonia.[152] This occurred after Harney recorded Waudby’s baby son ‘Jim’ being taught the bush lore of desert people. References to Tjungurrayi’s constant proximity to the homestead garden and Waudby’s choice of his son’s name, suggest that Tjungurrayi may have been the boy’s namesake and teacher, plus a member of his employer’s extended family network.
While Harney’s articles reflect a shift in Walkabout’s image-making practices, it is evident there were still constraints on what writers could say. A comparison of Harney’s accounts of Tjungurrayi published in Walkabout and elsewhere suggest that either Holmes or Harney deemed some issues were unprintable in the former. This includes Harney’s discussion of Indigenous elders’ selective acceptance and rejection of attempts to assimilate them. For example his London published Life Among the Aborigines explained that attempts by Native Affairs to re-settle Warlpiri in modern houses were met with Warlpiri preferences for ‘grass-thatched shelters among the bushes’. It also recounted struggles between colonial missionaries and Pintupi over the education of their children. Harney described how Pintupi elders were thwarting missionary attempts to teach their children ‘hackneyed’ Arrernte on mission stations by ensuring they learned Pintupi from family networks and English in government rather than mission schools. Harney told tourists that elders had decided this would best ensure their children gained an understanding of the colonising culture.[153] In his commercially published book — rather than in government-supported tourism literature — Harney felt free to describe Tjungurrayi translating Pintupi songs sung by desertmen as they travelled from Areyonga mission to the Yuendumu government settlement via Mount Wedge station. Tjungurrayi relayed the happiness both he and Pintupi experienced in the knowledge that these chants were reinvigorating Pintupi language and their cultural connections to ancestral homelands.
Walkabout May 1958. Reproduced with permission of the artist’s son, Rhys Roberts.
After Holmes retired in 1957, Walkabout published a letter and photograph submitted by Roberts.[154] His contribution departed from the conventions embodied in the images captured by Dunstan and mobilised by Holmes to reinvigorate old ideas of Aboriginality. This contested the former presentation of Tjungurrayi as a ‘Stone-Age’ man (Fig 5.23). Gone were the classical warrior-hunter pose, the faraway look and the suggestion of Aboriginal extinction, the boomerang, the spear and the woomera, the pristine natural environment and the nakedness. Roberts’ photograph presented him as a Warlpiri cattleman in a cowboy shirt, gazing intently at the camera. He was laughing energetically in the presence of a friend. His mouth was wide open revealing a gap between his front teeth, which was possibly the outcome of a tooth removal ritual and a marker of his passage to manhood. In sending this photograph to Walkabout, Roberts sought to re-educate tourists about Tjungurrayi’s complex identity. He presented him as an aging black man who had adapted to station life, maintained his connections to country and family networks, and advanced through levels of Warlpiri manhood.