There is still much to learn about the life of Tjungurrayi. This includes his possible participation in three cultural movements. Firstly, there is evidence to suggest he may have played a role in an Aboriginal resistance movement to revive native law that began in the Kimberleys and arrived in Central Australia near Mount Wedge whilst Jimmy worked there.[155] Secondly, we know from Clifford Possum’s life stories that Tjungurrayi’s family knew Albert Namatjira at Jay Creek and was familiar with the European style of landscape painting this Arrernte artist had learnt from Rex Battarbee. Jimmy’s influence on his artist sons — three of whom participated in an alternative Indigenous arts movement at Papunya — is yet to be considered. After all, Mountford and Roberts encouraged Tjungurrayi to sketch on paper his ‘totemic landscapes’ from an aerial viewpoint. This provided Tjungurrayi with a means other than travelling and guiding to maintain, diffuse and promote respect for Western Desert cultural knowledge. Finally, Tjungurrayi or ‘One Pound Jimmy’ was a harbinger of Aboriginal economic independence through participation in Aboriginal cultural tourism. These concerns, however, are beyond the scope of this enquiry and beckon further work.
Holmes mobilised travel writers to guide the choices of tourists and educate them in particular ways of seeing Aboriginality, cross-cultural contact, and connections to land. Their articles used images of Tjungurrayi to support their claims. These narratives did not reflect Tjungurrayi’s lived reality or personal qualities until the 1950s. They constricted understandings of Aboriginality to a narrow European idea of ‘primitive’ man. Holmes used these images to present desert men as ‘Stone Age people’ doomed to extinction. This legitimated dispossession and soothed troubled consciences. Image-making was a powerful form of self-justification for colonisation.
Tourism image-makers created three overlapping tourist gazes. Each shaped tourism rituals. They directed tourists to seek out ‘Stone-Age’ men, capture their likeness in photographs and display them upon their return home. This created a vicious circle. Aboriginal men became entrapped by a stereotype when tourists asked them to pose, take off their clothes, and act like a ‘Stone-Age’ man just like ‘One Pound Jimmy’.
Despite this institutional power, Jimmy managed to challenge this myth and escape from its confines by developing relationships with a new regime of image-makers. The combined efforts of Harney, Roberts, Mountford and Tjungurrayi destabilised cultural barriers. They disproved the idea of ‘two polarised worlds’, promoted human mutuality rather than racial alterity, produced counter-images that fostered respect for desert culture and tribal law, and created a complex identity for Tjungurrayi.
Tjungurrayi moved from a disempowered to an empowered position. He was able to influence how he was presented to mostly Anglo-Australian tourists and some Aboriginal people. Holmes shifted from having unrestricted use of his photographs to being constrained by counter-images produced by Tjungurrayi in collaboration with others. Shortly after Tjungurrayi’s passing on 28 March 1965, Roberts reworked his photograph into a painting for the cover of The Dreamtime Book (Fig 5.24).[156] This was possibly a response to the Walkabout cover. It commemorated the life of Tjungurrayi and asserted the ongoing presence of his spirit force in Warlpiri-Anmatyerre country. It shows him as a water spirit calling water to the earth to give life and renewal to a parched country, a thirsty people and all living things. This is a far cry from Holmes’ presentation of him as a passive ‘Stone-Age’ man who willingly accepted his own extinction and dispossession.
The Dreamtime Book, cover, 1973 [detail]. Reproduced with permission from the artist’s son, Rhys Roberts.
The relationship between Tjungurrayi and Holmes provides many insights. The young tourism executive brought to his work a desire to present stories about Anglo-Australian pioneers shaping the destiny of a new white nation and a set of misconceptions about Aboriginal people. These revealed more about the aims and fears of his colonising culture than the people he claimed to represent. They blinded Holmes to the individual circumstances and lived experiences of men like Tjungurrayi. This is not a purely theoretical matter because images educate tourists how to see and relate to others. Images create effects. In this instance, they reinforced negative stereotypes of Aboriginal men and fostered a belief in British superiority/Indigenous inferiority when tourists were first being encouraged to travel to the inland. This limited tourists’ capacity to imagine how to relate to Aboriginal people while they were there.
Tourism is a powerful agent of social change and identity construction. Whilst the extent to which travel images determine tourist attitudes and behaviour is a topic of much debate, it is generally accepted images do exercise intellectual force. Tourism image-makers hold positions of power in contemporary society. This story is one from which we can draw lessons and inspiration. It reveals the dangers associated with the indiscriminate combination of ideas and photographs drawn from tourism image-banks. It also shows how cross-cultural collaboration produced images to foster new ways of seeing that incorporated Tjungurrayi’s lived experiences, preferred identities, alternative rationale and contribution to the history of Central Australian cohabitation.
Smithsonian Institution, 1951-4 [detail].
Smithsonian Institution 1951-4.
[detail, cropped to respect cultural markings of the men], Roy Dunstan, 1936-1938, ‘Two Old Aboriginal Hunters with Weapons’, Australian Aborigines at the Devil’s Marbles area north of Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Charles Weetman collection, State Library of Victoria, H92.342/215, <http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/pictoria/b/2/6/doc/b26630.shtml>