In 1950 an advertising artist and executive named Ainslie Roberts woke up, got out of bed, and collapsed. He was subsequently diagnosed as being in the midst of a nervous breakdown, and when he was well enough to get out of bed again, his wife and his business partner decided the best thing to do would be to buy him a one-way ticket to Alice Springs. There he recovered almost instantaneously, and there he made some major decisions: to spend more time on his art, to ease himself out of the advertising industry, and spend as much time as possible in Central Australia.^[9] He was not the first Australian artist to go to the bush for inspiration; in fact, Sidney Nolan had made his famous trip to the Centre only two years earlier.^[10]

According to Hulley, Roberts’s biographer, Roberts was born in England in 1911. His parents were theosophists, which was a spiritual movement that aimed to blend the sacred wisdom of the East with the scientific materialism of the West. Roberts grew up in a home in which seances, photographs of the supernatural, and discussions of ectoplasm and other arcane matters were part of the domestic culture.

The family migrated to Australia in 1922 (when Roberts was eleven), and they spent the first months with relations on a farm in South Australia where he fell deeply in love with the bush. Once the family settled in Adelaide and Roberts was back in school he proved to be a top student and a gifted artist, but was unable to fulfil his early promise because he had to leave school at age fourteen. Over the years he put himself through art school, founded his own business, married and had a family, and achieved success in the world of commercial art.

In 1952, not long after his collapse and recovery, he met Charles Mountford, and the two of them became good friends. They started making short expeditions to the bush: Mountford to record rock art; Roberts to draw, paint and photograph. Mountford was an amateur ethnographer (he subsequently gained formal qualifications, but never found significant acceptance within the academic community). He had a great interest in Aboriginal art and culture, and the two men came to be collaborators in the retelling of Aboriginal myths, and the creation of works of art inspired by them. The first exhibit was in 1963; the first book came out in 1965. Both ventures were wildly successful. As Mountford said, ‘No Australian artist has painted like this; he has followed no school – he has copied no previous artist’.^[11]

Mountford and Roberts made their first major expedition together in 1956, and (as you will have anticipated) they went to Central Mt Wedge station. Their host was Bill Waudby, and their Aboriginal guide was One Pound Jimmy, an Aboriginal man whose face was the most well known of Aboriginal faces because it had been reproduced on a 1950 series of Australian postage stamps.^[12] The artist came back in 1966, just after his first big successes, and was flooded in for a month during an uncharacteristic period of rain.

The first visit, in particular, with its interactions with Aborigines and opportunities to gain an understanding of myth and landscape, was formative for Roberts. He made two visits to Palka-karrinya, and according to Hulley, ‘of all the places in the North that Ainslie [Roberts] came to know, this is the one that would hold the most deeply personal meaning for him’.^[13]

Roberts brought his fascination with this site to fruition in 1983, shortly before he died. Hulley says that the story Roberts knew and painted was that Palka-karrinya was sacred to an Owl Dreaming.^[14] In the course of the land claim a great deal of evidence concerning Palka-karrinya was presented to the Aboriginal Land Commissioner, and none of the public evidence made any mention of an Owl Dreaming. Let us simply hold to the fact that the site made a huge impression on Ainslie Roberts. According to Hulley, it ‘would haunt his imagination until he could exorcise it in a major painting twenty-five years later’.^[15]

This painting is not typical of Roberts’s work, but it does go to the heart of his endeavour. He depicts a site, and alludes to a Dreaming or story for that site; the place and its power are refracted through the ‘surrealism’ of Roberts’s imagination.^[16] Most of Roberts’s paintings depict a more generic landscape. Similarly, most of the stories are unsourced; while specific, they are unlocated. In most of the work, most of the particular knowledge of place and people is erased and the final product speaks to a far more generalised sense of place and to a homogeneous mass of ‘brown people’. A number of the books are dedicated to ‘the brown people who handed down these Dreamtime Myths’.^[17] Not only are the storytellers generic, but they are positioned as putative ancestors who hand down stories – to us, when we read these books.