Whilst flooded in at Central Mt Wedge in 1966, Roberts painted directly on to the walls of the homestead. One painting is labeled ‘Lasseter’s Last Ride’, and it can also be imagined as a self-portrait. The wedge-shaped hill is very similar to Central Mt Wedge.

Lasseter, as is well known, was a dreamer and a con artist who claimed to know the location of a gold reef in Central Australia, and in 1930 he got backing to mount an expedition. Although spectacularly unsuccessful, Lasseter’s expedition added another chapter to the legend of gold in the Centre, and Lasseter himself, having died in the bush, became a legend in his own right. The story gained more popularity in 1931 with the publication of Ian Idriss’s book Lasseter’s Last Ride.^[18] In Ainslie's painting, the lonesome figure of Lasseter making his solitary way through the bush in search of a dream gives us a fair portrait of Roberts himself, as well as linking his project with the prominent ‘motif of modern artist as nomad’.^[19]

What did Ainslie Roberts think he was doing when he made his paintings of Aboriginal mythology? His description of his method tells us about his intent. He says that he studied the long versions of the myths, but that: ‘The paintings always come first, and the big job is to get rid of me, the things I know, the conventional ideas I was taught and brought up with, so that the myth can come through. I become a channel, a communicator, scarcely a painter at all’.^[20] He certainly acknowledges his debt to Aboriginal people: ‘I just consider myself as the agent only, the communicator… I must always keep in mind my debt to the aborigines who created these myths … If my paintings continue to be accepted as readily as the first exhibition, I have the opportunity and responsibility of communicating to my fellow whites that here is a rich culture that deserves to be noticed, respected, and explored…’ Roberts held the view that Aboriginal culture was ‘very old’ and ‘very nearly extinct’, and he wanted his paintings to be ‘speaking for an ancient culture’.^[21]

The underlying theory of Roberts’s art is the Jungian view that there are universal archetypes which manifest in myth, and which are present in the unconscious of all humans. Like Nolan and other modern Australian artists, Roberts claims universal significance for his work through its expressivity in relation to a universal consciousness or universal soul.^[22] To become a channel, for Roberts, was to open one’s self to one’s own unconscious, where one will connect with the universal archetypes which Aboriginal mythology also expresses. This theory of artistic channeling situates the artist as a medium through whom the archetypes, and by extension that which is universal in Aboriginal culture, can flow into the modern world.

There is a more historically conscious intention in Roberts’s work as well. The generic landscapes and homogenous indigenous people he presents in his work are totally Australian, and his work contributed to the making of Central Australian landscapes occupied by Aboriginal people as a primary symbolic Australian landscape.^[23]

Mountford put his views on landscape and nationalism into words:

I will set aside the gender issues here. In discussing Aboriginal action toward the place I have deliberately drawn on women’s action in order to combat the generically gendered articulation of indigenous belonging.^[25] Mountford apparently takes it as given that localities have a power or spirit, and he believes that the power or spirit of Australian localities can be accessed through Aboriginal people because of their long history here. The argument is that the shallowness of settler culture is due to its short chronology, and that it can be overcome by being grafted onto Aboriginal culture. It is thus a completely non-provocative theory of history. It rests on a sedimentary view of history and meaning, suggesting that both accumulate with time. It does not even dream of suggesting that shallowness might be linked to frontier violence or the concept of terra nullius.

Mountford’s argument toward nationalism runs on a parallel track to Roberts’s channeling of universalised archetypes. Whereas Roberts wanted to dip into what he believed to be a common pool and channel out messages that are both universal and located (at least at a continental scale), Mountford wanted to bore into historically grounded spirits of place, and thus to build up a modern history that connects with ancient powers. The artist and the anthropologist share this penetrative action in which Aboriginal people and their knowledge are mined to serve the interests of settlers. Even as Roberts attempted to channel respect for Aboriginal people, he was erasing their own particularity, their own representations, their own knowledges. And as he erased theirs he superimposed his own visions of what he imagined might once have been theirs.

In Mountford’s nationalistic theory of the power of place the relationship of channeling seems to be reversed. The white man uses Aboriginal culture as a channel to sacred geography and to history. So, on the one hand, Roberts claims or hopes to channel myths into modernity. On the other hand, Mountford hoped Aboriginal culture would channel or bore the white man’s presence into the landscape. In both forms of encounter we see the tension between desire and erasure, presence and absence, love and violence. This is nationalism in the settler society mode. Its own autogenesis is enacted through the dynamic tensions of love and death. Thomas suggests in his article ‘Home décor and dance’ that the business of simultaneously exhibiting and exterminating natives is part of the enduring invasive logic of a settler colonial nation.^[26] Philip Deloria makes a similar point concerning the United States: that American (settler) identities are ‘built not around synthesis and transformation, but around unresolved dualities themselves’. Those dualities include the simultaneous desire to exalt and ‘extirpate’ the Indian.^[27]

This tension finds a complex articulation in the work of Mountford and Roberts. Commercially their collaborations were enormously successful. Roberts’s first exhibit sold out in two days, a subsequent exhibit sold out in two hours; there was a waiting list of persons wishing to buy paintings. The books sold out and were reprinted; they remained in print for over 20 years, and thus became an Australian publishing phenomenon.^[28] Along with the widespread enthusiasm, there was also criticism. At the time, many critics spoke of appropriation. Hulley took those criticisms seriously and sought to answer them by claiming that the intent was not to replicate Aboriginal art, but to find a new western art. He wrote, ‘the paintings have nothing to do with the forms of Aboriginal art. They relocate this timeless material in a Western inner landscape. They do not falsify it, for in itself it is the product of something universal; but they give it a new range, and a wider context of immediacy’.^[29] Hulley’s reclamation of integrity is arrived at through recourse to this universal and timeless common pool. So the colonising logic of exhibition and erasure goes round and round.

The appropriative elements of both nationalist and universalising encounters are the subject of huge amounts of analysis, and, more recently and more interestingly, of law suits over the copyright of intellectual property. I would just note that in both nationalist and universalising contexts, the theory of a universal unconscious quite conveniently displaces indigenous people as the privileged artists and experts of their own culture. It treats Aboriginal knowledge as an ore body that could be mined by anyone with the talent for tapping into the unconscious. This invasion via mysticism replicates the process of colonisation of land; it discovers, claims, and opens up indigenous culture as another unowned region, a cultural terra nullius.

Furthermore, while mysticism can be seen to be in contradiction to the pragmatics of both colonisation and modernity, the Mountford/Roberts project is in its structure completely modern. It claims access to universals, and it breaks, dissects and fragments in order to find the meanings of things.^[30] It breaks into the mother lode of inspiration, pulling out and disconnecting pieces, and reducing parts to fragments. It relocates the fragments into new configurations and it markets this new work with a claim for non-native authenticity. The authenticity or integrity of the market product is based in part upon the fragments of an indigenous life world, which are worked into the piece or alluded to by the piece, which claims to transcend them.

There is a hollowness at the heart of this enterprise that is exactly the hollowness and emptiness created by more familiar frontier violence. One name for this hollowness is monologue: it constitutes its own closed circle and declares that circumscribed arena to be the true basis of all culture. As Said says, it mistakes ‘one idea as the only idea’.^[31]

Hulley tells a story which he believes symbolised the spiritual meaning of the 1956 trip for Roberts: ‘As he walked through a ... [stone arrangement] on the east side of the hill, he picked up a sacred stone that lay there, broken into two pieces. Joining the pieces together in his hand, he stood for a long time looking down at them’.^[32] There is an amazing amount of information about the modern artist and about redemption through landscape expressed and exposed in this little story. The white man fled civilisation and went to the frontier. He went with a white expert in Aboriginal matters, and with a love of Central Australia and respect for Aboriginal people. Whilst there, and ostensibly under the guidance of an Aboriginal man, he went walking around alone and he found what he took to be the broken remnants of Aboriginal culture. This is to say that he found confirmed in a stone his own expectations of what Aboriginal culture could be – ancient and nearly extinct.^[33] The meanings he attributed to the stone – that it was sacred, that it was broken (in the sense that it should have been whole), that it needed to be mended – these meanings, as far as we know, were solely in his imagination. With his own two hands he tried to make these broken pieces whole again, and in that act he found a mission. He would heal himself by restoring or repairing Aboriginal culture.

According to Hulley’s account of this pivotal event, Ainslie Roberts did all of this as a solitary act. He did not ask One Pound Jimmy (or even Mountford) about the place, the stones, or the need for healing. Indeed, One Pound Jimmy does not seem to figure in this vignette at all. The guidance of this Aboriginal man meant a lot to both Mountford and Roberts, but it seems they wanted him to navigate and to answer questions as asked. On the basis of available information, One Pound Jimmy was asked to walk, point, carry, and provide pieces of information. His circumscribed presence enables us to realise how deeply Roberts was on a white man’s quest. One Pound Jimmy facilitated the journey; he travelled with the white men, but he did not journey with them.^[34]

As I read the accounts of the interactions with One Pound Jimmy, it looks to me like he was treated as a marvelous repository of fragments – an ore body in his own right. I am not accusing Roberts of using a poor methodology, of failing to consult, or of being insensitive to Aboriginal people’s knowledge and feelings, although all of these things might, anachronistically but realistically, be said. What fascinates me is the solitariness of it all. This is monologue: the self talking to the self, and the self structuring encounters so that he will hear only reflections of the self. Violence lurks here: in monologue, where the possibilities for dialogue are erased. Roberts’s experience with the stone is a solitary act of imaginary repair. It is emblematic of the larger project, and captures both the longing for a transcendent presence and the erasure of the real people and knowledge of the place. These two intertwined acts of imagination – longing for an imaginary presence / oblivion toward the real presence of others – together configure the violence of frontier redemption.

Let us recall that ‘of all the places in the North that Ainslie [Roberts] came to know, … [Palka-karrinya was] … the one that would hold the most deeply personal meaning for him’.^[35] This painting is on the wall in the kitchen at the old Waudby homestead on Central Mount Wedge. It was painted in 1966, just a few years after Roberts’s first public successes. It is labeled ‘Palka-karrinya’, but for me it is a stunningly insightful portrait of the frontier.

The painting leaches all the colour from the country, and shrinks the stone to a peanut. The foreground is an oversized skull, which I take to be an eagle skull, but it could be any predatory bird. It is not asking too much to see the predatory skull as both the colonising project and the artist himself. Death dominates here. The eye socket is a reversed telescope, making everything seem small, distant, and terribly faded. This frontier gaze kills the country; we see that very clearly. Through the reversed telescope of the death head the sacred site looks lost and lifeless. Not just its presence, but its meanings too are absorbed, erased, strained through the dominating eye socket of death. The artist came for redemption; he imagined a mission to make whole that which had been broken by frontier violence, but here he recognises himself as one of the predators.