A STORY OF MAN AND COUNTRY Sera Davies’ Namatjira Project
In the late 1920s, the Arrernte families of Ntaria (later established as the Lutheran mission of Hermannsburg) in the Northern Territory lost an estimated 85 per cent of their children to scurvy and malnutrition, brought on by severe drought. Stricken with grief after having lost a daughter, young father Albert Namatjira – only in his twenties – then resolved to use whatever he had been given to improve the lot of his community, so long as it brought in the money.
When the white artist Rex Battarbee, accompanied by colleague John Gardner, drove a converted Ford Model T on unsealed roads from Melbourne to Arrernte country in 1934, Namatjira found his opportunity. Battarbee and Gardner had come all this way once before – an utterly mad distance at the time – to paint watercolours of the desert’s interior and take them back to their coastal-dwelling urban audience. While in Hermannsburg in 1934, they exhibited their creations to the Arrernte locals. Namatjira saw their work and must have been deeply inspired, so much so that he might have asked himself the logical question: if a foreigner could paint his country and get money for it, why couldn’t he? This was the first significant time the connection between non-Indigenous artists and an Aboriginal genius would lead to an explosion
