Australia’s grand old matriarch of contemporary painting Emily Kame Kngwarreye was kept working until she dropped, reports Anthea Gerrie
THE extraordinary army of spongers who lived off the talents of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Australia’s foremost contemporary painter, are looking for a new meal ticket after her.
Emily’s talent was milked by her extended family for money, food and cars — at one point she was buying a car a day. Though she was in her eighties, there was no placid old age for Emily, despite earnings that should have kept her in luxury.
She was also badgered by adventurers who arrived uninvited at the outback settlement of Utopia, where she lived in the utmost simplicity, and by squabbling dealers dazzled by the soaring value of her work. True to Aboriginal tradition, she refused no-one and painted until she dropped.
Her entourage, a gaggle of adopted children and grandchildren, accompanied her everywhere. She was their golden goose, and they snatched money from her as soon as she received it.
I met her in July at her home in the parched red desert of central Australia, 180 miles north-east of Alice Springs and accessible only by light aircraft or 100 miles of dirt road. Her first words were: “Too much painting!”
Her principal dealer of recent times was Don Holt, a cattle rancher whose grandfather homesteaded the lands abutting Utopia, establishing a 70-year link between his and Emily’s people. He told me: “As a senior woman of her tribe, she’s always seen it as her obligation to provide for an extended family of up to 100. We’ve tried to get them to think about the possibility of Emily dying and the need for other sources of income, but it is something nobody has wanted to contemplate.”
Emily’s health began to fail from the moment she found fame. She had only seven years on canvas behind her when she died, but that was long enough to attract a horde of mercenaries to her Utopia. “They come uninvited, clutching wads of cash, asking her to ‘just do us a quick Emily’. Being Aboriginal, she couldn’t refuse,'” said Holt.
The best work fetched six-figure sums and hangs in the Australia’s top museums and collections; Paul Keating and Janet Holmes ^ Court are among her fans.
During my visit, Emily asked Holt to build her a humpie — a traditional tin-rooted shelter — on his land. He said she was contemplating adopting Delmore Downs, the Holt estate where she did most of her painting, as a permanent home since she was getting so little peace in Utopia. Disdaining bricks and mortar, she preferred to sleep on the bare earth. “Houses are so cold,” she explained. “The ground is warmer.”
Emily spoke little English but seemed anxious to communicate, whispering confidences as I sat beside her on a blanket. These were not for the ears of her entourage, but she immediately passed them the barbecued chicken Holt had given her after taking the tiniest piece for herself. It was shocking to see how quickly chicken and dollar bills alike were snatched from her ever-open hands.
One paper called Emily’s lifestyle “sleeping under the stars.” That is to romanticise Utopia. Small groups sit round campfires surrounded by mangy dogs; unemployment is chronic and there is an undeniable air of desolation.
Emily was a bundle of rags huddled under blankets, unwilling to rise until tea had been brewed in the billy by Lily Sandover, her loving friend. Lily, an artist of note herself, acted as a surrogate for Emily when she was unable to bear her own children; the one son thus produced, the light of her life, vanished mysteriously several years ago, causing Emily a grief from which she never recovered.
Her one personal possession appeared to be the wheelchair without which she could no longer get around. Her only other needs were the materials with which she created her highly contemporary work, packed with an astonishing amount of emotion. Canvasses were provided by the Holts together with an acrylic palette of her choice — or almost: “I only give Emily blue reluctantly because I feel she uses it less successfully,” admitted Don Holt’s wife, Janet, one of the government’s first Aboriginal advisers.
For the Holts, Emily painted primarily in hot desert colours — to the disgust of other dealers who felt the Holts tried to lead her towards crowd-pleasing pictures in commercial colours.
Christopher Hodges, a Sydney dealer who gave Emily her first one-woman show, favours the sombre colours she used while mourning her vanished son. “I told her it was all right to make angry marks and do paintings that were not pretty.” Hodges told me he had never had and never will have any dealings with the Holts since Don Holt told him that “art was more profitable than cattle”.
The challenge now for the “extended family” will be to find a new Emily — not as difficult as it sounds. Ever since government advisers brought cloth, wax and dyes to the women of Utopia in the Seventies, teaching them batik as a form of occupational therapy, the settlement has produced a number of museum-quality female artists. Whether they feel the same sense of obligation as Emily is another question. One rising star of Utopia, Kathleen Petyarre, was avoiding the annual Alice Springs Fair held the week I visited Utopia. “She knows she gets hassled for money in Alice,” explained Holt, who said Petyarre’s paintings would soon cross the five-figure barrier.
For Emily, who never forgot a harsh, nomadic childhood which often obliged her to walk barefoot for days in search of food and water, there was no such choice. But more valuable even than her paintings is the legacy she left her kinswomen of an enormous sense of self-esteem; there is a fount of artistic talent in Utopia and Emily demonstrated that it is never too late to find fame and fortune.