Clifton Pugh’s ‘Aboriginal’ Epiphany and the Transformation of his Landscape Art (1954–65)

Abstract

This article focuses on two episodes in the Australian modernist artist Clifton Pugh's (1924–1990) artistic career – his journey across the Nullarbor Plain in 1954 and 1956, and his travels to the Kimberley in 1964 – where his experience of the desert environment and its Indigenous inhabitants resulted in a pictorial engagement with aesthetic and sociological forms of Aboriginalism. Pugh's landscapes contributed significantly to national imagery during the 1950s and 1960s, yet his engagement with Aboriginal art, people, and culture has been overlooked. Drawing on the visual record, critic's reviews, and Pugh's statements and interviews, this article argues that Aboriginalism was a crucial element in shaping his expression of a primal Australian landscape and his own existential search for identity as an artist and as an Australian. It not only transformed his landscape art but also his sense of being and belonging in the Australian environment.

The Australian modernist artist Clifton Pugh (1924–90) is renowned as a dramatic painter of primal hostile landscapes, beset by volatile elemental forces and predatory beasts. His work belongs to the mythic national imagery tradition of more famous contemporaries such as Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd and, in particular, Russell Drysdale, whose influence on him will be explored. For art historians Robert Hughes and Bernard Smith, writing at Pugh’s peak in the 1960s and 1970s, the importance of Pugh’s landscape painting lay in its perceived continuation of a European-Australian landscape tradition.¹ This article explores the European-Australian dualism of his art with a focus on Pugh’s engagement with Aboriginal art, people, and culture, which has been overlooked until now.² Biographical texts have regarded Pugh’s engagement with Aboriginal motifs and techniques as a minor interesting aside to his wider oeuvre, and art historical studies on Aboriginalism and appropriation have excluded Pugh altogether.³

Aboriginalism refers to white representations and constructions of Aboriginal people as a ‘primitive’ Other, in a binary opposition to the ‘civilised’ West, in Australian literature, film, and art.⁴ The term was first coined by the cultural theorist Vijay Mishra in 1987 and was expanded in Dark Side of the Dream (1991) by Mishra and Bob Hodge, a semiotician and linguist, and in Power, Knowledge and Aborigines (1992) by the historian Bain Attwood and others.⁵ Mishra, Hodge and Attwood draw upon Edward Said’s groundbreaking critical work Orientalism (1978), which argued Orientalism was a European system of power and knowledge that acted to control, contend with, and even produce the Orient.⁶ A key focus of Said’s text concerns the notion that the Other cannot represent themselves and must therefore be described and demystified to Western audiences by the higher authority and knowledge of the Orientalist, poet, and scholar.⁷ Both Aboriginalism and Orientalism are premised upon exteriority and posited as a significant cultural enterprise through which the West has defined and affirmed itself.⁸ Aboriginalism has also been a useful interpretive lens in art historical discourse, particularly with art and design of the 1950s and 1960s, when, according to Ian McLean, an ‘Aboriginalisation of Australian identity’ emerged.⁹ In this article, Aboriginalism is approached from an aesthetic and sociological perspective: in terms of appropriation as part of a localised incarnation of the international primitivist art movement and as a ‘mode of discourse’ that concerns ‘ways of knowing’ and representing Aboriginal people.¹⁰ Historical terminology such as ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Aboriginal Art’ is employed to reflect the common parlance of the 1950s and 1960s. Although current practice favours the identification of Indigenous Australians by specific Indigenous language groups and traditional country, this is not possible with Pugh during this period as he did not name the individuals or communities he encountered. Pugh was not a diarist and there is a paucity of private records detailing his intimate thoughts and feelings about his work and experience of Aboriginal culture during the 1950s and 1960s, including about his journeys across the Nullarbor Plain in 1954 and 1956, and to the Kimberley in 1964, which this article identifies as major turning points in his art. Drawing on the visual record of these transformations, critics’ reviews, and Pugh’s statements and interviews, this article argues that Aboriginalism was a crucial element in shaping his expression of a primal Australian landscape and his own existential search for identity as an artist and as an Australian.

Pugh consolidated this insight into his own work relatively late. Describing himself as a regional painter in 1959, Pugh believed ‘an Australian art’ should ‘reflect the background and “soul” of the country’ because ‘it is the only truth for us to express to the rest of the world’.¹¹ Two decades later, as the impact of the Western Desert painting movement was starting to be felt, Pugh could pinpoint that it was Aboriginal art that ‘was just right for Australia’.¹² Reflecting upon its aesthetic influence on his art in a 1982 interview, Pugh proclaimed:

There’s so much about Aboriginal art I respond to. It so much belongs to the environment. It belongs to this country. There’s something about the patterns … I’m a European and I’m trained in the European manner and [my response] is some attempt to wed these two in some way or other.¹³

Pugh’s journeys across the Nullarbor in 1954 and 1956, and to the Kimberley in 1964, gave him a direct engagement with the desert environment and its Aboriginal inhabitants that resulted in a pictorial engagement with aesthetic and sociological forms of Aboriginalism. These trips were catalytic for Pugh; they not only transformed the style and content of his landscape art but affected his sense of self as an Australian of European descent living in a land with a long Aboriginal history. Looking back in 1982, Pugh identified the works he painted between 1955 and 1956 as marking ‘the beginning of the Aboriginal thing that was happening to [him]’, and he concluded, ‘this is where Clifton Pugh, whoever he is, started to emerge’.¹⁴ The ‘Aboriginal thing’ thus represented more to Pugh than a superficial appropriation of motifs and techniques. It was transformational at a personal level. After the 1964 trip, Pugh pushed further, experimenting with a cultural and spiritual dualism in his art. His perception of Aboriginal people as being at ‘one’ with their environment caused him not only to question his own cultural connection to the land but also to explore correlations from within his own inherited Christian tradition. He used St Francis, a figure that he identified with, in conjunction with images of Aboriginal encounters and corroborees to visually traverse tropes of alienation and belonging, pilgrimage, and redemption. The critical reception was savage, perhaps contributing to an explanation for the long neglect and misunderstanding of Pugh’s Aboriginalism.

Across the Nullarbor 1954 and 1956

Pugh’s first journey across the Nullarbor Plain, crossing the continent from Melbourne to Perth in November of 1954, represents a major creative catalyst in his career, one that Pugh declared ‘split open his vision’ and revealed a new aim in his art: to paint the ‘beauty – terror – hard and soft qualities’ of the Australian environment.¹⁵ Pugh was ‘deeply impressed by the primordial nature of the land’, feeling as though he had travelled through time to ‘cut back into the deserted vastness’.¹⁶ According to Pugh’s biographer, Sally Morrison, the Aboriginal people Pugh met, on the edge of the Nullarbor at Ooldea in South Australia, ‘were rainmakers’, whom Pugh subsequently depicted in paintings of that name from 1955–56. As a permanent waterhole at the juncture of north–south and east–west tribal routes, Ooldea had long been an important meeting place for several language groups, and, at times, ceremonial gatherings.¹⁷ Unfortunately, there is little to no information about Pugh’s interactions to identify individuals or describe the nature of the encounters.¹⁸ From 1955, segments of Aboriginal cross-hatching, animals painted in the x-ray style and Aboriginal figures emerged in his landscape art. The artistic stimuli derived from this first trip spurred another in January of 1956, and thereafter twice-annual excursions into the outback became habitual for Pugh. It was not just the primordial quality of the land that fascinated Pugh but ‘the feeling of man’s alienation’, the emotional intensity which Pugh in 1962 described ‘as a real shot in the arm’.¹⁹

Notably, cross-hatching and the x-ray style derive from Arnhem Land, and Pugh never visited the region. Arnhem Land motifs and techniques were extremely popular amongst modernist artists during the 1950s and 1960s due to the publications and collecting activity of anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt, Baldwin Spencer and Charles Mountford.²⁰ Pugh could have observed examples of Aboriginal art and artefacts, including Arnhem Land bark paintings collected by Baldwin Spencer at the National Museum of Victoria, which in the 1950s shared the same premises as the National Gallery and State Library of Victoria. Several publications may have provided further visual source material for his appropriation. The UNESCO World Art Series monograph Australia: Aboriginal Paintings, Arnhem Land, published in 1954, ‘outsold any other book published on Australian art’ at the time, as Ian McLean has noted.²¹ Its unusually large format and luxurious colour photographs showcased a substantial array of bark paintings and rock art in exquisite detail. In addition, black and white photographs of Aboriginal warriors surveying the distant landscape from atop boulders and escarpments illustrated the preface of the catalogue, which promoted an image of romantic primitivism that bolstered the narrative thrust of the text. The expression of Australia as an ancient and timeless land populated by stone age people would certainly have conditioned (or reinforced) Pugh’s perception of and emotive response to the land and its Aboriginal inhabitants. Australian Aboriginal Decorative Art (1938) by Frederick McCarthy, curator of anthropological collections at the Sydney Museum, was a primary resource for artists, with seven further editions published from 1948 to 1971.²² The third edition (1952) included an expanded section on Arnhem Land art and artefacts and McCarthy’s observations on the 1948–49 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. The National Museum of Victoria also celebrated the reorganisation of the ethnographical collection with an exhibition of Australian Aboriginal Art (1947), reprinting the catalogue of its pioneering 1929 exhibition verbatim.²³ All these publications present illustrations that correspond stylistically to Pugh’s appropriation of Aboriginal motifs and techniques and his representation of Pukamani poles and carved trees.

Such sources presumably primed Pugh for the aesthetic influence of Aboriginal art on his practice even before his first Nullarbor experience in November 1954. Pugh’s pre-Nullarbor landscapes are largely conventional. They emphasise a picturesque ‘prospect’ view (seen from an elevated and distant position) with an easily navigated perspectival space and naturalism in palette and execution. Works such as River Gums, Barmera, S.A. (1953) utilise a traditional compositional ‘S’ curve to lead the viewer’s eye through the scene, enabling them to enter the landscape in the imagination. Esperance Plains, W.A. (1955) presents settlement as a barrier to this activity in the form of a vermin gate, intersecting the road as it recedes into the distance.

An abrupt and distinct stylistic change is evident in works produced between February and March of 1955. Black Boys (1955) abandons both prospect views and perspectival space. The landscape is closely framed, and the viewer is positioned to observe the scene up-close from a worm’s-eye view. While Pugh still loosely employs the ‘S’ curve as a means of navigating the composition, it acts to direct the viewer’s eye up the vertical plane rather than through perspectival space. Moreover, Pugh overwrites this ‘S’ curve with a series of curvilinear transcriptions that not only obscure a clear navigation of the scene but also segment the landscape into an abstract arrangement – a patchwork of solid matte greys augmented with a variety of scumbled ochre and red hues. This revolution in composition is perhaps most clearly expressed in Numbat in a Landscape (1955) (Figure 1), which stands in stark contrast to Esperance Plains, W.A. (1955) (Figure 2), painted just one month earlier.

Figure 1. Clifton Pugh, Numbat in a Landscape (also known as Banded Ant Eater), 1955, oil on composition board, 50.8 x 60.9 cm, private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.

Figure 2. Clifton Pugh, Esperance Plains, S.A., 1955, oil on composition board, 71.1 x 78.7 cm, private collection. Photo © National Library of Australia.

Pugh attributed these new formulations to the influence of Aboriginal art. He described the period between 1955 and 1956 as the most formative, where the inclusion of ‘Aboriginal concepts … like flattening and white line’ resulted in his ‘biggest break in painting’.²⁴ Three works that resulted from his Nullarbor experience are Spider and a Beetle (1955), Crows and Dead Kangaroo (1956), and Depredations of a Wild Dog (1956) (Figure 3), all of which present a flat ambiguous composition, segmented into delineated areas of broad colour and dense patterning. Spider and beetle are rendered in solid dark tones thickly outlined in white. Pugh countered this simplification of form with areas of complex patterning to create a visual dynamic, as in Crows and Dead Kangaroo (1956), where solid black birds act as a foil for a kangaroo carcass painted in the x-ray style. The lyrical interweaving of these passages of simplicity and complexity provides the visual interest. In Depredations of a Wild Dog (1956) Pugh used this strategy to increase the dramatic intensity of the scene, amplifying the aggression of the carnivorous dingo by its disjointed appearance. The white-fanged skull is unrelated to its broadly patterned torso, and the coloured bands of its spine mysteriously merge with that of the skeleton prey below, suggesting a dire anticipation of the dingo’s future demise.

Figure 3. Clifton Pugh, Depredations of a Wild Dog, 1956, oil on composition board, 91.5 x 116.8 cm, private collection. Photo © National Library of Australia.

Contemporary reviews of the exhibition of these works in 1957 did not wholly acknowledge their debt to Aboriginal art. Most emphasise Pugh’s ‘Aboriginal’ earth palette as a natural celebration of the desert landscape. Gertrude Langer regarded ‘the warm deep reds, browns, blacks [to] spell earthiness and love of life’ and Pugh’s composition as the result of ‘a contemporary use of abstraction and expressive form’.²⁵ James Gleeson also found these works ‘bold’ and considered Pugh to be ‘a designer of power and distinction’; and he additionally recognised that ‘from Aboriginal art he has adapted a harsh earthy palette’ to evoke ‘the spirit of the Australian landscape’.²⁶ The Herald critic furthered this notion to claim that like ‘Aboriginal bark painters’, Pugh’s paintings present ‘a world of primordial passions … which touches new chords of feeling and observation’.²⁷ Two years later, in 1959, Max Harris, an early contributor to the Jindyworobak literary movement, acclaimed Pugh not as an appropriator or adaptor of Aboriginal art and colour but as ‘a myth-pattern maker, the wise and visionary Aborigine who takes the Australian bush at its worst and makes it into a totem design of lavish beauty’.²⁸ In Harris’ romantic conception, Pugh was a kind of artistic shaman able to channel Aboriginal identity directly into his art.

Alongside these new chords of ‘Aboriginal’ feeling, a focused view on the subject of native animals and notions of ‘belonging’, expressed as a merging of animal and environment, appeared in Pugh’s landscape paintings. Two Beetles (1957) are reduced to simple outlines through which the colours and shapes of the bush scrub emerge. Pugh later explained in relation to another version, Beetles (1957), that the forms were ‘very deliberately crosshatched and contain stone and seed shapes that belong in our harsh landscape’.²⁹ Pugh’s native animals physically mimic and merge with features of their environment, as in The Dead Kangaroo (1956) (Figure 4) where the figure is just discernible amongst the trees and rocks of the surrounding landscape. Being ‘up-close’ enabled Pugh to see nature as a process of life, death, decay and renewal, and the transparency of the kangaroo, painted in the x-ray style, reveals not just its inner composition but also its biological belonging as part of the ecosystem. Further, such works show Pugh harnessing Aboriginal design elements such as cross-hatching to denote a sense of cultural belonging in the landscape. Pugh presented an allusion to Aboriginal totemism (in which animals act as spirit emblems for a certain clan and environment) through corresponding segments of cross-hatching on both the head of the kangaroo and carved into the heartwood of a nearby tree.

Figure 4. Clifton Pugh, The Dead Kangaroo, 1956, oil on composition board, 69.5 x 91.3 cm, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, bequest of Karl and Gertrude Langer 1984. Photo © QAGOM.

Pugh was influenced not only by encountering Aboriginal art in books and museum displays, and by his travels through arid environments, but also by the explorations of fellow artists such as Russell Drysdale, who became a friend. Following Pugh’s Nullarbor experience, he recalled, ‘Drysdale entered his consciousness as a painter’.³⁰ Aboriginal human figures appear in Pugh’s landscape paintings for the first time in 1955.³¹ Drysdale was already renowned for his images of the desert, drought, and stoic country people who embodied the characteristics of their place when he turned his attention to Aboriginal subjects following his travels to the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland in 1951. The ensuing works were regarded as representing Aboriginal people with unprecedented dignity and empathy, and their exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney in 1953 was a critical and commercial success.³² Following his travels to Melville Island off the Northern Territory in 1956, Drysdale moved to engage more deeply with concepts of Aboriginal ceremony and spiritualism in his art. Pugh would later become well-acquainted with Drysdale through their mutual friendship with Monash University ornithologist Professor Jock Marshall and their participation on two field expeditions: Flinders Island in Bass Strait off Tasmania in 1962 and Lake Callabonna, a dry salt lake in the far north of South Australia, and Cooper Creek in 1963. Pugh and Drysdale hunted and collected fossils and Aboriginal artefacts at Lake Callabonna, and the ‘strange’ quality of their surroundings and ‘the utter desolation of the lake’ was a point of discussion around the nightly campfire.³³ A 1965 photograph by Mark Strizic of Pugh in his studio-home at Dunmoochin shows a carefully curated display of part of his large collection of spears, clubs, dilly bags, shields, Sepik River art, bark paintings, fossils, pestle stones, axe heads, and dehydrated animal carcasses. Pugh’s interior décor, set against mudbrick walls and rough-hewn timbers, presents both a warrior’s trophy room and a curiosity cabinet of natural history. Strizic’s photograph also contains imagery of highly sensitive material that Pugh looted either from the Kimberley or Tibooburra, New South Wales.³⁴ Although Pugh’s understanding of cultural protocols and sensitivities evolved during the 1970s through his more intimate interactions with Aboriginal people, and he repatriated this material in the late 1980s, this photograph points to the limitations of his engagement with and knowledge of Aboriginal people and their culture during the 1950s and 1960s.

Pugh’s portrayals of Aboriginal people are not portraits but generalised impressions, and in the case of the rainmakers, abstracted elemental figures. While Rainmakers (1955) originally contained affixed wool reflecting Daisy Bates’ description of the ceremonial markings of ‘Nyin’dagu’ rainmakers at Ooldea as edged with ‘birds' down, ochre, blood, [and] pipeclay’ in her 1929 article published in The Australasian, Pugh likely improvised.³⁵ His depiction of body decoration corresponds more to that worn by rainmakers at Milingimbi in Arnhem Land, as illustrated in ‘Aboriginal Rain-Makers and Their Ways’ (1952) by Frederick McCarthy in the Australian Museum Magazine.³⁶ Pugh’s Rainmaker paintings (1955 and 1956) invite us to contemplate the abstract patterning of scarification and body paint upon the male torso. The head, and thus identity, of the figure is absent and the lines painted and etched upon the body extend ambiguously into the landscape, emphasising the deep connection between Aboriginal people and nature. These essentialised figures are, in Pugh’s biographer Sally Morrison’s terms, ‘figures of a landscape’ rather than figures in the landscape.³⁷

Rainmaker figures additionally feature in the large mural that Pugh painted upon the exterior of his home at the artists’ cooperative Dunmoochin in Cottles Bridge, Victoria, some thirty kilometres northeast of Melbourne, shortly after his return. His written rationale for the mural, published in Architecture and Arts in 1955, reflects on the catalytic nature of his Nullarbor experience and the Aboriginal people he met, and on the spiritual ‘struggle’ they provoked in him:

This building represents my struggle not only physically, but spiritually, in adjusting feelings with conditioning. The material is mud brick … for this material belongs to the landscape rising up and out of the hill on which it stands. The colours of the mural are earth colours, ochres, reds and blacks. The mural begins in the centre of the building and reading from the right represents the story of the universal man rising from the earth … The repeated theme of the painting, a figure of a man, is cruder in execution in the beginning … [and] each succeeding figure becomes more refined; this represents the physical advance of man. The heads of the three figures from the right are … looking back – not back in the sense of retrogression, but as if questioning his physical advance. This is the position I consider we are at now … in terms of mental and spiritual understanding.³⁸

This statement reflects Pugh’s growing awareness of the clash between Aboriginal and Judaeo-Christian worldviews and ways of being in the Australian environment. His ‘universal men’ are visibly identified as Aboriginal – scarred, patterned, and partly merged with kangaroos painted in the x-ray style. Pugh’s statement not only questions the value of Western material progress but appears to suggest salvation lies in the simplicity of the past and a greater connection to the natural world as represented for European-Australians by Aboriginal people. While Pugh arguably attempts to situate himself as part of this extended lineage of universal men, he does not fully embrace Aboriginalism as a mode of self-identification; but, instead, conveys his consciousness of being a European-Australian on the edge of Aboriginal culture. Pugh’s notion of ‘universal men’ also reflects the postwar United Nations tendency to universalise human life and experience and was possibly inspired by the widespread acclaim of The Family of Man photography exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from January to May of 1955. While the exhibition would not be displayed in Australia until 1959, the international call for submissions released in January of 1954 announced its intended aim to portray ‘the universal elements and emotions and the oneness of human beings throughout the world’.³⁹

Pugh applied the same ‘universalising’ tendency to female as well as male figures, despite his then-conventional use of ‘man’ to represent ‘humanity’. In Mission Girl and Wild Galahs (1956) Pugh seems to contemplate the divergent nature of Christian and Aboriginal worldviews regarding death, spirituality, and the human connection to nature. The girl, clothed in white, stands beside a coffin-like vessel decorated with squared segments of cross-hatching. Her figure appears part of a niche hollowed out from the landscape, promoting a sense of ambiguity as to whether the mission girl forms part of a totemic structure or merely stands before the vertical lid of the funeral vessel. Overall, the pictorial elements reinforce the idea that Aboriginal people and their environment were closely connected. Pugh draws a tonal parallel between the white vertical of the girl’s clothed form and the column of white galahs and between the horizontal reddish-brown of the casket interior and the distant mountain range. Her shadow disperses as it falls across the mortuary vessel to intermingle with the birds in flight, suggesting that the Indigenous spirit returns to the land upon death.

From 1957 to 1963, Pugh’s pictorial interest in Aboriginal art and culture waned. The representation of Aboriginal figures as a subject of his landscape painting ceased for a period after 1957 and works featuring Aboriginal design elements shrank to a few pictures, such as Crab (1958) and Spider and Beetle (1959). The reason for this is unclear. We do know, however, that around 1958, Pugh experienced a period of ‘crisis’ in his artistic practice, a ‘crossroad’ where he ‘wasn’t sure where [he] was going or how’ with his art.⁴⁰

Pugh’s ‘crisis’ is revealed in his self-portrait titled Myself (1958) (Figure 5).⁴¹ There is an uncertainty and vulnerability in Pugh’s expression as he sits, clutching his newly adopted totemic animal – the Powerful Owl – whom Pugh described as a ‘watching and waiting bird’.⁴² In this painting, the owl belongs to Pugh as much as it belongs to the land; its talons are purposely placed to present an extension of Pugh’s arm as though his hand had magically transformed.⁴³ The spatial relationship between Pugh and the owl, their shape and tone are duplicated in the arrangement of rocks in the adjoining landscape. This painting features many of the stylistic elements that Pugh had been experimenting with since his Nullarbor trip: the detailed segmentation of the landscape, its spiky structures, and flattened forms outlined in white as well as segments that Pugh termed ‘Aboriginal primitive markings’.⁴⁴ Pugh described these artistic developments as ‘psychological stepping stones, rocks of something which I’ve understood’.⁴⁵ One might argue that Pugh attempted, via this psychological self-portrait, to create his own personal ‘Aboriginal’ mythology whereby he is not in the landscape but of the land like the native animals he depicted.

Figure 5. Clifton Pugh, Myself, 1958, oil on composition board, 91.4 x 122 cm, private collection. Photo © National Library of Australia.

Pugh’s participation in the controversial 1959 Antipodeans exhibition launched his professional career and firmly established him as a regional painter of Australian themes. The exhibition – featuring seventy-one works by: Charles Blackman (11 works), Arthur Boyd (6 works), David Boyd (9 works), John Brack (13 works), Robert Dickerson (5 works), John Perceval (18 works), and Pugh (9 works) – and its manifesto, penned by the art historian Bernard Smith, were intended as an intervention in the social culture of the day. The central aim of the Antipodeans was to mount a defence of the image against the perceived inroads of international abstraction. The name ‘Antipodeans’ not only located the group within a specific geographic region but also defined the aim and activity of the artists as an inversion or opposition to that which occurred at the centre of the global art world. Motivated by his belief in the unquestioned acceptance of overseas trends by art critics, curators, and audiences alike, Smith argued for the importance of an Australian accent in art. In a young settler nation still shaping its identity and myths, Smith believed ‘the image, the recognisable shape, the meaningful symbol’ were vital to communication in art.⁴⁶ By contrast, total abstraction was inherently empty and opaque – an insufficient art for modern life.⁴⁷ Although the Antipodeans exhibition is the landmark event that falls between Pugh’s travels in 1956 and 1964, the tension between figuration and abstraction arises in his work in 1955. This development is the result of a personal journey. The Antipodeans episode, however, does show how individual interests – Pugh’s conviction that ‘art must be indigenous’ – can fuel grand national cultural claims in a global context. Yet, while Pugh acknowledged that his work ‘could be nationalistic’, his preference was ‘to call it geographical art’.⁴⁸

Broome and the Kimberley 1964–65

At the start of 1964, Pugh was searching for a new direction in art.⁴⁹ Unlike other artists of his generation, Pugh was not inclined to travel to Europe; he preferred the ‘fringe of nature’ that ‘still [lay] over Australia’.⁵⁰ Hoping to find new visual stimuli, Pugh set out with his family in tow for the far north of Western Australia in June of 1964, travelling first to Perth, then on up the coast to Broome where he stayed for a month, before moving on to the Kimberley.

Before 1964, figures in the landscape were a rarity in Pugh’s overall production. Pugh had felt ‘man was out of harmony with nature’ but his experience of the Kimberley landscape and its Aboriginal inhabitants altered this perspective.⁵¹ As a result, there was an unprecedented surge of interest in figurative subjects. Writing to a family friend in November of 1964, Pugh explained:

I’m painting people in the natural environment now, before I only painted animals, quite often in human situations. I have always felt that perhaps humans were a horrible mistake on the part of nature – alien – [and] I was always on the outside looking in  …  [But] up north for the first time I really felt I belonged … [and] the people seem to feel the same and now I can understand the natives … [who] do not seek to alter their surroundings but just to belong.⁵²

Although Pugh’s discourse is romantic, naïve, and ill-informed in terms of the way Aboriginal people had farmed and shaped the land, it suggests that the transformation in his art, in this instance, was instigated by ideology rather than aesthetics.⁵³ From 1964 to 1965, Pugh produced twenty known works in which he returns to depicting Aboriginal figures in the landscape, and these may roughly be divided into images of encounter or celebration. These works have not yet been published or examined. Indeed, his biographer Morrison mistakenly believed that Pugh ‘hadn’t followed up the initial urges that had him painting Rainmakers I and II’ in the mid-1950s.⁵⁴

On the contrary, Pugh reprised his interest in Aboriginal subjects in 1963. He produced several sketches of Aboriginal and white stockmen wrangling and branding cattle during a visit to the rural township of Innamincka in the far northeast of South Australia. While these sketches render scenes in a naturalistic and documentary fashion, the resulting paintings were highly stylised to emphasise the athleticism and grace of Aboriginal men intimately attuned to the instincts of their animals. During the early 1960s, Aboriginal stockmen vastly outnumbered the white workforce on rural cattle stations.⁵⁵ Aboriginal stockmen were preferred; they were not only highly skilled but possessed an intimate knowledge of their ancestral lands, on which these stations were often located, and were paid only a fraction of the wages earned by their white counterparts.⁵⁶ Although Aboriginal stockmen began petitioning for equal pay during the 1940s, leading up to the Wave Hill walk-off in 1966, Pugh provides no hint of their growing discontent in works like Bull Riding (1963) and Marking the Bull (1963). The agility with which the Aboriginal figures intuitively counterbalance the directional movement of the bull conveys an admiration of their skill. These works are rare examples of contemporary Aboriginal men at work as part of an essential rural industry. Whereas in paintings by Drysdale, such as Station Blacks, Cape York (1953) and Aboriginal Stockmen (1953), the figures are set within a barren landscape, isolated from the station and its activity. They appear positioned in a frontal arrangement suggestive of an old photograph, rigid and awkward in their stance and expression; several figures avert their gaze – representing an example of what Sally Butler has termed the ‘disengaged melancholic gaze’.⁵⁷ A more direct stylistic correlation with Pugh’s paintings of Aboriginal stockmen can be observed in Breaking Colts (1948) by Elizabeth Durack.

Pugh’s Aboriginal subjects from 1964 to 1965 are mostly celebratory, comprising images of corroboree dancers (Figure 6) and didgeridoo players. It is unknown whether Pugh experienced these performances himself. At least one work, Corroboree (1965), is based on a photograph by his friend, Melbourne jeweller and sculptor Matcham Skipper, taken while scouting film locations for the 1963 Tim Burstall film The Legend of Byamee. The photograph in Pugh’s archive displays evidence of repeated handling and adhered paint splotches in the same orange and ochre tone as the corresponding work. Other photographs from Skipper’s travels featured in the book These Were My Tribesmen (1965) by Alan Marshall, the previous edition of which, titled Ourselves Writ Strange (1948), Ronald Berndt heavily criticised as presenting ‘superficial … misleading … [and] inaccurate impressions’ of Aboriginal people, culture, and mythology.⁵⁸ Despite Pugh’s use of photographic reference material, his portrayal of Aboriginal people in these paintings is not as portraits; their faces are not individualised. The figures are highly stylised to convey the drama and rhythmic movement of the ceremonial dance. To some extent, these celebratory works evoke an idyllic sense of pre-contact times as Pugh provides no contemporary point of reference to locate the scene in time or place.

Figure 6. Clifton Pugh, Corroboree III, 1964, oil on composition board, 121 x 90 cm, private collection. Image courtesy of Leonard Joel.

By contrast, there is a documentary aspect to Pugh’s images of encounter that is atypical of his figurative works in general. Seafront, Broome (1964) is the first painting by Pugh to depict an Aboriginal subject in an entirely naturalistic fashion; there is no distortion of the figure in terms of proportion or pose. Moreover, it is the only work in which Pugh locates the subject within a specific urban setting. The image shows an Aboriginal mother standing barefoot on the foreshore amongst a vast array of debris, holding a small child precariously upon her hip. Her candid photograph-like pose is reminiscent of works by Drysdale, particularly his images of Aboriginal subjects whose facial expressions are similarly ‘disengaged’ or ‘vacant’, which convey a sense of psychological distance.⁵⁹ The rusted forms of the anchors that lie half-buried in the sand furthermore convey an awareness of the dark history of the local pearling industry – and their arced tips redirect our gaze back onto the Aboriginal subject. Broome was a centre of the Australian pearling industry from its inception in the 1880s. For the first two decades of its operation, Aboriginal men, women, and children were abducted and enslaved in a process called ‘blackbirding’ to perform the dangerous and often fatal task of pearl diving.⁶⁰ The impoverished and neglected state of both the figures and the foreshore ascribes, irrespective of the historical context, a moral atmosphere to the work that points towards Pugh’s real-life experience of the scene.

From this point, we can arrange and interpret Pugh’s images of encounters with Aboriginal communities to convey a progression of emotional experience. Moving into the desert region, Pugh’s depiction of Aboriginal figures is at first indistinct, and they emerge from the haze as though a mirage in The Substance Seekers (1965). While the title of this work might evoke contemporary notions of drug use, Pugh likely refers to the act of foraging in the desert environment. Further encounters convey a sense of intrusion in which the figures display a subtle hostility and wariness in their expression and stance. For example, the same group of ‘substance seekers’ and their canine companion resolve from the haze to form a barrier to the distant settlement in Encounter (1965) (Figure 7). And Pugh similarly arranged the figure group to prevent the viewer from imaginatively entering the scene in a further untitled work from 1965. Notably, these images of encounters situate Aboriginal people in a contemporary context in terms of their attire and environment. Moreover, contrary to the celebratory works, these Aboriginal figures address the viewer’s gaze to present a psychological challenge in terms of the viewer’s emotional engagement and sense of belonging.

Figure 7. Clifton Pugh, Encounter, 1965, oil on composition board, 121.9 x 91.4 cm, private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images.

In conjunction with these Aboriginal figure paintings, Pugh produced ten works in which the figure of St Francis is shown journeying through the outback, communing with animals, observing instances of decay and birth, and receiving the stigmata. These works were explicitly biographical. Pugh regarded Aboriginal people as an ecological Other whose ethical stewardship of the land provided a suitable role model for all Australians, and he connects this notion, in his letter of November 1964, to the figure of St Francis. For Pugh, St Francis represented his ideal self. He employed St Francis as a signifier in these works because ‘he had the same sort of feelings’; ‘St. Francis was just trying to belong’.⁶¹ And through these works, Pugh attempted to reify what can only be described as a spiritual experience.

While both Traudi Allen and Sally Morrison discuss the St Francis series in their biographical accounts of Pugh, they do not refer to the concurrent Aboriginal paintings. I argue that these series must be considered together. Pugh not only painted these works at the same time, but they were also exhibited as a group at the Rudy Komon Gallery in Sydney in July of 1965. More importantly, he clearly intended them to interact with each other as three of the works reveal the same narrative connection.

In Sketch for the Meeting (1965) and St. Francis and the Aboriginals (1965), Pugh situates the figure of St Francis in close association with Aboriginal people. These figure groups are more open and less guarded in their formation than in Pugh’s previous images of encounters, and there is a sense of interaction between the subjects that suggests a reconciliation of differences is at hand. Yet, the most intriguing work in the series is The Mourning (1965) in which the body of St Francis lies in repose upon a ceremonial altar attended by two Aboriginal elders. In this work, his elongated arm hangs down to entwine with the foliage of the desert scrub so that, even in death, St Francis forges a deep connection with nature. Considering Pugh intended St Francis to act as his alter ego in the series, in this composition, where the subject dies, the meaning of the work is obscure. Yet Pugh was undoubtedly affected by his Kimberley experience, after which he wrote, ‘now the rocks, trees and birds were all one with me’.⁶²

Collectively, the St Francis and Aboriginal figure paintings represent an emotional and psychological exploration of Pugh’s relationship to the land and its Aboriginal people. For Pugh, the ‘symbol’ of St Francis was ‘not necessarily religious’ but rather a way of communicating his personal ‘experiences’ in the landscape.⁶³ Conscious of his cultural ‘conditioning’ towards nature following his first Nullarbor trip, Pugh’s newfound sense of ‘oneness’ with the Australian environment imparts an awareness, albeit limited and naïve, of the core philosophical underpinnings of Aboriginal worldviews.⁶⁴ Aboriginal spirituality is ‘geosophical’ rather than theosophical and founded on two simple yet complex precepts: ‘the land is the law’ and ‘you are not alone in the world’.⁶⁵ The concept of interconnectedness is central to Aboriginal being and belonging in that ‘all objects are living and share the same soul and spirit as Aboriginal [people]’, and it forms the basis of an ethical ‘charter of custodianship’.⁶⁶ Thus, it is possible to propose that through his images of encounter, Pugh grappled with his sense of alienation and, via the figure of St Francis, he enacted a visual process of confrontation, reconciliation, and reform.

Critics were scathing about the 1965 exhibition of Pugh’s St Francis and Aboriginal works, liking neither his Christian nor his Indigenous themes. James Gleeson objected foremost to the ‘Australianisation of the story of St. Francis’, which he believed rang a ‘false note’.⁶⁷ Similarly, Elwyn Lynn regarded the ‘dehydrated’ figure of St Francis as an ‘irrelevant religio-aesthetic prop’ that ‘retrogressed’ Pugh’s art to the ‘lowest level’ of ‘myth-making crimes’.⁶⁸ Pugh, however, was not the first artist to situate the figure of St Francis in the Australian outback. Sidney Nolan had exhibited St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata (1951) in the inaugural Blake Prize for religious art in 1952. In this work, Nolan depicts Francis of Assisi in retreat in the central Australian desert, where he beholds, after forty days of fasting and prayer, the vision of the crucified Christ and in his moment of rapture receives Christ’s wounds. Despite its Australian setting, Nolan adheres to the traditional iconography of the St Francis legend modelled after the works of Giotto, El Greco, and the frescoes he observed in the Basilica of S. Francesco in Assisi.⁶⁹ By contrast, Pugh’s portrayal is deeply biographical. But it was Pugh’s Aboriginal works that attracted the most virulent criticism. Daniel Thomas found Pugh’s configurations of Aboriginal dancers ‘unbelievably banal’.⁷⁰ The critic for The Sydney Morning Herald denounced Pugh’s ‘Aboriginal themes’ as the ‘jaded and slick’ illustrations of a ‘storyteller who produces the banal, conventional cliché of the Aboriginal’.⁷¹ Gleeson derided the exhibition overall as ‘trivial gimmickry’.⁷²

These criticisms were harsh, perhaps unduly so. Set against the backdrop of government assimilation policy, segregation, and the forced removal of Aboriginal children from family and community, attempts by modernist artists to engage with Aboriginal art and culture are significant because they emphasise Aboriginal existence and difference. According to Anna Haebich, the fashion for Aboriginal motifs and imagery in art, design, and popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s represented ‘cracks in the mirror’ of national identity that undermined ‘the vision of an assimilated nation … rather than erasing Aboriginal cultural difference this kept it firmly in the public spotlight’.⁷³ Yet with the rise of Aboriginal-led activism in the mid-1960s, Pugh’s lack of engagement with the social and political difficulties of Aboriginal people, publicised in the same year as the exhibition, may have caused his depictions of corroborees and didgeridoo players to be seen as old-fashioned, clichéd and banal. The 1965 Freedom Ride, led by the Aboriginal activist Charles Perkins over two weeks in February, drew unprecedented media attention to the ‘embedded and entrenched racism’ and poor living conditions Aboriginal people experienced in rural townships throughout New South Wales.⁷⁴ Film footage of the bus tour revealed shanty settlements on urban outskirts with no electricity, water, or sewerage, and widespread discrimination, segregation, and bans from swimming pools and pubs.

In addition, Pugh may have suffered by comparison with other painters, such as Arthur and David Boyd, who were more overtly engaged than Pugh with racial issues in art. From 1957 to 1960, Arthur Boyd painted between thirty and forty works featuring the tribulations of an Aboriginal man and his bride (both of mixed descent) inspired by his month-long journey to central Australia in 1951. Boyd was shocked by the squalid shantytowns and the ‘ghastly and sad’ Aboriginal people he observed along the riverbank and relegated to ‘cattle trucks’ at the rear of the train. And his witnessing of a gowned bride holding a floral bouquet as she stood on the flatbed of a truck formed the ‘basis for a sequence of happenings’, illustrating his feelings ‘about the visit’.⁷⁵ Exhibited in 1958 as ‘Allegorical paintings’, critical response to the Love, Marriage, and Death of a Half-Caste series was mixed. They were cautiously admired in Melbourne, denounced as ‘bad painting’ in Sydney, and only one-third of the works sold.⁷⁶ But their exhibition in London at the Zwemmer Gallery in 1960 was a critical and commercial success, forming a turning point in Boyd’s national and international reputation.⁷⁷

Conclusion

Like other artists of his generation, Pugh journeyed into the outback for inspiration, where his excited imaginings about the ancient landscape and its people enacted significant changes in his landscape art. Overlooked as largely inconsequential, these travels and Pugh’s related use of Aboriginal imagery and design have not previously been examined or understood in any great detail. Yet these trips were catalytic for Pugh on both a practical and personal level.

Following his first experience of the Nullarbor Plain, a dramatic shift occurred in Pugh’s work away from a naturalistic representation of the landscape towards semi-abstraction. His composition became highly segmented and vertical in its arrangement, while landscape elements were simplified and rendered in flat blocks of black, red, and ochre. Ultimately, the stylistic developments that Pugh derived from Aboriginal art served to modernise his landscape painting, and coming at the start of his professional career, contributed significantly to his early critical acclaim.

Further, repeated exposure to Aboriginal art and culture through travel affected his sense of being and belonging in the landscape. Pugh’s perception of Aboriginal people as being at ‘one’ with their environment caused him to profoundly question his own cultural connection to the land. While his essentialism and tendency to self-mythologise stemmed from admiration of Aboriginal cultural life, they highlight the superficial and distant nature of his engagement with Aboriginal people and culture during the 1950s and 1960s. Pugh’s portrayal of Aboriginal people did not reflect the reality of their existence but instead reinforced colonialist representations of Aboriginality that sought to situate Aboriginal people at the dawn of human cultural evolution. Moreover, the fact that Pugh experienced Aboriginalism as a liberation from societal constraints and mores gives primacy to whiteness, presenting Aboriginal art, culture, and people as subservient to the white imagination. He used the figure of St Francis in conjunction with images of Aboriginal encounters and corroborees to visually traverse tropes of alienation and belonging, pilgrimage, and redemption. Although Pugh’s romanticism was self-serving, it did instigate further, more intimate interactions with Aboriginal people during the 1970s that changed the romantic and naïve tone of his previous discourse about Aboriginal people to impart a deeper and more measured understanding of their situation. Pugh is a case study in the genre of Aboriginalism in Australian art and his experience enhances understanding of the extent to which European-Australian modernism was influenced by Aboriginal art and culture.

Notes

1 Robert Hughes, Art of Australia (Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1966), 237; Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 1788–1970 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1971), 407.

2 Pugh’s engagement with the natural environment and his life in the bush have been extensively explored in biographies by Traudi Allen and Sally Morrison and survey texts by Christopher Heathcote and Sasha Grishin. I aim to present new material and interpretations of Pugh’s work based on my assemblage of the first catalogue of over 1,460 known artworks and how Pugh’s interest in Aboriginal art and culture intersects with his biography, personal statements, and interviews. See Traudi Allen, Clifton Pugh, Patterns of a Lifetime: A Biography (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson Australia, 1981); Sally Morrison, After Fire: A Biography of Clifton Pugh (Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2009); Christopher Heathcote, A Quiet Revolution: The Rise of Australian Art 1946–1968 (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1995); Christopher Heathcote, Patrick McCaughey and Sarah Thomas, Encounters with Australian Modern Art (Melbourne: Macmillan Art, 2008); Sasha Grishin, Australian Art: A History (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2013); Debbie Robinson, ‘Imaging a Biocentric Australia: Environmentalism and Aboriginalism in the Art and Life of Clifton Pugh (1924–1990)’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2022).

3 Noel Macainsh, Clifton Pugh (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1962), 7–8; Allen, 52; Morrison, 131 and 412; Geoffrey Dutton, White on Black: The Australian Aborigine Portrayed in Art (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1974); Catherine De Lorenzo and Dinah Dysart, A Changing Relationship: Aboriginal Themes in Australian Art 1938–1988 (Sydney: S.H. Ervin Gallery National Trust Centre, 1988); Ian McLean, White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Claire Baddeley, Motif and Meaning: Aboriginal Influences in Australian Art, 1930–70 (Ballarat: Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, 1999); Christine Nicholls, From Appreciation to Appropriation: Indigenous Influences and Images in Australian Visual Art (Adelaide: Flinders University Art Museum City Gallery, 2000); Daena Murray, The Sound of the Sky (Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press, 2006).

4 Bob Hodge, ‘Aboriginal Truth and White Media: Eric Michaels Meets the Spirit of Aboriginalism’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 3, no. 2 (1990): 202.

5 Vijay Mishra, ‘Aboriginal Representations in Australian Texts’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 2, no. 1 (1987): 165–88; Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Post Colonial (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991); Bain Attwood, ‘Introduction’, in Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, eds Bain Attwood and John Arnold (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press in association with the National Centre for Australian Studies, 1992), i–xvi.

6 Mishra, 165; Hodge and Mishra, 27; Attwood, i; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, 1979), 3.

7 Said, 20–1.

8 Hodge, 202; Attwood, iii and iv.

9 McLean, 82.

10 Attwood, i.

11 Clifton Pugh, ‘Statement’, 1959, in Bernard Smith, Death of the Artist as Hero: Essays in History and Culture (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), 206–7.

12 Clifton Pugh, ‘Gallery of Man Exhibition Video’, interview by Alex Bortignon, Festival of Perth, 1982.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Morrison, 445; Clifton Pugh, Exhibition Statement, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, May 1959.

16 Clifton Pugh, quoted in ‘Young Artist Paints Desert’, Sunday Times Perth, 10 January 1955.Morrison, 445; Clifton Pugh, Exhibition Statement, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, May 1959.

17 Ronald Berndt, ‘Tribal Migrations and Myths Centring on Ooldea, South Australia’, Oceania 12, no. 1 (September 1941): 4.

18 Morrison, 133.

19 Clifton Pugh, quoted in ‘Australian Artists Look Outback’, Theatre and Arts Letter (1962): 4.

20 Charles Percy Mountford, Aboriginal Decorative Art from Arnhem Land, Northern Territory of Australia (Adelaide: Royal Society of South Australia, 1939); Ronald Berndt and Catherine Berndt, ‘Aboriginal Art in Central-Western Northern Territory’, Meanjin 9, no. 3 (1950): 183–8; Adolphus Peter Elkin, Catherine Berndt and Ronald Berndt, Art in Arnhem Land (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1950); Charles Percy Mountford, Records of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land: 1 Art, Myth and Symbolism (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1956); Charles Percy Mountford, Aboriginal Art (Melbourne: Longmans, 1961); Ronald Berndt, ed., Australian Aboriginal Art (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1964).

21 McLean, 96–7.

22 Anna Haebich, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950–1970 (Perth: Fremantle Press, 2008), 317.

23 Richard T.M. Pescott, ‘Preface’, in Charles L. Barrett and Alfred S. Kenyon, Australian Aboriginal Art (Melbourne: Brown, Prior, Anderson for the Trustees of the National Museum of Victoria, 1947), 3.

24 Pugh, ‘Gallery of Man Exhibition Video’.

25 Gertrude Langer, ‘Pugh’s Painting Is Vital’, Courier Mail, Brisbane, 3 July 1957.

26 James Gleeson, ‘Bold Art: Appeal to Senses’, The Sun, 6 November 1957.

27 The Herald, 6 March 1957, n.p., in MS9096 Papers of Clifton Pugh, Series 10. Scrapbooks of cuttings, catalogues and photographs, 1953–90, item 1, National Library of Australia.

28 Max Harris, ‘Pugh Hits the Gong’, Mary’s Own Paper (Adelaide, May 1959), n.p. Harris joined the Jindyworobak Club in 1938, at its inception, and was its first secretary. His poem ‘I Scarce Could Bear This Day’ was published in the Jindyworobak Quarterly Pamphlet 1, no 1 (April 1939), 16, while ‘Let Me Not Call You Lovely’ appears in the 1940 Jindyworobak Anthology. Harris’ first book of poetry, The Gift of Blood (1940), was also published by the Jindyworobak imprint. Although Harris broke away from the Jindyworobaks, disapproving of their ‘Aboriginalising’ in the 1941 issue of the Angry Penguins, he continued to be associated with the group, publishing an article about ‘The Importance of Disagreeing’ in the Jindyworobak Review, 1938–48 (1948). See for example: Betty Snowden, ‘Max Harris: A Phenomenal Adelaide Literary Figure’, in Adelaide: A Literary City, ed. Phillip Butterss (Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2013), 166; Max Harris, with introduction by Alan Brissenden, The Angry Penguin: Selected Poems of Max Harris (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1996), 8. Harris was co-owner of the Mary Martin Bookshop and instituted and authored its newsletter.

29 Pugh, ‘Gallery of Man Exhibition Video’.

30 Morrison, 445.

31 There are five known works by Pugh depicting Aboriginal figures from this period: The Rainmaker (1955), The Rainmakers I (1956) and II (1957), Aboriginals on the Goldfield (1956) and Mission Girl and Wild Galahs (1956).

32 Geoffrey Smith, Russell Drysdale 1912–1981 (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1997), 28.

33 Russell Drysdale, ‘Log Book’, MLMSS 4191 Sir Russell Drysdale – Papers, 1933–81, box 6, item 19, 1963, 77, State Library of New South Wales.

34 Pugh first visited Tibooburra with Drysdale in 1963 and later with Fred Williams in 1967, where on 22 October, they painted several of the ‘more than eighteen Aboriginal gravesites’ whereabouts they were able to ‘easily pick up artefacts’. Clifton Pugh and Fred Williams, ‘Journal’, 1967, unpaginated, in Clifton Pugh, MS9096 Papers of Clifton Pugh, National Library of Australia, 1943–91, Series 5. Diaries 1970–90.

35 Daisy Bates, ‘Aboriginal Rainmakers’, The Australasian, 7 December 1929, 6.

36 Frederick McCarthy, 'Aboriginal Rain-Makers and Their Ways’, part II, Australian Museum Magazine 10, no. 9 (15 March 1952): 304. See also Frederick McCarthy, ‘Aboriginal Rainmakers and Their Ways’, part I, Australian Museum Magazine 10, no. 8 (15 December 1951): 249–52.

37 Morrison, 133.

38 Clifton Pugh, ‘Art’, Architecture and Arts, October 1955, n.p.

39 The Museum of Modern Art, ‘Museum of Modern Art Plans International Photography Exhibition’, Press Release, 31 January 1954, 1, https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_325966.pdf (accessed 11 June 2019). Jane Lydon has argued that there was symmetry between the program of universality espoused by UNESCO and Australian assimilationist ideals of unity in diversity, applied to Aboriginal Australians. See ‘Happy Families: UNESCO’s Human Rights Exhibition in Australia, 1951’, in Jane Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), 117–32.

40 Pugh, ‘Gallery of Man Exhibition Video’.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh and Bernard Smith, ‘The Antipodean Manifesto’, in Bernard Smith, The Antipodean Manifesto: Essays in Art and Art History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1976), 165.

47 Ibid., 166.

48 Pugh quoted in Smith, The Death of the Artist as Hero, 206.

49 Allen, 65.

50 Clifton Pugh quoted in Judith Rich, ‘St Francis in the Kimberleys’, The Bulletin, 3 July 1965, 44.

51 Pugh quoted in ibid., 45.

52 Clifton Pugh, letter to Betty Richardson, 18 November 1964, cited in Allen, 66.

53 See Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012); and Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture (Broome: Magabala Books, 2018).

54 Morrison, 235.

55 Thalia Anthony, ‘Reconciliation and Conciliation: The Irreconcilable Dilemma of the 1965 “Equal” Wage Case for Aboriginal Station Workers’, Labour History 93 (November 2007): 17.

56 Ibid., 17.

57 Sally Butler, ‘Facing Melancholia: Racial Implications of the Disengaged Gaze’, in The Persistence of Melancholia in Arts and Culture, ed. Andrea Bubenik (New York: Routledge, 2019), 172.

58 Ronald M. Berndt, ‘Review: Ourselves Writ Strange’, Oceania 19, no. 3 (March 1949): 302–4.

59 James Gleeson, ‘Russell Drysdale’, Art Gallery of New South Wales Quarterly 2, no. 1 (October 1960): 42; Butler, 164; Jennie Boddington, Drysdale: Photographer (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1987), 50.

60 Hugh Edwards, Pearls of Broome and Northern Australia (Perth: self-published, 1994), 47.

61 Pugh, letter to Betty Richardson, 66; Pugh quoted in Rich, 45.

62 Pugh, letter to Betty Richardson, 66.

63 Pugh quoted in Rich, 44.

64 Pugh, ‘Art’, n.p.

65 Max Charlesworth, ‘Introduction’, in Religious Business: Essays on Australian Aboriginal Spirituality, ed. Max Charlesworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), xx; Mary Graham, ‘Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews’, in Worldviews, Religion, and the Environment: A Global Anthology, ed. Richard C. Foltz (San Francisco: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2003), 89.

66 E.K. Grant quoted in Vicki Grieves, ‘Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy, the Basis of Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing’, Discussion Paper Series: No. 9 (Darwin: Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2009), 7; Graham, 89.

67 James Gleeson, ‘False Note’, The Sun, 23 June 1965, 34.

68 Elwyn Lynn, ‘Myth-Making Crimes’, The Australian, 1 July 1965, n.p.

69 Geoffrey Smith, Sidney Nolan: Desert and Drought (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003), 83.

70 Daniel Thomas, ‘This Week in Art’, 27 June 1965, n.p., in MS9096 Papers of Clifton Pugh, Series 10. Scrapbooks of cuttings, catalogues and photographs, 1953–90, item 1, National Library of Australia.

71 The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 June 1965, 16.

72 Gleeson, ‘False Note’, 34.

73 Haebich, 17.

74 Charles Perkins, ‘Charles Perkins – Freedom Ride, Australian Biography Series 7, video, National Film and Sound Archive, 1999, https://dl.nfsa.gov.au/module/1554/#about (accessed 10 April 2020).

75 Don Bennett, ‘Arthur Boyd: Art and Soul’, documentary film script, Film Victoria, Melbourne, April 1993, Bundanon Trust Archive, box 33, 28, Bundanon.

76 Barry Pearce, Arthur Boyd Retrospective (Sydney: The Beagle Press in conjunction with Art Gallery NSW, 1993), 20–1; Geoffrey Dutton, The Innovators: The Sydney Alternatives in the Rise of Modern Art, Literature and Ideas (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1986), 159–60.

77 Franz Philipp, Arthur Boyd (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967), 83.