RESTRICTED IMAGES, Made with the Walpiri of Central Australia

Title: RESTRICTED IMAGES, Made with the Walpiri of Central Australia

Photographer(s): Patrick Waterhouse

Writer(s): Patrick Waterhouse

Designer(s): Tim Wan

Publisher(s): Self Publish Be Happy, London, England

Year: 2018

Print run:

Language(s): English

Pages: 208

Size: 19,5 x 26,5 cm

Binding: Hardcover

Edition:

Print: Grafiche Veneziane, Venezia, Italy

Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: Australia,2014-2018

ISBN: 9781999814465

The publication in 1899 of The Native Tribes of Central Australia caused a sensation in Europe. The book’s authors, telegraph-station master Francis J. Gillen and ethnologist W. Baldwin Spencer, had written in depth about the customs and traditions of the Aboriginal groups living near Alice Springs and also illustrated their texts with 119 photographs, many of which captured rituals and ceremonies. While the subject, quality and quantity of the images set a new standard for anthropological photography, the authors were largely oblivious to the impact they would have on the lives of the Aboriginals. The pictures revealed the gap in knowledge between the authors, whose goal was showing the exotic natives “in their natural state”, and the subjects, who were completely unaware of the new medium and how it could invade their privacy or reveal their secrets to a wider audience. Unwittingly or not, the authors also infringed upon Aboriginal cultural protocols by showing sacred sites and the dead. Attitudes have changed since Gillen and Baldwin Spencer first ventured in the Central Desert with a camera and institutions have taken extensive measures to ensure that cultural sensitivity is respected. Today, photography within Aboriginal communities is limited and historical images are often “restricted”. Over the past four years, I have taken photographs in the Yeundumu and Nyirrpi Aboriginal communities, and in the surrounding Warlpiri country. After making prints, I returned to Central Australia to work with artists and other members of those same communities at the Warlukurlangu Art Centre, so they could restrict and amend my photographs through the process of painting.

Spending several years taking pictures of them, he made prints and then returned, inviting the Warlpiri to paint the surfaces of the images and enact their own restrictions upon them using the traditional technique of dot painting. In intricate, colourful acrylic clusters they transformed the black and white depictions of themselves and their sacred sites. Restricted Images is the first instalment in a long-term project that looks to renegotiate the politics of who gets to decide what is seen and what is kept hidden, and reveals artists and a community trying to understand one other.

When the first British colonialists disembarked in Australia in 1788, they looked hopefully at what for them was ​terra nullius​: an empty, barren land that belonged to nobody. However, Australian Aboriginal society, the longest continuous culture in world history, operated so differently to their own that the settlers found it hard to comprehend what they were seeing. They were not able to understand the unfamiliar landscape or recognize such a radically different way of life. The settlers were unaware of the fact that these people had survived the Ice Age, successfully modified and managed the landscape, and handed down from generation to generation one of the longest oral histories on Earth, one that is derived from the belief that people and the land upon which they live are at one with each other.

Ignorant of these facts, the settlers started drawing maps, dividing the territories, erecting houses and churches, searching for gold and laying down train tracks. This resulted in the newcomers displacing and destroying the indigenous communities along with decimating Australia’s ecosystem.

Despite colonisation, the Warlpiri indigenous groups have preserved an enduring philosophical belief system, enacted through rich ceremonial traditions and art making practices. In 2014 Patrick Waterhouse travelled to Warlpiri land for the first time. He had been taking photographs in Central Australia since 2011 and had steadily acquired documents tracing Australia’s colonial history. Waterhouse presented these photographs, along with archival material from museums and auction houses, to members of the Warlukurlangu Art Centres in the communities of Yuendumu and Nyirippi and invited them to revise the documents through the traditional Aboriginal technique of dot painting, practiced by almost half of the community’s population. Drawing upon their own stories and traditions, the artists – a group of men and women aged from 16 to 90 – applied layers of colourful patterns and symbols to the documents. This process can be seen as defacement, a correction of what was there, or the revelation of something that had always been hidden beneath the surface.