Writing Place

I recently picked up a book of Ian Abdulla’s paintings of the Murray Riverland, a region in the north-eastern corner of South Australia. Abdulla is an indigenous artist who grew up in the Riverland in the 1950s and 1960s and lives there still. He’s been an artist for more than eighteen years now. The book, Ian W Abdulla: Elvis Has Entered the Building (2003), is intended at a retrospective look at his work.

(Riverland Suite #5, acrylic on canvas, 61x91cm, courtesy of the artist and Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide).

I hadn’t heard of Abdulla before I stumbled across the book. Nor had I seen his work. And I admit that looking at it at first, I was struck by little more than its simplicity. Abdulla paints in the naïve style, with vivid flat surfaces, childishly-drawn figures, and often misspelt text. This style is apt when it’s used to evoke childhood memories, as do plenty of Abdulla’s works. He paints and writes of fishing by the Murray, of bathing in it, and of the hard life his family led on the Gerard Mission when he was young. But he doesn't just depict childhood memories. There are abundant adult memories in his paintings. The flatness of his works also makes them like maps - the kind of affective maps that Kent Ryder is so keen about in Mapping the Invisible Landscape (1993). There are 'maps' of bridges, paddocks and fishing-spots in his paintings, maps of particular bends in the river at particular moments in time. And this urge to map his own landscape makes it clear that there is nothing childish about his project. The fetishisation of memory in Abdulla's work, the drive to capture the past and to weave it consciously into the present, is something that only comes with an awareness that childhood has passed away.

Once I could see past the spelling mistakes (God I curse my pedantic obsession with spelling sometimes), an upwelling of feeling came to me as I looked at Abdulla’s paintings. The intensity of its interconnection of memory and love for the Riverland was like standing in front a burning surface and feeling the heat-waves rippling from it. You don’t get this feeling from looking at one of his paintings alone. (I’ve only included a single image here, alas, but you can see plenty more on the Greenaway Art Gallery’s website at http://www.greenaway.com.au/artists/AbdullaI/AbdullaWrk.htm). You get it when you look at his work en masse, taking in the sheer volume of his Riverland images, the repetition and almost antic specificity they involve. Looking at all those paintings gave me a sense of awe at something outside my own experience. It also gave me a vicarious sense of connection to the Riverland, so that the place took on a value and a significance to me that it did not have before. And because of this, the after-images of his paintings have stayed in my own memory for weeks, half-flickering at moments when I shut my eyes.

Rockwell Gray tells us that for everyone there are certain places that stand out as ‘the “hot points” of our affective life’. There are places in which important things happened for us, he says, or which acquire a special meaning to us, for whatever reason. These places become absolutely central to our sense of individual identity. Perhaps this is why Abdulla’s paintings have such a candescent feeling about them. All of his works are depictions of hot points in his emotional life. That’s what you feel when you look at them. You think: this is someone with an extraordinarily powerful sense of who he is. But what does this mean, I wonder, for people who don’t have the same drive as Abdulla to recapture the key places of their past? Do such people have less of a sense of personal identity (as Rockwell Gray appears to suggest)? Or do they just have a very different one?

I ask this question because it's easy to feel jealous for the kind of attachment to place that Abdulla feels, the intensity of self which he so obviously feels, and to long for the same thing oneself. So much writing about 'sense of place' is infected with this jealousy. Rockwell Gray owns himself as an middle-class American, for example, who has moved so much he 'hardly know[s] where home is any longer'. He laments 'the lack of deep connection to a place and its traditions' in his own life and culture, and insists that in its stead it is necessary to cultivate one's own sense of past sacred places.

In his work, Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership (2000), the Australian historian Peter Read explores the sense-of-place envy that so many non-indigenous people seem to feel. What are the rights and wrongs, he asks, of longing for the kind of deep connection to place often associated with indigenous cultures? Is a 'deep belonging' to place and the sense of identity it brings just one other thing that white people want to take from indigenous people? Is it ethical to wish for a deep connection to the Australian country and its 'traditions' as a non-indigenous person?

Read is right to ask this question, I think, although I'm not entirely sure of my own answer to it. Certainly I agree that Ian Abdulla's sense of place is both culturally and individually specific. As someone born to a Ngarrindjeri mother, who spent formative years at the Gerard mission, he grew up with a different cultural understanding of place to me, as a non-indigenous Australian. The fact that he makes a fetish of memory is also informed by his awareness of the history of indigenous experience in Australia. Memory and place are even more important to those who have an experience of displacement; to those whose connections to family and country have been forcefully severed over time. So I do think that there's something misplaced or presumptuous about wanting to feel the way he does about the Riverland. Perhaps, then, it's better just to be thankful for the glimpse into the furnace one gets from his work. It's a good thing to feel the heat it gives off, and to feel something of a vicarious love for the Riverland as a result. But it's also a good thing not to want to claim that feeling as one's own.

References

Abdulla, Ian, Marree Suite and Other Paintings (2006), and Riverland Suite (2003), reproduced by the Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, on its website: http://www.greenaway.com.au/artists/AbdullaI/AbdullaWrk.htm (viewed 7 March 2006).

Fox, Stephen and Janet Maughan, Ian W Abdulla: Elvis Has Entered the Building (Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2003).

Gray, Rockwell, ‘Autobiographical memory and sense of place’, in Alexander J Butrym, ed, Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp53-66.

Read, Peter, Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Ryder, Kent, Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), pp36-46.