Dear all,

High in the McDonell ranges in Central Australia, and indeed in much of the surrounding terrain you will find standing a lonely, beautiful tree swaying gently in the hot desert breath.

It is a ghost gum.

It is lonely because there is only so much water to go around.

And it stands like a white fingered sentinel among the distant bloodwoods and the spinifex littering the red-gold soil.

Fifty years ago, no-one would have dreamed that this ancient gum, would be instrumental in setting the Aboriginal people free.

In 1959, a little known Aboriginal artist called Albert Manatjira died from complications following a heart attack and the subsequent onsetting of pneumonia.

But the story starts further back than that.

This is Alberts story.

Albert was born Elea, into the Arunda or Arunta community near Alice Springs.

He shared tribal kinship with the Kngwarriya, Piltharra, Mpitjana, Ngala, Purrula, Panagangka, Purlanda and Kummara peoples.

He fell under the charge of the Hermannsburg Lutheran mission wher he was baptised Arthur and taught to read and write both in English and in his own native language.

As with most Aboriginal people at the time, Albert would disappear on occasion to go walkabouts for periods as long as six months, with relatives or elders of his people during which time he was drawn into sacred initiation ceremonies and ancient rituals and histories, timeless and unwritten.

In 1934, and artist called Rex Battarbee and his friend John GArdner visited the mission where they exhibited some of their watercolours of the magnificent McDonnell ranges.

Albert was entranced.

His curiosity and enthusiasm was rewarded by being given his very own box of water colours and paper by the mission Pastor Albrecht.

A few years later, Battarbee returned to the mission and was astounded to see the work that Albert had produced.

He saw that Albert had swiftly understood the fundamental rules of perspective, colours and composition that took many other artists years to grasp.

By now, Albert had sired nine children by his wirfe Rubina, seven of whom were stuffed into one, tiny, cramped  room at the mission.

With his watercolours now starting to sell, he was encouraged for the first time to sign his paintings with his full name, Albert Namatjira.

He wanted to buy a home with his new found wealth but was not allowed.

He was an Aboriginal.

Flushed by his artistic acceptance, Albert would embark on walkabouts with his entire family to his favourite dreamings and it was on one of these walkabouts that RUbina gave birth to their tenth child.

During the war, paper was short, so Albert so driven by his muse, resorted to washing his works onto smoothed sections of beanwood tree, like small cameos on rippled tree skins.

But Albert became famous for his trademark, the lonely ghost gum that appeared in most of his paintings.

Ghost, red and blue gums are striking for the way that the bark sloughs off into long fingered strips, leaving pastel shades of smooth bark beneath of all hues in infinite and mesmerising variety. Each instance of gum is unique and captivating in its often lonely spleandour, expecially in the outback where these lone sentinels hang and brood in quiet solitude.

Albert could still not buy a house.

He was Aboriginal.

Acceptance and success in his art started to have a negative effect on his health. He ate too much 'white mans food', and drove around in a gifted car, neglecting excercise.

His weight ballooned to a massive 18 stones and angina set in.

Albert took himself off once more on walkabout and the return to the land and songlines of his ancestors seemed to improve his health. When he returned, he was fiitter and more driven than ever.

His fame had begun to spread, and even Queen Elizabeth II purchased one of his works where it still hangs in Buckingham Palace to this very day.

Trouble loomed on Alberts brightly painted horizon however.

The Australian government had become aware not so much of Alberts talent, but by the fact that he was now earning a substantial amount of money.

And they wanted their slice.

Albert was presented with a tax return.

This simple act of abstract greed by the state was to prove a seminal point in the eventual recognition of the Aboriginal peoples as being fully paid up members of the Commonwealth.

As an Aboriginal, Albert was considered a ward of the state, and thus, not a citizen of the Commonwealth. In short, Albert was not allowed to vote, own a business or build himself a home, and if the state felt like it, it could remove his children from himself and his wife.

He was not a subject before the law, yet now the state was demanding that he pay tax on his income.

Taxation without representation.

When trying to seek permission to build a home for himself and his family in Alice Springs, the application was rejected, the reason given being a statute that prohibited Aboriginal peoples from remaining in the confines of the towns after dark.

In 1953 Albert was awarded the Queens Coronation Medal.

He was still not allowed to vote.

But by now his plight had come to the attention of the common Australian people, and they were outraged. Support gathered, and people flocked to his cause.

In 1957 Albert and his wife, Rubina, were awarded full citizenship, the first Aboriginal people do be accorded that privilege.

He scould now vote, build a house where he pleased and remain in town, even after dark.

This citizenship was not extended to his children however, who remained wards of the state and were therefore not allowed to remain with their parents after darkness fell.

The vulture shadow of the dour weight of prejudice, despite Alberts citizenship, never left his shoulders however.

He was implicated in supplying alchohol to his fellow Aboriginals when a man killed his young Pitjantjatjara wife.

In theory, he was the only one allowed to buy alchohol.

Some months later he was charged and convicted of illegally supplying alchohol to a fellow tribesman who, unlike Albert, was a ward of the state and had no right to the freedoms that Albert had to win through his merits, the merit of being an extraordinarily talented human being.

Albert was sentenced to two years hard labour, but released after six months because of his exemplary behaviour.

But on his release, Albert seemed to have lost his muse, he'd become listless and apathetic.

He never painted again, and his famiiy and friends observed that he had become very much like the ghosts that he so loved to capture in his watercolours.

Most Aboriginals sing the songlines.

Albert painted them in stunning works that now sing his dreamtime the world over.

He has transposed the ancient melodies of the land into a dreamscape of incomparable and ethereal, transcendental beauty.

His life was a monument to the struggles of the idigenous, Aboriginal peoples not just of Australia, but of the world over, to have the right to have a voice over their land, their history and their future.

Albert lives on through his legacy of visionary landscapes, his gentle offerings a bridge between two vastly different cultural perspectives; those of the transitory, acquisitive greed of the West, and of his own ancient bedrock of some 65,000 years of continuous histories.

The land sung Albert into being, and Albert in turn painted the land, before returning to her loving arms.

yechydda,

Alberts works can be seen on many web sites. Here are few:

http://www.artistfootsteps.com/html/Namatjira_ghostgum_gosserange.htm

http://www.artistfootsteps.com/html/Namatjira_fennsgap.htm

http://www.artistfootsteps.com/html/Namatjira_ghostgum_centaust.htm

http://www.artistfootsteps.com/html/Namatjira_woomera61997.htm