Albert Namatjira (1902-1959)
Australian Aboriginal Watercolour Artist

By JOHN TOFT

Albert Namatjira was born on 28 July 1902 at Hermannsburg, an Aboriginal mission established by Lutheran missionaries near Alice Springs. He was given the Aboriginal name Elea but later baptised Albert when his parents converted to Christianity. Western Aranda custom was for a person to be given a single name. He signed his early paintings ‘Albert’ but eventually adopted his father’s original name, Namatjira, as his surname.

After a western-style upbringing on the mission, when he was 13 Albert returned to the bush for 6 months, where he was introduced to traditional culture and initiated as a member of the Aranda community.

At the age of 18, he left the mission and married his wife Ilkalita, a Kukatja woman, who was christened Rubina when they returned to Hermannsburg. Like his father’s wife, she was from the wrong skin group and he violated the law of his people by marrying outside the classificatory kinship system.

Namatjira struggled to support his growing family. Two of his children had died from scurvy because he was unable to provide them with suitable food. He eked out a living working at various jobs which included working as a camel driver, station hand, carpenter, blacksmith, and shearer. In addition, he decorated plaques, woomeras and boomerangs with pokerwork and painted images for sale to tourists.

It was because of his remarkable friendship with the watercolour artist Rex Battarbee that Namatjira became a painter.

Battarbee was brought up in rural Victoria. Eager for adventure, he volunteered to fight in World War I and was severely wounded on the Western Front during the second battle of Bullecourt. According to his daughter, Gayle Quarmby, ‘For three days he survived under a pile of his dead mates. It was only when he was about to be thrown into a mass grave that someone noticed he was still breathing. But he was never the same man again.’

Like many soldiers returning from WWI, Battarbee found it difficult to fit back into normal life. After the war, he spent 3 years in hospital recovering from his wounds. Unable to work on the family farm, he studied art and worked as a commercial artist. He also began to paint landscapes in watercolour, partly because his damaged hand was sensitive to oil and turpentine. In 1925, after working as a commercial artist in Melbourne, Battarbee and fellow painter John Gardner set out in a Model T Ford that had been converted into a caravan - the 1920s equivalent of a motor home - on a long painting trip around Australia. He told an interviewer ‘I wanted to be out of doors. I didn’t want to be tied up in a city and be just a commercial artist for the rest of my life.’ Painting in the Australian outback was Battarbee’s way of putting his life back together.

Battarbee and Gardner held an exhibition of their paintings at Hermannsburg in 1932. At the time, Albert was away building a stockyard on a nearby station. Two years later, they returned and held a second exhibition which was seen by at least three hundred Aboriginal people, including Namatjira. Rex Battarbee’s daughter recalled ‘When he saw Dad’s paintings he said, ”How much does this man get for this?” He was told 5 guineas. He said, “I have to work for 6 months for 6 shillings, and I could do this.”

Battarbee returned to Hermannsburg on his own in 1936. He told an interviewer:
‘Albert was waiting for me; he had visioned up in his mind that he could look after camels for me, while I taught him to paint. I also provided food for him, and we set off in 1936 on two trips of a month each…
I used to bring up painting materials for the children, but I never thought a fully-grown mature man would want to become an artist amongst these people…

During those two months Albert and I lived continuously on our own, Albert painted continuously, and that is really the only tuition that Albert had. Other trips we did together, but those two months Albert learnt all his background in art, which enabled him to become famous.

The amazing thing about Albert was that he was a man of 34 years of age, a mature man, who had great ambition, a very clever man, a marvellous pair of hands and marvellous eyes, and he had no mistakes to unlearn. He only made one mistake in composition, but he never made it again; that is why he was so easy to teach, he was just like a sponge or a piece of blotting paper. He absorbed everything and it was easy to eliminate the mistakes, because you only had to tell him a thing once and he did not repeat the mistake a second time.’

The following year Battarbee included three of Albert’s paintings in his exhibition at the Royal Society of Arts Gallery in Adelaide. A collection tin was placed beside them to raise money for painting materials and the sum of 8 pounds was donated. In 1938, Battarbee organized a solo exhibition of Albert’s work at the Fine Arts Society Gallery in Melbourne which was opened by Lady Huntingfield, the wife of the Governor of Victoria. All forty-one paintings sold within three days. Sell-out exhibitions in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth followed, setting a pattern of commercial success which continued for the rest of his career. By the 1950s, Namatjira had become a household name. In 1944 he was the first indigenous Australian to be included in Who’s Who in Australia. His fame spread far beyond his native country: in 1951, an envelope addressed to ‘Albert Namatjira. Famous Aboriginal Artist. Australia,’ posted in India by an autograph hunter, reached the post office in Alice Springs.

In 1953 Namatjira was awarded the Queen’s Coronation Medal. He was introduced to the Queen on her first overseas visit to Australia in 1954. After viewing his paintings, she commented ‘No one will ever be able to tell me that Central Australia is a dead heart.’

In his Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell described an exchange with the 18th century author of the famous dictionary: ‘I told him I had been that morning at a meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach. Johnson: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”’ The Australian art establishment adopted a similar attitude towards an Aboriginal painting western-style watercolours. Despite his immense popularity with the public, they largely ignored Namatjira during his lifetime. The director of a prominent Australian art gallery dismissed his work, stating, ‘Curiosity, not aesthetic value, has made him so popular. The then director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Hal Missingham, declared ‘We’ll consider his work when it comes up to scratch.’ One wonders whether they would claim that Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang and Vanessa Mae are not really capable of playing western classical music, or that Mao’s last dancer, Li Cunxin, is somehow inauthentic because he chose to devote himself to western-style ballet. Namatjira delivered a wry riposte to critics who claimed he painted pot boilers: ‘If I want to boil a pot, I light a fire and use some of the paper those blokes write on. Can’t waste good painting paper.’

What these critics failed to recognize was that although Namatjira adopted a western style of painting, he had a deep connection to the landscapes he depicted. He had spent his entire life in the country he painted; they were his ancestral lands with all that entailed.

Despite the condescending attitude of some members of the Australian art establishment, Namatjira achieved both fame and fortune. His annual income grew to around 7,500 pounds, equivalent to around $250,000 in today’s money. Aranda are expected to share everything they own and Namatjira ended up supporting an extended family of over 600 people. Prior to a referendum in 1967 which granted them the same rights as other Australians, Aboriginal people had the status of wards of the state. They could not vote, own land, build a house or buy alcohol. Because of Namatjira’s fame, he was granted Australian citizenship in 1957. He did not request this and learned of it from a journalist. His wife was also granted citizenship - he could not lawfully have sexual relations with her otherwise - but his children were not. The government was now able to tax Namatjira’s considerable earnings, which they had previously been unable to do. One of his granddaughters commented ‘He was happy before, you know, when he was going out with Rex. That was his happy days. What made him sad was when he was made a free citizen…that made him very sad.’

It also led to his arrest and imprisonment. When a young woman was killed as the result of a drinking party at his camp, Namatjira was arrested and charged with supplying the alcohol which led to the drunken fight that caused her death. He was found guilty and sentenced to six months in goal. An appeal failed and he served a reduced three-month sentence, which was subsequently reduced to two months for good behaviour. According to one of his nephews, he was also subjected to a traditional punishment, pointing the bone, ‘something like what they have in Africa, voodoo or something like that.’

When Namatjira was reunited with his wife he seemed to have lost the desire to paint. Less than a year after his release, he died of heart disease complicated by pneumonia.

At his funeral, Pastor Friedrich Albrecht, superintendent of Hermannsburg, delivered the eulogy: ‘Never before in the history of this country has an Australian Aborigine been borne to his last resting place under conditions as we witness today. I venture to say he was not looked upon as belonging to Australia only – he was a world figure. In spite of many honest attempts to make him happy and a valuable member of our society, we have fundamentally failed.’