WA, Desert Art and the Australian Landscape Tradition.
by Quentin Cockburn

WA: “everything BIG” as Borat would say.  And everything NEW.  New buildings, new roads.  This is a mining state, and a veritable ‘gold rush’ is underway.  Money is to be made, and making money is the name of the game.  Anything getting in the way of profit is taboo.

Kings Park, on an escarpment overlooking the picturesque Swan River Estuary on the Western edge of the city is an oasis.  This park is a gallery exhibiting WA’s most valuable and precious resource – its native flora.  This was the only, the singular exhibit that said environment matters.  And on the skyline, dominating, is the largest Perth City building, all steel and black glass, with massive naming and logo above.  It reads ‘BHP Billiton’

Big (and new) were the roads that coursed between the coastal developments, Kwinana, Mandurah, and Busseltown, and Big (and new) were the trucks that thundered past, some filled with timber, others petrol tankers, road trains, and utes.  It’s a mining and resource state and don’t you forget it!

It’s hard to get a sense of the scale of Western Australia.  We were down the bottom end, though I was told the drive East to Esperance, was at least another ten hours.  The trip North to Broome, an incomprehensible 2500 kms, and further north, the speedo flicks over to the thousands.  Distance, not tyranny but curse, Australia’s curse.   There is a luxuriance of distance -distance to develop, to mine, and transmigrate beyond the fringes. The physical being out of sight, out of mind.

It’s hard to get a sense of the distance, and yet as we cursed and fumed amidst the interminable roundabouts between Busselton and Bunbury, we had an inkling that someone, perhaps from the the English post war traffic management roundabout school had had a say. .  To turn the expanse into digestible, frustrating, episodic vignettes.
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I never quite dug the Papunya desert paintings.  Or perhaps it’s easier to say that dots didn’t appeal to me.  If you wanted dots I would say, go talk to Yayoi Kusama, or those french blokes, the pointilists like Seurat and Signac.  I am of the great and noble landscape tradition, the mud school, the heroic, sun bleached entabulature to an emergent nation, golden summers, showers, and that sort of thing.  Not an indiginee to be seen, and only much later, almost as an act of contrition ‘painted in’ as compulsory addenda, a signature to every Drysdale as high art recognition, and Jolliffes ‘Outback’ to the lower end

But landscape is intuitive.  I believe that landscape and environment craft, mould, and distill perceptions about us.  Tony Abbot is from Sydney; destiny is ruled by an autocracy and determination of will, part Rum Rebellion, part Manifest Destiny.  Unswerving un-yeilding.  Gina Rhinehart is from Western Australia, vast, incomprehensible, enigmatic, and powerful.  You see what I mean?

Sitting in the comfortable chair of our Tiger Airlines flight 774 Cecil remarked, “look at these”.. It was not (to my disappointment) the hostess but the pattern of salt pans that decorated the scene below.  From thirty thousand feet I got the dot painting as a perfect representation of travel and attachment to a vast landscape.  The salt pans, spread below us in a mosaic of perfect symmetry, and between the brilliant edges, the paddocks and scrub, established an interplay of simple colour.  It, as all form and movement.  I now knew what the first Australians understood, that the patterns and circles defined place and country.  I then realised what I owed to the traffic management school the infernal miasma of roundabouts affected the same result.  A sympathetic homage perhaps?  ‘An infernal nuisance.’ came the dull reply.