Geoff Bardon: Kepping Faith

In a time when no-one believed in indigenous art, Geoff Bardon inspired a community to portray their beliefs and legends in their own way, and dot painting was born. Dawn Jerrard looks at his committed life.

Geoff Bardon died in early May, 2003, after a short battle with cancer. Although awarded an Order of Australia medal for his amazing contribution to the welfare of Aboriginal culture and art, his life and work wasn’t without its difficulties. In his years as a teacher in the Outback, Geoff oversaw the birth of the dot-painting technique of indigenous artists at Papunya, near Alice Springs, NT, inspiring and encouraging them, and helping them to break free of their chains of poverty and to overcome their lack of self-respect and self-worth.

However, his support of such causes put him under incredible social and political pressures, which undermined his health. At one point he was an inmate of the infamous Chelmsford Hospital, where he was given experimental treatments. Such experiences so affected him, he said, he lost 20 years of productive living.

However, overcoming these adversities, Geoff rallied, researching and publishing a book on the indigenous art he’d inspired. The book Papunya Tula: The Art of the Western Desert was published in 1991. His newest publication—presently a 1550-page manuscript—is tentatively entitled Papunya—A Place Made After the Story. It is “a definitive work” to be published by Melbourne University Press, one of Australia’s most prestigious publishers of serious literature, and is scheduled for release in 2004. His three documentary films on the artists and their art included A Calendar of Dreamings.

Born in Sydney in 1940, he studied law, but after threee years turned to art, graduating from the National Art School in 1966. It was during his time there that his interest in Aboriginal culture was kindled.
“I learned about theories that say that art grows out of the soil, that it belongs to a particular place, where it was created; that it has a sense of belonging. It’s a nationalistic view, put forward by European nations. This made me realise that Aborigines are the ones in this country who have real contact with the land; it is their art that truly belongs to Australia,” he told Ulli Beier, who wrote the foreword to Papunya Tula.

Having trained as an art teacher, Geoff was appointed to Gunnedah High School, NSW, where he first came into actual contact with the country’s indigenous population. He realised how marginalised, disoriented and alienated they were in the white man’s culture and also that he hadn’t the skills to help them. He asked for a posting closer to tribal Aboriginal life, and so after a short time in Darwin was appointed to Papunya, some 150 km west of Alice Springs, in 1971.

There he saw Aboriginal people in distress and very much in need of help. But it was their pictographic form of writing that caught the artist’s eye. Within three months he was the art teacher.

However, he was viewed with suspicion by his European peers, as in contrast to the whites on the station, he dined with the Aborigines, took them hunting and even invited them into his home. But “he was too enthusiastic and too innocent to notice the disapproval,” says Beier.

In his art classes, he performed a cultural and artistic revolution. In class the children attempted to reproduce European art, but their hearts and minds were in the Outback. Geoff struggled to inspire and empower them with confidence in themselves and the intrinsic value of their traditional art. When he tried to encourage the children to paint a large mural in such style on a drab classroom wall, their timidity overruled and lacking the confidence needed to put themselves on display, they declined. “They got stage fright,” he said.

However, the Aboriginal men who worked around the schoolyard saw what was happening, and offered to do the painting, producing a magnificent five-metre mural. Inspired, they covered another wall with a more sophisticated painting depicting traditional lore. Papunya Tula art was born. Indicative of the hostile climate in which Geoff lived, the murals were painted out soon after he left Papunya.

Geoff began night classes for the station’s older people, and inspired the community to portray their beliefs and legends in a manner they considered appropriate—the dot form of artistry so popular with collectors and galleries around the world today. “Geoff was a true pioneer; he was the man who had faith in the artists when no-one else credited them with any talent whatsoever,” says Beier. And inspired by his enthusiasm, by the time he departed in mid-1972, they had produced about 1000 pieces of artwork.

More than inspiring their productivity, Geoff believed in the artists themselves. “The Aboriginal men of Papunya had endured decades of unsympathetic treatment by whites,” writes Beier. “They were told what to do and what not to do. . . . Geoff Bardon was a different kind of person. . . . He believed in them: ‘I believe in God; I believed that I had a duty toward them [Geoff says]. The Bible says: “Deny not the innocent what is their due.” I could show them what to do and I respected them.’”

However, in a changing climate, the value of his work—and that of indigenous artists—was eventually recognised, and so on Australia Day, 1988, Geoff was awarded the Order of Australia (OA) for his services to the preservation and development of traditional Aboriginal art, in a service at the NSW Parliament House.

Geoff went through some deep waters during his life, but through it all he had the support of his devoted and capable wife, Dorn, and his two sons, James and Michael.

But despite difficulties, Geoff says he always found consolation and strength in the study and acceptance of God’s revealed will in the Bible, and after a three-year-long study of the Bible, decided to be baptised in early 2003. Sadly, just six weeks before this planned day, he was hospitalised with major surgery for a malignancy. He was informed by doctors that he had only months to live.

Given the bad news, Geoff hurried to make his final and ultimate commitment—to die in Jesus Christ his Saviour. On March 1, 2003, he stood in the baptisimal font of the Taree, NSW, Seventh-day Adventist church; on May 9 he was cremated, leaving us an example of how we all might better live.

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