It’s odd how selective one’s memory can be. I couldn’t tell you when my parents passed on, but I can remember sitting in our local cinema at Teralba, the town where I was raised, and seeing a black and white newsreel of Albert Namatjira being presented to the queen.
Photographs of his work were shown and immediately I liked what I saw. At that time, in 1954, Albert was at the peak of his powers, but other aspects of his life were in tatters. He’d been granted a grazing licence but had it taken away less than a year later. He bought a block of land in Alice Springs but wasn’t allowed to build on it due to the racial climate of the day.
He’d married outside his “skin” and had been ostracised by the Aboriginal community, but when he started making money, he had up to 600 people wanting a “share”.
Eventually, in 1957, he was granted citizenship, the first Aboriginal to be so blessed, which seems totally weird in today’s more enlightened times. The appalling prejudice that existed then didn’t allow native Australians rights in their own country.
Sadly, being granted these rights allowed him to buy alcohol which made him more in demand and, when sharing some with fellow artist Henoch Raberaba, he was arrested and got six months’ gaol, later commuted to three months, but he survived only days after his release and died of congenital heart failure in 1959. The main reason he was arrested was because an Aboriginal woman had been killed due to an alcohol inflamed argument, alcohol that Albert had indirectly supplied.
By then, his legacy was writ large on the landscape. The first indigenous person to be painted (by William Dargie) and win the Archibald Prize; he was the first Aboriginal to have his portrait on a postage stamp. Though talented at many forms of art, his outback watercolours, prompted by his mentor Rex Battarbee, are what Namatjira will be remembered for. Battarbee had been badly wounded in WWI and, unable to do heavy manual work, turned to art.
Over 60 years later, it’s hard to believe my memory of Namatjira stuck, but when I first visited Hermannsburg, the village of