JONATHAN BROWN KUMINTJARA, Red Ochre Men Taking Boys to Christmas Creek, 1995

JONATHAN BROWN KUMINTJARA Pitjantjatjara language, 1960 - 1997 Red Ochre Men Taking Boys to Christmas Creek, 1995 acrylic, sand and ochre on linen 150.5 x 90.5 cm bears inscription verso: Red ochre men taking boys to Christmas Creek; red lines where boys are picked up (camps) a long drive in troop carriers to the place (law) PROVENANCE Neil McLeod Fine Arts, Victoria Private Collection, Victoria Jonathan Brown Kumintjara was a member of the Stolen Generations, removed from his Pitjantjatjara parents at a very early age and raised by foster families in Melbourne and later the Hunter Valley. Educated at Camberwell Grammar, he came to Aboriginal Studies and painting only in his late twenties, enrolling at the South Australian College for Advanced Education in Adelaide. After more than twenty years of separation, Brown actively sought and eventually found his parents in the small community of Yalata on the Great Australian Bight. Though reunited with his family, he felt profoundly estranged - unable to speak their language and confronted for the first time with the full story of his community's dislocation and the catastrophic destruction wrought upon their country by the British nuclear testing program at Maralinga. Taken through the affected lands by a local nurse, he wept the entire way. Overcome with grief and a sharpened political consciousness, Brown translated this experience directly into his art. In works such as this, he first depicted his homeland in the tradition of Pitjantjatjara dot painting before covering the surface with ochre, sand and glue - materials that evoke scarred and disrupted earth, conveying the devastating aftermath of the atomic tests. The Tjukurrpa is obscured. Significant sites are erased. What remains speaks to an act of profound cultural and physical devastation.

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