‘A whitewashing of minds’: the mania and myth of Geoffrey Bardon and the painting men of Papunya

Like many foundation stories, the white Australian narrative about the birth of the globally celebrated Western Desert Aboriginal “dot painting” movement is steeped in myth.

For decades it has gone like this. In 1971 a young, eccentric middle-class art teacher from Sydney, Geoffrey Bardon, arrives in the remote assimilationist Aboriginal settlement of Papunya, 250km west of Alice Springs.

At the settlement, made up of disparate desert peoples (Warlpiri, Pintupi, Luritja, Anmatyerr, Arrernte and Pitjantjatjara), Bardon meets a group of men including Clifford Possum, Charlie Tarawa, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Kaapa Tjampitjinpa and Maxie Tjampitjinpa.

He convinces the men to paint on hard surfaces the “dreaming’’ stories they had hitherto only committed with fingers to sand and ceremonially on to one another’s bodies, beginning with an expansive mural of honey ants on the external school wall.

Bardon starts to sell their works. In so doing he not only conceives the western desert painting school but also a voracious global market for what the critic Robert Hughes called “the last great art movement of the 20^th century’’. The men will later become known as the celebrated Papunya “painting men’’. But Bardon meets impossible opposition from the white assimilationist authorities to the point where he must flee Papunya with his physical and mental health in tatters. He never works again.

In death at 62 in 2003 Bardon has largely remained in popular and internet consciousness (if not that of the 21^st-century art academy) as the synonymous hero and martyr of the Papunya – and, more broadly, Western Desert – art movement’s origin story.

But a new biography – Art Mania: Geoffrey Bardon and the Painting Men of Papunya by Kitty Hauser – brings extraordinary new understanding to the teacher and his somewhat culturally parasitic older barrister brother, James (“Jim’’) Bardon.

Art Mania is more than a biography of “Geoff’’, as Hauser calls him, and his role in the emergence of the Western Desert painting movement. It is also partly about Jim, who used his younger brother’s year or so at Papunya from 1971 as his own creative fodder for two novels (including the critically acclaimed 1991 novel, Revolution by Night, which won the Victorian premier’s literary award for new writing), film documentaries, and numerous articles and speeches he penned for Geoff.

In the book, Hauser concludes of the elder brother: “Jim got a fair bit of literary mileage out of the painting men, or his idea of them. There could hardly be a better example of appropriation, even if it has gone under the radar (including, perhaps, Geoff’s) because of the obscurity of Jim’s writing.’’

Hauser has examined the extensive private Bardon archive held by Geoff’s widow, Dorn, to produce a multi-layered book about intercultural agency and theft, about who gets to tell whose stories and about how a template of white saviour/hero mythology has long formed a narrative opacity – a sort of settler state cataract – over the Papunya art story.

Hauser makes “no claim to know what was going on” for the painting men at the time. Hers is, she writes, “a white story, an account of a white myth”.

This is also a book about mental health – the mania of the title – and psychiatry. For after Bardon left Papunya in 1972, physically and mentally ragged, he was admitted to Sydney’s Chelmsford hospital under psychiatrist Harry Bailey. There he was subjected to deep sleep therapy – a barbaric treatment, antithetic to psychoanalysis, that blended extended heavy sedation with electro-convulsion to “re-set” the brain and psyche. The treatment was exposed in a 1990 royal commission as responsible for 24 deaths.

Of Papunya, the settlement for the assimilation into “European forms of work and rewards” and Chelmsford, Hauser writes: “Didn’t both institutions seek to instigate (imperfectly) a deliberate forgetfulness, a whitewashing of minds, in one case, and of entire cultures in the next?”

Obliterating memories

Chelmsford was already in British-born Hauser’s consciousness when, soon after settling in Australia in 2003, she saw a short 1970s magazine article about Bardon and the Papanya painting men. The article featured an evocative colour photograph of the large-limbed Bardon sitting on the earth. He is surrounded by some of the painting men (and a child) who look upon the open book or sketchpad on his lap.

She says: “It was the photograph, in combination with the unlikely mention of Chelmsford hospital, that got me interested – two apparently disconnected things (Aboriginal art and deep sleep treatment) connected through this man. Plus it was, of course, a remarkable story, with – as I now realise – elements of myth.”

Like Bardon, Hauser’s mother-in-law, Noeleen, had been a patient of Bailey’s at the hospital in the 1970s and her “distress continued, with repercussions both for her and the family”. The synthesis, for Hauser, of these two otherwise seemingly disparate institutions formed the seed of her book.

“The juxtaposition of Chelmsford and Papunya was surreal but suggestive thematically: sleep, forgetfulness, whitewashing,” Hauser says. “I wondered if there were parallels between the hospital and the settlement, since both sought – so it seemed to me – to obliterate memories in one way or another.”

‘A short story with a long ending’

While Bardon had little knowledge of anthropology, his self-placement at the centre of the Western Desert art creation narrative echoes that of numerous anthropologists’ early cultural contact with First Nations communities.

“Not to take anything away from his timely and impactful intervention,” says Margo Ngawa Neale, Indigenous art curator and writer, but “history tends to inflate the influence of white fellas like Bardon over the existing painting practices in Black communities where agency, voice and work is easily eclipsed.”

From Donald Thomson to Norman Tindale’s geographic mapping of First Nations tribes and collecting of Aboriginal hair samples for his genetic map, to Charles Mountford’s early “discovery’’ of North East Arnhem land bark art (like Bardon at Papunya he recognised its aesthetic value and was among the first to export it from communities), white men placing themselves heroically at the vanguard of Indigenous cultural knowledge – as discoverers – is nothing new.

Neale, who is of Gumbaynggirr and Wiradjuri heritage, says Bardon’s involvement with Papunya art represents “a short story with a long ending”.

“He was a damaged man but a talented one who gave the best of himself to the painting men of Papunya – he became a messiah in the eyes of many, if not himself. He was the right man in the right place at the right time.”

Bardon’s short time at Papunya was a whirlwind of enthusiasm and tireless commitment. Besides teaching at Papunya elementary school (Bardon was himself a painter and qualified art teacher), he used his own resources to supply materials including acrylic paints and boards to the men. Bardon recognised the men’s profoundly beautiful works for their artistic merit ahead of their anthropological value. On weekends he packed his Kombi van with the men’s works and drove to Alice Springs where he sold the paintings to a fledgling arts centre and returned with money for the men, who all had to perform other manual work duties around the settlement for the white administrators.

Some in authority viewed the painting as a distraction from work. Bardon’s chaotic, shambolic approach to his life and work in Papunya – together with his status as a single man – brought him criticism and derision.

“Behind the scenes questions were raised about Geoff’s character, and his capacities, especially in relation to managing money,’’ Hauser writes.

Meanwhile tensions developed with Pat Hogan, the woman selling the artworks in Alice Springs. Then a senior official at the settlement accused him of “trafficking in Aboriginal paintings”.

While Hauser uncovered a written comment by Bardon that “I was always tempted to cheat them”, she says “no evidence has turned up” that he did. Rather, his record-keeping, like so much about him, was simply chaotic and he was “making it up as he went along” in the nascent Aboriginal art market.

At Papunya, Bardon was sometimes unwittingly exposed to secret, sacred stories. Considerable tensions would emerge between the men of the disparate First Nations communities represented at the settlement because some of the men were sharing stories that were culturally taboo for outsiders – among them Bardon – to see.

Bardon became increasingly paranoid, isolated and depressed. He thought he was under surveillance including, once, by Asio.

Hauser quotes his widow, Dorn: “He just couldn’t take criticism.”

Finally, one Friday in 1972, Bardon went off “on a binge” to Alice Springs, stayed in a pub and “insulted and abused anyone he could find once there”, according to his brother. But the painting men, many of whom loved him but also relied on him, followed him into town with their works intended for sale “wrapped up like wounded animals”. On the Sunday he was hospitalised.

Jim crossed the continent to bring Geoff back to his parents’ home in Sydney’s gentrified Randwick.

“Grandiosity, delusion, paranoia, fury, shame and a lingering sense of having let everyone down – the inevitable earthward phase following the exuberant one,” Hauser writes of that time. “We might draw a curtain over it, as Geoff himself did, in public at least; except that the mania to which it was connected had been the right sort of thing to bring to the cross-cultural party, or at least not the wrong one.”

‘The limits of knowing’

Back in Randwick, Bardon told the family doctor he was “depressed in my struggle to evolve a new art form with the Aboriginals”. He was referred to psychiatrist Harry Bailey and admitted to Chelmsford for deep sleep therapy in August 1972.

He was fortunate to survive the psychiatric therapy, already discredited, that aimed to psychiatrically reset patients who were being treated for everything from substance addiction to depression and mood disorders by drugging them to keep them unconscious for a period of days or weeks.

“I did recover but could not hold a proper job and have been an invalid ever since,” Bardon said in a documentary, Mr Patterns, filmed in the last year of his life.

While producing Mick and the Moon (a 1979 documentary about one of the painting men, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri – for which he returned briefly to Papunya) Geoff began a relationship with Dorn Saunders, a boarder at the Bardon home. They married and moved to Taree in northern New South Wales. They had two sons. They lived in Taree until his death, largely surviving on his pension and the meagre earnings from writing.

In Papunya he had acquired dozens of paintings. A wealthy collector, Margaret Carnegie, bought many of Bardon’s pieces in the 1980s. Such works would later profoundly multiply in value as the global market for Western Desert painting exploded. Bardon would tell a journalist, “At the time I didn’t have much money. So, I had to sell them.”

There can be no doubting Geoff Bardon’s sincerity in helping and supporting the painting men of Papunya. But beyond his altruism, as Hauser reveals, it is clear that he also considered Papunya a personal artistic opportunity.

“In places among Geoff’s papers it was clear that almost from the start he was trying to corral his experiences at Papunya into some other form: a novel, a film script, some kind of science fiction,’’ Hauser writes.

In Bardon’s archive, Hauser came across a diagram and writing in which he portrays his Papunya experience consistent with popular American writer Joseph Campbell’s cinematic monomyth template of the questing hero returning, against all odds, with a communal prize.

In assembling a more holistic picture of Bardon, Hauser credits the fine research of others, including Luke Scholes, John Keane and Vivien Johnson, who established that painting was already happening when Bardon arrived in Papunya and that he was not the first to take works out of the settlement.

Others have also strongly suggested that people were also already painting at other Western Desert Aboriginal communities including Yuendemu.

For the rest of his life Bardon’s extensive writings and talks about Papunya (including one of three books, Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert, in which his role with the painters is extensively canvased and came to define, for a long time, the accepted narrative of the painting movement’s birth) made it clear he felt ostracised and effectively forced out of the community by its white overseers.

But central to Hauser’s book – like the intrinsic unknowability of Aboriginal art for non-Indigenous people – simmers the mystery of precisely why Bardon left. Of what, exactly, happened at Papunya.

Perhaps, Hauser writes, there was “something else that Geoff could never speak about [as he later told one writer] – or … something that tilted the world away from him and made it impossible to stay”.

“Part of what the book is about generally is the limits of knowing. We don’t like that. We want to know, want to see everything! That’s true of the art too,” Hauser says. “But there are some things that can’t show themselves directly; and it interested me that this is true both in the painting and in a person’s life.’’

‘I really didn’t want to do it’

Art Mania was a long time coming. It was 2008 when Oxford history PhD Hauser first contemplated writing it. “For a long time it felt as though it was too dark to do. I didn’t really want to do it. But things kept happening, as though coincidentally, in the way that they seem to do to tell you that an idea is yours: I kept meeting people who had relatives who had been at Chelmsford hospital, for instance,’’ she says.

All up, it took 18 years before the book was finally published. “There were a couple of times when I stopped doing it [the biography] altogether because I felt it was none of my business, any of it, and that I should have stayed in my lane.’’

Hauser’s sources are expansive (her notes on them and acknowledgments run to 53 pages). They include extensive visits across years to Geoff Bardon’s vast archive at Dorn’s Newcastle house, and Jim Bardon’s unpublished writings.

“I came to look forward to my visits to Dorn; she was kind to me. I wanted her care for Geoff, and for his papers, and her contribution to his work to go on record. I am very grateful that she gave me access to the archive,” she says.

The archive of writing and photos were held in boxes around the widow’s living room and kitchen, “out on the driveway and in the garden shed as well”.

Art Mania brings compelling new perspectives and nuance to the life of Geoffrey Bardon, who ultimately emerges as neither sinner nor saint, rather as complex and pained for whatever may have happened at Papunya.

What is certain is that Bardon could never entirely move on from his brief time at Papunya. He would, his biographer says, mull over it for the rest of his life.

“It was for him the great time, the sacred time when he felt something shift,” writes Hauser. “It was something that could never return for him, he found, except momentarily in the echo of his own repetition of it.”

Art Mania: Geoffrey Bardon and the Painting Men of Papunya by Kitty Hauser, published by Giramondo ($39.95)