Darwin Festival diary – day minus one

Chips Mackinolty by Colin Holt

You won’t get a room in Darwin over the next week or so and, as I found yesterday when I wanted to fly up from Alice Springs to Darwin direct, I couldn’t score a ticket and had to go via Melbourne and Sydney.

At least I had the time on the plane to read Singing Saltwater Country in a sitting. Singing Saltwater Country is a marvellous new book by the anthropologist John Bradley and the families of the Yanyuwa people of the south-eastern Gulf of Carpentaria that Jon Altman describes as:

A rare diary of devotion…sometimes humorous, sometimes very sad, revealing the extraordinary personal commitment needed to gain insight into Aboriginal connections to country…a moving tale of an urgent quest.”

I landed in Darwin early this morning and after a couple of hours sleep got up early for a few early appointments. I’ve come up to Darwin, a city of which I’ve spent a lot of time in since I ran out of cities that I wanted to live in down south in the mid-eighties, to spend a few days digging around in the visual arts gigs that form a large part of the annual Darwin Festival.

Sculptor Colin Holt tells me what he thinks of me

I have a love-hate relationship with this city, and some of it’s people, and today at least I was back in love with it…we’ll see if that lasts.

By mid afternoon I was at the Darwin Supreme Court where my good friend Glenn Campbell was opening Shrine, his exhibition of photos of roadside memorials that is a part of the Darwin Festival that starts tomorrow and runs through to the end of the month.

As Darwin-based author Andrew McMillan notes in the catalogue for Shrine:

In the Territory the stories are all too common…backpackers in vans swerving to avoid a wallaby of a basking lizard or a stubborn eagle feasting on roadkill, losing control in the dirt, overcorrecting, rolling over and over ’til they come to permanent rest in the the scrub…

I’ve had a look at a few of the roadside memorials that are scattered all too frequently along our highways before – see here and here – but for mine Glenn’s stark black and white images nail something that I couldn’t find. And he has a stunning 10 minute audio-visual presentation that runs alongside his pictures that will touch more than a few raw nerves.

Glenn Campbell and son at his opening

My apologies to Glenn – and his son – for forgetting the young fella’s name…

I’ve got a long interview that I did with Glenn a month or two ago where we talk about his workaday life as a news photographer for the Fairfax press where you will regularly see his photos spread across the front page. I hope to settle the edit for that interview over the next few days and post it here next week sometime.

In the meantime you can see more of Glenn’s extraordinary personal work at his blog, Geography is the Deciding Factor.

I’d caught up with my old pal Andrew McMillan at the Courthouse and we adjourned to the harbour-side for a cooling ale or two before setting off across town for the early evening opening of another visual feast at the new(ish) exhibition space at the Charles Darwin University, on Darwin’s northern fringes.

Djiya wiba-ngka koma, eh? (You're not from here, are you?) Therese Ritchie, 2000 © the artist.

The Charles Darwin University Art Gallery resident curator Anita Angel has put together a great retrospective of the work of two of the Top End’s finest public artists – Chips Mackinolty and his long-standing partner in artistic boundary riding, Therese Ritchie.

Anita Angel says that Mackinolty & Ritchie’s exhibition:

…highlights the best of a collaborative and creative partnership by two Territory-inspired, contemporary Australian artists. Drawn from a corpus of eight earlier exhibitions, and a large body of art created over four decades, this exhibition includes many works shown in Australia for the first time.”

I first ran into Chips around Sydney University sometime in the early seventies, where he was variously editor of the Honi Soit and a prolific screenprinter and visual artist at the Tin Sheds.

By the time that I wandered north in the mid-eighties Chips was already settled in the small town of Katherine, 300 kilometres south of Darwin where, as he’d told me a few months before, I could look him up in the “best house in First Street.”

Over the years I’ve enjoyed more than a few beers and glasses of red with Chips – and exchanged the odd mutually-surly silence and snarl – and I am more than pleased that his visual works continue to shock more than a few and pleasantly surprise – thankfully – even more.

Chips and his co-workers have always been good at sticking sharp hot sticks under our skin and wriggling them about a bit, and if our consciences bleed and scream, well all the better for it – particularly in Darwin where is is easy to fall prey to a sodden, slackened somnolence.

You can find a lot more words that do a better job of describing the work of Chips and Therese than I even will be able to in the marvellous catalogue that accompanies the show.

Therese Ritchie. Sculptures by Colin Holt

That’s about all you’ll be getting from me right now.

Its only day one of a long week ahead and I’ll be up early for a media call for the annual Telstra Aboriginal Art Award, then I’m off to the opening of the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair, then a rehearsal of Gary Lang’s new work, Goose Lagoon, followed by the opening of Djalkiri at the 24 Hour Art Space in Parap. And if I’m still in one piece after that I might go don to the Darwin Botanic Gardens to see a bit of music at the opening night concert of the Darwin Festival.

Then I get to do it all again on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The Top End – absolute hell one day, even worse tomorrow. And not a spare plane ticket or empty bed in town.

Suffer southerners…