Scott Rankin: BIGhART - BIGsTORY

Scott Rankin; BIGhART BIGsTORY

[: 00:00:21

It's 8 p. m. on October 12, 2006, at the Melbourne International Arts Festival. The house lights dim, and the audience settles like hiving bees at twilight.

The stage is bare saved for a large copper colored monolith in the center. From the right side of the stage, Trevor Jamieson enters into the reflected copper light, his foot falls silent on a carpet of black sand. He greets the audience with a smile. His words are a lyrical mix of Pitjantjatjara and English. He speaks about the vast plains where the sharp-edged spinifex grasses spread across his homeland.

He speaks about his family and his community and what happened when the mushroom shaped clouds rose up on the horizon and the suffocating heat and burning sand rained down on them?

[: 00:01:22

Am I right? ...am I wrong? (Tjukaruru munu nguntina nyinanyi)

Kanku tjinguru wangkaku

Munta!...what have I done?

Wantiriyalani / kapingkunitju witini

Wantiriyalani / kapi unngu ukalinganyi

Piruku Ngurpatjakutu / mani wiyanka

Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

Paluru purunypa Same as it ever was...

Paluru purunypa Same as it ever was...

(anangu tjina ananyi munu tjitji kulunypa tjuta katinyi)… Walytja, carrying little ones (nintiya kutjupa kutjupa kura ngaranyi, utuwari nyanganyi)… they know something is wrong, see the clouds (tjitji paku putu tjina ananyi)… children too tired to walk (Tjamu kami pikatjara, ngururpa wantikatingu)… Elders too sick, left by the road, to wait for trucks that never come. (walytja tjuta kulpingka kumpini)… Families hiding in caves till the sticky cloud passes… refugees.

When our families pass on outta respect, we don't talk about it. So, when the government asked us if people died out there, we wouldn't talk about it. But it made it easier for the government to pretend.

Ngapartji Ngapartji means I give you something and you give me something. Ngapartji Ngapartji is about teaching people in the cities, around the country and overseas that we need to keep our languages strong. We need to work together to start talking about this at a government level.

The Ngapartji Ngapartji Show is a story about the Cold War and the Maralinga Bombs, how it affected me, my family and my people, the Spinifex Nation. Scott Rankin and I have been working together on this play for the last seven years,

[: 00:05:14

[00:05:30] BC: In February of 2006, I traveled to Australia to spend time with filmmaker Alex Kelly, and actor Trevor Jameson, who you just heard and director Scott Rankin, to document what I understood to be their production of a play about the impact of British nuclear testing on Australia's Aboriginal communities for my book, Art and Upheaval.

[Long story short, it didn't take me long to realize that that understanding was akin to our human ancestor’s belief that the world was flat as a pancake. In my defense, this was an entirely reasonable conclusion given that the show, called Ngapartji, Ngapartji was being produced by a performing arts organization called BIGhART, that among other things, produced plays.

I suppose you could say that assumption was the flat earth part of this story. As you probably guessed, it's the “among other things” aspect that I came to learn provided the third dimension for planet BIGhART. Don't get me wrong, a major performance did play an important role in the Ngapartji Ngapartji saga, But the show's multiyear national tour was only one of the many chapters in what turned out to be an incredibly expansive and impactful endeavor that among other things produced:

• A National Indigenous Language Maintenance and Revitalization Campaign.

• A National Online Pitjantjatjara Language School.

• A grassroots cross generational community development program.

• A touring company of indigenous and non-indigenous performers, many of whom lived the story being shared on stage.

• A three-year indigenous language research collaboration with the Center for Aboriginal Economic Policy.

• A digital media training program for indigenous youth, with a catalog of dozens of films.

• A music and theater training program for indigenous young people,

• 6 national theater awards,

• A multi award winning documentary called Nothing Rhymes with Ngapartji

• And a significant increase in public awareness and understanding of the devastating multigenerational impact of 12 years of British nuclear testing on Australia's aboriginal communities.

Like I said, what I discovered on my journey and subsequent research was far more than a do-gooder play in a faraway land. It was a big, expansive, constantly morphing, multi-dimensional, seven-year long enterprise that was quintessentially BIGhART.

An enterprise I also came to know was just one continent on a much larger BIGhART planet, a planet that we'll be exploring in depth through conversations with BIGhART director Scott Rankin in in our next two episodes. On with the show.

Part One: Acknowledgement & Observation.

BC: So I'll begin with a question that we often ask where are you hailing from?

[: 00:08:38

So it is, it's acknowledged and called Tommeginne locally. but it's The great sadness to say that there, there aren't any Tommeginne people here now. So, it's looked after by the Palawa people of Tasmania.

[: 00:09:18

[00:09:31] SR: Yeah, in some ways, the acknowledgement of the country that you're on has become a kind of convenience. it's like a risk mitigation strategy of not putting a foot wrong and being cancelled instead of it being an insight, and a reminder, before public gatherings of the greatest cultural and environmental, achievement in the history of humanity. And that is the continuous, cultural, activation of country and cultural knowledge and cultural sharing, for somewhere between 65 and 100, 000 years.

So, I sometimes in acknowledgements will say, “Look, we think of the 10 generations of being, colonized, since the frontier wars of, this country that's called Australia; we think of 50 generations to a quite a good playwright called Shakespeare and when he was, working, and we think of him as quite a long time ago; and then,100 generations, if you like, back to Gaza Strip, and Galilee and a fisherman who could turn water into wine, and we think of that as a long time ago; or the ancient pyramids 184 generations ago. And these are very short timeframes compared to 2,000 generations of continuity, really, in acknowledging the privilege of being brought into, and held by this kind of deep, cultural, and ecological, knowledge system.”

And, and it's a rare and wonderful place to live in the world, sometimes, that can reshape the beginning of meetings or the beginning of discussions away from the risk mitigation, to go, “Oh, my God. I'm so lucky to be included in this generous way.”

[: 00:11:10

[00:11:27] SR: That's a great question. And it's something that I would answer in different ways on different given days. And I sometimes see it like this, that as many people have commented, if you're well fed and the proteins are good, and, the air is good, etc., you as a human being, you're going to live for about 750, 000 hours, and that's where you make your contribution. And a third of it, you'll be asleep. There's quite a bit where you're very vulnerable as a baby primate, and there's quite a bit, at the end of your life where you're vulnerable again.

And in the middle, there is this very short few 100, 000 hours where You are contributing to the world. And so, I think of contribution as one of bringing stories that are seemingly invisible into visibility for people in such a way that it's harder to abandon them. Or another way phrase that we use is it's like a vision statement in a funny way:

It's, it's harder to hurt someone if you know their story.

And visibility requires virtuosity. And sometimes we frown on that word at our end of the the making, but for the voice of sorrow or the voice of, abandonment to be present, it requires every ounce of our virtuosity in content, and our virtuosity in the process of making the work. So, keeping an eye on invisible stories and making them visible, my focus is on the 80 percent of that task, which is process, , not so much on the 20 percent kind of commodity Western view of the power of content.

Content is good. but the process and who's welcomed into the process, who's allowed to be one of the makers, and how you break down those permissions is the real work. And then finally, I sometimes combine it with, the neat phrase of, Professor Saed, who talks about, “nations are narrations” and for better or worse, we live in these temporary nations, and they unfold in chapters and, some power elites tend to gravitate towards controlling that narration. But there are many entry points into becoming one of those narrators. And that happens through virtuosic process and really virtuosic content as well.

[: 00:13:52

And I have to say that what you've just described as your practice -- revealing and celebrating those stories that have been controlled and rendered invisible. -- that 8- percent-process-work for me translates as, sacred.

Hmm. So tell me. more

BC: A sacred practice. Sacred to me is an abiding and deep consciousness of what we, think we know and the gap between that and the mysteries of the world. As you, quote, Carl Jung, “the luminous pause” between those two mysteries, life, and death, which in the end are one.

When you get into it as deeply as you have, what I hear you saying is, “We're not here just to do a show. we're here... in a way in which we recognize and respect that we're more aware of what we don't know than what we do know, and our practice, pays great attention to that.

And, as far as I'm concerned, the sacred, it's all about that. It is about, that luminous pause and the mysteries that those two bookends hold.

And it's, to me, it's thrilling. I think to a lot of people, it's really scary,

[: 00:15:27

[00:15:28] BC: Yeah, and virtuosity, basically, I think in the Western sense, is often just being so good technically that people are awed. And I think the virtuosity you're describing is being extraordinarily accountable in your process to the awesome power of those stifled narratives, to those stories, in the communities where you work.

Yeah, and that's inspiring to me.

[: 00:15:50

And so, nuance and mystery and the sacred, are ways of describing, I think, a form of, the old-fashioned word of forgiveness. But how do you sit in the moment of great pain and loss, the kind of unifying thing of loss that is life, and forgive in such a way that nuance comes to truth and the truth, speaks to the current power dynamics and reshapes them.

Or another friend of mine he's on our board and he's worked the same, three decades, with people who live with a disability. And he lives with one himself. And he talks about people gentling the world. that, many of his clients who he's building lifestyles with. may have no connection with other people in the way that we think about it…and, but in the world, their purpose, and the way in which they move through spaces is a gentling factor or a gentling force. This is the wrong word, but that's mysterious and that's sacred as well,

Or, in a very, formal Judeo-Christian tradition of, true religion is looking after widows and orphans. And you can go, “What does that mean?” But if you think back into… through time, to the most vulnerable, most precarious lives were lived by the unparented and the, and the widowed. And so true religion is not abandoning.

So, that informs the work, aside from any of the Christian tradition that some people may not like. That informs this kind of work, along with the Jungian mystery.

[: 00:18:07

So now a bit more of a historical question. I know that your worldview and way of working springs from a pretty interesting life path. Where was the starting line? Where did all this begin?

[: 00:18:26

We were a shy family because we were living illegally, so we weren't drawing attention to ourselves. And so, we didn't have things like birthday parties, but we were a very warm family. We didn't have television. Both my parents were interrupted by the Second World War, ended up in Australia, my father from Ireland and my mother from England. And they got married here. No one came to their wedding. Basically, it's just that story of the new land.

My mothers’s passion was early childhood play. Very specifically, not educational play, but the sanctity of play itself as the work of childhood, as the theme and not loading it up with educative values, allowing them to come through. And my father was… he was into a lot of things, but basically timber and interiors and boats. And (he was) a wonderfully unsuccessful businessman, craftsperson, just brilliant at losing money at every turn. But…and together they lived this bohemian life on this Chinese junk and in this boat shed. The boat shed was borrowed, and the boat… you weren't allowed to live on permanently. And you could live on the boat for your holidays, and you could live in the boat shed like a shack for your holidays.

When the water police would come around and ask, “Are you living on that boat” they'd say, “No, we live in the boat shed.” And when the council came, they'd say, “No, we don't live in the boat shed, we live in the boat.” And they did that for 21 years.

It was shy, quiet, bohemian, and full of sunshine and water and, in boats all the time. And for some reason within it was a passion for, justice, which I think was seeded by my mother's interest in early childhood, her interest in play for children living with autism… it wasn't very well known in the 60s.

And we would make toys. for her, to her design, like a little family of toy makers. For… I'd get paid a dollar or something. And those would be specially made for a particular child that she was seeing, to encourage different kinds of play. But something was seated in that, passion for a better world at a young age.

And then looking back in my father's Irish heritage, there was a mad motorbike riding, gospel preacher who worked in the slums of Belfast and Glasgow and places. And I used to pour over these photos of him, as this charismatic, handsome, speaker. And then his father made the stained-glass windows on City Hall in Belfast. And another auntie was a weaver. So,I was pushed into justice and art by these forces that are in your DNA somehow, or in the homeopathy of who you are as a person.

And so that came out in school. The only thing I was good at was painting. And the only badge I got in Boy Scouts was the artist's badge. Then I went to Sydney College of the Arts for a year and hated it with a passion…hat it was attached to designing better toothbrushes or saucepan lids or, whatever and nothing to do with, traction in the real world, as I naively was thinking at the time. And then after that I came to Tasmania.

[: 00:21:53

[00:22:15] SR: It's hard to know, reflection neatens everything up.

[: 00:22:18

[00:22:24] SR: So, then the opportunity came up to go, to do this work in Burnie, which was a mill town, which was going through enormous changes. It was a world of changes as the mills closed down. They took over the Australian mill and shut it down in that way that they, those big companies were doing in the eighties. And I was asked to go and run an employment program, which I didn't know very much about and a drop-in center and there was no real money involved.

So, I, but I rocked up to do that, and fell in love with this industrial town, which was much hated in Tasmania as the arse-end of the, of the state. But I loved this underbelly of creativity that was there. And then just started, I said, “I've got to make some money.”

So, I just started playing music in restaurants. And there was only one restaurant at the time. And so, the two things started to come together, and then for International Youth Year, I wrote a play about all the issues that we were looking at and that did well and toured nationally and that just kick started a thing that I haven't got out of.

And initially it went from that work into writing comedies. I was quite good at structure and dramaturgy and working with individuals who were funny and writing material that would become a vehicle for them. So, those shows became popular, and they generated royalty and things. And, and then that allowed me to begin, Big Heart or BIGhART with a producer friend from Burnie and we got it all going.

[: 00:23:53

And, and were there any people, any influences that just lit your fire, in a way that told you that, you should keep doing this?

[: 00:24:32

And so much so that in the end I think his mind and body couldn't cope with, with his access to gift. And then, looking at that story and going, okay, there's that Diaghilev, producer, or Impresario in the background, and everybody thinks of him as the bad guy, who exploited. But then, in the nuance of that story, there's an incredible scaffolding of a talent and exploitation, they're hand in hand, and there's the yin and the yang and the good and the bad, however you want to say it, together. And they're a very muscley duo who pulled in these other incredible artists at the start of this, we think of the 21st century as modern at the… at their era as they were coming through, (they were) just revolutionizing a new century basically.

And I found that really inspiring. And there was a producer down here who was, a friend I met when I came to Burnie -- son of a potato farmer, John Bakes. He's still a great friend. and he had a certain patience to… when something is nothing, to be able to conceive of it, and to then fan it into flames, which… Everybody wants to be a producer these days, and almost no one is. Almost everyone who calls themselves a producer are a form of arts administration.

Whereas to be producing is to be a farmer with soil, and your first job is not to, raise the crop. your first job is to tend to the soil and leave it alone to do its brilliant thing. And that's much closer to what producing is in, in arts and society, I think. So, he was like that, and he gave me room to fail and to, to make enormous risky decisions. And, and then, he said, I've done this enough now and he's. He doesn't do it anymore and it set me free to explore the artistry and, I think there were then key.

There's lots of things you can talk about, but seeing, Kronos Quartet play. the first time I saw them, I can't, late 80s maybe,

[: 00:27:09

Which brings up a question related to your own path. I mean, you know, you could have jumped into theater as a producer, as a director of the western canon. But, at a critical point you turned your focus to young people in Burnie. So, there's Kronos who were steeped in the Western tradition, but. really went in a different direction, musically and stylistically in a way that, at the time was revolutionary, and I think, consciously disruptive.

And I was wondering if you thought of yourself as disrupting anything or was it just coming at you, naturally.

[: 00:27:56

And the first sort of gesture with them was,they got involved in various ways, but we just went into (this old theater) and I said, look, this space has been in your town for a long time.

It's a theater. And that day I'd been around and to all the secondhand shops and got. a stack of China plates, crockery, and I just was talking to them about what this space is, and they don't, they didn't care. And I just said… gave a plate, and said, to one of the kids, I said, “Can you just throw that against the brick wall at the back?”

And they tentatively threw it and trying not to, break it. And then I said, “So could you throw this one to another one? And then, they really took to it and they threw these plates in this wonderful, shattering Kronosian, world of, abandoned,vandalism held tight on stage.

And I said, “You know, that's what showbiz is. That is it.”

[: 00:29:31

And you know, I'm still in touch with them. One of them, 30 years on, runs a papermaking, social enterprise with me, this kid who smashed the first plate. And, in the dramaturgy, the community dramaturgy, they, found this perfect trajectory for themselves individually and as a group, and on stage,

And it was in, in that moment, after the first two pieces that we started to go, “Should we try and define what happened? What's just happening?”

There is the individuals and their journey. There's community responding to those young people, and then there's the work that's being made. And we have had three dramaturgical journeys platted together.

And that was the start of… “Hang on, this is more, more complex and therefore more valuable, and therefore appeals to many more policy areas than Arts Tasmania or the Australian Council for the Arts or something.

[: 00:30:43

You did a body of research on your own work, the work of you and your hundreds of colleagues, in the form of a thesis: 30 Years of Practice, BIGhART, Cultural justice, and the Right to Thrive. And so, what I'm going to ask you to do is to think about one of the many things that you have done, that personifies, that idea, cultural justice and the right to thrive.

[: 00:31:15

The eight year project was with, the family of Albert Namatjira who was an Aboriginal artist who was born in 1902. Which is almost at the same time as the Federation of Contemporary Australia. So, his life through to 1959 marked this emergence of this contemporary version of this ancient country.

He was a camel boy, using that word carefully, who could take people on journeys with camels. And he learnt to paint with an artist, a Western artist who'd come back from the Western Front. He should have died in the trenches. And he was a watercolourist, Rex Battarbee. And he went out to Central Australia to paint. And really he was painting his soul back to life, I think.

And he met Albert Namatjira, and then they very quickly started painting together, and Albert had this natural facility. And so he painted these incredible pictures that were portholes into the middle of the country, which, Anglo Australians hugging the coast, hoping the ships would come and take them back to Europe, never saw. Most people had no idea what it was like.

So, these pictures got showed around the capital cities and a frenzy took off with people buying his art. And he was a fully initiated, important man in one culture, …and he became this…which is the Western lAranta culture, near Alice Springs, and he became this crossover figure who could reinterpret sacred places, remove totemic symbols, and leave an image of it safe for non Aboriginal people to see in his own country.

And in doing so, he also entrepreneured this amazing career. And he was supporting a family of 600 people from his art making. And, he was made a citizen in, early 50s. Aboriginal people were still considered flora and fauna. I know that's an offensive idea, but it's… many other Aboriginal people have talked about that. And he was made a citizen because you can't tax a non citizen. So, because he was making so much money, they wanted to tax him, but he couldn't buy land in the Western sense. He, or he couldn't buy his own country.

Anyway, over the last few decades, the grandchildren and great grandchildren of Albert Namatjira didn't own the copyright in his work. So, they couldn't benefit from his images of his pictures in the media, or in galleries, or anywhere, or in catalogs. and clearly that was wrong.

And here we are painting our Qantas jets in imagery of Aboriginal art from the Aboriginal art movement --- which incidentally, there's 107 art centres and we chronically underfund them. And they are health centres, mental health centres, transport centres, care centres, and art centres, these places, incredible network. We, as a country, hardly fund them, and yet we exploit the imagery that comes from them to promote the billion dollar tourism industry. And Albert Namajira and Rex Batterby started that art centre movement.

bert Namatjira’s passing in: 2009

[00:35:32] BC: if you don't mind, I just want to point out, something here that I think will be striking to those who are listening, who are involved in community arts practice. Back then, you were at the front end of a campaign spurred on by a historic pattern of injustice, and you began by engaging community partners who you knew were going to need to trust you.

And you took the time, the many many months that it took to do that. And it's no small thing to have the patience and be in a position to do that. And then, you do the same thing with a prominent established institutional partner as well.

[: 00:36:12

And then, so then we, started thinking we better make a documentary, and we started thinking we better tour exhibitions of the contemporary schools of Namatjira paintings, and then we better be running workshops in Namatjira educationally in the community, and all these things were coming out of the conversations with Ntaria or Hermannsburg, as it's called.

Hermannsburg is named after a a little town in Germany, from the Lutheran tradition. And Lutherans who sang when Albert was just, a two year old, they came out to Central Australia to run this mission and brought their melodic structures with them. The women of Ntaria learned those melodic structures and combined them with the great, much, much older traditions of Western Aranta---music and vocal structures, where you sing in the throat and how you produce a sound.

And sitting in that community with this incredible sacred combination of music, which of course, many people would have said, “Oh, well, that's just, that's that terrible imposition of the Lutheran missions.” But it was, yeah. an entrepreneurial remaking of sonic structures and they're incredible singers. So, then the show started to form with this music. And, and then a virtuosic recorder player, Genevieve Lacey, got involved and the recorder is the opposite to what you would think, but it sat in the body of this intercultural, spiritual exchange that had happened in that community.

And then Kevin Namatjira, one of the grandchildren, said to us, “Look, I want to meet the Queen.” And we, the colonists in us all recoiled… “What are you saying? How could we possibly,…” And he said, “Because the police in the Northern Territory have the crown on their badge. And I need a letter from the Queen to stop them throwing me out of my house.”

And suddenly, all of that collection of massive ideas came down to this one thing that was happening right on the ground, right in front of our eyes. So, we said, “Kevin, we'll give it a go.”

The show toured the country. 50, 000 people saw it. The exhibitions traveled. That drove the media, Murdoch's media got involved to some degree, and we started to tell this story of this,… this is wrong about the copyright. And then we ended up in South Bank in London playing the show, and we got a call from Buckingham Palace saying, her Majesty wants to meet you on the day of opening night. we'd flown across the world,

[: 00:39:12

[00:39:13] SR: and that doesn't happen apparently, we didn't necessarily know that. So, we had nothing to wear, the protocols… An ambassador went in, was two minutes with the Queen before us. We walked in, in our costumes, because we didn't have any other clothes, coming straight from rehearsal, and had 20, 25 minutes with the Queen, Kevin speaking to her about his needs. We… it wasn't a politicized meeting, they exchanged paintings.

And Prince Philip, had these funny anecdotes, which I won't say in this, the classic, Prince Philip stuff. The point being, we are standing outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, Kevin and I were able to say, “From Buckingham Palace to Homeless in Alice.” And that got picked up as a phrase, on the back of the six years of touring. And an entrepreneur in Australia picked up the phone and said, “I will pay whatever it takes.” A guy called Dick Smith. “I'll, I will pay to buy that copyright back for the family.”

And, and we've been negotiating with the gallery owner who owned it legally. And suddenly it all came back to them. The family owned it, and the trust was set up by, pro bono by a law firm. And that now generates income for the family for education, and health benefits in the community. And that healing sore that was eating away at the soul of the country has, has occurred, because of the tenacity of the Namatjira family.

And we would describe it as; there were individuals going through that dramaturgical journey, there was the community itself, and our work and our collaboration with them, that was dramaturgical; there was the forms of art making that was… that had their own dramaturgies, including the documentary that, would play on the back of quite a seats around the world: there were awards, one for the family,then the, there was this other, what we call “domains of change.”

[: 00:41:09

Could you talk about that in the context of this story?

[: 00:41:39

And, I think the public would see the documentary, the exhibitions and the theater show as being the work. But that's the 20 percent over that 8-year project. And the rest is the work as well. It's not a value judgment, but all we've done is… If it's not a commodity, and you can't buy a small piece of cardboard for your entry into the theater, it's not a thing, but it is the thing. And in our own lives it's really what we call processes. We all have them. We're all deeply involved in them. And, and what we do is exclude others from them.

[: 00:42:40

And another thing we're going to need to reckon with right here is that I think we've come to a moment where we're going to end this first episode. So, in our next episode, we'll continue our discussion with Scott and hear, some more BIGhART stories, interestingly, one that is about skateboarding as a transformational lever for social and cultural change.

So thanks again for lending us your ear and also if you're so inspired passing this story and its companions on, change the story, change the World onto Your friends. And something we'd like to pass on in our show notes are links to all the incredible films and music and writing that tell much more about the big art story.

Also, if you have some comments or questions or ideas about how we can expand the change the story community, or people you think we should be talking to, please drop us a line at csac@artandcommunity.com That's csac@artandcommunity.com And please know that we read and try our best to respond to everything

Change the Story, Change The World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart, and hands of the Maestro Judy Munsen. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe. Our effects come from free sound.org. Our inspiration rises up from the ever-present spirit of UKE 235. So, until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word. And rest assured, this episode has been 100% human.