Walkabout Art

The Tour – comprised of three performance poets (Nigel Roberts, Terry Whitebeach and myself) and two, tribal Aboriginal songmen/painters (Dinny Nolan Tjampitjinpa and Paddy Carroll Tjungurrayi) – was billed by the Americans as a "30,000 year continuum of Australian performance art". From ancient song cycles to modern jazz poems, from goanna dreamings to talking blues, the oldest and the newest of oral traditions would be on show. Right from the start, it was an experiment in social interaction.

The flight to America was scheduled to leave Sydney on a Friday. Dinny and Paddy arrived the previous Tuesday with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. No suitcases, no money, no passports and no birth certificates. "What are birth certificates?"

The men were over sixty and had never been out of the desert till now; had never seen a "whitefella" until they were well into their forties, and had never heard of a birth certificate, let alone a passport. The Sydney Morning Herald covered the story. The men’s seemingly impossible quest for that little piece of proof, without which they wouldn’t be leaving Australia, made the front page. The Director of Immigration nearly had a breakdown. "In twenty years," he said despairingly, "I never thought I’d have to ask an Aborigine to prove he was Australian." The Minister for Aboriginal Affairs got involved, as did the head of the Finance Committee in Washington, D.C. Finally, with the help of a secondhand book of primitive Australian art – which featured not only Dinny's and Paddy’s work, but also their photographs – Nigel and I managed to convince the bureaucrats that the men were the genuine articles.

(Director of Immigration, Sydney: "I couldn’t get to sleep last night wondering if I’d done the right thing.")

(U.S. Congressman to American Consulate in Sydney: "You make damn sure those men get their visas or heads are gonna roll.")

For the next five weeks - accompanied by the Australian filmmaker, Lindsay Frazer - we journeyed through California and the American southwest. The scope of the tour was phenomenal. From a gold-rush theatre and a garden party in Sonora, California, to a Miwak Indian village and ceremony during a snowstorm in Yosemite. Then onto readings and workshops in San Jose and Santa Cruz; and a cold water flat in San Francisco. In Columbia, California, Dinny and Paddy supervised painting workshops during the day, enlisting the help of over a

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