Walkabout Art
workshop... and no days off. A seemingly endless expedition into homes, cultural centers, universities, and Indian reservations.
In California, the Tour had performed for elementary school children in neighborhoods where state-funded programs were attempting to drive out the crack dealers. In San Francisco, Nigel and I spent a Sunday morning roaming the streets where homeless people begged meals in the Land of the Free. Terry, seeking refuge from the Tour and five men, retreated to the security of Anita Wilkins’ house outside Santa Cruz for a couple of nights.
Near Second Mesa, Arizona, the poets and songmen spent the afternoon at a Hopi high school, set in some of the most beautiful country in the world. Ironically, the place had no windows.
(Art teacher: "This is a first for this school. You people got these kids outside. Do you know I’m the fifth art teacher this year.")
After a while, performance and life began to merge. What happened on the stage, more a back-play to the sequence of events: Paddy and Dinny ringing Papunya Settlement to see if their families were all right; endless meetings in under-lit corridors; college kids trying to bargain the men down to nothing for their paintings; fevered shopping excursions through K-Mart; the never-ending raids on secondhand clothing stores; and the constant “interfacing” with the American public.
(Numerous Californians: "Thank you so much for sharing with us.")
If nothing else, the Tour proved that Australian culture can travel and does translate. It seemed that we were able to say things to the Americans that Americans were not able to say to themselves. The poetry and the songs and the paintings were not part of American life as Americans knew it, but they still made sense. Perhaps all good art does, but to actually witness it happening, to see that Australian art can have an impact outside Australia was worth all the miles of bland hotels and takeaway dinners. The Tour certainly put to rest the prejudice expressed by the Australian arts bureaucrat who had turned down our request for assistance because she couldn’t see what possible interest Aborigines or Australian poetry could have for Americans.
"I wish I had five dollars," Nigel Roberts said later, "for every American who came up to me and said, 'It’s so good to see that something else in happening in Australia besides Crocodile Dundee'."
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