James Wigley and the Strelley Mob: Social Realist Painting in an Aboriginal Community

ABSTRACT

James Wigley has been historicised by Australian art scholars as a social realist, but the focus of his work through the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s differed from others who were a part of this art movement. During this time, he returned again and again to join the “strike mob” who had walked off pastoral stations in the Pilbara in 1946 and become independent by mining and purchasing their own pastoral properties. The organiser of the strikers, Don McLeod, invited Wigley to help the strikers with building boats to gather pearl shell, and later to run a printing press at the school in the new settlement of Strelley, on one of their pastoral leases. During his time with the strikes, Wigley drew and painted; he would send work to Melbourne and return there to exhibit work about the Pilbara and the people who lived there. He also illustrated the schoolbooks he was printing for the Strelley Literature Centre in the late 1970s. This article argues that this significant body of work places Wigley alongside other Australian artists who spent substantial time in remote Aboriginal communities, and whose experiences shaped their art.

KEYWORDS:

• James Wigley
• Australian art
• Strelley Mob
• Pilbara
• social realism

In the scant mentions of the artist James (Jim) Vandeleur Wigley (1917–1999) in Australian art history publications, he is listed alongside other social realists working in Melbourne during the 1940s and 1950s.¹ The social realists were a group of painters who took poor and marginalised people as the subject of their art, and included Yosl Bergner, Noel Counihan and Vic O’Connor. These artists were, in turn, part of a wider interest in figurative, expressive painting during these decades, and Wigley is also a part of this more encompassing trend in Australian art.² More recently, art historians have listed him alongside other Australian artists who travelled to Europe after the Second World War, in particular alongside those who took up residence at the Abbey Art Centre just out of London.³ Wigley’s contemporaries are in this sense more broadly the artists of his time, including the surrealist James Gleeson, sculptor Robert Klippel, and abstract painter Mary Webb, as well as Bergner and Counihan. This article highlights the life and work of this little-known artist by looking into the time he spent with Aboriginal people in the Pilbara who were associated with the pastoral workers’ strike camps during the 1950s and 1960s—as well as their newly formed community at Strelley Station in the 1970s. Reviewers of his work during these decades argued that his paintings had a “warmth and depth of feeling” in their representations of Aboriginal people, and that “no painter is closer to the spirit of the [Aboriginal] (specifically the [Aboriginal] of Northern Australia)”.⁴ These reviewers imply another set of artists working during the 1950s and 1960s, who like Wigley travelled beyond the east coast of Australia and into the continent’s interiors to spend extended periods in remote Aboriginal communities. This intuition about Wigley’s relationship with Aboriginal people is supported by Nyangumarta speakers from the strike community who remember Wigley fondly. Nyangumarta elder Bruce Thomas recalls him building boats and gathering pearl shell on coastal camps during the early 1960s, while the sisters Barbara Hale and Sharon Hale remember eating lettuce and tomatoes from the garden he made while living in a caravan on Strelley Station during the 1970s.⁵ The Hales are also Nyangumarta Elders. This article does not focus on these memories of Wigley among Aboriginal people, which would be a different project, but instead turns to his place in settler society and art history.

Wigley’s interest in both social realist ideas and remote Aboriginal people intersected in the community of people who had been part of the Pilbara Aboriginal pastoral workers’ strike from 1946. Aboriginal people in the Pilbara who became known as the “strike mob”, or the Pindan mob, are those who walked off the pastoral stations of the Pilbara in the late 1940s, striking against deplorable pay and living conditions on the stations and remaining “on strike” for decades, most never returning to the stations. The strikers lived in camps and settlements while running their own mining, pastoral and pearl-shelling operations, economically independent of state and private interests alike, and making decisions collectively in long community meetings.⁶ Don McLeod, a non-Indigenous strike organiser, was responsible for inviting sympathisers such as Wigley to join them in their Pilbara camps.

Wigley was not the only Australian artist to have been attracted to the actions of the Pilbara strikers. Queensland painter Sam Fullbrook also spent time there in the 1950s, while working his way across the continent. Although Fullbrook has been the subject of state gallery surveys, and his work can be found in state collections, many of Wigley’s most important works are difficult to find, presumably because they remain in private collections.⁷ Wigley’s best-known paintings are two book covers used to illustrate monographs on the strike and its politics: Donald Stuart’s Yandy (1959) and Don McLeod’s How the West Was Lost (1984).⁸ McLeod and his Mob (circa 1958) is printed on the dust jacket of Yandy and shows McLeod standing among a group of strikers (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Dust jacket of Donald Stuart, Yandy (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1959). Jacket reproduction is 30 × 22 cm.

Printed on the cover of How the West Was Lost is a painting of a group of people sitting and standing around a truck, as if they are about to crowd into its tray and leave for somewhere (Figure 2). The image is representative of the mobility of the strikers in the two decades following their walk-off from pastoral stations in the Pilbara, as they moved from camp to camp, following mining, shelling and pastoral opportunities. These camps were autonomous operations, as the strikers worked for themselves, with McLeod running the business of selling minerals and pearl shell to people in Perth. The events of the strike, including walking off stations, being arrested, and holding a march into Port Hedland, have been much memorialised.⁹ In the lives of the strikers, however, these events would soon be overshadowed by the hard work and negotiations in the decades to follow, as the group took up small-scale mining and other enterprises, as well as continued engagement in battles with competing business interests and the state government.¹⁰

Figure 2. Don McLeod, How the West Was Lost: The Native Question in the Development of Western Australia (Port Hedland, WA: self-pub., 1984). Cover reproduction is 29 × 21.5 cm.

Wigley first travelled to the Pilbara to work with, draw and paint the strikers in 1957. He would go back there in 1961 and then again in 1969, staying for much of the next decade.¹¹ His artwork from these visits, often sketched while there and completed while living in Melbourne, make up a substantial portion of his oeuvre. It is possible to interpret Wigley’s motivation for first writing to Don McLeod and then joining the strike communities by considering two aspects of his early biography. First, his work with the social realist painters politicised his art practice, creating an interest in drawing and painting subjects who were not a part of mainstream Australian society. With Bergner, Wigley found Aboriginal people to be a subject alongside Jewish people, as those cast out and oppressed by mid-20th-century Western society. A second friendship also drove Wigley’s interest in Aboriginal subjects. He was a school friend with Ronald Berndt, who would go on to become one of Australia’s most prolific and influential anthropologists. This article begins by outlining Wigley’s relationship with Bergner and Berndt before moving on to his life and work in the Pilbara.

Wigley, Bergner and Social Realism

Wigley’s interest in social realism came to the foreground of his art practice in Melbourne during the Second World War. He had grown up in Adelaide, going to the School of Fine Arts there, before moving to Sydney and then Melbourne. During the war, while a member of an army survey regiment—a unit making relief maps and model aeroplanes used to train officers—he began to exhibit paintings alongside other artists who had been politicised by both the Great Depression and WWII. These artists became known as social realists because they shared a political point of view, rather than a particular style. The activist and artist Noel Counihan was a focus for the politicisation of painting during these decades, as he set himself against more established artists who defended a more conservative idea of artistic autonomy.¹² Wigley was a part of Counihan’s struggle, and he writes of him along with Wigley’s close friends Yosl Bergner and Vic O’Connor as creating compassionate, critical work to protest against injustice.¹³ Subsequent histories of the social realists have listed Wigley as a fellow traveller of Bergner, Counihan and O’Connor, who have received more attention and praise.¹⁴ His most significant exhibition of these years was the 1942 Anti-Fascist show, organised by Counihan through the Contemporary Art Society.¹⁵ This show and the society itself would become the focus of debate among Melbourne's artists over the place of art within politics.¹⁶ In the 1980s, Wigley and the social realists were shown in a couple of exhibitions alongside figurative modernists from the time including Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, Danila Vassilieff and Sidney Nolan.¹⁷ These exhibitions broadened the frame by which Wigley and the social realists have been historicised, placing them into an expanded context in which figurative painting was part of these times.

In the 1950s, Aboriginal people would become increasingly visible as subjects in work by high-profile painters including Russell Drysdale, Boyd and Tucker, who turned to them as compelling symbols of Australia.¹⁸ Wigley and Bergner were, however, driven by a concern for social justice and preceded these artists by a good decade in finding Aboriginal people a worthwhile subject to draw and paint. The anti-fascist movement, and the widespread concern for the fate of Jewish people in Europe, gave them a context within which to exhibit Aboriginal people as dispossessed and impoverished. Bergner was a close friend of Wigley, working alongside him at the National Gallery art school in Melbourne after the war. As Jennifer Phipps points out, Bergner’s first paintings of Aboriginal people coincided in 1938 with a protest by the Australian Aborigines’ League against the Nazi persecution of Jewish people.¹⁹ It is likely that Bergner identified his Aboriginal subjects with the oppressed Jewish refugees in Europe. He felt that their poverty, rejection and isolation was similar to that of Jews in the ghettoes of Europe.²⁰ His paintings of this period include Aborigines in Fitzroy (1941), picturing an unhappy family standing in the street, and Aborigines in Chains (1946), which he painted after reading of a station manager who had chained his workers to a tree. These pictures sit in Bergner’s oeuvre among pictures of poor, migrant and working-class people.

Wigley travelled with Bergner to Europe in 1948, having an exhibition with him in Paris late that year. While Bergner exhibited paintings of Jewish people, Wigley showed a series of works depicting Aboriginal people.²¹ Wigley also would go on to draw Jewish people in London, no doubt influenced by Bergner, while living with other expatriate Australians and Europeans including Counihan at the Abbey Arts Centre at New Barnet, just north of London. Here communist, émigré and refugee artists lived under the patronage of art dealer William Ohly.²² Ohly’s collection of Asian, African and Oceanic works surrounded them in the communal Tithe Barn. Along with Bergner, Grahame King, Peter Graham and Douglas Green, Wigley was one of “the bush boys” who had the skills to do repairs around Ohly’s property.²³ He had already built a house in rural Warrandyte, just outside of Melbourne, with Australia’s first butterfly roof, designed by architect Fritz Janeba.²⁴ It was to this area that many of the Abbey artists would settle upon their return to Australia, including Douglas Green, Max Newton, Grahame King and Inge King.²⁵ While Wigley returned to Australia, Bergner would go on to settle in Israel, leaving the Australian art world forever.

Wigley, Ronald Berndt and the Daly River

Wigley was a childhood friend of Ronald Berndt, and his first contact with Aboriginal culture was through the artefacts that Berndt’s father, Alfred, collected.²⁶ Alfred influenced Wigley to become a collector.²⁷ Berndt and Wigley had attended the same school, but being dissatisfied, had both left early.²⁸ Berndt invited Wigley to accompany him during his first fieldwork expedition to Murray River, not far out of Adelaide, in November 1939. Berndt had no formal training as an anthropologist, but he became attached to the South Australian Museum as an honorary ethnologist. The trip was, as Sheridan Palmer and Jane Eckett suggest, a turning point for both Berndt and Wigley because it was the first time they had spent extensive time with Aboriginal people.²⁹ The book that came out of subsequent visits with Berndt’s wife, fellow anthropologist Catherine Berndt, A World That Was: The Yaraldi of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia, was not published until 1993, but it documents the social history of the Ngarrindjeri peoples of the southern Murray River.³⁰ The book is of interest not only for the three Wigley sketches that are reproduced within it, but also for his sketches of the Berndts’ most important informant from the region, Albert Karloan. The use of sketches of costumes, burial rites and other dimensions of Aboriginal life anticipates more famous bodies of work commissioned by Ronald Berndt, such as the drawings from Birrundudu and Yirrkala in the Northern Territory. The interest that the Berndts had in art is reflected in their metaphorical use of “sketching” in descriptions of their own anthropology. They write, of a previous study of the Ngarrindjeri, that it is “sketchy”, and at the conclusion of their own study of nearly 300 dense pages, that it too is a “sketch we have of Kukabrak near-traditional life”.³¹ The notion of sketching is useful in unpacking Wigley’s own work with Aboriginal subjects because he drew them on-site before returning to a studio to work these drawings up into more detailed drawings or paintings. Wigley also drew Berndt working with Karloan, sitting at a table with him and another informant, Mark Wilson (Figure 3).

Figure 3. James Wigley, Kaolan’s Hut Murray Bridge, 1940. Coloured pencil drawing, 49 × 21 cm. The drawing shows, left to right, Mark Wilson, R. M. Berndt and Albert Karloan inside Karloan's cottage at Murray Bridge. Photographed by Michael Bonner, courtesy of the Berndt Museum. Berndt Museum collection, The University of Western Australia, Perth.

Wigley did not return to Murray River with Ronald and Catherine when they conducted their more substantial studies there in 1942, but he would travel with them to Daly River in the Northern Territory in 1945 for three months after being discharged from the army in 1944. Ronald Berndt had been exempted from serving in the army and instead had been sent to the Northern Territory to investigate the treatment of Aboriginal people on cattle stations, where he was sensitised to the difficult conditions they were living in. The motivation for the trip could not have been more in line with Wigley’s interest in painting socially pertinent subjects. Wigley accompanied the Berndts to Daly River for a few months, charged with drawing artefacts.³² As Berndt interviewed people, Wigley sketched. He remembers the “vitality of Aboriginal people in the bush, in their environment”, while also remembering the racism that was endemic in Australian society at the time.³³ Wigley returned to Melbourne with a case full of drawings, which were the basis for studio work he would produce at the National Gallery of Victoria, subsequently exhibited in a successful solo exhibition in 1947.³⁴ He describes the way that he became “someone who paints Aborigines” through this exhibition of work from his Daly River trip.³⁵

These paintings show Aboriginal people in a lush and fertile world, influenced by the tropical plenty of the Daly River in the wet season. The Berndts list the bountiful supply of “fish, turtles, wallabies, wild fowl, eggs, yams, wild fruits, tortoises, and water lilies from the billabongs”, while Wigley remembers barramundi being large and plentiful.³⁶ There is also a biblical sensibility about Wigley’s paintings, as he uses fish and trees as symbols around which green and brown compositions revolve. Wigley recalls that the people he painted “can disappear in front of your eyes if they want to, [and] you cannot see the landscape through their eyes”.³⁷ He accentuates the shapes of Aboriginal bodies to resonate with the nature that surrounds them, creating as much an Arcadian vision of remote Australia as one that highlights the social and political conditions within which they were living.

The Daly River trip was foundational for Wigley’s later work. While he was based in Warrandyte, he would constantly be leaving on trips to find subjects for his work. Among these, Aboriginal people proved enduring, and he drew them with “all their vitality in the bush”.³⁸ He developed a fluid, expressionistic style that emphasises the relationship of his subjects to the world around them. At the same time, as O’Connor notes, he was also a “natural draftsman, he can draw like a dream”.³⁹

This combination of a highly attuned composition and an expressionistic style is visible in the later paintings that cover Yandy and How the West Was Lost. Figures dissolve into the ground of these paintings, people standing tall while also merging into a landscape background and a truck. This blurring of figure and ground is done with the use of colour and a light brushwork, bringing them into relation through a unified style. This view of the strikers reflects Wigley’s view of Aboriginal people as having an intimate relationship with their environment. As he recalled decades later, speaking of his time at Daly River, “they disappear in front of the eyes if they want to, they are just not there”.⁴⁰

The Strike Camps of the Pilbara

After his success with the Daly River paintings, Wigley made a long trip to North Queensland to find new subjects for his art. Here he made a series of pictures of cane cutters around 1952 or 1953. His first trip to the Pilbara was another such expedition. Wigley had heard about Don McLeod and his involvement with the Pilbara pastoral workers’ strike. It may have been that the story of the Aboriginal pastoral workers’ walk-off resonated with Wigley’s experience with the Berndts, as they documented the working conditions on pastoral stations in the Northern Territory. Wigley wanted to see for himself what was happening with Aboriginal workers’ rights in the Pilbara and wrote to Don McLeod in 1957, who invited him to visit.⁴¹ Wigley joined the strike camps as the strikers moved from site to site, trying to sustain themselves through mining efforts and collecting pearl shell on the coast: “In the 1950s mineral prices collapsed and the group, now working under the company name of Pindan, shifted its activities to the coast near Port Hedland, and turned its attention to gathering buffel grass and kapok seed for sale to a distributor in Sydney, hunting goats and kangaroos for their hides, and dry shelling for mother of pearl shell, which were used in the manufacture of pearl buttons. This latter brought the group good returns but was highly seasonal, and could only be carried out during seasons of greatest tide range.”⁴² Wigley spent three months with the strikers, collecting pearl shell while doing his drawings.⁴³

Monty Hale, one of the early strikers who was involved in the pearl-shelling activity near Condon on the Pilbara coast, recalls, “A walypila who came there, Jim Wigley, made us a boat which had an engine.”⁴⁴ Hale writes: “Every morning we’d go out in the boat on the outgoing tide. The tide went out a long way, and the boat would be left in the shallow pools. In the evening we used to follow the tide out with the boat, and we’d put on goggles and flippers to go and look around for pearl shells through the glass. When we saw pearl shells we’d thrust the rod down through the sea [into the sand] and then we’d jump overboard and dive down. Under the sea we’d collect the pearl shells.”⁴⁵

Wigley witnessed the harassment that the strike mob were experiencing and the tension they were living with, as they carried on the strike in the face of opposition from non-Aboriginal people in the Pilbara.⁴⁶ Wigley describes the expressionist style of these and other works as a means of relating to his subjects, describing the way he painted their vulnerability:⁴⁷ “You can’t just observe people, you have to relate to them to paint them. You have to relate yourself. To avoid being too romantic.”⁴⁸ How to portray Aboriginal people remained a lifelong dilemma for Wigley. Very few artists had been interested enough to paint Aboriginal people up to this time, and fewer still were interested in creating long-term relationships with them. Wigley worked up his sketches and watercolours into paintings when he returned to Melbourne, resulting in a sell-out exhibition at Australian Galleries in 1959.⁴⁹ The successful sale of these paintings enabled Wigley to return to the Pilbara once more.

In 1960, Wigley made a second trip to the Pilbara after some of the strike mob were camping near the town of Roebourne. He stayed for about six months, living in a tent with a spinifex windbreak for a studio. He would soon return once more with a caravan and his new wife, Eugenie Knox. While there, Eugenie set up a classroom in a tent to teach the community’s children.⁵⁰ Eugenie soon returned to Melbourne, but Wigley stayed on. The situation had changed somewhat in the Pilbara by the time of this visit. It was a tough period for the strikers. Pearl shell work had finished by now, no longer economical. Their mining activities were also under pressure because a mining boom had begun in the Pilbara, with exploration companies staking out claims and leaving less room for the strike community to work. This was also a period of dissension and splits within the group, with some leaving McLeod and the original strike group to follow dissenters Peter Coppin and Ernie Mitchell.⁵¹

After returning to Melbourne in 1961, Wigley lived in Eltham. During this time, he was building up for a few more exhibitions including another at the Australian Gallery, but he was finding it difficult to settle down. He was restless, feeling that the contact with Aboriginal people had become more real than anything else.⁵² It was time to get out of Melbourne once more. So, supported with money from the Australian Galleries, he bought a jeep and caravan and travelled slowly back to the Pilbara with Knox and their two children. This was after the split in the striker group. It was not long before Knox departed, taking the children, while Wigley stayed on for quite a few more months.⁵³ He then returned to Melbourne with a lot of drawings, but also a messy separation with his wife, money running out and paintings not selling. Wigley reflects that this was a “lost period” for him.⁵⁴

By the mid- to late 1960s, Wigley was living with Bergner’s sister, Ruth Bergner, in Sydney and then Melbourne, but Wigley felt his painting was getting “rubbishier and rubbishier”.⁵⁵ Then he received a letter from McLeod, asking him to come back because the mob were now in Port Hedland. In the late 1960s, therefore, Wigley returned once more to the Pilbara, with periodic visits back to Ruth in Melbourne.

Strelley and the Illustrated Literature Centre

Around 1969–1970, the lease to Strelley Station was bought, and the mob moved from the Nine Mile camp outside of Port Hedland and established a permanent community at Strelley. Wigley was living with the mob once more.⁵⁶ After that, they became known, and began identifying themselves, as the “Strelley Mob”. It was, however, a hard station, with everything rundown and broken. The mob started repairing fences and windmills; they restocked and sheared the sheep. Wigley spent much of the 1970s at Strelley, living in a caravan tending his cherished vegetable garden. The new settlement also enabled the community to establish a school and employ its first teachers, John and Gwen Bucknall. Wigley recalls that the school lifted everyone’s spirits.⁵⁷ Strelley School remains Australia’s oldest independent Aboriginal community–controlled school.

Wigley’s son, Julian Wigley, visited Strelley over the course of the 1970s and remembers McLeod being enthusiastic about education, fantasising about building a granite university in the Pilbara.⁵⁸ In her recent book on the strike, Anne Scrimgeour notes that this focus on schooling dates back to the earliest years of the strike community.⁵⁹ The 1970s then opened up opportunities for self-determination under the new Whitlam Labor government, including the funding of bilingual education initiatives. By 1976, a big cyclone-proof roof and housing was established, a Literature Production Centre was funded by the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, and an offset printing press installed enabling the printing of locally produced books for the bilingual school program.⁶⁰

This proved to be a fertile period for Wigley, during which he supported the early school initiatives in book production by learning to operate the press. It also became Wigley’s job to illustrate a number of books in the earliest years. Gwen Bucknall remembers that “we knew Jim was an artist and John [Bucknall] asked him if he would be interested in drawing for us to make resources for the oral English program. He would do faces of smiling, sadness, all that sort of thing.”⁶¹

The first book to be run off the press, Susie’s Story (1976), was a collaboration with one of the children, Susie, who told the story of when Wigley “growled those three girls” who had been waiting for him to give them tomatoes. Wigley’s garden at Strelley is remembered by all who were there at the time, and in this book he draws himself as a thin and shirtless figure, arms upraised as he yells at the girls from behind the garden gate (Figure 4). The girls cause havoc on their run through the community, before becoming ashamed and then going to school.

Figure 4. James Wigley, illustration from Jim Wigley, Susie’s Story, Strelley Literature Centre, Strelley, 1976. A5 (14.8 × 21 cm). Nomads collection, Perth.

Wigley recalls the effort of keeping the garden alive in the dry heat of the Pilbara: “I lived in an old caravan from a wrecker’s yard. I had somewhere to work and live. I rejuvenated the old station vegetable garden, had a vegetable garden, somewhere to live and worked at the printing shop. The garden involved making enemies over water for the garden, from pump and windmill. People would steal my water and my vegetables, pull up a carrot before it was ready then put it back in the ground.”⁶² Wigley remembers battling to keep his garden going; Hale remembers him giving children the vegetables he grew.⁶³ Gwen Bucknall, too, remembers that “he would give veggies away as people called by to say hello”.⁶⁴

After Susie’s Story and a second English book, The Magic Yoogersuki (1976), about a kangaroo with a flying car, which Wigley both wrote and illustrated, the community became excited about the printing press and its possibilities. Wigley remembers: “Once I started printing the books, everybody wanted to print a book. Old men, young girls, up to 50 copies of each book, books collated and bound. Not so long, about eight pages each side, but people came in enthusiastic. Became an important part of forming of the group, the school. I stopped doing any of my own work during that time.”⁶⁵

While many of the Literature Production Centre’s earliest books were in English, Strelley was founded as a bilingual school, and the books would increasingly be published in Nyangumarta (and, in the early days, Manyjilyjarra), to facilitate literacy learning in language. Book production in Nyangumarta necessitated the employment of local storytellers who could speak the language and a small group of newly literate writers. The content also shifted to telling stories that portrayed Nyangumarta history, everyday life and traditional Dreaming stories. Local illustrators were also needed. Billy Gardiner was among the Nyangumarta illustrators who turned their hand to drawing for the books.

By 1978, Monty Hale, along with Fred Bradman, was central to the transcribing and translating process, and enabled storytellers and illustrators including Solomon Cocky and Bruce Thomas to take up the job of producing literature in Nyangumarta for an increasingly literate Nyangumarta readership. While Wigley was the only one who could operate the press when it first arrived, he trained a local man, Bobby Jones, who took over this role. Wigley’s son, Julian, recalls of his father: “His real joy I really do believe was the printing press period when he was doing the multicoloured books. His stories and talking to kids and doing those initial picture books. I think when it became more academically and linguistically demanding, maybe the fun when out of it for him. But before that I think it was his real moment. Over and above his paintings. His paintings are marvellous and his drawings are even more marvellous of people. But the politics isn’t there in those ones.”⁶⁶

While he lived at Strelley, Wigley continued to pursue his own art practice. Gwen Bucknall recalls going to a gallery in Melbourne to see his work because he was shy of sharing it with others on the community.⁶⁷

Conclusion

This extended period at Strelley suggests that Wigley may have a different place in Australian art history from that which has been previously documented. While he is generally remembered as a painter of the 1940s and 1950s of the social realist school, his 1947 exhibition of Daly River, and subsequent life and work with the Pilbara Aboriginal strikers, puts him into relation with another group of Australian artists—a group who had been influenced by spending extended time in remote Aboriginal communities, and who built longstanding relationships with them. In this sense, his contemporaries include Rex Battarbee and James Cant, who painted work while spending extended periods in Central Australia and Arnhem Land respectively in the mid-20th century.⁶⁸ Battarbee, Cant and Wigley anticipated later generations of Australian artists who have been inspired by their time in remote Aboriginal communities. They include Tim Johnson, whose paintings were influenced by his time at Papunya in the 1970s and 1980s, and in subsequent decades Kim Mahood at Mulan, Rod Moss in the town camps of Alice Springs, Marina Strocchi at Haasts Bluff, Wes Maselli at Tjukurla and Fitzroy Crossing, Tim Acker and Una Rey at Balgo, Wayne Eager and Neridah Stockley at Kintore and Kiwirrkura, and Djon Mundine and John Wolseley in Arnhem Land.⁶⁹

It is also possible to put Wigley in relation to Aboriginal artists working with figures in landscapes, in particular the Nyangumarta artist William (Billy) Gardiner. Gardiner grew up with the strikers and has a style that shares something with Wigley’s. In Gardiner’s paintings, there is a similar relationship between figures and the country. The legs and arms of the men he paints dissolve into the background, as they lean into and out of the overall composition, such that they appear to be as stationary as the features of the landscape itself (Figure 5).

Figure 5. William Nyaparu Gardiner, Old People (III), 51 × 40.5 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2016. Collection unknown.

Wigley’s paintings, and his later illustrations for some of the early books produced at the Strelley Literature Production Centre in the 1970s, express something of this distinct working history of the strikers. It may be that Gardiner was influenced by Wigley. John Cruthers reports that Gardiner’s face lit up when he mentioned Fullbrook painting on the community, but it may be that Gardiner was confusing Fullbrook with Wigley, who was a more consistent presence on the strike camps.⁷⁰ The interview took place decades after Gardiner had left Strelley, so it is not likely that Gardiner remembered Fullbrook’s name. It may also be that Gardiner was influenced by Wigley’s book covers, which circulated in the Pilbara as he took up drawing as a book illustrator for the Wangka Maya Language Centre in Port Hedland. The light, expressionistic style that Gardiner shares with Wigley conveys something of the way in which the people of the North West of Australia identify with the landscape.

While the work of Wigley’s social realist contemporaries is well documented, the most significant of Wigley’s paintings remain undocumented in private collections. The history of his work continues to be difficult to reconstruct, not only because his work was sold through private galleries but also because he did not date his paintings or keep a record of them. In his last period at Strelley, during the 1970s, Wigley continued drawing and painting on whatever materials he could find or have sent to him. John and Gwen Bucknall, who later saw his painting on brown paper that an urban gallery had framed, realised that Wigley had perhaps been short on materials while at Strelley.⁷¹ Yet this work, sent for sale to private galleries, only now comes into public view when it is sold at auction or on eBay (Figure 6).

Figure 6. James Wigley, Taba-Taba Creek, watercolour and pen, year unknown, 35.5 × 43 cm. Private collection, Perth.

As Aboriginal art and Aboriginal representations have become central to Australian scholarship, Wigley and his work haunt the margins of Australian art history. His engagement and life with the Pilbara strike community reflects the way in which the strikers themselves forged their own unique, determined path through the 20th century.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Barbara Hale, Sharon Hale, Bruce Thomas, Julian Wigley, Samantha Disbray, Sheridan Palmer, Vivien Johnson, Gwen and John Bucknall, Caroline Purves of Australian Galleries, Ingrid Walkley of Nomads Charitable and Educational Foundation, as well as Michael Bonner, Alana Colbert, Courtney Henry and Jessyca Hutchens of the Berndt Museum.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number DP210103825].

Notes

1 See, for example, Richard Haese, Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art (Adelaide: Allen Lane, 1981), 131, 156, 177, 231–32; and Andrew Sayers, Drawing in Australia: Drawings, Water-Colours, Pastels and Collages from the 1770s to the 1980s (Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1989), 198, 219.

2 The social realists have been increasingly historicised alongside painters whose politics appeared less in the foreground of their art practice. These painters include Arthur Boyd, Jacqueline Hick, Sidney Nolan and John Perceval. On this subject, see Bernard Smith, “Australian Art in England,” in Antipodean Perspective: Selected Writings of Bernard Smith, ed. Rex Butler and Sheridan Palmer (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2018), 281.

3 See Sheridan Palmer, Hegel’s Owl: The Life of Bernard Smith (Sydney: Power Publications, 2016), 100, 112, 138.

4 Noel Counihan, “Art Exhibition,” Guardian, 16 July 1959; Alan McCulloch, “Imagery of James Wigley,” Herald, 8 August 1962.

5 Barbara Hale and Sharon Hale in private communication with Darren Jorgensen, 21 February 2023; Bruce Thomas in private conversation with Darren Jorgensen, 23 February 2023.

6 James Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman, sound recording, 22–23 September 1987, National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA), https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-199167683/listen/4-682.

7 Sam Fullbrook’s Delicate Beauty was at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, 2014; Racing Colours was at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, 1995. Of Fullbrook’s Pilbara paintings, The Butcher (1955), Fat Lady with Kangaroo (Pilganoora) (1954) and Portrait of Don McLeod (1954) are all in the Art Gallery of Western Australia collection. Girl with Yandy (1954) is in the collection of The University of Western Australia.

8 D. W. McLeod, How the West Was Lost: The Native Question in the Development of Western Australia (Port Hedland: self-pub., 1984); and Donald Stuart, Yandy (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1959).

9 The most comprehensive account of the strike itself is Anne Scrimgeour, On Red Earth Walking: The Pilbara Aboriginal Strike, Western Australia 1946–1949 (Clayton, VIC: Monash University Publishing, 2020). See also Max Brown, The Black Eureka (Sydney: Australasian Book Society, 1976); Jolly Read with Peter Coppin, Yandy, theatre production, directed by Rachael Maza, Black Swan Theatre Company (Perth: Octagon Theatre, 2004); Stuart, Yandy; and David Noakes and Paul Roberts, How the West Was Lost, directed by David Noakes (Port Hedland: Ronin Films, 1987). A handful of other monographs tell the story of what followed: Peter Coppin and Jolly Read, Kangkushot: The Life of Nyamal Lawman Peter Coppin (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1999); Monty Hale, We Come from the Desert, trans. Barbara Hale and Mark Clendon (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012); and Kingsley Palmer and Clancy McKenna, Somewhere between Black and White (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1978).

10 McLeod, How the West Was Lost, 94–153.

11 The details of Wigley’s life and the circumstances of his comings and goings from Strelley are best documented in Sheridan Palmer and Jane Eckett, “James Vandeleur Wigley (1917–1999),” The Abbey Art Centre Digital Repository, University of Melbourne, 9 August 2021, https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/items/show/978.

12 Bernard Smith, Noel Counihan: Artist and Revolutionary (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993).

13 Haese, Rebels and Precursors, 177–78.

14 See, for example, Haese, Rebels and Precursors, 156; Smith, Noel Counihan, 214, 113.

15 Smith, Noel Counihan, 171.

16 See Jennifer Phipps, “A Human, Democratic Art: Three Realist Artists 1944–1947,” Art Journal, National Gallery of Victoria, 23 May 2014, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/a-human-democratic-art-three-realist-artists-1944-1947/.

17 See Christine Dixon and Terry Smith, Aspects of Australian Figurative Painting 1942–1962: Dreams, Fears and Desires (Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1984); Charles Merewether, Art and Social Commitment: An End to the City of Dreams (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1984).

18 Geoffrey Dutton, White on Black: The Australian Aborigine Portrayed in Art (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1974), 62–66; Ian McLean, White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 95.

19 Phipps, “A Human, Democratic Art”.

20 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

21 Smith, Noel Counihan, 231.

22 Sheridan Palmer, “The Abbey Art Centre, Cultural Diversity and Postnational Modernism,” School of Culture and Communication Staff Work in Progress Day, University of Melbourne, 8 December 2021.

23 Palmer, Hegel’s Owl, 138.

24 Philip Goad, “‘Austria in Australia’: Fritz and Kathe Janeba in Warrandyte,” in Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture, ed. Philip Goad et al. (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2019), 226–27.

25 Jane Eckett, “‘More than tea and sympathy’: Eva Frankfurther’s and James Wigley’s Portraits of Migrant Workers at Lyons’ Corner House, London,” presentation, School of Culture and Communication Staff Work in Progress Day, University of Melbourne, 8 December 2021.

26 Geoffrey Gray, “‘Cluttering up the department’: Ronald Berndt and the Distribution of the University of Sydney Ethnographic Collection,” reCollections 2, no. 2 (September 2007), https://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_2_no2/papers/cluttering_up_the_department#nav.

27 Gray, “Cluttering up the department’”.

28 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

29 Palmer and Eckett, “James Vandeleur Wigley (1917–1999)”.

30 Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt, A World That Was: The Yaraldi of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993).

31 Berndt and Berndt, A World That Was, 281, 290.

32 Geoffrey Gray, “‘He has not followed the usual sequence’: Ronald M. Berndt’s Secrets,” Journal of Historical Biography 16 (Autumn 2014): 69.

33 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

34 Palmer and Eckett, “James Vandeleur Wigley (1917–1999)”.

35 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

36 Ronald Berndt and Catherine Berndt, End of an Era: Aboriginal Labour in the Northern Territory (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1987), 152–53; Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

37 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

38 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

39 Vic O’Connor, interview with Barbara Blackman, oral history recording, 19 and 20 August 1985, NLA, https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-196340963/listen.

40 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

41 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

42 Hale, We Come from the Desert, 63.

43 Eckett and Palmer, “James Vandeleur Wigley (1917–1999)”; Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

44 Hale, We Come from the Desert, 65.

45 Hale, We Come from the Desert, 73. Wigley would also paint people doing this work. See Hale, We Come from the Desert, 75, for Painting of Marrngu Gathering Pearl Shell. It has not been possible to obtain a good reproduction of this work for this article.

46 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

47 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

48 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

49 Some of the Pilbara work from this time also went to Moscow and was exhibited alongside other works by Australian social realists, including Counihan, O’Connor and Herbert McClintock.

50 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

51 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman. See Coppin and Read, Kangkushot.

52 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

53 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

54 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

55 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

56 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

57 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

58 Julian Wigley, interview with the authors, 10 March 2022.

59 Scrimgeour, On Red Earth Walking, 341–88.

60 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

61 Gwen Bucknall and John Bucknall, interview with the authors, 4 March 2022.

62 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

63 Hale, We Come from the Desert, 135.

64 Bucknall and Bucknall, interview with the authors.

65 Wigley, interview with Barbara Blackman.

66 Julian Wigley, interview with the authors.

67 Bucknall and Bucknall, interview with the authors.

68 On Rex Battarbee’s time in Central Australia, see Martin Edmond, Battarbee and Namatjira (Sydney: NewSouth, 2014).

69 On more recent generations of artists who have spent extended periods in remote Aboriginal communities, see Una Rey, “Black and White Restive,” in Black and White Restive (Newcastle: Newcastle Art Gallery, 2016), 6-49. See also Kim Mahood, Position Doubtful: Mapping Landscapes and Memories (Melbourne: Scribe, 2016); Rod Moss, The Hard Light of Day: An Artist’s Story of Friendships in Arrernte Country (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2011); Marina Strocchi, “Women Painters of the Desert,” interview on RTRFM, 29 March 2019, https://www.marinastrocchi.com/news.

70 John Cruthers, Nyaparu (William) Gardiner: Outside Men (Melbourne: Vivien Anderson Gallery, 2017).

71 Bucknall and Bucknall, interview with the authors.