Kunapipi XXVI:2

ANNE COLLETT and DOROTHY JONES
Two Dreamtimes: Representation of Indigeneity in the Work of Australian Poet Judith Wright and Canadian Artist Emily Carr

A child of the nineteenth century, Emily Carr was born on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in 1871 and painted her last works in the early 1940s, dying in 1945. Judith Wright was born on the New England tableland, New South Wales, in 1915, became a published poet in the early 1940s, and continued to publish poetry, essays, fiction and biography until her death in the first year of the twenty-first century. Why bring together an Australian poet and a Canadian painter whose published working lives overlap by little more than one or two years — artists separated not only by choice of form, but by thousands of miles of the Pacific ocean? The separation of time and place would appear to be vast, but appearances can be deceptive, for (to quote from Wright’s first published volume of poetry) — ‘blood’s red thread still binds us fast in history’ (‘Trains’ 13). What these two artists share is in many ways greater than what separates them — that common ground being provided by the historical trajectory of British invasion and colonisation of the Pacific rim. Wright and Carr are daughters ‘born of the conqueror’1 whose art and life work is haunted by an aboriginal presence. Both struggle to articulate self (and nation) in relation to that presence — a presence that most of their generation chose either to ignore or repudiate. A comparison of their representation of indigeneity is necessarily complex, and here, on the site of their shared ground, there are as many differences as similarities; but contrast is an effective tool by which to bring aspects of both artists’ work into sharper relief than previously.

According to most sources, Emily Carr’s interest in Canadian aboriginal art began (in 1899) with her first trip to the Nootka Indian mission at Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This trip is recorded in one of a collection of stories written and published some forty years later2 in which she writes of that initial ‘aboriginal experience’ as one of sensitively negotiated relationship. She sketches everything in sight — ‘boats, trees, houses’ — except the Indians themselves. For this she asks and is granted permission, but the sketching of an old woman is interrupted by the anger of the woman’s husband who believes, like other ‘old Indians’, that the reproduction of the human image traps the spirit of the subject. The missionary responds with a deprecatory dismissal, ‘They have such silly notions’, but Carr represents her own response as one of cultural and personal sensitivity: ‘“Tell her that I will not make any more pictures of the old people,” I said.’ (‘Ucluelet’ 9) This is followed by a curious statement of affiliation that links the Indians, Carr herself, and the natural world:
It must have hurt the Indians dreadfully to have the things they had always believed trampled on and torn from their hugging. Down deep we all hug something. The great forest hugs its silence. The sea and the air hug the spilled cries of sea-birds. The forest hugs only silence; its birds and even its beasts are mute. (9)