For a man who makes his living out of making people laugh, Steve Martin takes the visual arts very seriously. This is particularly so for Australian Aboriginal art, which the American comedian and writer avidly collects. And he happily acknowledges that the more he learns, the more out of his depth he feels. “When I first started, I really bore down and tried to learn the stories and the Dreaming,” Martin tells AFR Weekend via Zoom. “But it’s just a little bit beyond me in terms of having a wisdom about it. I’d say I’m better with the visual side of it, and I’m aware of the stories.” Martin is speaking to AFR Weekend because two years ago, when Australian filmmaker Michael Cordell asked him to back a film about the origins of the Western Desert art movement, the American said yes.
Steve Martin with artist Yukultji Napangati and her daughter Jodie Napurrula Ward at Salon 94 in New York in 2019. Paul Sweeney Production of Honey Ant Dreamers is scheduled to begin next year, with additional finance from investors including Minderoo Pictures, part of the philanthropic Minderoo Foundation founded by Andrew and Nicola Forrest.
The Western Desert art movement is a bold affirmation of the traditional Aboriginal culture that flowered in the face of the federal government’s suffocating and repressive assimilation policies at the time.
In 1972, Sydney-born Geoffrey Bardon arrived at the Northern Territory mission settlement of Papunya to teach art at the local school. Papunya was then the home of people from four different desert mobs, all forbidden from leaving the settlement without official permission. Heavy-drinking white administrators were openly hostile to the Indigenous people, and conditions were terrible. “It was a place of abundant hatred and distress,” Bardon would later write.
Indigenous people living at Papunya in degrading conditions were often typified to Bardon as “immoral degenerates, living in physical filth and mental squalor, too lazy to help themselves and little better than animals”, he wrote. In a moment of grace on which history would pivot, a cluster of Indigenous men visited Bardon’s quarters one evening to tell him they wanted to paint.
Bardon hopped to it and the men, led by former stockman Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, painted their honey ant story on the exterior wall of the Papunya school. Bardon encouraged them not to paint the white fella’s way, but to paint the designs and symbols their people had been inscribing in the red sand and in natural pigments on their bodies for thousands of years.
The men next began painting on oddments of found board, and many of these valuable artefacts are now in the Aboriginal art collection of Steve Martin’s friends John and Barbara Wilkerson of New York. Later, the artists turned to much larger canvases, and women joined the painting shed. These are the paintings Martin has been collecting since 2015 when he was gobsmacked by a Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri painting he saw in The New York Times.
Martin rode his pushbike through the heat to the Manhattan commercial gallery where the painting was on view, and bought it. It was the start of a journey of discovery for Martin and his wife, Anne Stringfield. One hundred artworks later, they are still joyfully on that journey.
Back in Sydney, Cordell was already obsessed with the story of the Western Desert art movement. For the award-winning co-founder of production company CJZ, with popular hits Bondi Rescue, Gruen and Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery under his belt, Papunya was “one of the world’s great art stories”. “It has high drama, a riot, comedy and pathos with a wonderfully triumphant ending,” Cordell says. “At the epicentre is Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, an artistic genius, rogue and scallywag. He’s a hero for the ages.”
Cordell is making Honey Ant Dreamers with Indigenous collaboration. He co-wrote the script with Anyupa Butcher, a Luritja woman, Papunya resident and emerging film and theatre creative. Sammy Butcher, an elder and co-founder of the Warumpi Band, joined Cordell and Martin as an executive producer. And there have been exhaustive consultations with the Papunya community over many years.
Cordell and Butcher have positioned Tjampitjinpa at the centre of the story. Tjampitjinpa was an authority on Western Desert iconography such as the concentric circles and half-moon shapes that are so easily recognisable in many paintings.
Tjampitjinpa and Bardon are both dead, but the story of those brief months when their lives intertwined is told in the document that arrived on Martin’s desk two years ago.
“I asked to see the script because in my experience, first draft scripts aren’t very good. But I thought this was outstanding,” he says. “So I was happy to get involved as a sort of name, I guess – maybe grab it a little extra attention than it might not get. I thought it was a valuable mission.”
Cordell says his knees were shaking when he and Paul Sweeney, a former manager for the Indigenous-run Papunya Tula Artists, pitched the film idea to Martin at his apartment overlooking Central Park.
“He was such a gentleman. It’s a meeting I’ll never forget,” Cordell says.
There was no request for funding. “When I pitched to Steve, I said I wasn’t after his money – his support was far more valuable,” Cordell says. “As a pro bono EP, his involvement has been priceless.
“Despite that, Steve has invested in the project, but it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to reveal how much.”
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Cordell has cast only one role so far. Celebrated Indigenous actor Wayne Blair will play Obed Raggett, Bardon’s interpreter and art room assistant.
Scouting continues for actors or Papunya residents to play artists, including Tjampitjinpa himself. Other senior men who were there at the beginning of the movement included Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Johnny Warrangkula Tjupurrula, Long Jack Phillipus Tjakamarra and Uta Uta Tjangala.
Martin jokes that although he’s an “experienced kibitzer” – someone offering uncalled-for advice from the sidelines – he has mainly left Cordell and his team to do their job.
Unlike Cordell, who has lost count of his visits to Papunya, Martin has only seen it in photographs. He watched the 1971 Australian film Walkabout, starring David Gulpilil and Jenny Agutter, which included footage of Alice Springs around the time the Western Desert movement was coming alive.
He can’t believe that Walkabout is virtually forgotten in Australia, and hopes Honey Ant Dreamers will show that Western Desert art deserves to be seen alongside the work of non-Indigenous abstract artists such as Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.
“It’s not just intellectual designs, it’s a very emotional, abstract painting,” Martin says.