TIME FOR TRUTH: SALLY MULDA, TRUTH TELLER
"The reconciliation process has stalled because it failed to do what reconciliation should do: talk about the truth.” (Professor Megan Davis, co-presenter of the Uluru Statement from the Heart)
Sally M Nangala Mulda, six Town Camp scenes, 2017.
EXTRAORDINARY IN THE ORDINARY
Arrernte-Luritja woman Sally Mulda, pre-eminent among the elderly women artists of the art centre called Tangentyere Artists, is one of an unassuming but powerfully resonant posse of storytellers now living in Alice Springs (Mparntwe) in Town Camps and in aged care. Her no-frills approach to telling her truths often packs a seismic wallop, counter intuitive as that may sound. Poignant without being sentimental, confronting without being sensational, not art school trained, and without a trace of irony, nor art-market nods and winks - few contemporary artists, in any genre, convey a sense of place, time and action as convincingly as Sally Mulda.
She vividly illustrates the complex human drama of Town Camp life in contemporary Alice Springs. An Australian place that, thanks to the politics of suffering, has come in recent times to stand for “the Aboriginal problem” (a misnomer from the other side of the looking glass if ever there was one). She is like a one-woman resistance movement, a sleeper cell breaking radio silence with her paintings, a truth teller whose jigsaw catalogue of stories, constructed across a decade and a half, holds a mirror to our self-delusion, evidencing for posterity just how criminally self-serving are the stories that governments and media choose to tell.
Doggedly, with just one good arm and partial sight in her only eye, she has developed a strong and simple visual language all her own. Not as sharply drawn as once, due to failing sight, but nonetheless still rocking the truth. Eschewing spectacle, it’s rich with detailed observation that tells women’s stories, of raising families amidst inter-generational trauma, grog runners, domestic violence, endemic chronic disease, the Intervention and constant police attention. In short, stories from the front line of the day-to-day ongoing Colonial Now, though that’s not a phrase she would use. Ubiquitous police paddy wagons do that well enough.
Sally M Nangala Mulda, Abbott’s Camp 2016. Acrylic on linen, 125 x 200 cm
Her world is Abbott’s Camp (Mpwetyerre), located opposite the Todd River in central Alice Springs, and daily painting sessions at Tangentyere Artists - the Aboriginal owned and governed art centre close by, a safe haven and a place for expression of contemporary and traditional stories for Town Campers.
There are 17 Aboriginal-run Town Camps scattered across Alice Springs, generally located at the compass points closest to the Country from which their residents have come. Some families have been there for several generations.
It’s no secret that Town Camps are overcrowded and often violent places, plagued by dysfunction - a factor of under-resourcing, alcohol and drug abuse and unemployment. Yet they are also home, with that mix of emotions and meanings conjured by the word.
Sally Mulda skewers that complex truth, imbuing her work with a humanity so elusive in contemporary art.
Her paintings are a window into a parallel world, an Australian world alien to most of us, yet quotidian in the extreme. Shopping trips; sleeping rough in the Todd riverbed; no money for food or power; small moments of pleasure, perhaps playing cards in the yard or sitting yarning around a fire; ambulances and police cars everywhere.
A charged eloquence resides in the very ordinariness of the scenes depicted, and the minimalist texts she often overwrites onto her canvases – plain and unadorned, but far from simple in their effect. I was going to say honest, too, but honesty in art is a cheap thrill in these days of identity politics and I think sincere and raw are much better words. Absent are hyperbole and the kind of rhetorical flourishes that too easily tip art into agit-prop. Instead, Sally Mulda’s world intersects with ours in many ways: Centrelink, the supermarket, bus trips, boiling hot summers and freezing cold winters, traffic infringements. And yet it doesn’t: daily visits from the police, and rates of incarceration, youth suicide, renal failure, glaucoma, diabetes and early death that are off the scale.
Her paintings counterpoint what Wiradjuri thinker Stan Grant calls our “Disneyland Australia”, exposed as no more than a stage set, a trompe l’oeil for the gullible, concocted by wilful amnesiacs, insider traders in the giant Ponzi scheme called Modern Australia (stock in trade: denial), and those shouty careerists, the sinecured barrow boys of frightened privilege.
Who could blame her if she fell into sentiment for earlier days growing up on Country, or into direct appeals to our consciences or better natures. But her method is more powerful than those more-obvious tropes. She challenges our sense of justice and fairness while she quietly but insistently shows us, if we have eyes to see it, how important it is for her to tell these stories - these truths - especially right now. For Sally Mulda the personal most assuredly is the political. And in sharing the personal so frankly and openly we are taken beyond empathy, into something approaching understanding.
After two and a half centuries of not understanding, we’d be foolish to pass by the open door into Sally Mulda’s world.
© 2023
Sally M Nangala Mulda, Sleeping, 2016. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 30 cm. “People sleeping in the Todd River. Police looking round. Night time”.
Sally M Nangala Mulda, Police Emptying Beer into the Todd River, 2013. Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 75 cm
“We all see police come. Every day, 2 o’clock come to Abbott’s Camp looking for grog. Follow those cars. He always doing that. We sing out ‘policeman coming’ all the time. Policeman just take that grog - don’t talk to us – family just watch. See him all the time. Everyone with grog try to hide him, but too hard. This one Abbott’s Camp, but anywhere… everywhere”.
Sally M Nangala Mulda, Man hit woman with big stick, ambulance man taking too (sic) hospital, policemen taking man to big jail, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 56 x 56 cm
Sally M Nangala Mulda, Three Woman Waiting for Power Card, 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 56 x 56 cm
This painting is about three women waiting for a power card. No power means no ‘swampie’, or air conditioner. So, really hot women during summer. Town Camp residents in Alice Springs have meters attached to their power boards; they have to pre-pay for power, using cards they buy from the shops (which are often a long way away, without public transport access). So no card, no power, no air coolers in summer, no heating in winter. As a result, chasing down ways to find or buy power cards consumes a great deal of time and energy among Town Camp residents, especially during the long hot summer months, when temperatures regularly soar to 40 degrees and more.
Sally M Nangala Mulda, Todd River Opposite Abbott’s Camp, 2014. Acrylic on canvas, triptych, 40 x 120 cm
“Life in Todd River, there at Abbott’s Camp. From left to right:
- Five o’clock in the afternoon. Family coming back from shops. That car with grog drives past. Policeman chasing him.
- Morning time, early. Family all going to the shop. No trouble here.
- Middle of the day. Policeman tipping out grog – they were drinking in the creek (Todd river-bed). Policeman find him – tip it all out.”
Sally M Nangala Mulda, Intervention Story, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 60.5 cm
“This painting is about police coming round to Town Camps late at night. Five women were sitting around two fires at night time. Two policemen came, said ‘Anything here?’ The women said, ‘We’ve got no beer here. We’re sitting by the fire at night because it’s cold time, talking story. We’re not drinking around here”.
Sally M Nangala Mulda, We come back from Emily Gap, policeman stop the car. You sitting no belt, $500 fine, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 56 x 52 cm
Sally M Nangala Mulda, Sally And My Man Feeding Little Cat and Mother Cat, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 cm
A sweetly personal ‘selfie’ of Sally and her man sharing a moment of domesticity. In its unfussy, straightforward observation it engages us just as powerfully as do her paintings of Town Camp life’s more confrontational moments. And in doing so it shows that the strength of Sally’s art is founded not just on what we might see as the shock value of some of her subjects but more importantly on her openness, her acuteness of observation and her unique painterly style.
Sally M Nangala Mulda, Going Shopping, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 61 x 61 cm, and White People Going to Piggly Wiggly’s for Shopping, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 74 x 101.5 cm.
This pair of paintings depicts a common event among residents of Abbott’s Camp: the daily walk to the shop called Piggly’s - popularly known as Piggly Wiggly’s - on Gap Road, Alice Springs, down the road from Abbott’s Camp, where Sally lives. It’s an independent grocery store that sells food, alcohol, all sorts of things. And it’s where people wait for and meet family and friends. The ‘people’ in the text that runs across the first painting refers to Aboriginal people, the figures depicted below the text. The artist has distinguished Aboriginal people here from ‘white people’ depicted in the second painting; a reminder that, far from being an integrated town, Alice Springs is still very much a town of two worlds.
Sally M Nangala Mulda, Three men come at night looking for blanket. Man said let’s go next door, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 50 cm
Sally M Nangala Mulda, Four people drinking bottle wine on (sic) night, 2018. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 cm
Sally M Nangla Mulda, Little Sisters Camp Life, 2010. Acrylic on canvas, 55 x 88 cm
This is my home at Little Sisters Town Camp (Inarlenge). Grown ups around, all the kids running round, playing, all the ladies all sittin’ down. All the kids and dogs makin’ a noise! No room in that house, we only sleep on the verandah outside. Or we sit down other side of the tree with a fire. All feeling good for being home though, you know?
Sally used to live in a different Town Camp, called Little Sisters. This is an early work by her about life there, distinguishable by its ‘soft focus’ look. A change came about after an eye operation allowed Sally to see more clearly, leading to sharper definition of detail in later works, in place of soft washes of colour. Her striking trademark layers of paint remained, however, evoking so strongly the distinctive colours of the ever-present MacDonnell Ranges, the sky, the vegetation, the multi-coloured houses and the dry river itself, at different times of day and night.
All paintings by Sally M Nangala Mulda. Born 1957, Titjikala, NT. Arrernte-Luritja people. Lives and works Alice Springs (Mparntwe), NT.
Copyright in the paintings resides with the artist.
Photograph of Sally Mulda in the Tangentyere Artists studio by Bec Capp, courtesy Tangentyere Artists.
Copyright in Sally Mulda’s artist statements resides with the artist. All other text ©. Information about power cards from painting documentation issued by Tangentyere Artists.
Stan Grant “Disneyland Australia” quote from ABC TV broadcast, 6 May 2023, the coronation of King Charles III.
All paintings from the Sims Dickson Collection & Archive, images courtesy the artist and Tangentyere Artists.
Details of first image, six Town Camp scenes: each 30 x 40 cm, all 2017, titled left to right by rows:
Policeman taking drunkin man to jail.
Three man walk out, two policeman emptying bottle and (sic) beer.
Two police Toyota looking round for people.
Two policeman taking to hospital that woman got broken arm man hit with big stick, policeman taking to big jail.
Two ladies sitting by the fire, two dog drinking water, two dog coming for water.
Four people drinking bottle wine on night.