Author: Brian Hawkeswood. " Scrollen Sie nach unten, um den Text auf Deutsch zu lesen.”
Prologue: A Certain Shade of Purple
I was a boy of ten, and though I knew, in some inarticulate corner of my awareness, that I existed like others—was dressed and fed, reprimanded and kissed—I rarely spoke. Words seemed to gather themselves like leaves in the wind, always just out of reach, scattered across the page, inverted, misaligned, or transposed, and though I could feel the pressure of meaning just beneath the surface of every sentence I attempted to read, it would dissipate the moment I reached for it, like breath on glass. Dyslexia, of course, had not yet reached the fashionable tongues of specialists, and so I was simply a quiet child, one of those boys whom teachers described as “dreamy,” and occasionally “a bit slow,” with the kind of affection that, even at ten, I sensed was fatal to expectation.
Albert Namatjira, Western Arranta people, not titled [Hermannsburg watercolour], c.1951,
But colour—that I could read. Colour, for me, was not a visual phenomenon but an emotional alphabet, one that seemed to decode the world in a language far older, far more visceral, than words. It began, I think, with birds—those brief, astonishing flickers of moving pigment that darted from gum tree to ironbark at dawn. Rosellas, kingfishers, lorikeets in the mango trees: each one a living paint stroke. And then the cloth—my mother’s summer dresses, the silk scarves of visiting relatives, the bright embroidery of teatowels and table runners, as if the world insisted, gently, that meaning could be found in brightness.
But what I remember most vividly—what persists even now, as I write this, decades later in a very different part of the world—is the painting. It was taped, with brittle yellowed cellophane, to the inside of a kitchen cupboard door in our modest weatherboard house. It was always there, omnipresent in that domestic theatre of smells and simmering saucepans and the clatter of cups. And yet it was not part of the kitchen. It belonged to somewhere else. Somewhere drier, vaster, still.
A painting by Albert Namatjira.
Though I did not know then that he was famous, or Aboriginal, or that his work had once been passed over in galleries only to later be praised by Prime Ministers, I knew—absolutely—that this painting was important. It was not like other pictures. The colours were both real and impossible: violet shadows on red rock, sky that ranged from cornflower to bone-white, green trees that seemed not so much painted as breathed into being. The trunks of ghost gums glowed like they had swallowed moonlight. I did not know where this place was, but I knew it was true. In a world that confounded me with letters and rules and verbal expectations, here was something whole. That painting was not simply an image—it was a kind of map, and its direction pointed not outward but inward. It told me, though I could not say how, that there were other ways of understanding. And so, in some secret but definite way, it shaped me.
It led me, years later, to seek out the place it depicted, and the man who painted it. And in doing so, I found a story—his, and another’s, long buried but not lost—that reached all the way across oceans and centuries, from the high deserts of Central Australia to the rolling meadows and quiet Lutheran churches of Saxony. The story of a connection invisible to most, but one which I came to see with the same intuitive clarity with which I once saw colour.
II. The Quiet Unfolding of a Hand
There are moments that unfold so gently we do not realise until much later that our entire future was hidden in them, folded like a moth in a cocoon, quietly waiting for the light. When Rex Battarbee came to Hermannsburg in the mid-1930s, he arrived with paintboxes and an easel, but also—though he did not know it—with an inheritance. Not his own, not Kempe’s, and not even Albert’s, but something stranger and subtler: the idea that landscape could be more than a background to human life—it could be the story itself.
Albert was assigned to guide him through the country—to carry supplies, boil billy tea, make fires under stars that sang their own cold songs. But in the long silences of those days, with the dust of ochre ridges clinging to the hems of both men’s clothing, a different kind of companionship emerged. Battarbee painted what he saw, and Albert watched.
Watched the way light bloomed on paper.
Watched the way sky was not blue but a hundred versions of forgetfulness.
Watched the way a brush could whisper what could never be said aloud.
It was not a lesson in the formal sense. No curriculum, no posture of pedagogy. But there was something in the watching that called to Albert. Something that answered a need he had not known he possessed. And so he tried it himself—tentatively at first, as though he feared his hand would betray him, or worse, betray the land.
But it did not. His hand, once uncertain, found an unexpected surety. He painted the ranges not from above, as though surveying, but from within. He painted not as a visitor but as a child speaking the language of his parents in dreams. And in doing so, he bridged two immense and seemingly irreconcilable worlds.
What emerged from his early works was not mimicry but memory—not of things seen but of things known. The way the rocks warmed late in the afternoon and gave off a sigh of heat. The hush that preceded a sudden wind through the gums. The taste of dust. The weight of silence. He was painting not just the physical world but the inner atmosphere of being Arrernte.
Yet it was through European methods—perspective, composition, shadow, the logical recession of space—that these inner worlds were made visible to others. He had not studied Caspar David Friedrich or Albrecht Altdorfer, had never heard the word “Romanticism.” But it did not matter. Their instincts had, somehow, reached him anyway. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the land itself contains all styles, and only waits for the one who can listen with the right eyes.
In one of his most enduring images, a solitary gum tree stands like a guardian beside a dry riverbed, the MacDonnell Ranges rising softly behind it. The tree is white—not blank, but luminous, like a thing that remembers the moon. Its arms stretch outward as if in invocation, or lamentation, or simply the full gesture of being. Behind it, the hills shift in tones of wine-red and violet, coloured not for realism but for feeling. The whole painting shimmers with quiet urgency. You do not look at it so much as fall into it.
To see this image as a child, as I did, was to feel—before knowing—that art could be something more than beautiful. That it could be an act of fidelity, of worship, even. Not of the gods of books or buildings, but of place. And in this, Albert’s paintings were as spiritual as any chapel fresco. His was not a European religion, but he had inherited, through Kempe’s mission and Battarbee’s brush, a European reverence for the act of seeing. He made of the landscape a cathedral, and of every painting a small prayer.
III. A Distant Saxon Bell
Though Kempe was long gone by the time Albert lifted his first brush, I like to imagine—because this is what time allows, these imaginative trespasses—that some faint memory of a church bell from Dauban, swinging back and forth through the winter air of Saxony, had rung once more in the air above Hermannsburg. Not literally, of course. But symbolically. In the sense that history leaves echoes where it passes, like fingerprints in wax.
Kempe’s vision was rigid, and his efforts to convert the Arrernte sometimes blinkered by the zeal of righteousness. And yet, his desire to preserve language, to live among the people, to translate not only text but tone—these were acts of strange, difficult grace. He could not have imagined, in the last years of the 19th century, that a boy would one day emerge from that same soil to become an artist of such singular voice. Nor could he have known that the very structures he helped build—the mission walls, the classrooms, the church—would form the scaffolding for a completely different kind of expression.
But perhaps this is the secret design of things: that we rarely know the full consequence of what we begin. That sometimes a gesture made in faith—not perfect, but sincere—can ripple outward across decades, and land in the hands of a boy who could barely speak, but who understood, without words, the exact shade of shadow beneath a gum tree at four in the afternoon.
IV. A Fame Both Bright and Brittle
There are two kinds of light in the desert.
One is absolute—merciless, brilliant, so sharp it cleaves the outline of every rock and tree into separate syllables. It reveals everything, exposes even the most delicate textures of bark, the grain of sand, the wings of a crow circling in the indifferent sky. This light gives nothing to the imagination; it insists. It says: this is the world, raw and without veil.
The other kind of light is more forgiving—filtered through late afternoon dust, softened by the angle of a distant ridge, turned pink by memory. This light does not reveal; it evokes. It does not speak, but hums. It allows mystery, even as it illuminates. Albert painted with this second kind of light.
But the world that came for him—souvenir-seeking, newspaper-printing, Parliament-debating—wanted the first kind. It wanted clarity. It wanted to pin him down, as if he were one of the birds I had loved as a child, bright and fixed behind glass. They called him a genius, a bridge, a prodigy of assimilation. They called him “the native artist.” And yet they rarely asked what he painted, or why. They saw gum trees and red earth and skies without cloud, and they called it beautiful without knowing that they were looking at country—not scenery, but spirit.
For Albert, fame arrived not like a rising tide, but like a wave breaking too suddenly, too hard. One moment he was painting quietly under a sky that seemed older than language, the next he was shaking hands with prime ministers, being filmed by news crews, offered exhibitions in cities whose streets he could not name. He was invited into rooms that would not have served him tea ten years earlier. Yet in all of this, something slipped from his grasp—not his talent, never that—but something harder to name. A kind of belonging, perhaps.
He was, for a time, granted full Australian citizenship—an honour bestowed with fanfare and conditions. A legal exception, not a precedent. He could vote, buy alcohol, own property. But his family could not. When he shared a drink with kin, he was arrested. When he tried to live as both artist and father, he was told he could not do both. And when the state looked at his paintings, it did not see what he saw. It saw proof of Western success. It did not see the law lines, the dreaming tracks, the quiet but insistent heartbeat of his land rising through every brushstroke.
There is a photograph of him—one of the few where he is not surrounded by journalists or white admirers. He is standing alone, near his country, the painting kit slung over his shoulder. His shirt is dusty, his hat pulled low, and his eyes—those eyes—look neither forward nor back. They look inward, as though he is listening to something distant and eternal. A wind through spinifex. A voice older than English. A memory from the bones of the hills.
When I saw that image years later, it stirred something I had forgotten: the same feeling I had when I looked at his painting in the cupboard as a child. A hush. A stillness. As if the world, for a moment, had turned inward too, and was listening with me.
V. The Landscape as Inheritance
There is something that Albert and Friedrich Adolf Hermann Kempe share, though they never met and lived in different centuries, under different stars. It is not belief, or language, or nation. It is not even purpose.
It is something quieter.
It is the conviction—unspoken, perhaps even unconscious—that the land has meaning beyond its use. That to walk across a place, to really see it, is to be changed. Kempe came from Saxony, a land of quiet streams and wooded hills, where churches stand like exclamation marks in the rolling green. He carried that sensibility with him into the desert, though the forms were unfamiliar. And though he came to teach, he was also, unknowingly, taught.
Albert, born into the land Kempe called mission ground, received more than Bible verses and catechism. He inherited a sense that land is not merely dwelled in—it is narrated. And in painting it, he became not only an artist, but a custodian of story.
His paintings carry within them a whisper of Europe—not directly, not deliberately, but as a distant echo, like the way old hymns sometimes find their way into lullabies. The discipline of watercolour, the conventions of light and line, the notion of the individual painter as interpreter of place—these arrived, in part, through that long thread reaching back to Germany, to Dauban, to a man who believed in language, and salvation, and the redemptive power of presence.
And yet what Albert did was something else entirely.
He indigenised the method. He used European tools to depict a worldview that had never needed paint. He made something wholly new, and wholly ancient. His paintings are not hybrids; they are revelations.
They are what happens when a man sees with two histories and one heart.
VI. The Return to Colour
Time does not pass in a straight line. It gathers, loops, folds in upon itself. It comes back in the scent of dust on hot iron, in the way evening light touches the side of a tree, in the softness of paintbrush bristles found at the back of a drawer. And so it is with Albert. He did not leave us, not fully. He remains, in a way more persistent than biography—he lingers in the space between sight and memory.
Years after my mother passed, I found her kitchen cupboard still faintly marked by tape where the Namatjira print had once clung. The image was long gone, probably curled in some landfill, yet it returned to me more vividly than any photograph: the gum tree radiant with inner light, the deep reds like clotted sunsets, the distance stretching away into time itself. I remembered how I had stood before it, a boy of ten, silent and wordless and wide-eyed.
I did not know it then, but I was being taught to see.
Not taught in the way school tried to teach me—with phonics and rulers and lines I could not trace—but in the way art teaches, by immersion, by affection, by long contemplation of the world as it is when language falls away. And perhaps that is why Albert mattered to me before I could even pronounce his name. He painted not to display, but to transmit something—an interior knowing, a stillness that reached across the broken grammar of colonisation and found a place in a boy who struggled with reading but saw in colour.
In the years since, I’ve walked across parts of that desert—the dry thunder of the earth beneath me, the sky so high and silent it makes you feel like a note struck inside a vast instrument. I’ve seen those hills he painted, still there, unmoved, indifferent. And yet, after Albert, you cannot see them the same way. He has altered the landscape—not physically, but spiritually. He has turned it into a kind of icon, not religious, but sacred all the same.
And I think sometimes of Kempe, too, standing on the wharf in Hamburg or Bremen before boarding the long voyage south. In his satchel: Bibles, German-Lutheran resolve, maybe a handkerchief stitched by a sister. In his mind: a land of savagery to be tamed. He could not have imagined that the greatest fruit of his mission would not be conversion, but art.
Yet perhaps, in the end, it is all connected: the church bell in Dauban, the mission walls at Hermannsburg, the paint tin in Battarbee’s hands, the boy watching silently from the edge of a riverbed. A long, meandering thread—faith, perception, colour—reaching from Saxony to Central Australia and back again, not in the form of doctrine, but in the form of image.
A quiet watercolour.
A white tree under a violet sky.
A painting in a kitchen.
A boy who could not read, learning to see.
“Albert Namatjira”, William Dargie: Mr Albert Namatjira Archibald Prize 1956
Autor: Brian Hawkeswood
Prolog: Ein gewisser Purpurton
Ich war ein zehnjähriger Junge, und obwohl ich irgendwo in einem unausgesprochenen Winkel meines Bewusstseins wusste, dass ich wie andere existierte—angezogen und gefüttert wurde, getadelt und geküsst—sprach ich selten. Die Worte schienen sich wie Blätter im Wind zu sammeln, immer gerade außer Reichweite, verstreut über die Seite, verdreht, verschoben oder vertauscht, und obwohl ich den Druck der Bedeutung unmittelbar unter der Oberfläche jedes Satzes spüren konnte, den ich zu lesen versuchte, löste sie sich in dem Moment auf, in dem ich nach ihr griff—wie Atem auf Glas. Legasthenie hatte zu jener Zeit natürlich noch nicht den modischen Wortschatz der Spezialisten erreicht, und so galt ich einfach als ein stilles Kind, einer jener Jungen, die Lehrer als „träumerisch“ beschrieben, und gelegentlich als „ein bisschen langsam“—mit jener Art von Zuneigung, die selbst ich mit zehn Jahren bereits als tödlich für jede Erwartung empfand.
Albert Namatjira, Western Arranta, ohne Titel [Hermannsburger Aquarell], ca. 1951
Aber Farbe – die konnte ich lesen. Farbe war für mich kein visuelles Phänomen, sondern ein emotionales Alphabet, eines, das die Welt in einer Sprache entschlüsselte, die weit älter und weit unmittelbarer war als Worte. Es begann, glaube ich, mit Vögeln – jenen flüchtigen, erstaunlichen Blitzen bewegten Pigments, die bei Morgendämmerung von Gummibäumen zu Eisenhölzern huschten. Rosellas, Eisvögel, Loris in den Mangobäumen: jeder ein lebendiger Pinselstrich. Und dann die Stoffe – die Sommerkleider meiner Mutter, die Seidenschals besuchender Verwandter, die leuchtenden Stickereien von Geschirrtüchern und Tischläufern, als wolle die Welt mir behutsam sagen, dass Bedeutung im Leuchten gefunden werden könne.
Doch was ich am lebendigsten erinnere – was bis heute fortbesteht, während ich dies schreibe, Jahrzehnte später in einem ganz anderen Teil der Welt – ist das Gemälde. Es war mit brüchigem, vergilbtem Cellophan an die Innenseite einer Küchenschranktür in unserem schlichten Wetterbrett-Haus geklebt. Es war immer da, allgegenwärtig in diesem häuslichen Theater der Gerüche, der köchelnden Töpfe, dem Klappern der Tassen. Und doch gehörte es nicht zur Küche. Es gehörte woanders hin. An einen trockeneren, weiteren, stilleren Ort.
Ein Gemälde von Albert Namatjira.
Damals wusste ich nicht, dass er berühmt war, oder Aborigine, oder dass seine Werke einst von Galerien übergangen und später von Premierministern gelobt worden waren – aber ich wusste mit absoluter Gewissheit, dass dieses Gemälde wichtig war. Es war nicht wie andere Bilder. Die Farben waren zugleich real und unmöglich: violette Schatten auf rotem Gestein, ein Himmel, der von Kornblumenblau bis knochenweiß reichte, grüne Bäume, die nicht so sehr gemalt als vielmehr ins Dasein geatmet schienen. Die Stämme der Geistergummis leuchteten, als hätten sie Mondlicht verschluckt. Ich wusste nicht, wo dieser Ort war, aber ich wusste, dass er wahr war. In einer Welt, die mich mit Buchstaben, Regeln und sprachlichen Erwartungen verwirrte, war hier etwas Ganzes.
Dieses Gemälde war nicht bloß ein Bild – es war eine Art Karte, und ihre Richtung zeigte nicht nach außen, sondern nach innen. Sie sagte mir, ohne dass ich sagen konnte wie, dass es andere Arten des Verstehens gab. Und so formte sie mich – auf eine geheime, aber eindeutige Weise.
Sie führte mich Jahre später dazu, den Ort aufzusuchen, den sie zeigte, und den Mann, der sie gemalt hatte. Und dabei fand ich eine Geschichte – seine, und eine andere, lange verschüttet, aber nicht verloren –, die sich über Ozeane und Jahrhunderte spannte, von den Hochwüsten Zentralaustraliens bis zu den sanften Wiesen und stillen lutherischen Kirchen Sachsens. Die Geschichte einer Verbindung, unsichtbar für die meisten, aber für mich schließlich mit derselben intuitiven Klarheit zu erkennen wie einst die Farben.
Zunächst war da das Papier. Ich sah es hinter Glas in einem Museum in Alice Springs – nicht das Gemälde, sondern das Blatt, auf dem es gemalt worden war. Es war nicht weiß. Und es war auch kein gewöhnliches Künstlerpapier. Es war von einem Grauton, fast warmgrau, mit einem Hauch Ocker, leicht texturiert, von einer Art, wie ich sie zuvor nie gesehen hatte. Und auf der Rückseite war ein Stempel – in Deutsch.
Ich verstand die Worte nicht, doch ein Museumsführer erklärte es mir: Das Papier stammte aus Deutschland. Es war echtes Aquarellpapier, importiert, verwendet von den frühen lutherischen Missionaren, die ihre Farben und Materialien aus Europa mitgebracht hatten. Die gleichen Materialien, mit denen sie begannen, den Wüstensöhnen das Malen beizubringen – eine Handlung, die sie zweifellos als zivilisatorisch betrachteten, vielleicht sogar als heilig.
Und doch geschah etwas Seltsames: Die Technik wurde übernommen, aber der Blick blieb der eines anderen.
Namatjira, geboren in der Hermannsburger Mission, nutzte dieses europäische Medium, um nicht Europa zu malen, sondern das Land seines Volkes – und zwar mit der Intensität dessen, der sowohl das Innere kennt als auch das Licht zu sehen weiß. Diese Landschaften waren nicht romantische Idealisierungen, keine dekorativen Fantasien. Sie waren zutiefst lokal, zutiefst persönlich – topografisch genau und doch spirituell aufgeladen.
Diese Ambiguität – dieses paradoxe Miteinander von äußerer Technik und innerer Vision – ist es, was seine Arbeiten so radikal macht. Und es ist auch das, was sie vielen weißen Australiern so unangenehm machte. In der dominanten kolonialen Logik war ein Aborigine entweder ein edler Wilder oder ein Opfer – jedenfalls kein Schöpfer hoher Kunst. Wenn er malte, dann musste es „primitiv“ sein, mythologisch, symbolisch – nicht naturalistisch. Doch Namatjiras Arbeiten entzogen sich dieser Zuschreibung. Sie waren zu gut. Zu subtil. Zu wissend.
Und so wurden sie von manchen beschönigt, von anderen verspottet, gelegentlich gesammelt, aber selten verstanden.
Ich erinnere mich an die Worte eines Kunstkritikers, der Namatjiras Werk als „Postkartenkitsch“ abtat – ein Vorwurf, der mehr über das koloniale Unbehagen mit indigenem Können aussagt als über die Bilder selbst. Denn was ist eine Postkarte anderes als ein Zeugnis von Sehnsucht? Ein Fragment von Schönheit, das sich zu einer Botschaft faltet?
In diesem Licht erscheint es beinahe prophetisch, dass ein Kind wie ich, ohne Anleitung und ohne Kontext, ausgerechnet auf dieses Werk reagierte. Dass ich im violetten Schatten eines zentral-australischen Gebirgsmassivs ein Versprechen fand.
Hermannsburg selbst liegt heute seltsam still da. Die alte Missionsstation steht noch, mit ihren niedrigen, dickwandigen Gebäuden aus Lehmziegeln, ihren schattigen Veranden und dem Glockenturm, der an die Schwermut deutscher Pietisten erinnert. Ich war erstaunt, wie vertraut mir der Ort vorkam – nicht wie Australien, sondern wie etwas anderes. Die Mauerstrukturen, die Gartenanlagen, der Rhythmus des Raumes – es war, als hätte jemand ein Dorfstück aus Schwabenland oder Thüringen mitgenommen und in die Wüste transplantiert.
Und das war auch der Fall.
Die Missionare, viele von ihnen aus Sachsen, hatten nicht nur ihre Bibeln und ihre Sprache mitgebracht, sondern auch ihre Vorstellung von Ordnung, Musik, Bildung – und Kunst. Sie brachten Orgeln, Harmonien, Psalmengesang. Und sie brachten Aquarellpapier, feine Pinsel, Farbtiegel.
Sie lehrten ihre Bekehrten nicht nur das Vaterunser, sondern auch Perspektive, Tonwert, Bildaufbau.
In diesem merkwürdigen, oft widersprüchlichen Raum wuchs Namatjira auf. Er lernte Deutsch. Er sang Choräle. Er lernte, wie man den Schattenwurf eines Eukalyptus auf Papier einfängt. Und doch blieb er – im tiefsten Innern – immer Teil seines Volkes, seiner Geschichten, seiner Sprache, seines Landes.
Vielleicht ist es gerade diese Spannung – zwischen zwei Welten, zwei Sehweisen, zwei Verständnissystemen – die seiner Kunst ihre leuchtende Kraft verleiht.
Und so kehrt mein Blick, wieder und wieder, zurück zu jener bestimmten Schattierung von Violett. Nicht das satte Purpur europäischer Könige, nicht das grelle Magenta der Pop-Art – sondern jenes trockene, atmende, halb durchsichtige Violett, das sich aufträgt, wenn das Sonnenlicht durch Staub gebrochen wird und sich auf uralten Felsen ablegt.
Es ist eine Farbe der Erinnerung, aber nicht sentimental. Eine Farbe der Transzendenz, aber ohne Pathos.
Ich habe sie seither nie wieder ganz so gesehen wie damals auf Namatjiras Papier. Aber ich trage sie in mir – wie ein inneres Prisma, das mein Sehen immer noch färbt.
Vielleicht ist das das wahre Erbe der Kunst: nicht Ruhm oder Marktwert, nicht Zuschreibungen oder Schulbücher, sondern die stille, nachhaltige Veränderung eines fremden Blicks.
Ein Kind, das nicht lesen konnte, sah ein Gemälde auf einer Küchentür – und begann zu verstehen.
Nicht nur das Gesehene, sondern auch das Nicht-Gesagte. Die Linien zwischen den Kulturen. Die Tiefenzeit des Kontinents.
Und dass Schönheit – wirkliche, stille, unbestechliche Schönheit – manchmal aus den unwahrscheinlichsten Begegnungen hervorgeht.
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