In the shadow of modernity ONE morning in mid-April this year, senior desert lawman Spider Kalbybidi walked out of his house in the remote northwest community of Bidyadanga and vanished into the back country, precipitating a long and fruitless search.
With him, that cool day, Spider took a couple of blankets, and a backpack, which West Australian police teams soon came across, together with his clothes.
But that was the point where the mysteries began. His tracks in the red dirt leading inland simply stopped, as did those of two wild dogs that seemed to be accompanying him.
Spider was well-known as an artist. He was one of the stars of the Yulparija painting group, based at Broome's Short Street studio: master colourists, old men and women born in the Great Sandy Desert, who had lived in exile from their country for years.
But in the Aboriginal domain, Spider was prominent because of other, less obvious gifts: he was a Maparnjarra, a traditional doctor, a healer of great power. Sick men and women from far-off communities came constantly to seek his help. More than this, he stood at the apex of the desert's religious system: he was a man of high degree, with all the powers that exalted rank implied. It was widely believed that he could project himself across great distances, that he could make himself invisible and see deep into the future and the past.
Spider's disappearance, and the events it precipitated, offers an unusual glimpse into the hidden realm of traditional indigenous beliefs, beliefs that still survive, in the shadow of modernity, across much of the centre and the far north. Of course, the missing person posters that went up in Broome and the brief articles in the local paper dwelled on rather different aspects of the case: that Spider had wandered off twice before, that he was well over 80, and that he had failed to take the tablets on which he depended. But his family, and all the Yulparija people at Bidyadanga, knew better. Strange things began happening the moment he vanished. There were brief sightings of him, at dusk, in the community, and in the country. His classificatory sister, the famous painter Weaver Jack, was sure that he was still alive, and there was even something like proof: for now he was appearing routinely, if fleetingly, in Yulparija dreams. The search went on. It was a time of high emotions; it seemed impossible that he was gone.
Word soon spread through the bush. Other men of power came and searched, among them two of the most senior lawmen from the Martu region, Muuki and Wokka Taylor, who travelled north from their home at Parrngurr down back tracks to investigate.
Gradually it became plain to them that ancestor figures had lured Spider into the backlands and taken him away. But where to and for what reason? Was this death, or transition, and on what plane of being was Spider situated? The picture clarified, and precise details emerged, when three members of the Balbal family, all desert born, all strongly endowed with maparn, or magic, powers, had a shared dream in which Spider's circumstances were spelled out, and this account soon became the standard version of the story, at least in the indigenous domain.
At the painting bungalow in old Broome, sitting cross-legged, poised before an unfinished canvas, Lydia Balbal runs through what she and her two brothers saw in their sleep that April night: a group of ancestors, led by the prominent figure of Maruwateye, coming to take Spider, and it was they, she realised, who had transported him, far, all the way to a cave in country south of Wangkatjunka, a central Kimberley Aboriginal community, hundreds of kilometres distant.
On this journey Spider was accompanied by two dogs; no vast surprise, as the Yulparija homelands are very much dog country, roamed by totemic dingos. Once in that cave, he was painted up for law ceremonies, wrapped in cloth, looked after, and fed on a rich diet of wild cat. There was an obvious, pleasing pattern to this tale, for he was close to the landscape of Tjukurrmaradji, on the fringes of the Sandy Desert, where his mother had raised him.
If he was not fully dead, it was plain from this account that, as a living being, Spider was no more; he had passed over to the world of spirits.
"They have him now, that's right," Lydia muses. "But he can come back to us, flying down the law line in that snake cloud, travelling. He wasa strong lawman. I can still feel him. And I think about him, whenever I see those long, thin, snake clouds."
Here was a kind of answer, at least to the most obvious questions.
But for Emily Rohr, the gallerist who shaped and guided the careers of the Yulparija artists, the disappearance raised strong emotions, which remain with her to this day. Rohr had always grasped Spider's special standing in the desert world and had known how precious her time with the old Bidyadanga men and women was. So she paid particular attention when Spider took her aside one afternoon and urged her to look after the last surviving artists with great care. It was their final conversation. The mere fact it took place was unusual, for Spider was widely regarded as deaf and dumb. In fact, he simply chose not to speak to most people: he preferred gesture and non-verbal modes of communicating. Rohr suspects, from what old people have confided to her, that his silence was connected to deep, cataclysmic desert dramas from the past, involving the ceremony cycle at which Spider was initiated, during the darkest hours of World WarII. This willed restraint lent him an extraordinary presence, almost an aura. When Rohr first met him, in 2002, at the One-Mile camp in Broome, she felt at once he was both physically imposing and far beyond the physical domain.
"He was the boss in that world," she remembers. "That was clear, and he had a wild temper, but he was always dignified and honourable. There was strong humour in him, too. He had a sense of play about life, he knew the seriousness of life and that it had to be laughed at. Fierce and gentle. Proud and humble; a real conundrum. You couldn't help but be happy around him. Always, though, you understood that he was totally of the bush, that he was an extension of that landscape, that the landscape was his heart and essence." Under Rohr's tutelage, Spider's painting career, similar to that of the other Yulparija artists, took off. The leading members of the Bidyadanga school were keenly collected; they were prized not just for their vivid colour sense but for the fierce emotions collectors read in their work: work of exile, suffused with longing for their abandoned desert home. Spider, though, provided little information about the paintings he made, almost all of which concentrated on sand-dune country near the Canning Stock Route. It often seemed to Rohr that his art was about something else, and reflected his preoccupations and the way he thought. "Spider existed very much on the plane of ideas and metaphysics," she says. "And that's really what matters most for all the old desert people.
"The physical world is the least important world for them -- this surface world of theirs, that's so damaged, now, and decimated -- and that may well be one reason their society can endure so much hardship. What's central to them are the things you don't see, that belong to the further, higher world, and those are the subjects of their paintings as well.
"Decisions about right and wrong relate to this other dimension they can all sense, where the dead are alive and ancestors are present.
"And that's why dreams are so important for Yulparija people; they work as a connecting gate into the other realm."
Perhaps, given these insights into the life- ways of the desert, Rohr and her team at Short Street should have been waiting for what came next. But it was a busy time in Broome, there were exhibitions looming, and the usual flux of small-town disasters and brief joys filled their days. A month passed, and more.
Rohr's husband, Michael Hutchinson, took visiting Melbourne gallerist William Mora on a weekend fishing trip out to the Buccaneer Archipelago. It was late afternoon when they drove back into town. Hutchinson was just beginning to reverse his boat-trailer towards the studio garage, when Mora called out: "Stop," he cried. "There's a painting in the driveway."
There on the ground was a canvas with two large rips slashed through it. It was a piece by Spider Kalbybidi, a rendition of sandhills and desert springs, ochre red, with white dotting and pale glimpses of elusive blue. The day before, Short Street studio manager Abi Temby had been showing clients a selection of Spider's work. Those paintings had been left unrolled and spread out on the floor when she locked up but the painting out in the driveway was one she had held back, unshown, buried in the middle of a pile in a back corner. How could it have got there? And what was the meaning of the rips across it? They could only have been made by dogs: you could see the surrounding scratch-marks and paw-prints on the surface. They were plain as day.
Rohr now felt increasingly on edge. To her it seemed obvious Spider, the man, or some aspect of his being, had come to Broome that weekend and into the studio and pulled out the painting. She asked Weaver Jack, her senior artist. "Oh, yes," Weaver said in reply, very casually. "That's just Spider telling us where he's gone."
So were the slash-marks really some kind of directional message? Had the dreams pinpointing his whereabouts been accurate? The rips on the canvas ran right across Spider's trademark sand-dunes: his traditional country, Minymurrka, south of Wangkatjunka. "I've never had a sign as clear as that from the other world," Rohr says. "It's hard, when those kinds of things take place around you, to know what's real, what's not, where it all begins and ends."
In private, she agonised about what had happened to Spider and to the damaged painting, which she put away in a corner of the studio and tried to thrust from her thoughts. But the artists and their families at Bidyadanga had other preoccupations: for in the desert, the links of event and consequence take second place to issues of agency. It was not so much what had befallen Spider that concerned them but who was responsible for taking him away and why.
There were several theories, mutually exclusive yet oddly supportive of each other, in active development. They remain current, with fresh twists and subtleties being braided into the master narrative almost every day. The best-known young artist at Bidyadanga, Daniel Walbidi, is circumspect: "We don't know," he says. "There are many explanations. Some people say it was because of a painting he did, some people say it was because of his power, the maparn."
Whatever the form of words one chose, magic and power were at the heart of things: some infraction had occurred, or the balance of power had been disturbed, and a man's disappearance was the result. Simply put, for the Yulparija, Spider did not wander off into the bush by chance or lose himself through the confusions of age. Rather, he was caught or claimed.
It was just as the Martu lawmen, the first searchers on the scene, had said: ancestral figures of awesome potency had come for Spider, exactly as they had twice before, only this time they were successful. They came for his magic power, which they envied and yearned for, but they were able to steal him away only because his capacities had waned. Perhaps a duel was fought out between Spider and his adversaries; perhaps he had gone out to meet them, and he knew the time had come. A phase of transformation then had begun for him, as a man of high degree, moving from the condition of human life on to another plane, where he would know his ancestors and see their faces, and eventually become one with them.
And so, for almost six months, things stood. No funeral was held for the vanished man. Life at Bidyadanga fell back into its rhythms. Rohr remembered the long bush trip she had made two years earlier with Spider and the artists into the Sandy Desert as far as the Percival Lakes, the Yulparija's long-abandoned home.
She watched, repeatedly, the documentary film of the journey, in which Spider figures as a constant, courtly background presence. She went on new travels, with her family, overseas. Then, one day back at the studio in Broome, without any preliminaries, Weaver Jack turned to her and said in simple fashion: "You know, he's gone, now, that old man."
It was over. Spider was dead. There was no doubt. Rohr took this in, and in her thoughts she too began to let him go, though nothing quite seemed to make sense or fit.
But almost as soon as she had started edging towards this acceptance, a break came in dramatic style. Photographer Leon Mead, a Broome veteran, was taking shots for Review of the damaged Spider painting, in the still, dark viewing room of the studio, with the afternoon sunlight, filtered by palm-fronds, pouring in. Mead poised the canvas, for an instant, against the window shutters. Through his viewfinder, he saw a shadow pattern.
"Did you know there's something underneath that painting," he called out. "Something else painted there?" Rohr flashed into life. Another painting! At last she understood, or at a minimum she had a pathway to grasping the shape of events. She held up the ripped canvas. She studied it: it was true. There, painted over, she began to make out symbols: circles, crosses, faint hints of radiating lines.
That same day, the senior man among the Yulparija painters, Donald Moko, came in to Short Street Gallery and sat down for a conversation with Rohr. Previously Moko, a figure of exceptional grace and elegance, had shied away from talking in much depth about Spider and his whereabouts: "Danger," he would say, "that man can fly, and see us," and then he would fall quiet. The two of them had always been close. Moko was second only to Spider in rank and in magic power. He had his own understanding of what had happened, an understanding bound up with ceremonial life.
"There's another painting under that painting," Rohr said to him, almost accusingly.
"Yes," Moko said, simply, as if that much had always been obvious.
"A law painting? And that's why they came to get him? Because of what he painted there?"
Moko, looking exceptionally saturnine, gave what might have been a half-nod, which in desert terms is a very telling gesture of assent. "That old man was boss," he then said, gravely. "Boss for all that country in that painting. And he's in that country now, he painted it. He's walking around; he's with the ancestors."
After this discussion, Rohr felt the weight of her emotions start to lift, as if the whole cycle of life and death in desert country had been given new, clear emphasis in her mind. There was a logic to the disappearance now. Spider had known the way to cross the threshold. It may have been that he had deliberately painted his own way into another realm and that realm's emissaries had come to find him, and all this had happened in plain sight of the outside world and no one had been any the wiser about the deep events taking place. "I look back on Spider today and I see his going in terms of the power and the strength of desert life," she says.
"Increasingly it seems to me that this is the area of proper understanding of indigenous art. With desert art of this kind we're dealing very much with the effects of high law, secret things. All we outsiders can see is distant traces, the surface aspects of a religion. Painting is a part of that process. Singing while painting is a part of it, too. If an artist sits and really paints something, they're calling it across a bridge into our world. And that's the power of the art.
"It's much stronger than some decoration you just put on your wall. And that energy, that vibration is what's sensed by people who respond to that work."
Like other art lovers who become closely involved with old desert artists and find their lives entwined with the tradition, Rohr feels the intimations and intuitions brought to her are far deeper than the gleaming works that pass through her hands. The works flow by; the things she senses stay. She has come to believe that the disappearances of old northwest desert Aborigines, which are relatively common events, can best be understood as elevations.
Thus Spider Kalbybidi was already a man of power, unquiet precisely because of the quest-stage looming in his life.
He was waiting for ancestors to come and take him to the depths of the inland. He was, in fact, she believes, already the living equivalent of the most-feared figure in desert belief systems, the nocturnal "featherfoot", or Kadaitcha-man, a being who travels invisibly with emu-feather sandals on his feet. Kadaitcha-men are felt to be constant presences in the remote desert, moving through, wandering the landscape, heading for their appointed country. Old people in remote communities often see them, and have dealings with them. They are beings in whom maparn power is especially concentrated.
What, then, could be more natural than an evolution into that realm, for a dying man who must find a new place in the order of the world and who must, in a last journey of ordeal, effect a return to his own far-distant landscape?
Rohr holds the slashed painting before her and looks down at its surface, and angles it against the light to catch the hidden marks. There they are, beneath the white dottings and the reddish, ochrey coat. Her eyes can just make out a roundel, with crosses, and lines flooding out: the signs of ceremony, signs beyond easy or simple reading. How cryptic they look. How beautiful in their concealment.
In truth, the idea of hiding symbols beneath the surface lies close to the heart of the desert painting tradition, founded as it is on secret, sacred beliefs, on male initiation rituals, on revelations and abrupt knowledge shifts. One of the earliest desert masterpieces, Secret Sandhills, painted in 1972 by Tim Payunka Tjapangati and exhibited in the key Papunya Tula retrospective of 2000, relies on precisely this effect and takes its title from the green ridges concealed beneath its mauvish surface coat. Similar coded, hidden images lurk beneath a number of much-prized desert works, and always they refer to the higher reaches of desert religion: to death, transformation and the shimmer of creation stories reaching into the realm of today's life.
"These are deep waters," says Rohr. She returns the canvas gently to its resting place. "Paintings like this serve as windows through which we can see into a further dimension. The physical tear in this painting was like a metaphysical sign.
"You look through and you see, your eye sees further: you look into the heart of life."
Nicolas Rothwell is The Australian's northern Australia correspondent.
