Ron Hurley / Gurang Gurang/Mununjali people / Australia 1946–2002 / Albert Namatjira – Traditional Morph (series) 2002 / Pencil, ink and synthetic polymer paint / 61.5 x 43cm / Gift of Gadens Lawyers through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation 2013 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Ron Hurley/Licensed by Viscopy

Ron Hurley
Albert Namatjira – Traditional Morph (series) 2002 2002

Not Currently on Display

Ron Hurley’s portrait Albert Namatjira 2002 is one of four drawings from Hurley’s ‘Traditional Morph’ series, which sits within a wider examination of Aboriginal heroes. This series of deconstructed and reconstructed figures come from Hurley’s acknowledgment of a lack of Aboriginal heroes in his own school days.

The works in this series relate to the later stages of Namatjira’s life, after he was exempted from the Aborigines Act and granted citizenship, only to be denied the right to buy land. As a result, Namatjira and his family continued living in a shanty at Morris Soak, a creek bed near Alice Springs.

In contrast to the many heroic portraits of Namatjira painted and taken during the height of his career, while he was celebrated by white Australia, here Namatjira is pictured as a dishevelled, disillusioned figure. Hurley’s portrait is an antidote to the sanitary depictions of the man and his story, which stopped when he fell out of vogue with white society. Hurley’s works lets us contemplate the tragedy of Namatjira, and celebrate his triumph.

Ron Hurley was born in 1946 in the Brisbane suburb of Mt Gravatt. On his mother’s side he belonged to the Goreng Goreng people (whose ancestral lands lie from Gladstone to Bundaberg), and on his father’s side he was descended from the Mullunjali (Mundanjali) people from Beaudesert. He completed his art education at the Queensland College of Art from 1973 to 1975 and was the first Aboriginal person to graduate from the college.

Throughout his career, Hurley worked as a commercial artist, sign writer and screen printer, and later as a teacher, curator and arts manager. He was a role model to many young Indigenous artists, initiating and facilitating workshops to communities in Far North Queensland. A passionate advocate and campaigner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and culture, Hurley engaged with various boards and committees at state and national levels, giving advice on Indigenous and arts-related issues. He was a Trustee of the Queensland Art Gallery from 1996–97.

Commenting on his own artistic practice, he said:

At long last the world is responding in a more positive manner [to Aboriginal art], and traditional art is being looked at in its rightful context. It is the very fibre of our country’s imagery. The urban Aboriginal situation is the one which captures my imagination, for it is here that one experiences ‘limboism’, being neither Black or White… A world of such extreme contrast is the one to which I have learned to respond, survive, and attempt to create in.1

Endnotes:

Ron Hurley, on the artist’s own website, viewed September 2017.