Bloodwood Totem
Totems are beguiling and mysterious, affording the viewer a glimpse into deep spiritual traditions. A particular magic occurs when aesthetics and meaning are complimentary, when the essence of the story is captured in the art. This happens with Bloodwood Totems – the dancing shimmer of the pole announcing its iconic status. The trees imbue landscapes with totemic significance, placing the sacred into the everyday. Painting the Bloodwood has become a meditation for Ian on ancestors and relationship to country. Waldron’s Bloodwood Totems appear in various contexts, as the sole subject of a painting, or making a cameo in the background of a landscape. They come alive and their presence can be felt as if they are about to take leave of their place on the canvas and enter our dimension. The appearance of the Bloodwood Totems, turning up anywhere, anytime, parallels the essence of Aboriginal spirituality – it is non-site or time specific, it does not change in relation to how far from country someone lives or how long it has been since detailed ceremony was known and practiced. The absence of stylistic references has allowed Ian complete freedom of interpretation. While bearing no definable relation to traditional artistic styles from Kurtjar country, the potency of the symbol has been translated perfectly and powerfully.

Holiday Nation
The question of identity as it relates to place for Indigenous people is complicated when their place is a tourist mecca. People “know” Australia by the way it is represented in the news and tourist media, and in a sense this becomes Australia because it is what a large number of people believe it to be. The way Indigenous people know their country, in an intimate familial way, is invisible to most people. Ian’s landscapes are animated with an Indigenous presence and history. In tourist Australia, in contrast to Indigenous Australia, the only Indigenous presence illustrated is that of settlements in remote areas producing art and artefacts and living in a manner that bears the visible marks of “ancient culture”.

In Holiday Nation names of language groups are visible markers of the Indigenous presence that is so often overlooked, especially in urban areas. Incorporating Indigenous language group names into paintings is something Ian has been doing since his days at university studying a fine art degree in the 1990’s. He first employed this feature in response to a conversation he had with a stranger. Ian recalls, “I remember one day this redneck was saying to me that Aborigines don’t really have any language left any more, they just make it up, and he almost had me convinced. Then I saw David Horton’s map and this confirmed to me that Aborigines do still have language. I started putting anguage group names in my paintings way back then when I saw that map at university, it was important to me. If people have a language, they’re solid – language exists – it’s a tangible part of culture. I love the aesthetics of incorporating text as well, and I get a great deal of pleasure out of doing lettering, part of my former trade, as a ticket-writer and sign-writer”2.

An interest in vintage travel and movie posters was rekindled when Ian spent time researching at the National Film and Sound Archives in 2007, prompting a strong swing back to a nostalgic painterly style that he has worked with since he was a teenager. The incorporation of lettering is an important element of this style, assisting in capturing a sense of history and indicating places and meanings. By placing his clan’s Bloodwood Totem into the picture and uperimposing names of Indigenous language groups, Ian is illustrating that excluding the Indigenous from the Australian is impossible, and that admission of its existence enriches all landscapes.

Camp Kitchen
This camp is a working camp, used when mustering cattle at Maravale, an outstation a few kilometres from Delta Downs Station. A generation earlier, Maravale was a station in its own right. The building in the background was originally a kitchen where Ian’s mother cooked, and vegetables grew in surrounding gardens. Until recently two large watertanks stood beside the old cookhouse but had to be demolished because they had become dangerous. On previous trips Ian drew these tanks and they became the subject of a set of limited edition prints. It is with a hint of sadness that Ian tells of the demolition of the tanks, they had been there since before he was born. However, it is not because of a downturn in business that things at Maravale were scaled back and these facilities became derelict, rather the growth of business and the centralisation of operations at Delta. Today the men cook for themselves at this camp, beef, snake, goanna and sometimes longneck turtles from the nearby lagoon (also inhabited by a crocodile), all chargrilled on the open fire. The pigs were brought in to “fatten up” but have become pets. It’s not just a work camp, but a place to go to live, to get away from town (Normanton).

The Brahman
The success of the Morr Morr Pastoral Company is a great source of pride to Kurtjar people, built on the determination of the traditional landowners to stay on their land and own their own company at the same time. Delta Downs station is one of the most successful cattle properties in Australia, running a number of different breeds of beef cattle on 400,000 hectares. Just as wealthy English landowners had portraits painted of their best bulls and cows, Ian has painted a magnificent Brahman bull from Delta.

No Through Road / Kangaroos Next 1km
The placement of this double road sign in thick scrub, and the nonsensical pairing of the signs, captures the irony of having to instruct people on what is ahead and how to travel. There is a clear regression in terms of relationship to the land in a country where Indigenous Australians have an intimate knowledge of the land, but now it is peppered with road signs every couple of miles. Despite the dark humour Ian sees in these signs, he enjoys their visual impact on the landscape, and has incorporated road signs into his work for over a decade. They have become an extension of the placement of text into paintings, and are another device for telling stories, veiled messages that give the viewer something to think about.

1. Conversation with author, November 2007.
2. ibid.Katrina Chapman 2008