Beyond the Yellow Brick Road
Beyond the Yellow Brick Road: Appearances and Memories from over the Great Divide
Michele Helmrich
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An apparition presents itself in the vast grassy plains of Central Western Queensland. The scene is mesmerising. An especially wide panorama is shared equally by blue sky and ochre-tinged earth, with an unworldly being at right. We may recognise the legendary figure of Pope Alice, facing us, clad in her white Papal regalia, arms raised in greeting. Pope Alice, the alter ego of artist Luke Roberts, has been caught on camera here by photographer John Elliott. Step closer and note that the face bears a curiously sci-fi, extraterrestrial aspect.
Roberts has titled this photograph Pope Alice (Lake Galilee) (2009), linking it to the Sea of Galilee with its biblical connotations and this region’s Galilee Basin with its proposed coal mines, mines opposed by environmentalists and the First Peoples of this Country. At once we are placed in a maelstrom of contested landscapes, the spectacle of Catholicism, a persona of heroic proportion wittily adopted, aspects of popular sci-fi culture, and truths exposed as falsehoods and vice versa.
In an article on Roberts of 1989, Urszula Szulakowska wrote, ‘his iconography veers between cosmic sublimity and Luna Park, secured to the constant bulwark of the Papacy.’1 According to legend, Pope Alice – ‘The World’s Greatest Living Curiosity’ – hails from the Doomed Planet Metalluna before falling to Earth at Uluru, near present-day Alice Springs. Her Divine Holiness was ordained as the Pontiff of Mu (a lost civilisation in the Pacific known as Lemuria) and is represented by The Pope Alice Xorporation. ‘Alice Springs into Wonderland,’ a promo card for Pope Alice asserts. Her Papal robes are proclamations of splendour, worthy of appearances at Dark Mofo or the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, as is her conveyance, the Papal Odong-Odong, a ‘chariot of the gods,’ modelled after the Vatican’s Popemobile.
‘Alice’ origin stories link the artist to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequels. Roberts became aware of the American holy man and ‘vision-seeker’ John Fire Lame Deer and his rodeo ‘stage’ name Alice Jitterbug – the name Roberts felt was being passed on to him for his persona in the early 1970s.2 Alice Jitterbug’s first major appearance was in 1974 on a Melbourne tram en route to the National Gallery of Victoria, and in the latter part of the 1970s featured on camera in often scantily clad performative poses. Here, the femme fatale is in her element. In comparison, the performance persona of Pope Alice was revealed in full Papal regalia as Guest of Honour at Brisbane’s 1979 Swish Ball, this Pontiff rebutting the repressive moral values espoused by the Catholic Church, and those of the conservative Queensland government of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, especially their repression of homosexuality. ‘Through Pope Alice,’ Daniel Mudie Cunningham noted, ‘Roberts critiques Catholicism by perversely using its own language of spectacle and ritual.’3 Roberts himself acknowledged, from his ‘sense of isolation, not belonging,’ that ‘dressing up as the enemy was a way of expressing a love/hate relationship.’4 Laini Burton has linked Pope Alice to ‘masking,’ masquerade, and carnival as articulated in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, and has argued that ‘she subverts and liberates not just the traditions of the church, but of gender, identity, and the origin story itself.’5
Of key importance to Roberts is the Outback origin story of Alpha – Alpha as symbol of the first and foremost, and Alpha the artist’s birthplace in Central Western Queensland. On the Tropic of Capricorn and some 500 kilometres west of Rockhampton, Alpha was established between 1883 and 1885 as a town to service the railway line and mail delivery. From 1958, Roberts attended Alpha’s St Joseph’s Convent School, run by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Sacred Heart, the order founded by Mary MacKillop. Later, in 1994, at the time of the approaching beatification of Mary MacKillop, Roberts painted My Childhood Vision of Mother Mary MacKillop Galloping Past the Alpha Convent Bringing More Joeys to Central Western Queensland. In his painting, Mary MacKillop is depicted riding side-saddle on a horse galloping across the sky, her arms full of kangaroo joeys (‘Joeys’ also being an affectionate term for the Sisters, the Josephites), the Alpha convent school on the horizon. Australia’s first saint, acknowledged for her good work for outcasts and the poor – at times in conflict with the Catholic hierarchy – is here imbued with the nocturnal fantasy of a painting by Marc Chagall, the sincerity of the Mexican devotional retablos embraced by Frida Kahlo, and a certain gentleness. Pope John Paul II viewed the painting in 1995 when it was exhibited in Sydney in Mary MacKillop: A Tribute, prior to Mother Mary MacKillop being canonised in 2010.6
In a childhood framed by the constraints of being ‘out West’ in a small country town, life had its limitations. Roberts has recalled a sense of isolation and difference while growing up, and finding wonder in local church ceremonies, cemeteries resembling sculpture gardens (Pope Alice was photographed in the Alpha cemetery in 1992), the Alpha library, movies at the local picture theatre, and dances and balls, some in fancy dress.7 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Roberts and his young siblings played dress-up, often ‘Cowboys and Indians’ as children did at the time, Roberts ‘always an Indian,’ underlying his sense of difference.8 Their dress-ups are recorded in photographs now held by the State Library of Queensland. As Julie Ewington has observed, these images are indicative of how ‘Roberts moves between past and present in his work: his treasures are both sources and talismans.’9 As a young child who identified in his imagination with the First Peoples of North America, he constructed cone-shaped tepees, imagining a nomadic life on the Great Plains, only comprehending in years to come the blood and pain of colonial conquest.10 In a curious twist, Roberts would also later learn of a connection between Alpha and Pocahontas (Matoaka) of the Powhatans, in what is now known as the state of Virginia.11
In 1982, by then having studied art in both Sydney and Brisbane, Roberts encountered the watercolour Breakfast, Alpha (1884), by English artist Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe, at the Queensland Art Gallery. This was a revelatory moment for Roberts, an unexpected cultural connection with his hometown of Alpha.12 Neville-Rolfe had visited family at Alpha Pastoral Station between 1883 and 1884, the station itself established in 1863. She was an artist with credentials, studying in Paris at the L’Ecole Nationale de Dessin de Jeunes Filles from 1874 to 1877, and previously at the Slade in London. Roberts has painted several large oil paintings that take as their starting point Neville-Rolfe’s watercolours of settler life on Alpha Station and nearby properties. Roberts’s versions of Breakfast, Alpha of the early 2000s, for instance, after Neville-Rolfe’s image, shows how elements of a genteel English existence could be replicated in isolated outback homesteads, including fine tableware and the presence of domestic cats and dogs, though weapons hanging on the wall in Neville-Rolfe’s work add a cautionary note about frontier violence.13
Roberts has also drawn a parallel between his painting after Neville-Rolfe’s Our Camp, Rainmore (1884), where tea and ‘johnny cakes’ are being prepared at this bush camp, and his painting Granddad Fred at Turkey Creek, Springsure (2020–2024) after a photograph of his grandfather seated near his Model T Ford at a campsite at that location in about 1930.14 The latter is highly coloured, the tent yellow against an almost Fauvist background of red and mauve trees. A similar transition occurs in Roberts’s Alpha Painting (Brumby Jack’s Camp, Rainmore) (2002–2006) after Neville-Rolfe’s Brumby Jack’s Camp, Rainmore (1884). Roberts likewise makes connections between his experience of outback life and images by other artists. For instance, Roberts has made self-portraits after Sidney Nolan’s painting Steve Hart Dressed as a Girl 1947. Nolan, with some humour and in a semi-naïve style, posed this member of the Kelly gang dressed in a floral cotton dress while riding a horse side-saddle to avoid detection and bask in the freedom of the great outdoors. In painting Uncle Tom Painting (Bailed Up) (2000) and Uncle Tom Painting (Shearing the Rams) (2000), Roberts took as his starting point Tom Roberts’s paintings Bailed Up (1895/1927) and Shearing the Rams (1890). He has described his works as semi-cubist after Pablo Picasso, with biomorphic elements related to such Surrealist artists as Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy.15 For Australian artists mindful of the tyranny of distance, modern art was elsewhere. The “Uncle Tom” in these titles refers to Tom Roberts.
As Roberts has observed, he had not known of Neville-Rolfe when he was growing up in Alpha, or indeed that Neville-Rolfe’s earlier relative John Rolfe had married Pocahontas (Matoaka) in Virginia in 1614.16 Nor did he know about the First Nations people of this region – local history, he said, had been ‘scrubbed clean.’17 A photographic work, The Spearing (2002) (camera John Elliott, Kevyn Chase), takes a more direct approach to the subject of frontier violence. A diptych, Roberts is photographed in the left-hand panel standing in the grass by a barbed-wire fence on his cousin’s property outside of Alpha, his back arched back as if fatally speared or suffering ‘some sort of psychic wound.’18 In the right-hand panel, Aboriginal artist Richard Bell is photographed in a white Brisbane studio in contemporary dress, wearing black shirt, trousers and shoes, his hand aloft about to release the spear (not an Aboriginal spear).19 Roberts holds a book his father had owned on tyrants – Nigel Cawthorne’s book Tyrants: History’s 100 Most Evil Despots & Dictators, with images of Hitler and Stalin on the cover. In this work, Roberts has cast himself as country parson the Reverend Dingo Howels, whose ancestors survived frontier violence. The artist recalls the killing in 1861 of the settler family of Horatio Spencer Wills at Cullin-la-ringo Station on the Nogoa River, between Springsure and Emerald. In retaliation to the nearby abduction of two Gayiri boys by men not associated with the Wills family, some ‘nineteen members of the Wills party’ were killed.20 Following the Cullin-la-ringo killings, settlers in the district and Native Police troopers sought vengeance and ‘dispersed’ or killed an estimated 400 Aboriginal people over a wide area. As David Marr has written, ‘The Yiman, Wadjigu, Gayiri and Darumbal peoples were nearly wiped out.’21 Roberts has cousins who are descendants of the surviving Wills, namely of survivor Tom Wills’s brother Cedric. 22 As Roberts has reflected, ‘So much trauma, so much history that hasn’t been properly dealt with.’23
With contrasting levity, Roberts has produced photographic works at Alpha of himself with his parents, My West (Father and Son) (2009)and My West (Mother and Son), (2009) (camera John Elliott). In the first, they are wearing mock cowboy gear – Roberts, with the black hat, holds a feather and his father, with the white hat, a toy gun. In the second, with his mother, each are wrapped in boldly patterned blankets, wear bright purple and red wigs with horns and sunglasses, and hold huge salad servers as if tribal objects. Is this a parody of playing ‘cowboys and Indians,’ enacted with warmth and good humour? Bearing in mind that his mother was a ‘dyed-in-the-wool Catholic,’ his elderly parents have played along with grace, perhaps understanding something of their son’s intention of dramatising their complex relationships.24 Are the horns a reminder of Catholicism’s distinction between good and evil – can it even be regarded as a dig at that institution’s often ambivalent relationship with those considered ‘the natives,’ in need of conversion to Christianity? In an alternative interpretation, Roberts draws attention to the buffalo-horn headdresses, a mark of stature that were worn with dignity and spiritual sincerity according to the cultural traditions of the Plains tribes of North America.25 We might here look at the photograph My West (Visionary) (2009) (camera John Elliott), where a dead magpie tenderly adorns Roberts’s head like a headdress, and combines with minimal costume details including his grandmother’s necklace. These, his upright bearing, and hair in braids, suggest a tribal elder, and are linked by the artist to aspects of the Celtic side of his heritage.26 The unmasked self-portrait imparts a quiet sense of the spiritual and the melancholic – a performative framing that opens space for questions and reflection. Humour is momentarily eschewed.
In her essay on Roberts, Szulakowska spoke of his ‘usurpation’ as a strategy whereby existing imagery could be manipulated, ‘turning its own voice against itself.’27 Images, be they from art history or popular culture, could be reworked to find a voice for the gay community, make fun of patriarchy, or undo the ritual solemnity of Catholicism. One such work is Australian Story (Australian Gothic) (2009) (camera Kevyn Chase), after Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic of 1930. Instead of the strait-laced rural couple, the man at right holding a pitchfork, here Roberts places Richard Bell at left holding a rod somewhat reminiscent of a spear and wearing a large gold-encased pendant, with Roberts at right in straggly blonde wig, green-trimmed sunglasses, a colourful ‘mumu’ shift dress, and thongs. The figures hint at both the sculptural works of Duane Hanson and the epic tale of Eliza Fraser, who was shipwrecked off K’gari (Fraser Island) in 1836. Their stony faces add to the satire. In a similar spirit, Roberts presents himself as a cross-dressing rural barmaid in At the Bar of the Pub with No Beer (2009) (camera John Elliott) wearing a pink wig and a brazen smile, replicating Édouard Manet’s painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Roberts’s title draws on the Slim Dusty song, A Pub with No Beer; on close examination, Slim Dusty’s official photographer – John Elliott – can be seen reflected in the glass behind the bar.28
More confronting is Roberts’s photographic work, Three Figures at the Bases of Crucifixions: Triptych (2009) (camera Kevyn Chase), which shatters any decorous assumptions held about this most solemn event in the Catholic calendar, given the addition of glitz and sparkle. Two of the figures (including Tobin Saunders, the semi-Krishna-like Christ figure at centre – and Jandy Rainbow on the left) and their attendants (Jodie Taylor and an anonymous gay Maori person) are from the LGBTIQA+ community and do not hold back on gender-bending glamour. Richard Bell is the crucified figure at right, and he is attended by Aboriginal artist Elisa Jane Carmichael.29
Roberts usurps many figures from history and art history, most often assuming their identities himself. Adolf Hitler’s identity is simply achieved with a black paintbrush beneath the nose, a severe sweep of hair, and glaring eyes, artist Andy Warhol with a white bristled brush and shock of pink wig. And then there are the photographs of a grittier nature, Roberts infiltrating Francisco de Goya’s Saturn (1820–23) with Saturn (2013), Caravaggio’s Head of the Medusa (c.1597), retitled simply Medusa (2013), and Diego Velázquez’s Mars Resting (c.1638), this retitled Mars Rusting (2018), the largely unrobed seated figure surrounded by missiles and flags.
Over the decades, Roberts has inhabited images of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, Greek singer Nana Mouskouri, bushranger Ned Kelly, Yoko Ono, and others. Likewise, many photo opportunities have appeared for Pope Alice, Her Divine Holiness being snapped alongside such figures as the author of The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp, and artists Gilbert and George, Pierre et Gilles, and Tracey Moffatt. These images are collectively known as Popepeople.
Pope Alice did not only ‘collect’ people. Her collections, under the title of the Wunderkammer, became well known in the 1990s, and were loosely based on those European private collections of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. For Pope Alice, wonder and humour were the underlying principles of these ‘Cabinets of Curiosities,’ as a vast assortment of human-made and natural objects from near and far, from ancient times to today, from art and science, folk or historic artefacts, objects true or fake, serious or kitsch, mementos of the famous, and so on, were assembled in extraordinary displays.30 The Wunderkammer was a thing of splendour, but also an opportunity for Roberts to provoke and challenge certainties. In a sense, this is Pope Alice – ‘The World’s Greatest Living Curiosity.’
In recent works, Pope Alice has been given free rein to take the form of an action superhero. In The Amazing Pope Alice (2021), she plunges down alongside a reptilian monster on a quest to stop the ‘Half-Man…Half-Reptile… THE LIZARD,’ who threatens to take over the world, the format reminiscent of a Spiderman comic-book cover. The other, Pope Alice (Love Wins) (2022), goes Medieval. Pope Alice sits astride a steed with wings, holding a ‘flaming heart’ that, Roberts explains, ‘emits the Light of Love and is piercing the Underworld, the domain of Satan and his Hordes.’31 The horse is frozen mid-gallop, much as the horse in the Mary MacKillop painting, though the Papal intervention is more direct in this instance. Pope Alice and her light force has infiltrated a photographic reproduction of an Eastern Orthodox icon, taking the place of the Archangel Michael in battle with the Devil in the chasm below. Glitter adds to the magic of both works.
In comparison, when viewed in performative ‘appearances’ before a live audience or in photographs of such events, Pope Alice has primarily presented herself with ethereal aloofness. Her Papal attire, always splendid, has evolved over the years. She may arrive in a stretch limousine, be accompanied by costumed Papal Priestesses and music, and silently address her audience by presence, gesture, and gift-giving. Occasionally, she has been depicted in images that may or may not be a photographic manipulation. In Pope Alice (Milk Hill, Alton Barnes) (2003) (camera for crop circle/Milk Hill, image: Lucy Pringle) from the Appearances series, Pope Alice flies above a green field marked by a crop circle whose hexagonal shape is similar to the Raëlian symbol, while in a further field is the Alton Barnes White Horse, one of the great white chalk figures cut into English hillsides, this originally cut in 1812.32 A Pope Alice performance at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art in 2006, titled You Are Not Alone, was termed a Raëlian performance by critics, a claim the artist argues was ill-informed given that Pope Alice is extraterrestrial and Raëlians are human.33 Roberts had joined the Raëlian movement in 2001, finding sympathy with its beliefs linking human beings with extraterrestrials. His public sculpture, UFO (Unclassified Flowering Organism) 2003, in Brisbane’s West End, for instance, took the form of a UFO with lights and mist enlivening the form. Roberts officially parted company with the Raëlian movement in 2018.34 Furthermore, Roberts is keen to assert that Erich von Däniken’s book Chariots of the Gods? in the early 1970s was a major influence, and that ‘Pope Alice has been extraterrestrial from the get-go – she’s always been extraterrestrial.’35
Could we expect anything less? Pope Alice, as a persona, is a super-sized blending of the rituals of Catholicism and the excesses of the carnivalesque, while stirring in mythic stories from across the world of our ancient past. Her Divine Holiness may appear a regal alien creature offering blessings, be photographed as Pope Alice as Madonna with Child (1993) (camera David Sandison), on occasion strike a more risqué pose, and even be sighted at Roberts’s hometown of Alpha. Roberts has described her as “a poetic benign figure”36 and “a patron saint.”37 Wit, parody and transgression underscore these endeavours, with occasional intrusions of deep sincerity. Her Papal messages are clear: ‘Pope Alice Loves You To Life!,’ ‘History is Fable Agreed Upon,’ and ‘The Voyage Within the Wonderful Continues…’
Michele Helmrich was formerly Associate Director (Curatorial) at The University of Queensland Art Museum. Her research, writing and curatorial projects have focussed on contemporary Australian art and art of the 1940s.
Notes:
- Urszula Szulakowska, ‘Luke Roberts,’ Eyeline 10 (December 1989): 17.
- Daniel Mudie Cunningham, ‘Camping Out at the Arse End of the Universe,’ in Luke Roberts: AlphaStation/Alphaville (exhibition catalogue), (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2011), 26; Luke Roberts, text message to the author, 15 April 2024.
- Mudie Cunningham, 31.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 14 November 2009.
- Laini Burton, ‘Pope Alice – 40 Years,’ Griffith University Art Museum, published online June 2021, https://www.griffith.edu.au/art-museum/research/pope-alice
- When Roberts’s painting of Mary MacKillop was exhibited in Alpha at the ‘Jane Neville Rolfe’ Gallery, the accompanying brochure proclaimed ‘Alpha’s Own,’ as ‘A tribute to Luke Roberts and other invited artists,’ c.1999.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 28 March 2024.
- ‘I was always an Indian and my brother was always a cowboy … of course, mine was a hopeless battle, in the movies the Indians never won.’ Roberts, conversation with the author, 19 July 2003.
- Photographs from the State Library’s Luke Roberts Archive were included in the Meet the Artists exhibition. Julie Ewington, ‘Encounters with Artists: The James C. Sourris AM Collection of Artist Interviews,’ in Meet the Artists: The James C. Sourris AM Collection of Artist Interviews (exhibition catalogue), (Brisbane: State Library of Queensland, 2023), 53.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 28 March 2024.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 8 July 2023.
- ‘Harriet Jane was such a wonder for me.’ Roberts, conversation with the author, 12 April 2024.
- Susan Herbert, ‘”HJ Sketches the Scene”: Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe in Queensland,’ in Brought to Light: Australian Art 1850–1965, From the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, Eds Lynne Seear & Julie Ewington (South Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 1998), 46–51, 301–302.
- Neville-Rolfe’s notation lower left of watercolour. Herbert, 50; Roberts, conversation with the author 28 March 2024.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 28 March 2024.
- ‘Artist’s Perspective: Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe’ (panel discussion), Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow, Luke Roberts, and Vernon Ah Kee for Plenty (exhibition), Queensland Art Gallery, 8 July 2023. Both John Rolfe and Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe were born in England at Heacham, Norfolk.
- Roberts, ‘Artist’s Perspective: Harriet Jane Neville-Rolfe.’
- ‘Luke Roberts: Growing Up in Alpha, Queensland,’ QAGOMA Blog, posted 26 July 2023, https://blog.qagoma.qld.gov.au/luke-roberts-growing-up-in-queensland/
- Richard Bell is not from the Alpha region. Born in Charleville, he is of the Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman, and Gurang Gurang communities.
- Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 2008), 22–25, 66, 75–76; See also ‘Cullin la Ringo,’ Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788–1930, The Centre for 21st Century Humanities, The University of Newcastle, Australia, accessed 11 May 2024, https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/detail.php?r=648
- David Marr, Killing for Country: A Family Story (Collingwood, Victoria: Black Inc., 2023), 249–251.
- Roberts, email to the author, 12 May 2024.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 21 May 2020.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 14 July 2020.
- Roberts, conversations with the author 14 July 2010, 8 April 2024; An example of a Horned Headdress ca. 1700–50 from the Eastern Plains or Western Great Lakes, on loan from the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, to The Met (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), New York, can be viewed here: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/738369
- The artist refers here to the 1995 Mel Gibson film Braveheart. Roberts, conversation with the author, 8 May 2024.
- Szulakowska, 19.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 8 April 2024.
- Mudie Cunningham, 39; Roberts, conversation with the author, 8 April 2024.
- Roberts’s Wunderkammern were exhibited at the State Library of Queensland (1990); Art Gallery of New South Wales (Australian Perspecta, 1991); Queensland Art Gallery (Gallery 14, 1994; 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial 1996); MoMA P.S.1 Studio, New York, USA (1997); and British School of Rome, Italy (2012).
- Roberts, text to the author, 28 March 2024.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 8 April 2024.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 12 April 2024; Mudie Cunningham notes that ‘Raëlians believe in a race of extraterrestrials, the Elohim – those who came from the sky. (In Hebrew, Elohim is a name for God.) The prophet Raël founded the religion in 1973 after receiving messages from the Elohim leader, Yahweh (another Hebrew name for God.)’ Mudie Cunningham discusses the IMA performance and perceptions about Raëlian beliefs. See Mudie Cunningham, 34-35.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 8 April 2024.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 28 March 2024.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 9 May 2021.
- Roberts, conversation with the author, 4 June 2021.
© Rockhampton Museum of Art 2024
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Authors: Michele Helmrich
Exhibition dates: 27 July – 3 November 2024