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won the Archibald Prize that year for his portrait of Namatjira. Namatjira was taken sailing, to Taronga Park Zoo,
where Vic Hall noted the animals reacted to the presence of ‘a full-blooded native... a descendant of the hunters
of the primeval jungle’, to dinners, parties and morning tea with the Olympic athletes. Loaded up with gifts, useful
and not so useful, the party drove back to the Territory in the new Dodge truck. Artist Charles Blackman who met
him during this visit commented that Namatjira had the saddest eyes he had ever seen in a man.
Controversy erupted at about this time over Namatjira’s lack of status as a tax-paying non-citizen. Frank Clune
wrote an article for Truth ‘From Hero to Untouchable’ pointing out the disparity between Namatjira’s Sydney
and Alice Springs experiences. In April 1957 Namatjira visited Perth and shortly after his return was, with his
wife Rubina, granted full citizenship and now allowed to vote and buy and drink alcohol. Namatjira had already
spent a night in jail in 1956 on a charge of drinking alcohol although the case was dismissed. Colleagues such
as Rex Battarbee and John Brackenreg, Namatjira’s Sydney agent, feared that he would be under pressure from
members of his family to supply them with alcohol. Throughout 1957 and 1958, Namatjira’s health deteriorated
and he spent periods in hospital but eventually returned to paint at his camp at Morris Soak.
In 1958, a young woman was found dead at Morris Soak and her husband charged with murder. Namatjira
was blamed for supplying alcohol to the camp where they lived. The incident shattered Namatjira who returned
to Hermannsburg. He did, however, continue to call in at Morris Soak on his way to town and after one of those
visits was formally charged with supplying alcohol to Aborigines. The trial took place in October 1958 and, despite
appeals, Namatjira was sent to an open detainment at Papunya for three months on 18 March 1959. Although he
was released two months later, he was depressed and broken by the experience. He moved to Hermannsburg and
then back to Papunya where he suffered a heart attack. Namatjira was brought to Alice Springs Hospital but he
developed pneumonia and died on 8 August 1959. He was buried the next day at Alice Springs. His old friend
Lutheran Pastor Albrecht conducted the service.
Although Namatjira’s art was recognised by his fellow painters such as Lloyd Rees, William Dargie and Charles
Blackman and he achieved enormous popular success in sales, Namatjira did not achieve total recognition from
the mainstream arbiters of art in Australia. The state galleries under Sir Daryl Lindsay and Professor Joseph Burke
in Victoria and Hal Missingham in New South Wales did not appreciate Namatjira’s work. The influence of the
European modernist artists from the 1930s, particularly Paul Klee, after reproductions of Aboriginal bark paintings
in European magazines, created a focus in the art world on ‘traditional’ painting. Namatjira’s work was considered
too western and not ‘primitive’ enough. John Brackenreg, however, points out that in the heightened consciousness
in the 1980s of Aboriginal land rights and sacred sites, Namatjira’s paintings won renewed popularity as they
could be seen ‘as a way of reaffirming his tribal territorial knowledge... [we can] sense a general spirituality in
his work.’
It is a much-stated cliché that Namatjira was ‘torn between two worlds’ and from a 1990s perspective it is clear
that nothing could be further from the truth. It was Namatjira’s Aboriginality, his relationship to the landscape and
his feeling for kinship that Australians could not cope with in a legal and judicial system that did not acknowledge
Aboriginal rights. Australians attempted to heap honours on Namatjira in the form of money, citizenship and
consumer goods but could not accommodate an Aboriginal heritage that was not about throwing boomerangs but
about a love of his country and his family. It is fortunate that the heritage of his painting remains to remind us of
the legacy of Albert Namatjira—Australian artist.
F W Albrecht, ‘The Story of Namatjira’, address at funeral, 1959; N Amadio (Comp.), Albert Namatjira, 1986; J D Batty, Namatjira, 1963; V
C Hall, Namatjira of the Aranda, 1962; C P Mountford, The Art of Albert Namatjira, 1944; Centralian Advocate, 23 March 1951; R H Croll
Papers, Latrobe Library, Melbourne, MS 8910 1200/1(a).
MICKEY DEWAR, Vol 2.
NELSON, HAROLD GEORGE (1881–1947), engine driver, trade union official, politician and agent, was born
on 21 December 1881, at Botany, New South Wales, the son of Scottish-born John Nelson, a shopkeeper, and his
wife, Elizabeth Anne Nelson, nee Tighe. Very little is known of his early years and nothing of his education. As a
young man, he was an engine driver in Queensland, where he mainly lived at Gympie and Mount Perry. He was
married with Presbyterian rites at Mount Perry on 17 March 1904 to Maud Alice Lawrence, who had been born in
Maryborough, Queensland, the daughter of William Henry Lawrence and Isabel Lawrence.
He travelled with his wife and five children to Pine Creek in 1913. There he was an engine driver and organiser
for the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU). In July 1914, he became the AWU organiser in Darwin and in 1917 first
Secretary of the union’s Darwin Branch. An able administrator and a fiery orator, he was largely responsible for a
substantial increase in the AWU’s Northern Territory membership. In 1917, he was also elected to the Darwin Town
Council. He was a dominant figure in the campaign of boycotts and strikes which forced Vestey Brothers to raise
wages for meatworks’ employees in Darwin, he called for Northern Territory representation in the Commonwealth
Parliament and he argued for removal of the Administrator, J A Gilruth, who had often clashed with the trade
union movement.
On 17 December 1918, in an incident later described as the ‘Darwin Rebellion’, Nelson marched with a few
hundred supporters to Government House and demanded that Gilruth leave. Continuing agitation resulted in the
Commonwealth Government recalling the Administrator in February 1919. A subsequent Royal Commission,
which investigated Gilruth’s administration generally, supported Nelson. However, the Royal Commissioner,
Justice Ewing, was criticised for using Nelson’s paid assistance with commission hearings.
In April 1921, Nelson stood down as AWU secretary. He was briefly jailed in June that year after refusing to
pay taxes as part of a campaign for a Northern Territory member of the Commonwealth parliament. This resulted