Robert Campbell

(Jr.) (1944-1993)

Awakening the Rainbow Serpent 1989

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Roslyn Oxley9 Galery, Sydney
The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired in 1989

EXHIBITED
Robert Campbell Jr., Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 5-22 April 1989 (label attached verso)


Robert Campbell Jr's form of social realist painting covers a multitude of subject matter: from episodes in the Aboriginal history of Australia in paintings such as Barred from the baths, 1986, and Roped off at the picture show, II, 1987; to portraits of Australian heroes, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, such as Charles Perkins, Senator Neville Bonner, Prime Minister Bob Hawke and racing identity Bart Cummings; and to topical events that engaged the Australian population at large such as Haley's Comet, 1986, and Winning the Americas Cup, 1987. In these works, Campbell displays an empathy towards his subjects, particularly when they represent the underdog.

Campbell's Aboriginal upbringing with its respect for the land is seen in the many landscape paintings of his people's country around Kempsey and the Macleay River delta on the central coast of New South Wales. However his attitude takes a more strident turn in paintings that deal with environmental issues where the land is threatened, as in Please don't rape the forests, 1990, and Awakening the Rainbow Serpent, 1989.

Awakening the Rainbow Serpent relates to the controversy over uranium mining and the destruction of sacred Aboriginal sites in the Northern Territory in the 1980s. The title of the painting makes reference to spiritual Aboriginal beliefs and the ancestral Rainbow Serpent who created the land with its freshwater rivers, streams and waterholes, mountains, forests and plains. At the end of this creation period, the Serpent's blood entered the earth, symbolising the spiritual powers of the ancestor within the land that are drawn upon in ceremony by successive generations. Any desecration of the earth angers the Rainbow Serpent who seeks revenge in the form of natural disasters and human sickness. The phrase 'awakening the Rainbow Serpent' was commonly used to draw attention to the potential consequences of mining the land.

In the painting, Campbell makes reference to conventional compositions that depict Rainbow Serpents surrounding their prey in a metaphor for transition and change. Here a large multi-coloured Rainbow Serpent encircles a map of Australia, surveyors at work, a truck loaded with uranium, a container ship of yellow cake, a nuclear plant and a warplane that drops a nuclear bomb and the mushroom cloud of the explosion. These images frame a globe of the earth where people of many skin colours link hands in protest. The entire cataclysmic scene is personalised by the depiciton of the artist's totems around the edges of the canvas.

Wally Caruana