Dos Chilenas en el Desierto Australiano
Por Paz Domeyko, desde Sydney (2006)
Para llegar a la comunidad de Yuendumu, en el desierto australiano, hay que volar primero a la pequeña ciudad moderna de Alice Springs, en pleno centro del continente australiano. Desde ahí se recorren otros 300 kilómetros de camino, los últimos cien sin pavimentar.
Al contrario que el desierto clásico del norte de Chile, la ruta bordea cadenas de cerros bajos, tan antiguos que son solamente montones de rocas, como pilas de huesos, los esqueletos de antiquísimas cordilleras.
La tierra es roja como ladrillo. Se ve abundante vegetación, principalmente el pasto espinudo llamado “spinifex” y arbustos que se han adaptado a esa tierra casi estéril.
Yuendumu es un conjunto de casitas primitivas, construidas por el gobierno hace años, cuando obligó a las tribus nativas a dejar de ser nómadas. Ahí viven alrededor de 800 miembros de la tribu aborigen Warlpiri, además de unos cien blancos, y mil perros.
Los aborígenes se encuentran en el continente australiano hace 60,000 años y son las tribus más antiguas de la tierra. Sus pinturas y dibujos, parte de ceremonias de su vida espiritual, se encuentran en cavernas y sitios sagrados y tienen también miles de años de antigüedad.
Son historias de sus antepasados, mapas, figuras de seres míticos. Su arte solamente comenzó a comercializarse en los últimos 40 años, y hoy ha logrado gran éxito en todo el mundo.
En la noche, en un lugar apartado del pueblo, grupos de mujeres de piel oscura como el carbón se reúnen alrededor de centellantes fogatas, con los pechos descubiertos, pintadas con dibujos en ceniza, las sienes sangrando donde se han golpeado en señal de duelo.
Es un “sorry camp,” una ceremonia fúnebre en que lamentan la muerte de algún pariente o amigo. En esa oscuridad total, millones de estrellas parecen estar al alcance de la mano. Es una escena de la edad de piedra, que sigue vigente en el siglo veintiuno.
El corazón de este pueblo pequeño y desolado es un edificio recién inaugurado, el flamante centro de arte Warlukurlangu Artists, cuya directora es la chilena Cecilia Alfonso Domeyko, tataranieta del científico, explorador y educador Ignacio Domeyko, de quien heredó un gran espíritu de aventura, tenacidad y amor por su quehacer.
Con un título de Master en Administración de galerías de arte, Cecilia, casi al azar, postuló al cargo de subdirectora del centro de arte de Yuendumu y resultó aceptada. Cuando llegó a asumir el puesto comprobó que el centro sufría de graves problemas. El edificio se venía abajo, devorado por las termitas.
Los cuadros casi no se vendían y la institución estaba cercana a la quiebra. Los artistas tradicionales, varios de ellos famosos en todo el país, casi no producían telas. En este nuevo desafío Cecilia encontró su vocación.
Al mejorar las ventas, aumentó el trabajo, y se hizo necesario contratar nuevo personal. Cecilia colocó avisos en diarios y se presentaron varios interesados y de ellos, la persona más calificada resultó Gloria Morales, otra chilena, quien estudió conservación de telas en Chile antes de emigrar a Australia.
Al llegar se instaló en Canberra, donde vio por primera vez el arte aborigen en la Galería Nacional de Australia. Tras desempeñarse allí como voluntaria y luego como conservadora especializada en arte aborigen por 10 años, decidió irse a una comunidad aborigen a aprender más en terreno. Había decidido buscar un trabajo estable en el rubro cuando vio el aviso del centro de arte de Yuendumu. Cecilia y Gloria se complementan en forma notable.
Mientras Cecilia es eximia vendedora y organizadora, Gloria controla la calidad. Es experta en la producción de los cuadros: las telas, los colores, la textura, la buena ejecución. Ambas comparten un inmenso cariño por los aborígenes, preocupación por la salud de sus artistas, y el deseo de que mejoren sus ingresos para que prospere toda la comunidad.
Tres años después de iniciarse como directora, Cecilia logró reunir fondos a través de diversas instituciones para edificar un centro de arte nuevo. Este se inauguró en octubre de 2005 con asistencia de cientos de personas de Australia, Europa y Estados Unidos.
Tres aviones charter aterrizaron en el pequeño aeropuerto, llenos de aficionados al arte aborigen que deseaban estar presentes en la apertura del nuevo centro. Cecilia ha obtenido donaciones de instituciones médicas, de pasajes aéreos a Canberra, la capital de Australia, donde médicos voluntarios han practicado operaciones gratuitas de cataratas a varios de sus artistas.
Muchos de ellos sufren de graves problemas a la vista debido a la fuerte luz, el viento y la arena del desierto, además de la vejez. Varios de los principales pintores no saben cuándo nacieron, pero se sabe que sobrepasan los 80 años.
Además de preocuparse de los ancianos, Cecilia quiere desarrollar los talentos de las nuevas generaciones. Ha logrado convencer a varios aborígenes que ya no pintaban, o que lo hacían rara vez, a que vuelvan a producir, y uno de ellos, Shorty Robertson, es hoy uno de los artistas más populares del país.
Con el fin de estimular a la juventud, ha iniciado clases de arte para escolares durante las vacaciones. Tanto es el entusiasmo de los niños, que horas antes de que se abran las puertas en las mañanas, ya esperan frente al centro.
Cecilia les compra sus pinturas a bajo precio, para que comprendan que aprender a pintar bien les puede brindar un futuro de prestigio y dinero. Así como ocurre en las comunidades indígenas de muchos países (y cada día más en nuestra propia sociedad) los aborígenes comen mal. Su alimentación ha dejado de ser la natural y sana de su vida nómada, y se han aficionado al azúcar, las harinas, las bebidas y la comida chatarra, además del alcohol.
Hoy el 30% de la población sufre de diabetes. Para enseñarles a comer de manera saludable Cecilia les proporciona desayuno y almuerzo a sus artistas, dándoles sándwich de pan integral con carne y verduras, y dos porciones de fruta. Cuando Cecilia llegó a Yuendumu, el centro de arte estaba cerca del colapso económico y físico.
Hoy el nuevo centro se ha convertido en uno de los más conocidos del país, con ventas de millones de dólares. Los cuadros se venden en Estados Unidos, en numerosos países de Europa y de Asia, además de galerías de toda Australia. Los diarios australianos publican artículos continuamente sobre el auge del arte en Yuendumu, que acarrea un importante beneficio económico a las extensas familias de los artistas.
Pero también hay gran reconocimiento al papel que desarrolla el centro de arte en mejorar la salud de los aborígenes de la comunidad. Entretanto, Gloria ha complementado su afición por el arte con una debilidad por el reino animal: el cuidado de cientos de perros vagos del pueblo, abandonados, enfermos, y hambrientos, que hoy gozan de una clínica para perros.
Un veterinario visita el pueblo regularmente para vacunarlos, esterilizarlos, curarlos o darles muerte sin dolor. Gloria alimenta a numerosos canes diariamente (con ración extra para las madres criando cachorros). Su labor ha sido alabada por la prensa como la forma ideal de controlar el número excesivo de perros vagos que rondan los pueblos aborígenes.
################
Santiago dreaming
By Nicolas Rothwell
The Australian newspaper 1 may 2004
ONE is tempestuous and one is reticent. One is a child of romance and remembered privilege, one is a daughter of hardship. One is a persuader and art marketer of genius, one a conservator of paintings, a watchful perfectionist.
Both are Chileans, both are beautiful and both have sharp-drawn characters. Put them together, in their present home at Yuendumu, 300km northwest of Alice Springs, and you have the Western Desert's strangest, most engaging double act.
How, though, did Cecilia Alfonso and Gloria Morales, who only a year ago had never met, come to be working side by side at the Warlukurlangu Art Centre, where some of Australia's best-known artists can be found each day, painting their canvases patiently upon a worn concrete veranda?
This story of crossing destinies begins in a small town in the far south of Chile where, 39 years ago, Alfonso, one of five distinctly glamorous sisters, was born into a diplomatic family. Her father was an artist of elusive promise; her mother, an ambassador's daughter who had been educated in Sydney, was running the local US information centre.
The radical government of Salvador Allende was elected: a charged and molten time began in Chilean politics. Soon the family emigrated, pitched up at Cabramatta migrant hostel and started again. Alfonso was just six.
She cast herself, as a young woman, in a bold, Australian image, but with a distinctly international flavour; by the time she was 20 she was off, travelling the world with exotic companions, seeing Africa, Europe, America, receiving a high-speed international education, honing her eye for art in all its guises.
She fixed on arts administration as a career path in her mid-30s; she applied for a post at the Yuendumu art centre almost at random. When, 2½ years ago, she reached the bustling Warlpiri capital, she realised at once what she had walked into.
The Warlukurlangu building was infested with termites; all was lassitude and decay. Alfonso set about reviving the careers of the best-known Yuendumu artists, men such as Paddy Simms and Paddy Stewart, who had helped found the desert painting school.
She encouraged female artists such as Judy Watson, whose brightly coloured canvases have become much collected. And it was she who coaxed the art centre's new star, Shorty Jangala Robertson, into the painting life.
News of the revival at Warlukurlangu spread fast. Visitors came. One was Wally Caruana, the nation's best-known indigenous art curator, now an expert at Sotheby's. He mentioned that he was on his way to Oenpelli in Arnhem Land to see a former colleague of his, Morales – another Chilean and also an arts co-ordinator.
Alfonso was struck: "I thought to myself, I'd really like to meet her one day. Fancy there being two Chilean women in remote art centres." One day, about a year ago, another post at Warlukurlangu needed to be filled. It was advertised, and Morales applied.
"She answered every question in the telephone interview flawlessly," says Alfonso: "But would we get on? I'm quite emotional and just a little extrovert – and I could tell at once Gloria was very professional and reserved." Certainly there were differences in the two women's respective paths through life.
But there were echoes too. Morales was also born 39 years ago and also in a small Chilean provincial township, Escorial, far to the north of Santiago. "Because of my background, I can adapt quite easily," Morales reflects.
"I grew up in a very big family and I was the last of 10 children. I learned to think a lot before reacting; if I say something, I know the impression I want to convey." She lived in poor conditions: she was six when she started working for her family and it wasn't until she was 14 that the household bought its first fridge.
Morales won a sports scholarship to the Catholic University in Santiago; it was her road out. She studied art and conservation, living in a tiny inner-city apartment with one of her sisters: teargas fired during the anti-Pinochet riots of the era would drift into their room.
She became a professional curator, married, and migrated to Australia in her late 20s for purely economic reasons. It was late 1990; she learned English from scratch and remade herself. Almost at once she moved to Canberra and began working, initially as a volunteer, at the National Gallery of Australia.
There, for the first time, she saw Aboriginal art. The impact was immediate: "How wonderful it was! I didn't know anything about it. The objects that opened up this world for me were the Memorial Poles in the gallery. I thought they were magnificent, and as I started finding out about them it made them become bigger and bigger in my mind – not only for what they represent but as a beautiful piece, a contemporary installation."
Morales also realised how little was understood about the techniques of indigenous art, the methods of its creation. "This is a form of modern art, it is being made now, and yet nobody actually knows anything about it," she says.
"We have it on our doorstep and no one has the knowledge about its techniques." This gap became her professional specialty; it led her into the field, to west Arnhem Land, where she could study bark painters at work, and see them preparing their stringybark-wood surfaces.
She could also fulfil her vast enthusiasm for pig-shooting with .303 rifles and for the company of the camp dogs that infest remote Aboriginal communities. When the job at Yuendumu came up, it offered fresh challenges to a conservation expert.
How to care for desert acrylic paintings? How to coat their canvases? Under what conditions are they made? And what exactly are those odd, disquieting, half-noticed stains on their corners? At Warlukurlangu, Morales's detective instincts dovetailed neatly with Alfonso's revival program.
The two women soon found much in common. They would walk together, by the airstrip, and compare notes on the blessings and the burdens of a Chilean background. In the art centre, things moved ahead: Morales took over cataloguing and her waist-length hair quickly proved of much interest to the old painting men who spin their bands and ceremonial objects from lengths of hair-string.
Meanwhile, Alfonso deepened her ambitious exhibition program and took steps to improve the presentation of the art. She has invested in a few pairs of special gloves and begun a campaign to stop painters from blowing their noses above their canvases and expelling globules of mucus on to their best work.
Almost a year into her new post, Morales has not only realised how omnipresent dogs are in the desert painting world but has also drawn the diagnostic consequences (the corner stains, of course, are dog urine).
She now inclines to authenticating classic indigenous art whenever she can find paw-print marks and camp-dog hair scattered across the painted design. The two women have come to form an unusually balanced partnership, one touched on in Morales's forthcoming memoir-article, "Life, Painting and Dogs in Yuendumu".
"For me," she says, "respect is the essential: respect for the art and artists. Cecilia does a wonderful job, selling and all of that. I really enjoy working with the artists, watching them, helping with the colour mixing. In the Aboriginal art world you can make a bigger difference in a place like this than in the big public galleries. It's just a day-to-day thing."
"I'm the bridge," says Alfonso. "Between Yuendumu and the real world, the art market world. And I couldn't do what I do without Gloria here. We're like the undercoat and painted surface." Light begins to fade.
The artists slowly make their way home. The camp dogs gather to be fed. Morales and Alfonso exchange a glance, a shrug, and something from a distant land passes, momentarily, between them in the desert air. "It's not the most illogical place for Chileans to gather, you know," says Alfonso as the dust storms blow through the sandy art centre courtyard.
"As a nation, Chileans may be boring and conservative, but we know how to dance and have a party – like the Warlpiri in Yuendumu."
Por Paz Domeyko, desde Sydney (2006)
Para llegar a la comunidad de Yuendumu, en el desierto australiano, hay que volar primero a la pequeña ciudad moderna de Alice Springs, en pleno centro del continente australiano. Desde ahí se recorren otros 300 kilómetros de camino, los últimos cien sin pavimentar.
Al contrario que el desierto clásico del norte de Chile, la ruta bordea cadenas de cerros bajos, tan antiguos que son solamente montones de rocas, como pilas de huesos, los esqueletos de antiquísimas cordilleras.
La tierra es roja como ladrillo. Se ve abundante vegetación, principalmente el pasto espinudo llamado “spinifex” y arbustos que se han adaptado a esa tierra casi estéril.
Yuendumu es un conjunto de casitas primitivas, construidas por el gobierno hace años, cuando obligó a las tribus nativas a dejar de ser nómadas. Ahí viven alrededor de 800 miembros de la tribu aborigen Warlpiri, además de unos cien blancos, y mil perros.
Los aborígenes se encuentran en el continente australiano hace 60,000 años y son las tribus más antiguas de la tierra. Sus pinturas y dibujos, parte de ceremonias de su vida espiritual, se encuentran en cavernas y sitios sagrados y tienen también miles de años de antigüedad.
Son historias de sus antepasados, mapas, figuras de seres míticos. Su arte solamente comenzó a comercializarse en los últimos 40 años, y hoy ha logrado gran éxito en todo el mundo.
En la noche, en un lugar apartado del pueblo, grupos de mujeres de piel oscura como el carbón se reúnen alrededor de centellantes fogatas, con los pechos descubiertos, pintadas con dibujos en ceniza, las sienes sangrando donde se han golpeado en señal de duelo.
Es un “sorry camp,” una ceremonia fúnebre en que lamentan la muerte de algún pariente o amigo. En esa oscuridad total, millones de estrellas parecen estar al alcance de la mano. Es una escena de la edad de piedra, que sigue vigente en el siglo veintiuno.
El corazón de este pueblo pequeño y desolado es un edificio recién inaugurado, el flamante centro de arte Warlukurlangu Artists, cuya directora es la chilena Cecilia Alfonso Domeyko, tataranieta del científico, explorador y educador Ignacio Domeyko, de quien heredó un gran espíritu de aventura, tenacidad y amor por su quehacer.
Con un título de Master en Administración de galerías de arte, Cecilia, casi al azar, postuló al cargo de subdirectora del centro de arte de Yuendumu y resultó aceptada. Cuando llegó a asumir el puesto comprobó que el centro sufría de graves problemas. El edificio se venía abajo, devorado por las termitas.
Los cuadros casi no se vendían y la institución estaba cercana a la quiebra. Los artistas tradicionales, varios de ellos famosos en todo el país, casi no producían telas. En este nuevo desafío Cecilia encontró su vocación.
Al mejorar las ventas, aumentó el trabajo, y se hizo necesario contratar nuevo personal. Cecilia colocó avisos en diarios y se presentaron varios interesados y de ellos, la persona más calificada resultó Gloria Morales, otra chilena, quien estudió conservación de telas en Chile antes de emigrar a Australia.
Al llegar se instaló en Canberra, donde vio por primera vez el arte aborigen en la Galería Nacional de Australia. Tras desempeñarse allí como voluntaria y luego como conservadora especializada en arte aborigen por 10 años, decidió irse a una comunidad aborigen a aprender más en terreno. Había decidido buscar un trabajo estable en el rubro cuando vio el aviso del centro de arte de Yuendumu. Cecilia y Gloria se complementan en forma notable.
Mientras Cecilia es eximia vendedora y organizadora, Gloria controla la calidad. Es experta en la producción de los cuadros: las telas, los colores, la textura, la buena ejecución. Ambas comparten un inmenso cariño por los aborígenes, preocupación por la salud de sus artistas, y el deseo de que mejoren sus ingresos para que prospere toda la comunidad.
Tres años después de iniciarse como directora, Cecilia logró reunir fondos a través de diversas instituciones para edificar un centro de arte nuevo. Este se inauguró en octubre de 2005 con asistencia de cientos de personas de Australia, Europa y Estados Unidos.
Tres aviones charter aterrizaron en el pequeño aeropuerto, llenos de aficionados al arte aborigen que deseaban estar presentes en la apertura del nuevo centro. Cecilia ha obtenido donaciones de instituciones médicas, de pasajes aéreos a Canberra, la capital de Australia, donde médicos voluntarios han practicado operaciones gratuitas de cataratas a varios de sus artistas.
Muchos de ellos sufren de graves problemas a la vista debido a la fuerte luz, el viento y la arena del desierto, además de la vejez. Varios de los principales pintores no saben cuándo nacieron, pero se sabe que sobrepasan los 80 años.
Además de preocuparse de los ancianos, Cecilia quiere desarrollar los talentos de las nuevas generaciones. Ha logrado convencer a varios aborígenes que ya no pintaban, o que lo hacían rara vez, a que vuelvan a producir, y uno de ellos, Shorty Robertson, es hoy uno de los artistas más populares del país.
Con el fin de estimular a la juventud, ha iniciado clases de arte para escolares durante las vacaciones. Tanto es el entusiasmo de los niños, que horas antes de que se abran las puertas en las mañanas, ya esperan frente al centro.
Cecilia les compra sus pinturas a bajo precio, para que comprendan que aprender a pintar bien les puede brindar un futuro de prestigio y dinero. Así como ocurre en las comunidades indígenas de muchos países (y cada día más en nuestra propia sociedad) los aborígenes comen mal. Su alimentación ha dejado de ser la natural y sana de su vida nómada, y se han aficionado al azúcar, las harinas, las bebidas y la comida chatarra, además del alcohol.
Hoy el 30% de la población sufre de diabetes. Para enseñarles a comer de manera saludable Cecilia les proporciona desayuno y almuerzo a sus artistas, dándoles sándwich de pan integral con carne y verduras, y dos porciones de fruta. Cuando Cecilia llegó a Yuendumu, el centro de arte estaba cerca del colapso económico y físico.
Hoy el nuevo centro se ha convertido en uno de los más conocidos del país, con ventas de millones de dólares. Los cuadros se venden en Estados Unidos, en numerosos países de Europa y de Asia, además de galerías de toda Australia. Los diarios australianos publican artículos continuamente sobre el auge del arte en Yuendumu, que acarrea un importante beneficio económico a las extensas familias de los artistas.
Pero también hay gran reconocimiento al papel que desarrolla el centro de arte en mejorar la salud de los aborígenes de la comunidad. Entretanto, Gloria ha complementado su afición por el arte con una debilidad por el reino animal: el cuidado de cientos de perros vagos del pueblo, abandonados, enfermos, y hambrientos, que hoy gozan de una clínica para perros.
Un veterinario visita el pueblo regularmente para vacunarlos, esterilizarlos, curarlos o darles muerte sin dolor. Gloria alimenta a numerosos canes diariamente (con ración extra para las madres criando cachorros). Su labor ha sido alabada por la prensa como la forma ideal de controlar el número excesivo de perros vagos que rondan los pueblos aborígenes.
################
Santiago dreaming
By Nicolas Rothwell
The Australian newspaper 1 may 2004
ONE is tempestuous and one is reticent. One is a child of romance and remembered privilege, one is a daughter of hardship. One is a persuader and art marketer of genius, one a conservator of paintings, a watchful perfectionist.
Both are Chileans, both are beautiful and both have sharp-drawn characters. Put them together, in their present home at Yuendumu, 300km northwest of Alice Springs, and you have the Western Desert's strangest, most engaging double act.
How, though, did Cecilia Alfonso and Gloria Morales, who only a year ago had never met, come to be working side by side at the Warlukurlangu Art Centre, where some of Australia's best-known artists can be found each day, painting their canvases patiently upon a worn concrete veranda?
This story of crossing destinies begins in a small town in the far south of Chile where, 39 years ago, Alfonso, one of five distinctly glamorous sisters, was born into a diplomatic family. Her father was an artist of elusive promise; her mother, an ambassador's daughter who had been educated in Sydney, was running the local US information centre.
The radical government of Salvador Allende was elected: a charged and molten time began in Chilean politics. Soon the family emigrated, pitched up at Cabramatta migrant hostel and started again. Alfonso was just six.
She cast herself, as a young woman, in a bold, Australian image, but with a distinctly international flavour; by the time she was 20 she was off, travelling the world with exotic companions, seeing Africa, Europe, America, receiving a high-speed international education, honing her eye for art in all its guises.
She fixed on arts administration as a career path in her mid-30s; she applied for a post at the Yuendumu art centre almost at random. When, 2½ years ago, she reached the bustling Warlpiri capital, she realised at once what she had walked into.
The Warlukurlangu building was infested with termites; all was lassitude and decay. Alfonso set about reviving the careers of the best-known Yuendumu artists, men such as Paddy Simms and Paddy Stewart, who had helped found the desert painting school.
She encouraged female artists such as Judy Watson, whose brightly coloured canvases have become much collected. And it was she who coaxed the art centre's new star, Shorty Jangala Robertson, into the painting life.
News of the revival at Warlukurlangu spread fast. Visitors came. One was Wally Caruana, the nation's best-known indigenous art curator, now an expert at Sotheby's. He mentioned that he was on his way to Oenpelli in Arnhem Land to see a former colleague of his, Morales – another Chilean and also an arts co-ordinator.
Alfonso was struck: "I thought to myself, I'd really like to meet her one day. Fancy there being two Chilean women in remote art centres." One day, about a year ago, another post at Warlukurlangu needed to be filled. It was advertised, and Morales applied.
"She answered every question in the telephone interview flawlessly," says Alfonso: "But would we get on? I'm quite emotional and just a little extrovert – and I could tell at once Gloria was very professional and reserved." Certainly there were differences in the two women's respective paths through life.
But there were echoes too. Morales was also born 39 years ago and also in a small Chilean provincial township, Escorial, far to the north of Santiago. "Because of my background, I can adapt quite easily," Morales reflects.
"I grew up in a very big family and I was the last of 10 children. I learned to think a lot before reacting; if I say something, I know the impression I want to convey." She lived in poor conditions: she was six when she started working for her family and it wasn't until she was 14 that the household bought its first fridge.
Morales won a sports scholarship to the Catholic University in Santiago; it was her road out. She studied art and conservation, living in a tiny inner-city apartment with one of her sisters: teargas fired during the anti-Pinochet riots of the era would drift into their room.
She became a professional curator, married, and migrated to Australia in her late 20s for purely economic reasons. It was late 1990; she learned English from scratch and remade herself. Almost at once she moved to Canberra and began working, initially as a volunteer, at the National Gallery of Australia.
There, for the first time, she saw Aboriginal art. The impact was immediate: "How wonderful it was! I didn't know anything about it. The objects that opened up this world for me were the Memorial Poles in the gallery. I thought they were magnificent, and as I started finding out about them it made them become bigger and bigger in my mind – not only for what they represent but as a beautiful piece, a contemporary installation."
Morales also realised how little was understood about the techniques of indigenous art, the methods of its creation. "This is a form of modern art, it is being made now, and yet nobody actually knows anything about it," she says.
"We have it on our doorstep and no one has the knowledge about its techniques." This gap became her professional specialty; it led her into the field, to west Arnhem Land, where she could study bark painters at work, and see them preparing their stringybark-wood surfaces.
She could also fulfil her vast enthusiasm for pig-shooting with .303 rifles and for the company of the camp dogs that infest remote Aboriginal communities. When the job at Yuendumu came up, it offered fresh challenges to a conservation expert.
How to care for desert acrylic paintings? How to coat their canvases? Under what conditions are they made? And what exactly are those odd, disquieting, half-noticed stains on their corners? At Warlukurlangu, Morales's detective instincts dovetailed neatly with Alfonso's revival program.
The two women soon found much in common. They would walk together, by the airstrip, and compare notes on the blessings and the burdens of a Chilean background. In the art centre, things moved ahead: Morales took over cataloguing and her waist-length hair quickly proved of much interest to the old painting men who spin their bands and ceremonial objects from lengths of hair-string.
Meanwhile, Alfonso deepened her ambitious exhibition program and took steps to improve the presentation of the art. She has invested in a few pairs of special gloves and begun a campaign to stop painters from blowing their noses above their canvases and expelling globules of mucus on to their best work.
Almost a year into her new post, Morales has not only realised how omnipresent dogs are in the desert painting world but has also drawn the diagnostic consequences (the corner stains, of course, are dog urine).
She now inclines to authenticating classic indigenous art whenever she can find paw-print marks and camp-dog hair scattered across the painted design. The two women have come to form an unusually balanced partnership, one touched on in Morales's forthcoming memoir-article, "Life, Painting and Dogs in Yuendumu".
"For me," she says, "respect is the essential: respect for the art and artists. Cecilia does a wonderful job, selling and all of that. I really enjoy working with the artists, watching them, helping with the colour mixing. In the Aboriginal art world you can make a bigger difference in a place like this than in the big public galleries. It's just a day-to-day thing."
"I'm the bridge," says Alfonso. "Between Yuendumu and the real world, the art market world. And I couldn't do what I do without Gloria here. We're like the undercoat and painted surface." Light begins to fade.
The artists slowly make their way home. The camp dogs gather to be fed. Morales and Alfonso exchange a glance, a shrug, and something from a distant land passes, momentarily, between them in the desert air. "It's not the most illogical place for Chileans to gather, you know," says Alfonso as the dust storms blow through the sandy art centre courtyard.
"As a nation, Chileans may be boring and conservative, but we know how to dance and have a party – like the Warlpiri in Yuendumu."
