I first met Chips Mackinolty in the mid-1970s when I was bumming around Sydney with my brother-in-law’s band and Chips was working with a rag-tag artists’ collective called Earthworks Posters in a set of tin sheds on the fringes of the Sydney University campus.

Chips would later say the Tin Sheds were “a place where a number of us lived from time to time, worked, had hopeless personal lives, drank too much, and I imagine that some of us took too many drugs and so on, but it was a really important part of my life.”

Chips and I lost track of each other for a few years, he wandering north to Townsville to work in community arts and the South Pacific Arts Festival while I went south to Melbourne and let rock-n-roll drag me to all corners of the country and beyond for a few years.

In mid-1984, I was well sick of life on the road and ended up in Adelaide at the end of a very messy tour, so, with a box of cheap wine and not much else, I jumped on a McCafferty’s bus for the three-day trip up to Darwin.

Both Chips and I have been here and hereabouts ever since.

Chips followed his nose — or something else — and headed north and west where “chasing after an old girlfriend” he “ended up in Katherine, of all places”.

Somehow, I got the word Chips was in a town I’d never heard of and was living at “the best house in First Street, Katherine” so, while the bus was fuelling up I went looking for Chips.

Trouble was he was out bush.

In mid-1984, Chips was working for Mimi Aboriginal Arts and Crafts, one of the first Aboriginal arts centres in the Territory.

As Chips told me in Darwin last month: “Back then Mimi was the only Aboriginal arts and craft centre between Darwin to Alice Springs, west to the Kimberley and east to Groote Eylandt. That was our patch. We’d drive everywhere, apart from the islands or to Numbulwar if the roads were out … and they were out a lot. We covered an area bigger than the state of Victoria … or more than a few European countries.”

Getting around this vast area wasn’t the only problem the Mimi Arts and Crafts crew faced. 

“Back in those days no-one had a land line, let alone a fax or a bloody mobile phone. If you wanted to let a community know you were planning a visit you’d write a letter – good luck with that – or jump on the CODAN HF radio and either wait for them to turn up on a daily sked (scheduled call) or just shout out into the ether and hope, ‘This is Mimi Arts in Katherine calling anyone at … OVER.’”

“One of the problems we had with Mimi covering such a large area was that different parts of the country used different channels. We had VJY around the Top End but country around Alice Springs had a different channel, VJD. And the funniest thing was because they were open frequencies anyone could listen in, to any call, at any time. So, you had to keep your wits about you.”

In 1985, Chips spent a few months working with Maruku Arts at Muṯitjulu in preparation for the handback of Uluru to the Anangu Traditional Owners by Governor General Sir Ninian Stephen in October 1985.

Chips is a great obituarist and on the occasion of Sir Ninian’s passing in October 2017 he wrote that in the lead up to the Uluru handback “the NT’s Country Liberal Party government was running a rabid campaign against the Anangu Traditional Owners, which included taxpayer-funded interstate trips trying to drum up support. On the day itself, a light plane traversed the area of the handback ceremony carrying a banner with the slogan ‘Ayers Rock for all Australians’.”

But all power to Sir Ninian. He knew bloody well what he was doing as he would be walking into the bearpit of racist attitudes to land rights. “If anything the CLP’s stunt gave the events on the ground even more credence.”

Working in collaboration with Anangu artist Brossy Brumby at Redback Graphix in Wollongong, Chips produced an iconic poster that Traditional Owners of Uluru presented to Sir Ninian during the handback ceremony.

Back in the Top End, Chips continued his artwork and journalism, stringing for a range of southern and international publications. Because of his remote community connections he was very much in demand to work with government and remote service agencies out bush and this led to a job as a field officer with the Northern Land Council. Nominally based in Darwin, Chips spent most of his time travelling through the vast Northern Land Council area, working on many Aboriginal land claims, including on his beloved Jawoyn country in the Katherine region.

Katherine was a tough town in the 1970s and ‘80s.

As early as 1973, local pastoralist and member, later Speaker, of the Legislative Council Les MacFarlane was chairman of the Rights for Territorians Committee — originally called Rights for Whites — that gathered, apparently, 600 locals in a Katherine hall to protest against what they saw as discrimination against whites in education, welfare and other services. Michelle Grattan covered the event for The Age, characterising the meeting as an example of an Australia-wide “white backlash” against the Whitlam government’s policies “…including its policy to grant land rights and its plans for new schemes of ‘positive discrimination’ in favour of Aborigines”.

As Les MacFarlane told Michelle Grattan: “The policy of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs has turned the Aborigines into a race of bludgers.”

Katherine has always been slow to change. By the mid-eighties, as Chips told the ABC TV’s local current affairs show Stateline 30 years later, the Jawoyn fight for their land wasn’t just playing out in the courts.

“There were street demonstrations by various groups called One Law, One Nation and Rights for Whites. There were KKK cartoons sort of in the street and so on, and one of the Traditional Owners, Sandy Barraway, had shots fired over his head one evening after giving evidence.”

The Jawoyn people won their land claim and went on to reclaim vast tracts of their traditional lands and nowadays are rightly recognised as a powerful political and economic force in the Katherine region.

But racial tensions remained. In November 1986, under the headline “Bigotry Lives!”, the Northern Land Council’s Land Rights News reported: “The racism that bedevils Katherine and makes it infamous around the nation hasn’t diminished since the Jawoyn land claim hearing was finished. A group of white townspeople, including several prominent businesspeople and professionals, continue to be seen wearing a T-shirt at various social and private functions bearing the acronym SPONGE. That stands for the Society for Prevention of Niggers Getting Everything.”

Four years later, the Northern Land Council’s Darwin and Katherine offices were subjected to coordinated racist attacks. As Land Rights News reported: “Just before Christmas, shotgun blasts ripped through the windows of the Northern Land Council office in Darwin. And shortly afterwards racists sprayed slogans on the council’s regional office in Katherine. Police investigated both attacks, but no charges have been laid. In Darwin, the slogan “equal rights for whites” was daubed across the windows while in Katherine office the words ‘KKK UNITED’; ‘666’; and ‘Die Coon Scum’ were emblazoned on the windows.”

For all its faults, Chips retains a soft spot for the town of Katherine and points south. He told the ABC’s Annie Gastin that while Katherine was a difficult town to live in, it did have its moments.

“Unless you’d stayed in town for at least two wet seasons people would look at you as an outsider. And if you were crazy enough to do a third wet season they sort of thought, ‘Well, he might be a lunatic but at least he is our lunatic.’”

One hundred kilometres south the small town of Mataranka was just as difficult, “If you were in the Mataranka pub and you told a [white local] that you worked for Aboriginal people they would turn their backs on you.”

Reflecting on (most of) a lifetime based in the Territory, Chips told Annie Gastin that he hated it when people told him that the Territory “isn’t what it used to be, because of lot of what it used to be was really awful … but I don’t think we should ever forget those histories.”

Chips has been making sure we don’t forget our histories through the use of printed words and images since he was in high school. Arguably one of Chips’ best-loved images is his 1977 poster, Raising the Flag, which co-opted the famous image by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Joe Rosenthal taken in February 1945 of US Marines raising a US flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima.

Raising the Flag was first used to promote a 1977 land rights dance at an inner Sydney town hall. Eleven years later it was re-issued to promote a January 1988 land rights rally, as detailed in this poster.

Never forget those histories. TQ

CHIPS MACKINOLTY AT ONE OF HIS MANY EXHIBITIONS