Buried Treasure

Words Max Anderson

Photography Sam Roberts

George Cooley, a man with a sunny nature, has spent most of his working life walking behind a bulldozer in the searing heat of Coober Pedy, South Australia. “I was a ‘checker’,” he says, “looking for opal. A checker reads the landscape for tell-tale signs like changes in the colours of the sandstone, changes in the fault lines ...” Every time the bulldozer pushed away another layer of earth, Cooley would inspect the freshly exposed strata and call out through the plumes of white dust if he thought they’d reached “the level” – the ancient seabed dating back to the time of plesiosaurs. The miners would then set about searching for glittering veins of precious gemstone, issuing a single cry at the sight of rainbow-hued silica: “Colour!”

Today, Cooley still dedicates himself to finding colour in the landscape, though his workspace is rather less harsh. It’s after five in Adelaide’s APY Studio and Gallery, where Cooley sits on the edge of a chair, gripping a mug of coffee. “I’m pretty done in,” he says with a grin, clearly weary from a six-hour stint on a 1.5-metre-tall painting. The other artists have left for the day. There’s a dozen traditional dot paintings supported on tables and the air is sweet with the smell of paint.

Cooley’s works are the only non-traditional paintings in the cavernous studio. They include a triptych, two metres high and nine metres across, leaning against a wall. Like all the 200-odd works he’s done to date, it depicts Coober Pedy’s Breakaways, the desolate escarpment country 25 kilometres north of Opal City. The work is a landscape in every sense of the word, a thing with sweep, panache and gravity. It’s also rich with colour, rendered in orange, red and purple; the strata have been laid down with a palette knife beneath a sky painted in burnt apricot. “They call the country Kanku The Breakaways. But I call it the Painted Desert.”

Visitors to this year’s Adelaide Biennial, which runs until June, will be welcomed by a total of six panels by Cooley. They were commissioned last year by curator José Da Silva specifically to fill the foyer of the Art Gallery of South Australia. Of course it’s an honour, but it’s also a meteoric rise for an artist who by his own admission “doesn’t speak the language” of the art world.

Though Cooley is creatively driven – he’s been a storyteller and a musician from a young age – he never imagined he could “just jump into art”. And certainly not as an opal miner, straight off the fields at the age of 68.

In 2021, the APY Art Centre Collective – a group of 10 Indigenous-owned and governed enterprises based on the APY Lands – decided to set up a new centre in Coober Pedy. They invited local Aboriginal people to express themselves in all media. Cooley went along on a whim, equipped with little more than some admiration for the distinctive figurative work of Vincent Namatjira. He was encouraged to paint his landscapes – actually composites of the Breakaways and parts of the Stuart Range – on small half-metre boards.

“That was the image that was in my mind, because I’ve seen that all my life, you know? It’s the scenery where I’ve hunted and camped over the last 50, 60 years. I’m motivated when I recall the colours of the soils, the ochres and sandstone – knowing that the colours you see above ground are the same colours I see as an opal miner. I try to bring those colour variations to my work.”

Though he has his hands quite literally in the earth, he is not traditionally connected to the desert areas around Coober Pedy. The Cooleys originally came from Borroloola near the Gulf of Carpentaria but ended up jobbing on stations in the Central Deserts during the 1950s.

“Mum and Dad were working in the Simpson Desert doing fencing contracts and brumby shooting. Dad got injured one day and went to the hospital here in Adelaide. On the way back, he came up through Coober Pedy and that’s when he must have got the opal bug.

“It was 1958. I can remember very clear when he came and picked us up from our camp at Dalhousie Springs [near the Northern Territory border] – I remember it because it was when the British let the last bomb off at Maralinga. I was listening to the news on the old wireless radio. We actually saw some of the after-effects – big, black clouds that came up with a dust storm ...”

Living in the mining camps of Coober Pedy, Cooley and his brothers used to go “noodling” (fossicking) for opals among the piles of excavated dirt, eventually learning their trade. “Me and my brothers, we pegged some mining leases, but we never had the machinery – the bulldozers – to do open-cut mining. We just had our hands and our skills at finding opal.” So Cooley walked behind the dozers of other miners, earning between two and five per cent of whatever was realised from the operation. “The best I did was in Mintabie” – an opal mining community in the APY Lands – “when we made about $15,000. But that was after three months’ work.”

Cooley worked in the opal fields for five decades, but it was hunting and camping in the Breakaways as a young man that stayed with him, memories of gathering quandongs and hunting kangaroos. “There was a beauty that blended with the light. From morning to sundown, the landscape changes colour.”

In 2021, when he rendered his first visions of country in acrylic, his small boards sold for $200 apiece. A year later, his work appeared at the increasingly influential Tarnanthi Art Fair in Adelaide and was given prominent exposure in the Qantas inflight magazine. By mid-2023, he was a finalist in the 40th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, Australia’s most prestigious Indigenous art award. “I met José Da Silva at Tarnanthi. After he’d been made curator of the Adelaide Biennial, he approached me and said, ‘Look, I’ve seen your little works, but can you do any large ones?’ I hadn’t done one before so I whipped up a version [of the triptych] on panels of cardboard.” The large panels leave him weary, but they’re invested with a sense of the monumental. He loves looking back at the triptych from the other side of the studio – perhaps recalling how he did the same in the Painted Desert when he was a young man.

Cooley admits his head is spinning from his success. He admits also that he misses the opal fields and that demand for his art is keeping him a long way from the back end of a bulldozer.

But he’s building a legacy. “I’m laying a foundation down for my grandkids and great grandkids,” he says. “I’m telling a story for when they want to know, where did Pop come from? Where was Pop’s country?”

@George Cooley. @Umoona Community Arts Centre @APY Studio Adelaide

The 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art was showing at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2024.