TRAVEL FACES: GROETHE's LAST STAND - a photographer extraordinaire

Bill Groethe considers his most important work the series of photos he took in 1948 of the Native American survivors of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, better known as Custer’s Last Stand.

These portraits were taken at an event at Custer State Park in South Dakota, a place I stayed at in September, 2014 just before the annual Buffalo Roundup.

(On June 25 and 26, 1876 the 7^th Cavalry led by Lt Col George A Custer was defeated in Montana at what Indian tribes called the Battle of the Greasy Grass. I understand the people in the photo are Little Warrior, Pemmican, Little Soldier, Dewey Beard, High Eagle, Iron Hawk, Comes Again, Nicholas Black Elk and John Sitting Bull, who although not a survivor, represented his adoptive father, Sitting Bull.)

Later I visit the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and while talking to archivist Tawa Ducheneaux at the Woksape Tipi Library at the Oglala Lakota College, my eye is drawn to the prints of these photos on the wall. I try to do the maths and work out what Groethe later tells me – these men were between 85 and 90 years old when he took their pictures.

Ducheneaux tells me Groethe is not only alive (he’s 91) but still working as hard as ever. I call him at his shop when I get to Rapid City and he says to come quickly as he and his wife are getting ready to do another trip to the battle site in Montana, where a frieze is being made of his photos, sandblasted into granite – part of a memorial to the Oglala Sioux area tribes, who fought there.

“They’ve had a memorial from day one almost of the troops; the battlefield used to be called Custer Battlefield but now it’s Little Big Horn Battlefield (national monument).  It took many years to get it changed,” Groethe tells me.

As for the background to the famous portraits: “I took the photos all in the one day. The youngest was 13 at the battle, 85 when I took him.”

So how did it come about? Well, as he says, they all knew this pesky, teenage photographer, who’d been hanging round taking photos of them for months.

“I grew up here,” he explains. “I used to follow them around. They called me ‘the kid’. I was always going to their dances and stuff and photographing them.

“They were disappearing fast. In ‘51, the 75th anniversary, there were only three of them left.”

I ask Groethe if he asked his subjects about their experiences at this famous almost-end to the Indian wars.

“I never talked to them…the battle’s over. They were trying to live and assimilate into the community, make a little money when they dressed up for a powwow.

“I concentrate on my job. I want to get the images right and (it) takes a little more time. Talk to and learn from the people so I didn’t have to take a lot of pictures because I couldn’t afford to buy so much film.”                                 

One of his subjects, Dewey Beard, also survived Wounded Knee, 14 years later.

 “He lost his wife and daughter and he and his brother escaped. He was the last to die. He has a double survival record. He died November 2, 1955 and that happens to be South Dakota Day.

 “It’s the most important work I’ve done,” he says explaining he started as an apprentice with  Bert Bell,  when he was 12.

 What have your learnt from the Lakota and other Oglala Sioux, I ask?

 "I thought I had compassion but they’ve got more than the average white man to put up with us, I tell you.  When you’re all in the same boat in the Depression you’re all poor. I had no problems. Today we have more problems all the time because disparity is increasing all the time.

 “I learnt a lot, these people are very gentle really, considering they’re the warrior bunch. After the war was over and they were made to settle down and so many of them are all over that. They don’t want to talk about that. I never ask them either.”

 One major regret he has is that a writer, David Humphreys Miller, who asked to use his colour slides of the Battle of the Little Big Horn survivors, never returned them.

 “I shot 5 x 7 black and white of each one and then I shot 5 x 7 transparencies in colour the same time, so the images are almost exactly the same but I was young, I trusted this man and he was going to write a story for National Geographic and I foolishly gave him the transparencies and he never returned them.

 “He’s gone, his wife’s gone, I know the family has them someplace because 20 years ago he tried to sell those to the battlefield and of course they recognised immediately that they were the same poses as mine. They refused him and they called me right away and I still haven’t been able to run him down and now he’s gone.”

 One of his projects is to shoot all the phases of what is known as the Lakota Moon, so laborious a task that he’s so far only taken eight shots in 25 years.  The moons represent the different seasons, based on information from the famous book, Black Elk Speaks.

 “The scarlet moon is September and that’s when the wild plums are scarlet in the reservation. The moon of ripe cherries, that’s when the wild cherries are a deep plum colour.

 “I’ve still got four to get. You only get a minute or two to shoot. The foreground and moon have to be at the same density. You can teach chemistry and how to fix a machine, but a natural view is God-given.

 “I sit there and wait and then I shoot. Otherwise I pack up and go home.  I’ve set up and packed up 100 times.”

 "You’ve had a very interesting life,” I say in awe of this modest and fascinating photographer, who never uses a digital camera for his own work, as he shows me his room full of cameras and lenses. (He also once owned production labs in seven states – all since closed.)

 “Well, it’ not past,” he answers. “I work every day. I work four days in the lab and I take Friday to get ready to do a shoot. I went to (Mount) Rushmore every Saturday all summer.

 "I’m a commercial photographer. I’ve done portraits. I no longer do that… I do a lot of the tough jobs, photographing murals, things that nobody else wants to spend the time to do.”

 *        A longer version of this interview/story is available at request.

Photos: Diana Plater. Apologies to Bill Groethe for the quality!

TRAVEL FACES: Fighting cocks, Bali starlings and fried chicken

Ollie Smith and I wrote Raging Partners back in 2000 and we are in the midst of turning it into an e-book.

Our new chapter will be about our love affairs with Bali and the Balinese. Here's an excerpt from the work-in-progress:

To the Birds: Fighting cocks, Bali starlings and fried chicken.

Ollie’s little house in Dalung was filled with Balinese men partying every night, and cleaning up each morning. Cigarette butts were swept away and all traces of alcohol – beer and arak, the sickly sweet palm brandy that Balinese love. They’d sit in a circle and pass a cup around, sometimes mixed with orange juice, gradually getting drunker and more sentimental as the night wore on. Music would blare from a tinny tape recorder. Their favourite at the time was James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful. I’ll never get that damned song out of my head.

In the morning one of the men would make us kopi bali – thick, black and sweet – and we’d sit on little timber stools on Ollie’s verandah and survey the comings and goings of the street. Ollie had met Nyoman the year before – a sexy, silver-jewellery-wearing Balinese 20 years her junior – which led to her buying this house.

Nyoman’s father had had 18 children to two wives. He was actually married three times, but his first wife died childless. So Nyoman had a string of brothers and sisters and cousins who would come to the house on their motorbikes.

One night I was sitting inside on one of the benches under a fan to try and cool off from the steamy heat when one of these half brothers turned up. Budi was wearing a white sarong and udung as he’d just come from a ceremony, which matched his shiny teeth. He sat on one side of the window with the men, flirting through the wooden slats with me like a priest hearing confession.

Budi was a breath of fresh air after what I’d just been through: dad’s death six months before and a divorce.

I guess I should have seen it as a warning sign though that his job was helping his cousin look after his fighting cocks.  These fights are held as part of temple ceremonies as blood sacrifice is entwined in Balinese Hindu culture. According to renowned writer Fred B Eiseman Caru is blood sacrifice to the demons, bhutas and kalas, or more philosophically to the negative aspects of the universe.  Killing an animal in this way is not considered a cruelty – it actually acquires Karma and they are treated with reverence.  The cockfight, tajen, also appeases the bhutas with the spilling of blood.

But illegal competitions where thousands of dollars are bet and lost are also held all over the island.

The day after we met I had to go to Ubud to stay at a traditional five star hotel to write a story. Ollie thought it would be fun to come up and meet me and bring some of the boys. We went to the Jazz Club and danced to salsa music but they dropped me alone at the hotel on the way back – despite almost getting lost. Who said Balinese know their island? And as for reading a map. Forget it.

The next day Budi rode for more than an hour to visit me – at my villa with my own huge swimming pool. I had been trying to get an interview with Kadek Wiranatha, a local Mr Big, and only minutes after he arrived I got the call. Come down now to Legian for the interview.

“Budi, can you give me a lift?”  And we took off on his motorbike. He seemed to understand my job which was a great plus to me and I felt very comfortable and happy in his company.

The following January I returned to Bali and Budi and we decided to go to Lombok, via his village at Tianyar, in Karangnasem on the north-east coast.

We stayed the night at Budi's father's house, and everybody seemed to be worried that he was going on such a long trip.

I thought this was a bit of an over-reaction; it was only a five-hour ferry ride and perhaps a few more hours by road up the west coast of Lombok.

The only problem I could see were the afternoon downpours of the wet season.

The next morning we had coffee with Budi's father's second wife.

After changing her blouse and putting a sash around her sarong she said prayers at the compound temple to give us luck for the journey.

"Is it holiday or work that you are going to Lombok for?" she called out.

 "Holiday," he answered.

  "You must pray in the village temple," she told him.

 While I waited on the back of the motor bike  he also put on a sash, put rice on his forehead, lit incense, tossed bougainvillea around and prayed.

 As he climbed back on the bike he still had crimson petals in his thick, black hair.

We drove the bike onto the ferry at Padangbai and watched as food sellers crowded on to sell rice, noodles, water and bananas before it headed off.

 Budi remained sitting most of the time while I looked out across the sea to the island of Lombok.

 It was almost dark when we arrived. We rode again in the rain through the capital, Mataram, and then onto Senggigi, where we found a room in an almost empty hotel.

 The next day we headed north, avoiding chickens, ducks and goats on the road to the little port from where we jumped on a tiny fishing boat taking furniture to Gili Trawangan.

 When we returned to Dalung, Budi's family and friends were keen to know how the trip went.

 "Fantastic," I said, "It was one of the best holidays ever."

 "That's OK for her," Budi joked. "She was on the back. I was the one doing all the hard work."

 Then one night just before I left to fly back to Sydney, Budi asked me something:

 "Did you notice I looked a bit worried on the boat trips?"

 "Oh no," I said sunnily, thinking he'd loved the trip too.

 "Well I was actually very scared," he said. "Did you know I almost drowned a few years ago?"

 "No!" I was shocked, although I did know that like many Balinese he couldn't swim.

 "It was when I was working on a Thai fishing boat, out near Maluku," he continued. "I was hanging out my washing on a rope and I lost my footing and fell into the sea. One of the fishermen - a Thai man - threw me a rope.

 "I was so traumatised, I flew back to Bali and hadn't been on a boat since."

 "Why didn't you tell me?" I asked, remembering then that he had clung tightly to the small boat's mast and didn't seem to want to look over the edge of the ferry. "We didn't have to go."

 "It would have ruined your holiday," he answered.

Much to my surprise, and I really mean this, I was getting involved with a Balinese guy – 20 years younger than me. Was that what I really wanted? Was that what I needed? Well I knew I needed fun more than anything else. 

I’ll admit it, I didn’t really know that much about Balinese culture. I was interested to the extent of spirituality and its meaning in people’s lives. But being a cynic about religion and in particular religious hierarchy I could never get into it. I didn’t want to become one of those Australian women who marry or live with Balinese men and take on the whole mantle – wearing sarongs and kebayas as if they were born in them, making offerings, attending ceremonies. Even having their teeth filed as part of the wedding ceremony, to get rid of the ‘animal’ in you. Nuh, I have a good dentist and he thinks my teeth are fine just as they are.

I did ask him lots of questions about his religion and beliefs but he found it almost impossible to describe the reasoning behind it all. “Please explain,” I’d say. “Sorry I can’t explain it,” he’d answer.

 Budi was determined to come to Australia. There was nothing he wanted more. Was I just a vessel to get him here? Would he have gone with any other woman who was mad enough to sponsor him to come and live here? He denies that. He says he still loves me. He just couldn’t handle the gambling temptations in every pub and club here.

So after more than six good years in Sydney, Budi’s back in Bali, working for a big businessman who breeds fighting cocks. He’s their “security” making sure people don’t climb the barbed wire to steal these incredibly valuable animals that are sold on the international market.

Rather than fighting cocks, I spent part of this last trip searching for the endangered Bali Starling. Way up in the national park in the north west of Bali, we bumped along a rough track, as monkeys tried to climb into the car. Across the sea was Java. Finally we reached a temple in the jungle and a sign, “Save the Birds, Save The Trees, Save the Earths”. A ranger came out and took me by the hand and another gave me a pair of binoculars. There in the trees coming out of her little wooden nesting box was a white-crested blue-eyed starling and her baby. The ranger told me there were only 25 now in the national park area after years of poaching for the caged bird trade.

Back in Legian we went to eat fried chicken sitting cross-legged  at a warung as the rain teemed down.

 I told Budi about my trip and the starlings and he said, “I call them Jalak.”

Then I asked him if he was lonely without me and he said: “No, I have my family and friends. My nephews always smile when they see me and say, Hi Uncle.”

I said: “I hope we will stay friends.”

“Close friends,” he said as he bit into the chicken.