Mara Ninti (Clever Hands) Liritja (necklaces) by Lynette Lewis
Ernabella Arts & The Indigenous Jewellery Project

Women in Design

DESIGN Canberra 2017

Craft ACT: Craft & Design Centre

Curated by Emily McCulloch Childs

 Artist’s statement:

My name is Lynette Lewis. I am an artist and mother from Ernabella. I use my hands to express my country and my culture. I am interested in the patterns, the lines and colours I see in the world around me.

I create work in ceramics, painting and more recently contemporary jewellery. For a long time I have also created traditional jewellery using tatu (seeds) and punu (timber carving.) My mother, Atipalku Intjalki, is also an artist; she passed these jewellery skills down to me.

In my painting and ceramics I tell the tjala Tjukurpa (honey ant story) of my father’s country, a place called Makiri near Fregon in the APY Lands. Tjala or honey ants live deep in the ground beneath Mulga trees in tunnels called nyinantu.

When I create liritja  (necklaces) I use beautiful coloured wooden beads and also wayanu (quandong) seeds cast in resin. Resin holds light. The resin beads glow with their beautiful colours in the same way the mana maru (backside) of the tjala do when they are full of sweet honey.

The Indigenous Jewellery Project

The Indigenous Jewellery Project is the first nation-wide Indigenous contemporary jewellery project, working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander owned art centres across Australia, comprising research, workshops, photography, films, and exhibitions.

The Indigenous Jewellery Project was created by McCulloch & McCulloch co-director Emily McCulloch Childs to help traditional jewellers at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander owned art centres across Australia and contemporary jewellers. These have included Erub Erwer Meta in the Torres Strait Islands, Ikuntji Artists in Haasts Bluff, Northern Territory, Ernabella Arts in the APY Lands, South Australia and Buku-Larrnggay Mulka in Yirrkala, NE Arnhem Land, Northern Territory.

IJP has run workshops with artist Kate Rohde and contemporary jeweller Melinda Young and been involved in over 14 exhibitions including at the JamFactory, Adelaide, Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Darwin, NGV Store, National Contemporary Jewellery Award, Griffith Regional Gallery and touring to Sturt Centre for Design, NSW, Stanley Street Galleries, Sydney, Craft ACT, Canberra, Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair, Desert Mob, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs, and the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin.

 Lynette Lewis: Mara Ninti (Clever Hands)

Lynette Lewis is an artist, ceramicist and jeweller from Ernabella Arts, Pukatja community, APY Lands, in northern South Australia. She learnt jewellery from her mother, artist Atipalku Intjalki. Anangu jewellery is a thousands year old tradition that is still practiced very much today. Jewellers use native plant seed beads such as quandong: called wayanu in Pitjantjatjara, and gum nuts, called tatü, to make liritja (necklaces).

In 2015 Lynette participated in an Indigenous Jewellery Project workshop with contemporary jeweller & UNSW lecture Melinda Young, and IJP curator Emily McCulloch Childs. Her work focuses exclusively on the Anangu liritja tradition.

Using a combination of natural seed beads, seeds cast in resin during IJP’s previous workshop at Ernabella with Kate Rohde, and other beads, Lynette created a stunning series of necklaces, displaying her skill with design and colour.

A diptych of these were selected for the National Contemporary Jewellery Award, Griffith Regional Gallery, making Lynette the first Aboriginal jeweller to be a finalist in this award.

Mara Ninti is her first solo exhibition.

Catalogue essay for Australian Design Centre exhibition: Bulay(i): Buku-Larrnggay Mulka & The Indigenous Jewellery Project

Exhibition images by Simon Cardwell

As one of Australia’s most prestigious and internationally recognised Aboriginal-owned art centres, Buku-Larrŋggay Mulka in Yirrkala, the Yolŋu community outside of Nhulunbuy (Gove) in North East Arnhem Land, is well-recognised for both practicing and maintaining artistic and cultural tradition and creating exciting innovation with its art.

An art centre is a not for profit community business owned by Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander artists, run by a board, with staff appointed as managers or co-ordinators, as they are still called at Buku-Larrnggay. It is a uniquely Australian invention, invented long before the acronyms NFP and NTO became buzz words in the new business model world.

Established in 1976, Buku-Larrnggay Mulka works with many artists living in Yirrkala and its satellite homelands within a several hundred km radius. Artists have exhibited in many of Australia’s top public and commercial galleries, including as part of the Biennale of Sydney at the MCA, the NGA, AGNSW,  NGV,  NMA and internationally including the Istanbul Biennial and in the exhibition Marking the Infinite, Newcomb Museum of Art, touring USA.

The art centre has a close proximity to an airport and accommodation at nearby Nhulunbuy. Along with its fame for significance in land rights, it is rich in art and music (home of Yothu Yindi and family with nearby Elcho Island’s the late Dr. G. Yunupiŋgu), and the home of the yiḏaki or dhambiḻpiḻ (didgeridoo), and Garma Festival.

On any given day, one may encounter collectors and gallery directors from America, professors from Canberra, top Australian public gallery curators, important politicians (often a Prime Minister), or famous musicians, actors or artists. This is amidst the constant stream of fascinated tourists visiting for the rich culture, beautiful tropical scenery and world-class fresh seafood that the region has to offer, especially now that Yirrkala boasts a Yolŋu-owned and operated tourism business, Lirrwi Tourism.

Buku-Larrŋggay Mulka has long been a leading studio in printmaking, and is world famous for its tradition of bark painting and sculpture, with large commissions including The Kerry Stokes Collection of 95 larrakitj poles and accompanying encyclopedic book.

More recently these artists have explored new media in their art, working with computer programming, film and virtual reality with the Mulka Project. The centre’s dedicated archival and film project, it is now one of its major forces in working with younger generations full of the artistic genius that seems to spring up everywhere in this historically significant place.

As well as painting, sculpture, new media and printmaking, craft has always been well maintained here. The art centre is a treasure trove of stunning fibre work by Yolŋu women, inventive small wooden carvings and objects and of course jewellery.

Strands of necklaces, called girring’girring in Yolŋu matha, the lingua franca of the region’s many languages, hang in the art centre, delighting visitors who visit in a seemingly endless stream.

Whilst the jewellery practice from this region, consisting mostly of necklaces strung with extremely fine seed beads, shells and shark vertebrae, has long been noted and admired, appearing in the groundbreaking exhibition Art on a String (Louise Hamby and Diana Young, Object: Australian Design Centre for Craft & Design, 2001), Bulay(i) is the first jewellery-focused project held at Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka.

Bulay(i)
Yolngu Matha language
rich jewellery, gold, precious stones, bronze, treasure.

Bulay(i) is ‘old Yolngu’. It may refer to the treasures of the neighbouring Macassans, over the sea, who Yolngu have had a long relationship with. All of this exhibition is Bulay(i): not just the metals, the first metal jewellery made at Yirrkala. The natural materials are also precious.

Bulay(i) is the fourth Indigenous contemporary jewellery project undertaken by The Indigenous Jewellery Project. IJP is national: and has ranged from workshops in the Torres Strait Islands, to Ernabella (Pukatja) in Pitjantjatjara lands in northern South Australia, to Haasts Bluff on Luritja land in the Western Desert, and now with the Yolngu in north east Arnhem Land. It is the first contemporary jewellery project held at Buku-Larrnggay Mulka.

The Indigenous Jewellery Project is an attempt to address a gap, or rather two gaps. The first national contemporary jewellery project undertaken with Indigenous jewellers, it aims to provide a presence of Indigenous jewellers within the Australian contemporary jewellery context, and a contemporary jewellery presence within the Aboriginal art context.

The project has been inspired by many things: my collection of Indigenous jewellery, interactions with contemporary jewellers, being half New Zealander and seeing the now tradition of Maori contemporary jewellery, similar projects within Aboriginal art undertaken in printmaking (Basil Hall, Martin King), or weaving (Arnhem Land, Tjanpi Desert Weavers). The ways in which Arnhem Land art centres have worked with their skilled craftspeople in weaving to showcase the sophistication of their art.

IJP began because of an interest, and a need. Along the way in my path as a curator, I had the good fortune to cross paths with contemporary jewellers. They have taught me much about their genre of art, and through my own research into Aboriginal jewellery and body adornment I have seen the need for more development in this area. Of course it is largely a women’s art practice; although Aboriginal men do make jewellery and every one of our workshops has had male jewellers, from age six to adult. But it is undoubtably Aboriginal jewellery’s status as ‘women’s craft’ that has kept it out of the canon of Art.

The artists already working in such a way, such as Lola Greeno, Maree Clarke, and Julie Gough, for example, have illustrated the potential for the use of traditional Indigenous jewellery with contemporary jewellery as a powerful art medium created for the gallery space.

But for jewellers who live in the very remote areas, there is little access to contemporary jewellery influences, teachers or materials. We must come to them.

This project is a vision for a new kind of curating. I call it interactive or pro-active curating. Beyond the role of being a receiver of art, the concept of ‘curator’ may have originated from the museum, but is evolving. A new curatorial premise can include being the initiator of art projects. Curators are in a position to see the gaps. We have minds similar to artists, but yet not exactly like theirs. We don’t have their impetus to communicate visually, to make with the hands, but we understand them and what they create effects us strongly. We want to help bring their creations to the world. We are the Dhuwa to their Yirritja: we complement each other, we are in a symbiosis: this is our natural state.

Girring’girring

‘All art springs from the soil.’
Geoffrey Bardon

Traditional Yolngu jewellery is now well-known and recognised mainly due to its use of incredibly fine seed beads, often strung on long necklaces that can be wrapped around the neck two or even three times. These long necklaces are a direct descendent of ceremonial necklaces.

I recall first becoming familiar with these necklaces, and being astonished at the fineness of them, the skill of the makers. I was almost intimidated by their fineness, especially when compared to the larger necklaces of Central Australia I was more used to. And then there was the shark and fish cartilage. What jewellery genius eons ago had first thought to string beads from this material? The whiteness of the cartilage has such pure beauty: it recalls white ochre, and the whiteness of ceremonial feathers. The shape of the cartilage is sculptural, with small rhythmic holes like dots made by a skilled artist. The skill of these jewellers is in making art from nature’s materials.

It took several events to get to this stage: the first was discovering that Buku-Larrnggay Mulka’s long-term art co-ordinator, Will Stubbs, shared a similar fascination for these necklaces and their tradition as I do. During a visit to the art centre, he showed me a collection of girring’girring, made by women of this Miwatj region, including out on very remote tiny islands, that is significantly beautiful. Two of these necklaces have since been exhibited, at Tactile Arts, Darwin. They are comprised of shark cartilage but also the blue bone of parrot fish, an example we have in this exhibition is by the exemplary necklace jeweller Madinydjarr Yirrinyina #2 Yunupiŋu.

Together Will and I set out on making a jewellery project at Buku-Larrnggay Mulka happen.

The second event was the knowledge of contemporary jeweller and UNSW lecturer Melinda Young, whose become my partner in jewels with much of The Indigenous Jewellery Project. Before the workshops Melinda researched ways we could help fix the problems of the necklaces, which to us was mainly the fact that they were strung on fishing line: not something a jeweller would consider a suitable stringing material. Melinda helped bring in proper jeweller’s materials, and during the first workshop in particular she undertook much research & development into the issues with the necklaces.

She had science experiments going on the verandah of the house we were staying in, little bits of wire with seed beads on them, in various states. When her research was concluded she was overjoyed: the seed beads had ‘worked’ in the way she wanted them to. From observing the Yolngu jewellers, she noticed how they used fresh seeds, allowing them to dry on their string. The amount the seed shrank when dry caused gaps in the necklaces. Now, strung in our workshops, they have gaps but they look beautiful as there is no plastic fishing line to be seen. In fact, now that they are strung on silk, they are made from 100 % natural materials. They are now much stronger, more durable and infinitely more wearable than ever before.

The workshops

‘Art is a way of establishing connections between people across cultures.’
Professor Howard Morphy, Djalkiri: We are standing on their names, Blue Mud Bay (Djambawa Marawili, Marrirra Marawili, Liyawaday Wirrpanda, Marrnyula Mununggurr, Mulkun Wirrpanda participated in a printmaking workshop with master printmaker Basil Hall at the community of Yilpara, North East Arnhem Land, working alongside Fiona Hall, John Wolseley, Jörg Schmeisser and Judy Watson, 2009)

‘When you aren’t pushing uphill: when it just flows, when you aren’t forcing it: that’s when you have entered the Aboriginal space, and it’s working.’
Kim Mahood, advice to me, Mulan community, Tanami desert, Western Australia, August 2017

Each time we arrive in North East Arnhem Land it seems like it is to some kind of ceremony. Twice now there’s been the new music festival, Yarrapay, on. For the second workshop as I arrived there appeared a perfect rainbow, arcing over the community store with its mural of the famous artists and leaders, adorned in traditional Yolngu body adornment. According to artist and Bulay(i) jeweller Marrnyula Mununggurr, it was welcoming us.

The rhythm of the day begins, lost in a rhythm of tiny seed beads, tiny shell beads, wax carving, all kinds of shapes and creatures and designs appearing.

We run out of beads and go gathering: this is just down the road usually, to where the jungle, the bush that surrounds us, encroaches upon the community. Thick tangles of vines, flowers: it all looks the same to me, but the jewellers spot each and every different kind of seed bead plant. They show me how and where to look: once you get your eye in it’s easy to spot the green seed pods everywhere. It takes me a while to figure out which seeds, encased inside their pods like tiny perfect rows of sleeping bead babes, are perfect for beads, and which are too old to use.

The best ones are green/yellow to orange, not too young or too old, turning red. The seeds start off green and move to yellow to orange to red to brown. They are as transformative as the mythological shapeshifter creator beings. The jewellers use these different colours to give design and rhythm to their necklaces.

Yolngu are saltwater people, and the sea is part of their traditional country.
Reference to the sea abounds in their art. The sea is fundamental to Bulay(i): in the materials, and subject matter of many totemic marine animals. There are myriad names in Yolngu matha for different kinds of fish, at different stages of their lives,
The natural world is always present in Yirrkala, and many of its artists live in homelands by the sea, or go ‘hunting’ on the weekends: gathering sea foods.

The first workshop established the core Bulay(i) crew. Making jewellery as a group seems to be an incredibly strong bonding exercise. It should be used by the United Nations, in mediation, in Parliament, to stop wars.  Our core jewellers include Marrnyula Mununggurr: an artist, daughter of the significant artist Nongirrnga Marawili, granddaughter of famed artist and leader Wonggu Mununggurr, Madatjula Yunupingu, the great earring maker, and Madinydjarr Yirrinyina #2 Yunupiŋu, an exemplary traditional jeweller. She lives on her homeland of Wanduway, and only comes into Yirrkala occasionally. We were lucky enough to have her in the workshops, and she made an impressive amount of very fine girring’girring. Her young daughters also have her talent for jewellery: they took to lost wax instantly.

For this project, I became a workshop co-ordinator, project manager, and jeweller’s assistant. I have now become entrenched within a family of jewellers who share amongst us a common understanding of the significance of jewellery. We delight in the meditative process of gathering: seeds and shells, of sitting on the ground and making by hand, the rhythm of carving jeweller’s wax, of creating something that you can wear on the body, gift to a friend to wear, hang on a wall.

Working in the studio with the jewellers every day over several workshops, we became profoundly effected by the experience. We began to learn Yolngu words, to build up our Balanda mouths to learn the trickier Yolngu pronunciation for sounds that we don’t have in English. One day Marrnyula, an artist I’ve always connected with and who has adopted me as her ‘yapa’ (sister), gave me my Yolngu name: Dhonyin, the Javanese file snake, one of the three manifestations of the Rainbow Serpent within Yolngu culture. When we asked her why I was given this name, she said because I looked like a file snake: it was my hair, she said, yellow and brown, like the snake’s body, and with rainbow colours: this water snake creates rainbow patterns on the water as it moves through water lilies.

Symbol of creation, fertility, transformation. Dhonyin the Rainbow Serpent creates beauty, a rainbow, from water and leaves. For this exhibition, Marrnyula created a series of Dhonyin pendants: they symbolise this hugely significant creation spirit. Perhaps Marrnyula named me Dhonyin also because I created this project: to transform, to evolve, to elevate. But it is these jewellers who have the true creation magic: to create beauty and art. The Bulay(i) jewellers create beauty from twisted vines and tiny seed pods and shells. Dhonyin symbolises our transformation and the transformation of Yolngu jewellery: no longer confined to the art centre in Yirrkala, now ready to go out into the world and to transform us all.

Emily McCulloch Childs, October 2017

I would like to thank Melinda Young, who has been so invaluable as workshop teacher, curatorial advisor, and much more on this project, production assistant Jody Thompson, Will Stubbs, Merrkirrwuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Siena Stubbs, Edwina Circuitt, staff, board and artists of Buku-Larrnggay Mulka, the community of Yirrkala, the Mununggurr family, the Yunupingu family, all the Bulay(i) jewellers, and the Ministry for the Arts Indigenous Languages & Arts Program for supporting this project.

For Garland magazine Issue 7: For Love & Money I wrote a diary of our second Bulay(i) workshop working with Buku-Larrnggay Mulka on their first contemporary jewellery project

Bulay(i): Contemporary Yolŋu Jewellery: The Indigenous Jewellery Project meets Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka

Emily McCulloch Childs

The Indigenous Jewellery Project travels to North East Arnhem Land to explore the fascinating tradition of Yolŋu jewellery and work with jewellers on an exciting new project.

Bulay(i): rich jewellery, gold, precious stones, bronze treasure (Yolŋu Matha language)

As one of Australia’s most prestigious and internationally recognized Aboriginal-owned art centres, Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka in Yirrkala, the Yolŋu community outside of Nhulunbuy (Gove) in North East Arnhem Land, is well-recognised for both practicing and maintaining artistic and cultural tradition and creating exciting innovation with its art.

Its artists have exhibited in many of Australia’s top public and commercial galleries, including as part of the Biennale of Sydney at the MCA, the NGA, AGNSW, NGV, NMA and internationally including the Istanbul Biennial and in the exhibition Marking the Infinite, Newcomb Museum of Art, touring USA.

Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka has long been a leading studio in printmaking, and is world famous for its tradition of bark painting and sculpture, with large commissions including The Kerry Stokes Collection of 95 larrakitj poles and accompanying encyclopedic book.

More recently these artists have explored new media in their art, working with computer programming and film, with the Mulka Project, the centre’s dedicated archival and film project, now one of its major forces in working with younger generations full of the artistic genius that seems to spring up everywhere in this historically significant place.

As well as painting, sculpture, new media and printmaking, craft has always been well maintained here. The art centre is a treasure trove of stunning fibre work by Yolŋu women, inventive small wooden carvings and objects and of course jewellery. Strands of necklaces, called girring-girring in Yolŋu matha, the lingua franca of the region’s many languages, hang in the art centre, delighting visitors who visit in a seemingly endless stream.

The art centre’s proximity to an airport and accommodation at nearby Nhulunbuy means, along with its fame for significance in land rights, art, music (home of Yothu Yindi and family with nearby Elcho Island’s Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupiŋgu), the home of the yiḏaki or dhambiḻpiḻ (didgeridoo), and Garma Festival. On any given day, one may encounter collectors and gallery directors from America, professors from Canberra, top Australian public gallery curators, important politicians (often a Prime Minister), or famous musicians, actors or artists. This is amidst the constant stream of fascinated tourists visiting for the rich culture, beautiful tropical scenery and world-class fresh seafood that the region has to offer, especially now that Yirrkala boasts a Yolŋu-owned and operated tourism business, Lirrwi Tourism.

Whilst the jewellery practice from this region, consisting mostly of necklaces strung with extremely fine seed beads, shells and shark vertebrae, has long been noted and admired, appearing in the groundbreaking exhibition Art on a String (Louise Hamby and Diana Young, Object: Australian Design Centre for Craft & Design, 2001), this is the first jewellery-focused project held at Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka, which works with many artists living in Yirrkala and its satellite homelands within a several hundred km radius.

Its aims are to hold workshops aimed at helping Yolŋu jewellers upskill and develop their jewellery practice, to help maintain traditional jewellery practice, and to learn new skills such as lost wax and working for the exhibition space. The strength of all Aboriginal art has been the artists ability to both maintain their strong traditions whilst innovating their art in ways they see fit. In Yirrkala, there is a very strong tradition of bark painting in natural ochre using natural hairbrush, but the artist Gunybi Ganambarr has innovated this tradition by using mining offcuts such as metal and rubber. Yet his designs remain strongly traditional. Introducing lost wax for metals and professional jewellers materials for stringing is similar; the artists designs are still Yolŋu, but they are using materials which develop their practice.

Working with Sydney-based contemporary jeweller, UNSW lecturer and curator Melinda Young, as The Indigenous Jewellery Project founding curator I have run two workshops here, thanks to generous support from the Ministry for the Arts Indigenous Languages and Arts Program. The results will be exhibited later this year at the Australian Design Centre, Sydney, and Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre, Canberra.

This is a visual diary of the second workshop, held in April/May 2017: which saw jewellers continue to develop their practice and the project grow to encompass over 20 jewellers.

Arrival and set up

Our contemporary jewellery workshop teacher Melinda Young has already arrived, bringing a heap of workshop materials and tools, and begun to set up our pop-up workshop studio.

We are lucky enough to be once again given the Collector’s Gallery as our workshop space. This sits at the side of the large art centre, by a courtyard housing a pond with a beloved file snake, a sacred local totem related to the Rainbow Serpent lore, and a large sculpture by Gunybi Ganambarr, who Sydney Morning Herald art critic John McDonald declared a genius and said of a solo exhibition of his at Sydney’s Annandale Galleries: ‘No artist, not even Picasso, had ever managed to come up with so many revolutionary gestures in the course of a single exhibition’.

In this gallery we are surrounded by large, stunning bark paintings by top contemporary artists such as Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu, Banduk Marika, Nongirrngna Marawili, Djirrirra Wunungmurra, Dhuwarrwarr Marika, Mulkun Wirrpanda, and a large installation of Mokuy sculptures by a Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA), New Media Award winner, Nawurapu Wunungmurra.

Over our first morning coffee, we are greeted with a striking rainbow over the mural of the historically significant land rights leaders that decorates the store near the centre. It depicts a group of these major Australian figures and artists including Wandjuk Marika, Mawalan Marika and Roy Dadaynga Marika, in full traditional body adornment and jewellery: their image serves as a daily inspiration and motivation for me, a visual reminder of their culture and strength, a spiritual reminder of their persistence, and greeting them becomes the first thing I do each morning. The rainbow, a manifestation of the Rainbow Serpent for Yolŋu, is a good omen, according to our jewellers: it is welcoming us to this special place.

Workshop Day One: Wednesday

Our first thing to do is get the word out. With one of our jewellers, we go for a drive around the community to visit jewellers and let them know we are here and to come down to the workshop.

We set up our lost wax studio and have the first jewellers in the workshop. Melinda Young makes a surprisingly good jewellers bench out of the concrete breezeblocks that are everywhere here: used as presses to flatten out the barks for painting. She’s brought back the metals that were made last time for the jewellers to begin to learn the process of clean up and finishing.

She also has with her a very exciting development, a ring made with BLM young artist Djawalun No.2 (DJ) Marika. The grandson of famed artist and leader Wandjuk Marika, DJ came into the art centre one day wearing a ring made from a stingray he had caught. Called dirimbi, this is a kind of stingray that has rings on its tail. Traditionally, the hunter would wear these rings as a trophy of his catch. Will Stubbs, BLM’s co-ordinator, sent me a photo of DJ wearing this stingray ring, which I passed onto Mel. With her directions, the ring was put onto wood and sent to her in Sydney, where she prepared it for casting. Several stingray rings were prepared by her and some initially didn’t work, but then one did.

The results are stunning: the texture of the ring and its tiny horns is tactile and unique and it is the first I have known of a traditional Aboriginal ring. That this Yolŋu men’s tradition may be thousands of years old makes this an exciting discovery in the world of jewellery. We are all very excited about the potential for this ring and think it could have impact internationally. That a young Yolŋu man is continuing this jewellery tradition of his forefathers and the art centre is working to translate it into his contemporary age is symbolic of this art movement; a brilliant blend of strong tradition and innovation.

The ring was entered and accepted into the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA), the Aboriginal art world’s most significant art award, held at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, to be shown this August.

In our workshop, we are joined by the very established artist Dhuwarrwarr Marika, who has several bark paintings in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. Mel introduces her to lost wax and she makes her first pieces in this medium.

Another elder, Djul’ Djul’ Gurruwiwi also joins us. One of my favourite artists, our gallery has enjoyed exhibiting her work, beautiful depictions of totemic fish and water lilies. She is also introduced to lost wax and makes several pieces.

A new young jeweller, printmaker and associate director of the BLM Print Space, Rebecca Marika joins us, and instantly impresses us with her skills and feel for lost wax. The strength of these artists practice in traditional woodcarving and in printmaking lends itself well to lost wax, as much of it is about carving and etching. She also brings her own tool kit of printmaking tools that Mel discovers work incredibly well for etching into the jeweller’s wax, which is very exciting.

Workshop Day Two: Thursday

Dhuwarrwarrr Marika and Rebecca Marika join us again, and we continue with lost wax. As it is the end of the wet season, the seeds that the jewellers picked in our first workshop during the dry season last year aren’t available yet, so we are only working with shells, shark vertebrae, some limited seed beads from last year, and lost wax. It’s a good opportunity for the jewellers to develop their lost wax skills and refine their practice.

Gunybi Ganambarr also visits us, and is fascinated by my dremel toolkit. This artist has single-handedly revolutionised bark painting by using leftover materials from the local mining: large pieces of rubber and tin, which he etches into in intricate, beautifully patterned design. I explain to him the lost wax process and he is intrigued. I can envision this artist working in jewellery: his smaller rubber pieces would make incredible neckpieces and his skill at etching would transfer wonderfully to lost wax. It may be another potential future idea for this creatively rich art centre and our project.

In the afternoon, one of the talented jewellers from the last workshop Mandy Wanambi arrives. One of the biggest issues we thought of when we began this project was how to upskill the girring girring made by these jewellers. They are strung on fishing line, which has several issues. In research last year, Melinda Young identified three major issues with the fishing line: gaps, breaking and scratching. These jewellers use these tiny seeds fresh, and as they dry they shrink, creating gaps in the necklace. Fishing line also breaks, and the knots used to tie the necklaces are scratchy and irritating for the wearer.

In our first workshop we brought better quality necklace materials and the jewellers took to it instantly. What has become apparent to me through working with Indigenous jewellers is that no one understands this project and my vision for it better than these jewellers. They skillfully use the materials that are available to them to make jewellery, and are a long distance from the jewellery supply stores in Melbourne and Sydney. Their use of fishing line is not just cultural, but also born out of necessity.

Proper jewellery materials and tools are taken up enthusiastically, and whilst not every idea Mel and I suggest is of interest, the ones that are have great results.

This project has not so much been initiated by me, as is a response to the jewellery practice that already exists. As in the other mediums of art, all it takes is focus, attention and some assistance to develop this work from where it is situated currently into the exhibition space.

Another aspect of the girring girring is the importance of helping Yolŋu document and preserve language. Some of the Yolŋu matha words are disappearing from use: jewellers often refer to seed beads as ‘baked beans’ or ‘coffee seed’. This is an ongoing part of my work in the project: to document and use names in Aboriginal languages as much as possible and create a glossary, and to introduce those names into the lexicon of Australian jewellery to the outside audience.

Day Three: Friday

Marrnyula Munuŋgurr joins us today. A long-time practicing artist, she has been working with BLM since the 1980s, and has had significant exhibitions and work in Cross Art Projects, Gertrude Contemporary and the NGV.

Marrnyula’s enduring theme is her installations of often hundreds of small bark paintings, painted finely in ochre with a hairbrush paintbrush with her clan design of crosshatched squares. She begins work on a lost wax series: a collection of rings etched with lines, to be stacked up to recall a larrakitj pole. She then begins work on a series of square pendants in wax with her fine cross-hatched geometric design.

Day Four: Saturday

Beach studio! We decide to go to Galuru, a beach west of Nhulunbuy, with Marrnyula, who takes the rings she’s working on with her. We are joined by some special visitors, Nick Mitzevich, the director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, and Nici Cumpston, AGSA’s Curator of Indigenous Art and the director of TARNANTHI Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal + Torres Strait Islander Art, who are visiting the art centre.

Nick Mitzevich becomes instantly obsessed with DJ and Mel’s stingray ring: and says he never wears jewellery but he wants to wear one immediately!

Nici was The Indigenous Jewellery Project’s first supporter and helped us bring our first exhibition, working with Ernabella Arts and Ikuntji Artists, to the JamFactory, Adelaide, as part of the first TARNANTHI. She enjoys watching Marrnyula making her rings and hearing about the process, and we talk about future ideas for the project with TARNANTHI.

Everyone goes hunting and brings back fresh mussels and oysters, cooked on the campfire, and declares them the best they’ve ever eaten, while Marrnyula and I make rings together, Mel Young goes hunting for shells and other materials along the beautiful beach.

Day Five: Sunday

Sunday is hunting day in Yirrkala, meaning that the art centre staff, family and friends go for a long drive in the troopy to a more remote beach to gather fresh seafood. We all head off in the back of Will’s troopy, with Marrnyula and her sister with us, to Dhaliwuy Bay, a stunning spot popular for fishing and camping, passing the Garma Festival site as we do.

On the way we stop for oysters, and Marrnyula shows me the amount of shells and coral on the sloping cliff down to the rocky beach. We collect all kinds of shells that might be good for necklaces and find an incredible face-like stone.

Day Six: Monday

The great earring maker Robyn Madatjula Yunupiŋu joins us today. Robyn learnt to make hand-made earring hooks last year from Mel and is now a dedicated expert. She begins work on a new series of silver earrings using this years shell and shark vertebrae beads.

All the other jewellers continue on their lost wax and by the end of the day there is a small mountain of wax shavings on the floor! Mel fears we are running out of the large amount of wax she brought with her, so gets on the phone to order more.

Day Seven: Tuesday

It’s Anzac Day and the art centre’s closed but we all decide to work in the studio while it’s quiet. Lots of work gets done!

Day Eight: Wednesday

Marrnyula and the rest of the jewellers continue with their lost wax series. A particularly talented and dedicated young jeweller, Pamela Yunupiŋu, is making more and more refined lost wax work. She has a talent for the difficult aspects of jewellery: knot tying, the endless filing and sanding down required to get the work fine enough to be light-weight enough in metal to be wearable and soft on the wearer.

Day Nine: Thursday

The end of the wet season is having a final burst of rain, and we have a good group of jewellers inside the studio including new arrivals, as well as bark painters who usually paint in the courtyard outside.

We have also been looking at Contemporary Jewellery books with the jewellers to show them what is possible in terms of scale and making work not just for the body but also for the gallery space. In conversation with Marrnyula and Mel, we talk about Marrnyula’s installation at the NGV of 380 small barks and Melinda Young’s wooden neckpieces, and we all think about how to take Marrnyula’s barks onto the body. I enquire about any cultural issues with this and discuss this with Marrnyula, who knows an enormous amount. She says that it has no issues. Bark paintings were originally made on bark shelters, so there are no laws saying you can’t make them for the body just as you could for a wall. Marrnyula immediately makes some small barks and once strung the neckpiece looks incredible, both for the body and the wall. She sets about making a series of many of them for exhibition.

Day Ten: Friday

We have so many jewellers now making so much work: we are running out of materials! We beg the art centre for any more broken necklaces they may have, and find any old ones and even resort to buying some to reuse! I clean each seed and shell by hand with a paintbrush for the jewellers to use: I’m happy to be jeweller’s assistant and we need to use our time here as efficiently as we can.

We have some new jewellery talent come in, Marrnyula’s cousin, Yirrinyina #2 Yunupiŋu Maḏinydjarr nee Munuŋgurr, whose an exemplary necklace jeweller, working with shark vertebrae and parrot fish bone, and her two daughters, who are equally talented jewellers.

Day Eleven: Saturday

Mel and I have a meeting with Will in the morning to have a look at all the work and see how things are progressing. We discuss some of the designs that are culturally sensitive under Yolŋu law; anything he sees as problematic we pull out of the future exhibition works. Will is happy with the work and gives us some beautiful traditional feather armbands from the art centre to put in the exhibition. Mel suggests also including a spindle she saw, hand-made with soft bush string wrapped around it. These will provide important historical cultural context to the show at the Australian Design Centre.

We have heard from our jewellers that there are good shells to be found at Lombuy (Crocodile Creek), another beach not far from Nhulunbuy, so in the afternoon we head out there with Marrnyula, her sister Rerrkirrwanga Munuŋgurr and family. Rerrkirrwanga heads off into the mangroves, and after some time returns with a bag of the tiny shells, called ḻuthuḻuthu in Yolŋu Matha. We wash them with water from the billy on the campfire, and the sisters and Mel set about cleaning them and I take them home to clean again and dry out in the sun ready for Monday.

Last Days
Mel leaves us for Sydney Monday morning, and it’s May Day, a public holiday in the Northern Territory. The jewellers have seized the opportunity to go hunting for fresh bush tucker with their families, so it’s just Marrnyula and I in the studio. She continues work on her bark painting neckpieces and decides to make a large series of fifty! They will be stunning with her metal versions in the exhibition and to wear.

Our last day sees a big group of jewellers with still new ones coming in! Everybody is relaxed and focused now, huge amounts of wax gets made, and I have to finally wind everyone up to pack up all the work made, and the tools and materials and work for next time.

With last year’s and this year’s workshop I count how many jewellers we have: at least 23! They have made well over two hundred works and we plan to come back for our third workshop at the end of June to work further on the jewellers’ techniques, and on putting the cast metal pieces together with the shark, shell and seed necklaces to make some really stunning exhibition work.

Bulay(i): Contemporary Yolŋu Jewellery will show at Australian Design Centre, Sydney, 6 October – 15 November 2017

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An ambitious Australian project has recently emerged. The Indigenous Jewellery Project was initiated by Emily McCulloch Childs and to date has involved Melanie Katsalidis, Kate Rohde and Melinda Young. We learn from Emily about its origins, values, methods and future ambitions. She is interviewed by Kevin Murray, Managing Editor of Garland.

Garland: How was the project was conceived?

Emily McCulloch Childs (EMC): This project came about through an evolving interest in Aboriginal jewellery and contemporary jewellery. Early on, I was inspired by the exhibition Art on a String curated by Louise Hamby and Diana Young for Object in 2001. It to date is the only considered widely-focused Aboriginal jewellery exhibition and catalogue done in depth.

Researching Aboriginal women’s art, I became interested in the long (probably the oldest in the world) tradition of Aboriginal jewellery. I was also friends with several contemporary jewellers and contemporary jewellery curators in Melbourne, and we would often have long discussions about contemporary jewellery and Aboriginal art, wherein we would learn from each other.

I have been collecting Aboriginal jewellery from around Australia for about 15 years. Every time I visit events like Desert Mob, the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair, and the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, I collect jewellery. I always am impressed by Indigenous jewellers skills and design abilities.

Two necklaces I have from the NPY Lands (Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara region in Central Australia) particularly inspired me. They are painted quandong seeds, in very bright, contemporary colours. No artist was noted on their label. Part of this project is to identify Aboriginal jewellers, as Art on a String noted, so many are just anonymous. I could see also how great these quandong seeds would be cast in resin, which was the reason we started working with Kate Rohde.

Working in the field of Aboriginal art, I began to see a real gap within the field of contemporary jewellery. I’ve taken to calling it ‘the last great medium’ of Aboriginal art. Most other mediums, from painting, to weaving, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, new media, etc., are very well-represented by Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander artists, but only a handful of concerted contemporary jewellery projects have been undertaken.

One was a project with the Tiwi Art Network with Melbourne jeweller Ali Limb, which really inspired me. The work produced in silver was really beautiful. I could see the potential for indigenous artists to upskill their work into a more fine art, contemporary jewellery level. Through working with good curatorial drive and passion and great contemporary jewellers and object makers, I knew these artists could produce some really exciting, interesting art jewellery.

After making contact with Melanie Katsalidis of Pieces of Eight Gallery, who also saw the need for this sort of project, we began working with Kate Rohde. I helped Erub Erwer Meta art centre in the Torres Strait Islands to get Australia Council funding to send Kate up for two workshops. They fuse their ghost net weaving jewellery with resin.

Kate Rohde and I ran workshops in resin and lost wax at Ernabella Arts (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, SA) and Ikuntji Artists (NT). The work produced in these workshops was shown at the JamFactory in the exhibition Jewellery has always been here as part of TARNANTHI.

Garland: What does “upskilling” involve? What do you think may be the meaning and function of contemporary jewellery in a remote Aboriginal community like Ernabella?

EMC: Our aim is to give these jewellers the materials and support—the opportunity to work in a more fine art context. It has been done in every medium except jewellery: it’s been done in painting, ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, weaving, photography, new media, so why not in jewellery? It really is long overdue. These jewellers don’t have the opportunity to study at art schools in metropolitan cities, so we bring the art school to them. The workshops are a very intensive course in jewellery technique, using correct tools and professional materials, but also focused on maintaining tradition and passing on skills.

Aboriginal jewellers are perfectly placed to be contemporary jewellers. As you have written Kevin: contemporary jewellery is defined by connection to place. These jewellers’ work is all about their country: the materials, such as native seed beads, are gathered on country and relate to ancestral country and totemic ancestors. This is part of the artist’s identity. The Ernabella concept of walka: special design relating to an artist’s country and identity, has great application for contemporary jewellery, wherein design is personalised by its maker.

Ikuntji artist Virginia Ngalaia Napanangka’s work, such as her Western Desert Series is all about the symbolic totemic creation animals of each major site in the Western Desert, and her movement westwards through marriage to a Pintupi man from Kintore. It is highly conceptual: I believe Aboriginal artists are great conceptual artists: and this applies to their abilities with contemporary jewellery making also.

Additionally, Ernabella artist Niningka Lewis recorded endangered and extinct animals from her country in her work she did with us: this was used in the art centre during the workshops to teach children, the artist’s children and grandchildren, about these animals.

This project not only teaches new skills but also led to an interesting revival in tradition: at both Ernabella and Haasts Bluff, jewellers started making lots of what are called “bush jewellery”: necklaces in gumnuts, ininti and other native seeds. All of a sudden, these art centres were filled with this beautiful bush jewellery. The way it spread like wildfire was so inspiring and surprising to see: how if someone from outside, and the art centre, take an interest in an area of art, the artists will respond so well. At both art centres, jewellers came in who had never really come into the art centre before. I believe there’s a whole group of jewellers aren’t there with real skill and talent, just waiting in the wings for this kind of opportunity!

Last November, Pieces of Eight jeweller Melinda Young and I ran a two week jewellery workshop at Ernabella Arts.  We have just had an invitation from the NGA Shop to stock some work so that is an exciting promise for the future of these artists as contemporary jewellers and small object makers.  We are finding a lot of demand for this work particularly in the Aboriginal galleries, more than we are able to produce, as one of the reasons I began the project was because of the huge gap I saw, where there was really no consistent contemporary jewellery in the Aboriginal art worlds, apart from Lola Greeno, who was a real inspiration. More recently we have of course seen Vicki West, Maree Clarke, Jason Wing, and there has been a silver project in Arnhem Land with Zoe Crowder, but not really anything from these areas: the APY Lands, Western Desert in particular.

A huge part of this project was in identifying these jewellers and bringing forth their biographies and traditions, as well as working with them on new innovations, as is done in non-Indigenous contemporary jewellery and with say Aboriginal painting. As a collector I have a lot of anonymous jewellery and as an artist biographer, the artist is important to me.

Everything we do  (in the multi-faceted art company I run with my mother, Susan McCulloch, especially because we are art historians, is about personalising the artist as much as possible and undoing the colonial hangover of the “Anonymous Aboriginal Artist”. Indigenous jewellers have their own skill sets, designs, techniques and artistic creativity in their jewellery work just like they do in their other mediums, and this was a huge impetus for me in researching and doing films, etc. I was also becoming tired of beautiful necklaces that broke! Hence the upskilling.

Garland: I’ve  watched and considered your beautiful videos. It was great to get so much speaking to camera. It was clearly a sign of trust that the participants had in your project. I was also wondering: what do you think was special in the way the Aboriginal artists in Ernabella approached the use of resin in jewellery?

EMC: The background of Ernabella artists as punu (wood) carvers and their ceramic work was as important as their jewellery skills. Having an artist like Niningka Lewis who is unusual and experimental was important and having younger artists like Marissa Thompson who has a real skill for resin work was invaluable. The Ernabella tradition of walka (design) lends itself perfectly to mark making on clay or plasticine for making masters for resin. The ability of these artists to create small figures for casting and to gather seeds for beads was invaluable for resin.

The same goes for Ikuntji Artists: Virginia Ngalaia Napanangka, one of our most talented artists at Ikuntji, had a background from Hermannsburg—in fact her grandparents founded Hermannsburg Potters. She has an innate skill with clay. So when it came to resin, it’s really the same thing: it’s shaping in clay. So this was a perfect match. It’s much easier and more practical than glass for these remote art centres to work in. And they can also mix it with other materials easily.

When we were making the films one of the artists at Ikuntji, Alison Multa said to us: “You know jewellery is central to us traditionally. Jewellery is everything. It is probably THE most important art form.” Jewellery has very strong significance ceremonially and hairstring was used in love magic and things like that. So it is very powerful. But it was also used just more simply as body adornment, so it can be made as secular art, which works perfectly in a contemporary art context, where it can be publicly shown, and of course sold, and there is no issue with transgressing law or anything like that.

These artists are already working in a fine art context with their other mediums, particularly in weaving, painting, ceramics and printmaking. So this is not new to them in that sense. I think they feel similarly to me; that jewellery hasn’t been given its due and it is something that needs to happen. Some of the young leaders we have like Marissa Thompson and Anne Thompson who are very brilliant young women are really driven to do this more fine art work with jewellery. Marissa in particular identifies as being a jeweller, she has made jewellery since she was a little girl; she has a huge passion for it. People really enjoy making it. So if they can do that as a serious career, instead of here and there, it will be fulfilling and open up new doors for them.

Author

Emily McCulloch Childs is an art historian & writer, curator, gallery director, publisher and researcher.  She specialises in Indigenous art, and has worked with Aboriginal art and artists since 1994. She is co-director, with her mother Susan McCulloch, of McCulloch & McCulloch, a multi-faceted art company, and Whistlewood Gallery, on the Mornington Peninsula, and is the founding curator of The Indigenous Jewellery Project. She lives on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria.

Marissa Thompson

Marissa Thompson is a young Pitjantjatjara artist. The daughter of Ernabella Arts board member and former Chairperson, artist Carlene Thompson, her father Kawaki Punch Thompson was prominent in the APY Land Rights Movement, and her cousin is the significant ceramicist Derek Thompson.  As a child, Marissa was fascinated by traditional Anangu jewellery techniques and making, and studied these skills with her grandmothers who were elder jewellers.  Her jewellery work in the medium of resin includes necklaces using a variety of natural seeds, and seeds cast in resin, earrings and pendants. Her subject matter consists of totemic ancestral figures such as a small, local lizard and the well-known Ernabella walka design, etched into pendants and rings. Her skill at piercing ininti for necklaces is adept and remarkable in one so young, and her jewellery practice now extends to working not only in resin but also lost-wax design for silver and other metals.

We provided some questions for Marissa which were asked by Hannah Kothe, manager of Ernabella Arts.

Where does the design come from and who does it belong to?

The design is referring to that kind of tree that has small little bean pods hanging from it. The old ladies use to paint this shape longways.

With the help of a senior artist, Tjunkaya Tapaya, Marissa was able to identify the kind of tree she was referring to. Tjunkaya advised us that there are several kinds of trees that have these pods. In Pitjantjatjara the names for them are watarka, wakalpuka, ngatunpa and wanari. In English they are known as acacia or wattle trees. One variety is called Colony wattle or acacia murraynana. Traditionally the pods were moistened with water to make them soft and then ground to make a paste and eaten.

Marissa said she decided to change the original design used by the old women and create a walka where the bean leaf/pod went around in a circle.

What does it mean?

It is about country, the plants and the animals and how life goes round and round in a circle and everything is connected to each other.

Would you like to make more of these?

Yes, I enjoyed designing this work and creating thiswalka. I would really like to keep on going with it, to make more earrings and necklaces and other jewellery.

This interview appeared in Garland Issue 3: With Nature July 2016

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Tiwi artist Timothy Cook has won the 29th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA) with a stunning painting in natural pigments depicting an important traditional Tiwi ceremony. Kulama, in Cook’s signature ochre yellow, red, black and white, was awarded the $40,000 prize on Friday night at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Australia’s longest running Indigenous art award. Cook, a 53 year old, quiet man from Milikapiti, Melville Island, in the Tiwi Islands some 90 km north-west of Darwin, has been painting for some 13 years, and is the first Tiwi artist to win the award. At the announcement of his win on the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory lawns by the sea at sunset, he received enthusiastic applause from the audience, and was encouraged to perform his totemic Shark Dance with his fellow Tiwi friends and family, which he did, after much persuasion, with aplomb. It was a rare moment of pure joy in a oft-troubled industry that has suffered lately from much sorry business (the Aboriginal mourning following death), a damaged art market, low tourism, the social problems that plague Indigenous communities and the endless industry difficulties, from questionable dealers to the re-sale royalty (which is having the reverse intention of eliminating what was an important Aboriginalisation of the art industry, wherein artists successfully managed to be paid immediately for their works, rather than months later), and the Indigenous art-only code of conduct.
In an abrupt change from the awards of a few years ago, when there were many new media, photo media, photographic and conceptual installation works entered from Koori and Murri artists, and a highly-conceptual Murri artist (Danie Mellor) even won the award, this year there were few works in these mediums, and also few Koori entries in the final award exhibition (not one entry, for example, from Victoria or Tasmania). There was no New Media award given due to the lack of entries. Whilst the contemporary art world has embraced Indigenous artists from large towns and cities for their often cutting-edge art with its biting social commentary, their success in other areas and awards has led to less of these artists entering the NATSIAAs, feeling that it is no longer relevant to their careers.
Perhaps an emerging artist award could be a valid replacement, to new artists from all over Australia, with concerted effort to encourage artists from the south-eastern states to enter.
Cook’s work depicts the Kulama, an important increase ceremony, which is rarely held these days. It is an important work both artistically and culturally, due to the fading of cultural traditions plagueing Aboriginal society. When I visited Pirlangimpi (Garden Point), on Melville Island (Tiwi Islands) recently, the senior elder there Justin Puruntatameri (whose work, alongside his colleague’s Cornelia Tipuamantumeri was also included in this award) told me with great concern that the Kulama ceremony had not been held in his community for three years.
Cook’s work encompasses the Tiwi concept of Jilamara, which means ‘good design’: it is beautiful, strong, its composition well-balanced. I recently spoke with one of his long-time supporters, Gabriella Roy, of Aboriginal & Pacific Art, Sydney, who was exhibiting a work of his at the recent Melbourne Art Fair. She has been exhibiting Cook for some eleven years, and said that for many years, his work was difficult to sell. Tiwi art is much-admired by serious collectors, but its tribal rawness can be hard for the beginning eye to comprehend.

Raymond Zada, Racebook,  Giclée print on Hahnemuhle FineArt photo rag

The Work on Paper Award, Racebook, a digital print on paper, by emerging South Australian artist Raymond Zada, was the only conceptual winner. It received instant publicity from the media with its topical subject matter of racism on Facebook, with articles in The Age, The Financial Review, and The West Australian all leading with it and writing at length on it, rather than on the winner. The other winners, who are unquestionably more highly-skilled artists, were given far less immediate attention (articles that appeared later have however, written more broadly on the Award). While I commend Zada’s bold approach to confronting racism through art, his similarly important thoughtful reaction to contemporary issues which are played out through social media, the derivativeness of the work does give some cause for concern. The work’s design, consisting of large letters filled with small quotes of racist remarks, is perhaps too evocative of the Austracism series of works by Queensland artist Vernon Ah Kee.

Barbara Moore, Untitled, Synthetic polymer paint on linen 197 x 200 cm.

The General Painting Award was given to Barbara Moore, an Anmatyerre woman from Ti Tree in the Northern Territory who is based at Amata, South Australia, working through Tjala Arts. Her vibrant, expressionistic, painterly depiction of her country, described as ‘hyper-energetic’ by the judges (artist Bindi Cole, curator Glenn Iseger-Pilkington and academic Roger Benjamin), was powerful with its palette of rich yellows, reds, purples, pinks and oranges, subtle use of black and white, its broad sweeping brushstrokes depicting circular rockholes and important sites. While superficially abstract, her work is in fact deeply representative of the rockhole and soakage site she is depicting. The vast distances of country whose designs she has inherited ownership of recall that other great Anmatyerre painter, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. While language groups are distinct and land ownership is sacrosanct in Indigenous culture, there are often overlapping areas and people may belong to several language groups through their ancestry. As an Anmatyerre woman with connections to the vast area north and west of Alice Springs, now living in the Pitjantjatjara lands to the south, Moore’s paintings encompass several schools of Indigenous ‘desert’ art. The influence of her Pitjantjatjara colleagues’ extraordinary colourist and sophisticated landscape paintings, one of the most significant of all Australian landscape painting schools, has given her work a fresh, energetic vibrancy.

Djirrirra Wunungmurra, Yukuwa, Natural pigments on bark 236 x 100 cm.

The Buku-Larrnggay Mulka art centre in Yirrkala, east Arnhem Land, has been a consistent award winner at the NATSIAA, and this year was no different, with a stunning, elegant large bark, entitled Yukuwa, by Djirrirra Wunungmurra winning The Telstra Bark Painting Award. Yukuwai, a yam whose annual reappearance serves as a metaphor for the increase and renewal of people of their land, is depicted in delicate, intricate leaves and small flowers in a white ochre palette, with occasional use of a deep yellow ochre, on a flattened piece of Eucalyptus bark well over two metres tall. One would never guess that this beautifully calm work is in fact partly the result of an argument, when a family member challenged Wunungmurra’s right to paint bukyu, the fishtrap imagery of her clan and homeland. ‘Rather than argue’, her art centre explains, ‘she retorted by painting imagery that is in one sense her own personal identity’.  Its intention as an ‘almost self-portrait’ is also indicative of the wonderful complexity of Indigenous art, and its often secretive, mysterious constructions: for Yukuwa is one of the personal names of the artist. In Yolgnu society, one receives an invitation, in the form of an object representing a yam with strings emanating from it, with feather flowers at the end, to the ceremony held to strengthen relationships between clans belonging to the Yirritja moiety. The strings represent the kinship groups that are tied together.

Such an object is evocative of the winner of the Wandjuk Marika Memorial 3D Award (sponsored by Telstra), an almost abstracted sculptural depiction of Namorroddo, a malevolent being from the creation period (view video here). Comprised of paperbark, bush string, natural pigments, beeswax and feathers, the inky blackness of the ochre paint is in fact upon closer inspection a captivating deep indigo violet, highlighted with seven large white ochre shapes in a line around each side of the slim, tall spherical object, with delicate bush string emerging from either side, each finished with a small bunch of feather flowers. The artist, Jack Nawilil, is of the Rembarrnga language group, and lives in the central Arnhem Land community of Maningrida, a significant Arnhem land community renowned for its fibre work. Namorroddo, he says, flew through the air over great distances, like a ‘shooting star’, from Gapuwiyak in the east, westwards to Ramingining, descending on places to look for honey, to murder men and then alight again. He represents the Lightning Spirit in traditional Rembarrnga mythology, and the dangers of the night, the time when he travels. Nawilil’s work is both traditional and labour intensive, roots for dyes and bark must be gathered, soaked (the paperbark is soaked on the beach in saltwater), the string is made by vigorous, continuous rubbing on the thighs, the object itself constructed from extensive wrapping of the paperbark.
This years selection was the smallest in the history of the award, with only 63 works, from only 300 entries. And yet there were many beautiful works, although they may be becoming overly familiar to the indigenous art enthusiasts. Overall, the winners represented an important overview of contemporary Indigenous Australian art and some very fine and significant Australian artists.

“The blue hour is the time of transition between night and day, between day and night. It is the twilight and the dawn.”

In her most recent series, The Blue Hour, Emma Stuart focuses on the sublime moments that take place as a day transitions to night and night to day. Stuart captures the liminal shift between light and shade, between what is revealed and what is hidden, between the point of focus and distorted peripheries.

All of the works in this latest suite of paintings are based on Stuart’s experience of living and working near the Todd River and its tributaries between Alice Springs and Telegraph Station in central Australia. For over 20 years Stuart has spent time in this part of the world describing this country as having a force not experienced anywhere else. The deep human history and current cultural complex are just as much a part of this energy as is the physical landscape. As the paintings have evolved so has her insight of self, solitude, and connections with people and place.

I greatly enjoyed viewing these works, speaking with Emma about them, and reflecting on the Alice Springs landscape, as in my notes for the talk below.

Emma Stuart, ‘The Blue Hour’, Kick Gallery, 2015: opening talk

Emma has been visiting the Central Australia region for 20 years. She had an immediate connection with the Warlpiri people at Yuendumu (300 km nw of Alice), fell in love with the place, and continued visiting regularly. It had always been a desire of hers to go and paint there.

This series came out of visiting Todd River bed, and the walk to the Telegraph Station, in the early morning and at dusk with her mother, who is also an artist.

A few things struck me about this latest series of Emma’s: firstly, that it was unusual for several reasons; particularly the intimate close-up nature of the style of her landscape painting.

When I visit Alice Springs the aspect of the landscape I am most struck by, especially after flying in from a city like Melbourne, is the sense of vast open space. The big Central Australian sky, would be, if I were a landscape painter, tempting to paint. I would feel compelled to depict large landscapes. But Emma cleverly avoids this obvious tendency, and reaches further and deeper, into a more complex, sensitive and nuanced response to the landscape.

Another aspect these works brought to my mind was my first visit to Alice Springs, some 12 years or so ago. I went for a walk by myself along the Todd River bed. As I was walking, I felt overpowered and in awe of these beautiful ghost gums, and I kept seeing people, Aboriginal people, moving amongst them. Some were there, and some were not. Some disappeared into the trees when I turned to look at them. I asked my friend the Anmatyerre/Alyawarre artist from Utopia, Barbara Weir, herself an expert landscape painter, about this. She told me that the reason I was seeing these people, or spirits, was because the land in Alice is still sung, it was still alive, whereas the land in Melbourne did not have enough Aboriginal people left to sing it, so it was therefore  ‘dead’ land. I saw this with all due respect to the Wurendjeri people upon whose land we stand, and am also in awe of the continued strength of tradition here, in Collingwood, just up the road for example, is a place where Aboriginal people have been meeting for thousands of years, and still do today. It is the end-point of a songline which runs for thousands of kilometres across the land.

When I saw Emma’s tree portraits, I was reminded of this moment, and felt that she felt these living tree spirits too. Through discussion with her, I was struck by how astute and sensitive she was to this environment, and how she, as great artists and poets do, subconsciously picked up on elements in our environment and landscape that few people are aware of.

In conversation, Emma has said to me that she ‘wanted to capture the intimacy and personalities of trees’, particularly the majestic gums, such as the ghost gums, native to Central Australia, the largest and oldest of which she describes as being ‘like Kings’.

The Central and Western Desert Aboriginal language groups’ have as a fundamental philosophical and religious concept known as life essence, in which every living thing: trees, plants, animals, every single blade of grass, and even rocks, contain a life essence. My Maori whanau call it mana; life force, power, spiritual power.

Through her close-up, realist style, expertly executed in oil paint, Emma has captured the life essence of these gum trees, and brought them into being, not as objects as they are often rendered by Western society, but as animate and alive as humans.

Secondly, through her work, I began thinking about the Australian landscape tradition, in particular, the landscape tradition of Central Australia. Of course the first name that springs to mind is that of Albert Namatjira. Namatjira, as a Western Arrernte man, related to the ghost gums of his country as totemic ancestors. When out driving with Luritja and Arrernte artists I have been struck by the way they wave at certain gum trees; when I ask who they are waving to, they answer ‘that old man’, a creation ancestor.

When I began thinking about the Central Australian landscape tradition, I realised that it was quite lacking in a strong school or compelling level of artistic representation. Leaving aside the hundreds of majestic landscape painters of the Aboriginal schools, and the Hermannsburg School in particular, there are few outsiders that have captured the striking and to me hauntingly beautiful landscape of the Alice Springs region. Sidney Nolan came close, but his most striking work was, for me, of the Musgrave Ranges, many hundreds of kilometres to the south, in South Australia. Nolan painted the landscape big: powerful, overwhelming, bright, colourful, as reminiscent of the observations of the first non-Aboriginal explorers. He saw it as a land haunted by drought; perhaps he lacked Fred Williams’ sensitivities to forests and was also viewing the land with Eurocentric eyes, failing to see the myriad living elements of the Central Australian bush.

I believe that Emma has been one of the first Australian artists to really lift the level of Central Australian landscape painting, and to really see it, with eyes sensitively attuned to it. Unlike our Impressionist painters, she has not depicted Australian landscape as a beautiful but harsh, overpowering ‘wilderness’ to be tamed by the heroic pioneer, always a male. Streeton had a wonderful love for trees and was an early environmentalist, but was also a man of his era, continuing a European landscape tradition.

Emma has responded to the landscape, and the light, of Central Australia in a powerful way that heralds a new direction and understanding of the true beauty of the Australian environment. Not an environment to be tamed and made into a faux copy of Europe, nor one to be feared and controlled. She lets the trees and light speak to her, and responds in paint. It is a significant shift in Australian art and one which needs recognition and encouragement.

I am moved by the way she has had the patience and humility to let these majestic beings speak to her, and her skill and obvious highly-skilled technical abilities in depicting her observations and her respect for and relationship with these magnificent tree beings.

And I thank her and Kick Gallery director, Jake Hoerner, for bringing a little bit of Alice Springs to Melbourne, for those of us who miss it, despite not being from there, but who hold it in our hearts and souls.
Emily McCulloch Childs, Melbourne, April 2015

‘The Blue Hour’ runs April 16 – May 03 2015 at Kick Gallery.

Kick Gallery is located at 4 Peel Street Collingwood & open Thursday-Saturday 12-5pm | Sunday 12-4pm & by Appointment

For further information contact Kick Gallery on 9415 8483 or email info@kickgallery.com

Writers Bench: The Evolution of Melbourne Graffiti and Street Art Culture 1980-2011 is a new documentary that studies the origins and developments of both the graffiti and street art cultures in Melbourne over the past 21 years. The film “takes the audience on a first-hand journey through the historical timeline of graffiti and street art culture in Melbourne, exploring some of the revered artists who have helped to shape Melbourne’s cultural identity.”
The documentary invites you to “meet the legends of the graffiti and street art scene, as Writers Bench guides you through the events that created the culture as we see it today. Hear stories of growing up with the movement, why each artist got involved and what influenced their style. From its raw beginnings as political and radical slogans plastered on walls throughout the suburbs, to the colourful burst of murals splashed along urban train lines, to the rise of street art as an inner city tourist attraction, Writers Bench traces the evolution of this vital artistic movement.”

The first two thirds of this film is almost a visual version of the Kings Way book, and is similar in its tracing of the origins and evolution of the movement. Like Kings Way, it begins with some background of the Sharpie subculture in Melbourne of the 1970s, who wrote simple tags on walls. It also, again like Kings Way, appropriately discusses the late great photographer Rennie Ellis, a formative documentor of Australian sub cultures, who published three books on Australian Graffiti of the 1970s and 80s.

The film cleverly documents the huge impact of hip hop culture in early 1980s Melbourne, showing the break dancers and then graffiti writers of the day. The sense of innovation and freedom of those days is displayed through the interviews with some of the writers themselves and footage of the City Square and graffiti done in the 1980s.

Writers interviewed include old school king and queens, which is in particular, along with lots of great old photos, where the gold lies in this film. Some of my favourite writers such as Duel, Krissy, Paris, Peril and Merda are interviewed. It also features street art, with street artists/people discussed and/or interviewed, including Marcos Davidson, Andy Mac, Ha Ha, Rone and Meggs.
I tracked down director Oriel Guthrie, who made the film with co-director Spencer Davids, and asked her for an interview about Writers Bench. Here it is:

EMC: What led to you deciding to make a documentary on Melbourne’s graffiti and street art scenes?
OG: Graffiti culture was something I wanted to explore after I briefly touched on it in my last film ‘Skip Hop’ a documentary showcasing Australian Hip Hop culture. I was particularly interested in the early graffiti culture from the 1980’s, as there had not been enough documentation from that era. Melbourne has such a strong art culture and I feel its important to show people what has come from this city.

EMC: Graffiti writers in particular are often elusive and suspicious of outsiders, how did you approach the writers/artists?

OG: From my past film and involvement with the hip hop community I have developed great connections within the culture. I have found that once you gain the respect and trust from one writer, it leads on to another.I have always been pretty serious about the film and doing it justice to the culture. My co-director Spencer has a strong connection with the graffiti culture and has been able to get in contact with a lot of valuable writers. Most artists were positive about the project and enthusiastic about showing the history of the culture and their legacy.

EMC: I think it’s great that Melbourne graffiti, particularly the old school graffiti time of the 1980s is starting to get the recognition it so rightly deserves, with the publishing of the King’s Way book and now this film in particular. I find the more I learn about graffiti and speak to writers, the greater my respect for them grows, but it really is a closed world and difficult for outsiders to understand. Did the making of this film give you a greater insight into how important these writers/artists were/are?

OG: I couldn’t agree more with you!  Since delving into the production of this documentary I have discovered the 1980’s graffiti scene to be such a fascinating subculture in Melbourne. With the post modern punk movement and Sharpie gang culture fading out in the early 80’s, and the new generation discovering  the hip hop movement that exploded worldwide, Melbourne became rich in colour and vibrancy, transcending from the inner city to the outer suburban train lines. At the same time, we had artists like ‘Boxman’ & ‘Conehead’ who were coming from a more alternative scene and were doing early street art around the CBD, long before the popular movement we have seen in the early 2000’s. People are drawn to Melbourne for its graffiti & street art scenes, this makes the culture forever evolving and really exciting.

EMC: What were some of your highlights during the making the film?

OG: Highlights were having the privilege in meeting these graffiti legends and listening to their stories of growing up with the movement, their motivation, inspiration and sharing their collection of works. I have so much respect for the amount of skill, determination and energy that goes into graffiti. Some of the pieces that were done in the early days are really impressive, considering the limited amount of paint they had.

EMC: How has the response to the film been so far? I think some of the writers really enjoyed it, which is great.

OG: So far we have had great feedback from the writers, which is so important for this film. That was the most nerve racking thing for me, leading up to the premiere screening and seeing all the writers pour into the cinema! I have also had some great feedback from the general public who had no idea there was so much history in Melbourne’s Graffiti culture. Its important for this film to be interesting to all walks of life!

EMC: One of my only criticisms of the film would be that it jumps from old school graff and early street art into contemporary street art, with little discussion on mid school (90s) and new school (2000s) graffiti. Many writers and crews from these schools, such as the important 90s/2000s crew 70K, for example, were not discussed at all. Was this a conscious decision, did you base it on wanting to interview people directly (as I’d imagine 70K would not like to be interviewed for anything, even if you could find them in the first place)?

OG: I can understand your point, we are actually adding more graffiti artists to cover the late 90’s & early 2000’s graffiti scene. We tried to steer away from focusing on individual crews and naming writers and their crews. We approached the graffiti movement as a whole, by including interviews from writers across many different crews and environments. I hope this doco inspires someone else to keep documenting graffiti culture and tell their story or add to what’s missing from Writers Bench, to carry on and show what’s happening from now, and the new scene that has evolved. Some of the stuff people are doing now is insane!

EMC: Who was the masked writer with the memorable ‘fuck capitalism’ rant in the bathroom? (you don’t have to answer)

OG: I’m sorry, he must remain anonymous! But he does come from a very significant crew if you join the dots together.

EMC: For those that miss this final screening on Saturday, do we really have to wait until August 2012 until the documentary is available on DVD?

OG: We would love for the film hit the festival market and get seen to the rest of Australia, Europe and America. I feel its important to show Melbourne’s rich history in graffiti and street art to the rest of the world.  DVD release is the last step in releasing this documentary, but something we’re truly looking forward to!

Writers Bench is showing its last screening (for now) at ACMI this Saturday at 4pm, I urge everyone to see this important document of Melbourne’s cultural history.

We are the Tiwi. Tiwi is we the people. Tiwi is my people, we that lived for thousands of years on these beautiful islands. Tiwi is different to mainland Australian Aboriginals. The Tiwi culture is different: the language is different. My people, the Tiwi people, we belong to this place – the islands – Bathurst and Melville Island – all these islands belong to my people the Tiwi. 

Pedro Wonaeamirri, Tiwi Statement in Tiwi: art, history, culture [i]

Sophisticated geometric design and meditative mark making, a balanced fusion of contemporary adaptation and classical tradition, and the strength of generations of culturally significant families underlie the Munupi Arts & Crafts Association. The art centre exemplifies what is unique about Tiwi life and culture: a distinct art style, a balance of male and female power and status, a variety of artistic skills: painting, weaving, craft, textile design, ceramics, sculpture, printmaking. The artists of Munupi are adept at all these forms of art.

Located in Pirlangimpi community on the large Melville Island, over the Aspley Straight from Darwin, Munupi Arts is now well into its third decade as a successful art centre. It has in recent years blossomed into a new life brought about through the art practice of older masters, bringing a renewed energy and traditional vigour to the art.
Foremost amongst these masters are elders Cornelia Tipuamantumeri and the late Justin Puruntatameri. I visited Munupi in 2012 to research the art centre as a curator, art historian and writer, and to interview Puruntatameri about the extensive Tiwi resistance at nearby Fort Dundas (Punata), the first British settlement in the Northern Territory. I found him waiting for me one morning at his spot at the back of the art centre, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. While we spoke, they listened attentively. He was a great teacher, a man of much knowledge. His extensive knowledge of local flora and fauna had been published[ii], he had been featured in The Australian newspaper as the most senior traditional leader in the small Melville Island community of Pirlangimpi, a great new artist drawing comparison to Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, a ‘distinct’ voice of the old Tiwi[iii]: indeed, he was the most respected ‘culture man’ on both the Tiwi Islands.[iv]
Puruntatameri was born at Kadipuwu, next to the miscalculated site where the British would build their short-lived fort.[v] His knowledge of the fort, which lasted from 1824-9, was extensive; he told me, during our visit there, of events and features not previously documented. Of a bakery, which I have not noted on any of the archaeological records[vi], of how the Tiwi believed the British were there for treasure, for gold, of his grandfather being shot in the knee by the British, the bullet wound healed by his people’s ‘bush medicine’[vii].  Together with Munupi staff we walked around the old fort and trenches, commenting on our amazement that the British would think trenches would be any use against the Tiwi spears (perhaps they were confusing the Tiwi with Maori?). He showed me the two tutini he had made, those famous sculpture headstones made in the final stage of the pukumani ceremony.

Previous scholars have noted the tutini made for a white woman’s grave at the fort; Puruntatameri told me his were for the doctor and officer, the famous Green and Gold, who had been killed by the Tiwi as retribution for the British capture of their warrior Tambu, an act of war[viii]. I asked him why he had made these beautiful works for outsiders who had settled on his people’s land in such a brutal way. ‘I felt sorry for them,’ he said ‘having no headstone.’[ix]
This is revealing of the Tiwi’s generosity and nature, as it is of their use of art to express the deep cycles of life; birth, creation, death, and to communicate with each other and with outsiders. Early scholars of this art described the immense symbolic detail involved, wherein every painted line and dot in a bark painting or sculpture denotes a symbolic hieroglyph[x]. This hidden symbolism continues in the contemporary art movement today: in paintings by Munupi foundational artists such Reppie Anne Papajua (Orsto), Thecla Bernadette Puruntatameri and Francesca Puruntatameri, the acclaimed, award-winning artists Susan Wanji Wanji and Nina Puruntatameri, middle-generation strong Tiwi culture women Carol Puruntatameri, Delores Tipuamantumirri, Fiona Puruntatameri and Paulina Puruntatameri, and the new generation artists Natalie Puantulura and Debbie Coombes.
It is significant that most of this exhibition’s artists are women; Munupi was founded in the 1980s as a women’s craft and printmaking centre, combined with the pottery established by Eddie Puruntatameri, first chairperson of Munupi. The pottery is continued by his son, the expert ceramicist Robert Puruntatameri.[xi] Munupi artists have experimented in a variety of painting mediums, including ochre, acrylic and gouache; nowadays most of their contemporary work is done in traditional ochre, that natural, wonderful, ceremonial paint. Ochre gives their work a strong sense of ceremonial tradition but also allows for contemporary developments and interpretations of classical themes. The pared-down black and white ochre, seen beautifully in the work of Nina Puruntatameri, Josephine Burak and Fiona Puruntatameri, highlights the graphic elements of their designs.
The subtle warmth of the often rare pink ochre is worked expertly by Cornelia Tipuamantumeri, a perfect contrast to her black ochre background. Her works produce an emotional response in the viewer; they convey a deep calmness, but also a depth of cultural knowledge, not simplistically understood. Perhaps their detailed dot and line design evolves from her background as a skilled weaver.
It is astounding the myriad ways Munupi artists can work with the three classic tones of red, black and yellow. Black and yellow are Pirlangimpi colours, their prized football team, Imalu, has its name from the tiger; these colours are theirs. The Kulama ceremony, one of the most significant ceremonies on the Islands, features with these colours as the theme of many of these works. Nina Puruntatameri’s paintings of this semi-secret-sacred ceremony are an example of expert contemporary rendering of this ceremony: they illustrate its significance in their impressive power and beauty, giving us a glimpse of hidden depths involved in long and extensive ritual and religious ceremony.
The works in this exhibition may have a commonality in their mythological underpinnings but display a surprising array of stylistic variation. Carol Puruntatameri’s works depict organic-like forms in an earthy gentle palette of rich deep yellows and light browns. A painting by Daphne Wonaemirri is striking in its geometrical patterning, a clever, classic hallmark of Tiwi design. Debbie Coombs’ whimsical works are a great example of Tiwi anthropological observation, depicting the travels of peoples in vehicles and boats, more modern day realities that have become Tiwi through marks in their design. Delores Tipuamantumirri, daughter of Cornelia, paints strongly traditional designs and also more abstracted developments.
In complete contrast are the linear design graphs of Fiona Puruntatameri, perhaps the painter in this exhibition who most recalls the notable genre of Tiwi textile art. Her balanced compositions in black and white are intricate and aesthetically pleasing. Josephine Burak shares this reduced palette and geometry but her works are more fluid; they contains joyous explosions of light, perhaps evoking the great expressions of Tiwi ceremonial dance.
Only one artist, Natalie Puantulura, works in a multi-coloured palette. Yet her paintings lose none of the Munupi focus on balance, composition, and graphic elements. The beauty of the environment on the densely forested Melville Island is recalled to me by the evocation of natural beauty as seen in the works of Sheila Puruntatameri, Paulina Puruntatameri and Marie Simplicia Tipuamantumirri.
Thecla Bernadette Puruntatameri’s work is completely different again: joyous energetic shapes surge upwards in a dance-like movement; their combined design recalls the famed Tiwi barbed spears yet represent fire which is vital for both hunting and regeneration of country.
Justin Puruntatameri passed away just several months after I visited and interviewed him. His passing has left a great gap in the Tiwi world and the Australian arts. It is wonderful to see his legacy continuing on through the work of Munupi artists, and I think he would have been most proud of this exhibition, another great addition to the magnificent cultural lexicon that is the artists of Munupi, and a proud continuation of their fundamental assertion of their identity: ‘We are Tiwi’.
Emily McCulloch Childs

The name of the late artist Justin Puruntatameri is used with his family’s permission. The author wishes to thank the staff and artists of Munupi Arts for their generosity and time.

[i] Pedro Wonaeamirri in Jennifer Isaacs, Tiwi: art, history, culture, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing, 2012, p.viii.

[ii]Justin Puruntatameri et al, Tiwi Plants and Animals: Aboriginal flora and Fauna knowledge from Bathurst and Melville Islands, Northern Australia, Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory and the Tiwi land Council, Darwin, NT, 2001.

[iii] Nicolas Rothwell, Old memories from a new master, The Australian, 4 November 2011.

[iv] Jennifer Isaacs, Justin Puruntatameri biography, Tiwi: art, history, culture, p. 273.

[v] ibid, p. 272.

[vi] Several archaeological digs have been carried out at Fort Dundas/Punata, with the support of the Tiwi Land Council, the most extensive being by Eleanor Crosby, 1975, and Clayton Fredericksen, 2002.

[vii] This may have been the young boy who was shot as noted in Fredericksen and others, Clayton Fredericksen, Caring for history: Tiwi and archaeological narratives of Fort Dundas/Punata, Melville Island, Australia, World Archaeology, Vol. 34(2), Routledge, 2002, p. 288-302.

[viii] The story of Tambu’s (Tambu Tipungwuti) capture and subsequent escape is detailed by Tiwi people themselves and features in most writing on the events at Fort Dundas/Punata. It was also described to me in detail by Puruntatameri, who showed me the geographic locations of Tambu’s escape: he swam over the Aspley Straight from Fort Dundas/Punata to one of two small islands (regardless of crocodiles and sharks). From there he rested a while before swimming across to the other island, then back around to Melville Island proper, where he travelled around the back of the British and gathered his people, at his place called Ranku, who then warned the Munupi people, and they all planned a stealth attack on the British. This was a carefully planned, stealth ambush. One of the British escaped and alerted the Fort. The British then descended with guns, so the Tiwi ran into the mangroves. The famous barbed Tiwi spears, some up to 16 feet long, are impossible to get out. The Tiwi shot their spears through the windows of the hospital, and then they speared the commissariat officer John Green and Doctor John Gold, who were, Puruntatameri said, walking from the Fort to have a shower. They speared the doctor in the back. I believe this was a strategic attack on the doctor, for the British then had no medical help to deal with malaria, scurvy and the like, became ill, and the fort was abandoned. Puruntatameri also told me the Tiwi wondered why the British decided to establish their fort where they did, as there was little fresh water.

[ix] Justin’s daughter Paulina Puruntatameri, known as Jedda, accompanied us on our visit to Fort Dundas/Punata. A strongly active preserver of her people’s culture, she is current Chairperson of Munupi, and working towards creating a cultural museum there, and on digital archiving and on the repatriation of Tiwi artefacts. When visiting Fort Dundas/Punata she wittily commented to me ‘The British believed in terra nullius, because Tiwi hid in the bushes, they couldn’t see us, so they thought there might be no one here.’ We then discussed how that situation must have quickly changed when the first of the barbed spears flew from the bush.

[x] See Charles Mountford’s classic work The Tiwi, their Art, Myth and Ceremony, Phoenix House, London, 1958, which documents the intricate symbolic detail of mythology, landscape, religion and law particularly in Tiwi bark paintings of the people of Melville Island.

[xi] Isaacs, p.260.

Recently I was at an exhibition opening of art from the APY Lands, a vast, stunningly beautiful and largely unknown (to outsiders) area of Australia[1]. A region of big skies and open land, hidden rockholes filled with creation beings, occasional mountain ranges and desert oak forests, a land still alive and still sung. An Aṉaŋu[2] cultural leader[3] who had made a particularly moving speech during the opening spoke to me afterwards of the ecological catastrophes affecting his people’s lands. This was the first thing he spoke to me about, with a sense of great urgency and despair. To those not so familiar with the only true Australian art[4], this may have seemed just one aspect of the arts’ subject matter or of the exhibition itself. But it wasn’t: it was the central theme: underpinning all the complex law and religion, the colour and beauty and humour and creation stories. The man was reaching out to me as a writer and curator who could perhaps help educate the rest of Australia, and the world, about the battles against the areas of a death, spreading, a formidable disease. Its name? Buffel grass. Brought in on the hooves of cattle, it is devastating large regions of fragile, beautiful Australia.

Due to previous art research trips through The Lands, I knew first-hand the devastation brought about by introduced camels, feral cats, rabbits and other pests. The feral camels, over a million of them, kill everything: they strip leaves and bark from trees, effectively ring barking them. They die in the waterholes, the lifeblood of these areas, destroying the entire eco-system for everything from the little marsupials, like the ninu (bilby) and the little birds, right up to the malu (kangaroo) and kalaya (emu).

Aṉaŋu are ethno-botanists, they know complex connections of plants, animals, water and land; the ways in which birds and animals spread plant seeds. So when animals die, plants die. Everything dies. But the buffel grass: this was something new again. Traditional, highly developed Aṉaŋu land management techniques weren’t working. ‘You can’t burn it; it doesn’t burn.’ the leader said to me. It was destroying the native grasses, another major life source. His words stayed with me.

Speaking with him, I was reminded of a dear Aṉaŋu elder and artist I had the privilege to work with, the late Tjilpi R. Kankapankatja. He was a genius level ethno-botanist, whom scientists from ANU travelled to study with. He knew the names, medicinal and other properties of thousands of plants. He painted these, in paint on canvas, with love and joy. His works were delightfully, superficially naïve, but underlying their directness were decades of extensive complex botanical study and knowledge. He was an example of how art can encompass and communicate many seemingly disparate modes of knowledge.

The title of Fred Fowler’s exhibition, New Landscapes, is simple, but telling. Australia is one of the oldest continents on earth, with the oldest continuous cultures. But for the Europeans who arrived here in the eighteenth century, it was a strange and new land. For their descendants, it still is, in many ways. The land of Australia is written in our historical literature as being ‘strange’ ‘foreign’ ‘other’, most of it ‘desert’ ‘dry’ ‘arid’ ‘hot’ and uninhabitable. Its ‘remoteness’ is commented on: but it is ‘remote’ only depending on where you stand, where you come from. If you are Aṉaŋu, the APY Lands are in fact the centre of the universe; Melbourne and Sydney are remote, strange, foreign and often harsh and unforgiving places. This land has been demonized as much as its original inhabitants, in a way that is inescapably linked.

It took European-Australian artists over a hundred years to even begin to capture some of the reality of the Australian landscape, and to cease to see it through overtly European eyes. The landscapes of Heysen, Roberts and Streeton were groundbreaking in their evocation of the bush, its misty blue palette, or dry red earth under a blazing blue sky. Yet their work was of the heroic bushman; an Anglo-Celtic or Saxon male hero, against all odds, surviving in a harsh environment. Man sought to dominate and tame the bush, not to live with it (although Streeton, to his great credit, was an early environmentalist and protector of Australia’s old-growth forests).

It wasn’t until the Antipodean school that such a tranquil, and rather mistaken, telling of settlement and environment began to be challenged. Boyd, Nolan, Williams and Drysdale in particular broke with the conventions of Australian landscape painting and painted a more accurate reflection of the world around them. Boyd included Aboriginal women and their plights in his landscape in his pioneering 1950s ‘Half-Caste Bride’ series. Nolan explored the interior of Australia and revisited the heroic myth, and found that it wasn’t so heroic after all. Williams and Drysdale pushed the boundaries of landscape painting at the time, reflecting the often abstracted character of aspects of the Australian landscape; its angular trees and un-European palette, its rounded, often amorphous red rocks. They introduced black into their landscape palette, evoking the true contrast of the land and its forms, far from a perpetual gentile muted European softness.

Fowler’s approach, whilst this series, he says, cannot be understood as conventional landscape painting, reflects the changes that have occurred in our understanding of our environs and the past as non-Indigenous Australians since then. Fowler has, as he says ‘used the vessel of landscape painting to explore ideas about native and invasive species, both animal and human’. His work is subtle, didactic and articulate: the works are neither brutal expressions of a self-aware artists’ frustration with the present state of environmental destruction occurring in this country, nor harshly realistic depictions of racial oppression and the inequality between the colonisers and the subaltern; and yet, nor are they superficially pretty, decorative paintings of trees and bush. They are aesthetically intriguing paintings containing a subtle yet intellectual and empathetic message, with careful composition of colour and form. Strange shapes hover in a colour field, they are animalistic, but not always animals. Some recall collage, parts of skulls, crystals, buildings, trees, birds, ghosts, or abstracted tribal designs.

Despite his good length of time as an exhibiting artist, these new works continue to explore some of Fowler’s background in street art and graffiti; some of the raw, urgent shapes revisit Basquiat whose influence upon the world continues. Often painted in oil stick, occasionally shapes appear like watercolour; the artist’s methodology of his technique reflects his subject. A variety of surfaces are created, some multi-hued, some rough, others smooth. The collage-like shapes often appear either floating or behind the canvas, giving us hints of other worlds, of depths beyond our immediate perception.

The titles reflect the wide-range of Australian environments: ‘Fire Coral (Colonial Marine Organism)’, depicts the fragile, threatened seas, Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef with its vast coral systems, the colonial sea trades (fishing, pearling, whaling, trepanging) which brought with them the violent underside of Imperial trade: slavery, prostitution, disease, violence, colonial sea trades which developed into modern day incursions: dredging, mining, over-fishing, shipping, polluting.  And the seas as a modern day, unequal battleground over borders.

In creating this series, the artist had considered the work of several other artists working in the field of colonialism and identity. Paola Pivi’s work ‘One Love’, with its depiction of white animals in a colonial type landscape, shown at Queensland’s GOMA, ‘contains the resonance of eighteenth-century European paintings which depicted ‘exotic’ species from disparate geographies, brought to Europe via colonial trade routes for the entertainment of the wealthy. Pivi also underlines the connotations of ‘white’ identity and racist histories.’[5]
The late Yorta Yorta-Scottish artist Lin Onus, one of the most significant artists of his generation, also resonates with Fowler: his work exploring both issues of colonialism and Australian identity often used the symbolism of animals. Onus’ famous depiction of himself and his good mate, gallerist and artist Michael Eather, as ‘X and Ray’, a dingo and a stingray, are amongst the most positive depictions of the mateship across Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples made to date. But it is Onus’ famous ‘Fruit Bats’ that Fowler says has most influenced his current series directly. Defiant statements of anti-colonialism, these clusters of bats, their bodies painted in the rarrk Onus was given permission to use by Arnhem Land artists, take over the most suburban of all Australian signifiers, the Hills Hoist. In typical Onus fashion, the intellect of the artist drove him to conceive the installation using humour, wit and whimsy to catch the viewer off-guard and suspend their political defensive disbelief.[6]

Significantly, Fowler’s New Landscapes series has an engagement with these complex issues of colonialism, identity, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous interactions and issues, without feeling the need to do as so many non-Indigenous artists seem fit, to appropriate Aboriginal art, as a perhaps well-meaning but inadvertently offensive sort of homage. The works in this exhibition are painted in the artist’s own stylistic oeuvre, he has felt no need to cheat, by lifting designs used in paintings from the great artists from the Western Desert or other areas, to give us easy clues as to what they are about.
His landscape subjects comprise broad-ranging themes: ‘The Ecological Society of Australia’ ‘Merging of Diversification’ ‘A Brief History of Colonisation’ which evoke these questions of identity and concerns for the impact of colonising powers upon Indigenous people and lands.

Some works are more site-specific, the border of New South Wales and Queensland, a border which brings to my mind the towns of Moree and Boggabilla, as seen in the films of Ivan Sen, who explores the complexity of Indigenous and non-Indigenous identities, particularly amongst youth, and issues of racism. The Bournda Nature Reserve, a national park in New South Wales. And the most famous of all Australian natural landmarks, perhaps with the exception of Uluru or the Great Barrier Reef, one so familiar for its settler architecture that it is almost easy to forget that it is even a site of nature, Sydney Harbour.
Fowler’s new landscapes evoke all that is ancient and beautiful about this land, and simultaneously, subtly, that which is more recent, brutal and confronting. They are a much needed, thoughtful exploration of these issues of land, animals, plants and humans, adding much to the discussion of Australia’s past and its present condition.

Emily McCulloch Childs

Fred Fowler, ‘New Landscapes’, Backwoods Gallery, Melbourne, 20-29th June, 2014

[1] The APY Lands are the Aṉaŋu (human being, person) Pitjantjatjara (language group) Yankunytjatjara (language group) lands, in northern South Australia. They comprise some 103,000 square kilometres; have 7 art centres, a wealth of brilliant artists practicing in many mediums from craft to painting, and a richness of unique and delicate flora and fauna.

[2] Aṉaŋu is the word for ‘human being, person’ in Pitjantjatjara, which is how these people identify themselves in the contemporary age.

[3] Cultural leader Lee Brady.

[4] Art critic Alan McCulloch used to say ‘the only true Australian art is that which is made by Aboriginal people’, and reflected this belief in his writings in Meanjin, The Herald and other publications.

[5] Paola Pivi, http://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/past/2010/21st_Century/artists/paola_pivi

[6] Lin Onus, Fruit Bats, sculpture, 1991, held in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, see George Alexander in Tradition today: Indigenous art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2004. Rarrk is the unique style of cross-hatching used by Arnhem Land artists, and is owned by them, which must not be used without permission. See also Margo Neale et al, Urban Dingo: the art and life of Lin Onus, 1948-1996, Queensland Art Gallery, 2000.

Over the last five or so years one has come to expect a riot of colour, movement, shimmer and spiritual power when entering the galleries at Araluen. Unfortunately, that was not the experience this year. Desert Mob seems to have gone back to its earlier self; a mixed bag of works by major, middle level and emerging artists.

They fused the strong Indigenous skills of painting, craft and storytelling with a focus on recent and past history. As explorations of space, they work outside Western borders, just as paintings often do; some of the sides of the light boxes continued the story in the artists’ language (usually Ngaanyatjarra) and with imagery. They depict such significant events as the Circus Waters event, a horrific tale from Australia’s often bloody past, wherein Aboriginal people were shot and prospectors speared, and more recent events such as the arrival in the community of a mobile phone tower and ICTV. While they were naïve in painting style and didn’t contain the sophistication that Warakurna painters usually display, and they weren’t aimed towards the fine art collector who collects beautiful, spiritually resonant works, they are nonetheless an important body of works documenting a more recent history.

Desert Mob
Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs
Until 20 October 2013

View an online gallery of the works: www.desart.com.au/galleries

Desert Mob installation images: Lisa Hatzimihail
Courtesy: Araluen Arts Centre