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Published by on November 30, 2023

Eagle and Crow Dreaming

This is the main story for Warrmun (meaning “a place to camp”). This story took place just behind the present day Warmun Community. In the Ngarrangkarni (Dreamtime) both the eagle and the crow were people. The Eaglehawk and his wife the crow were sitting either side of a patch of white rock (quartz). The Eaglehawk was busy making spearheads from the hard quartz and asked the crow to help. Eaglehawk was ready to hunt for kangaroo. First he built up a fire of hot rocks so that they would have somewhere to cook the kangaroo. Eaglehawk asked the crow again, but she refused. Eaglehawk went out hunting and came back with a small, fat, girl kangaroo. When he got back to the camp, Crow was asleep. In anger the Eaglehawk threw a piece of quartz rock at the crow, striking her in the eye, and took the hot rocks from the fire and burnt the crow all over for being so lazy. They both turned into birds, and that is why crows are black with a white circle around their eyes. In the hill behind Warmun you can still see the white quartz camp of the eagle and the crow.

Categories: WARMUN ART

Name: SHIRLEY PURDIE

Language: English, Gija, Kimberley Kriol

Community: Warmun

Biography:

Shirley Purdie has been painting for more than twenty years and is an artist of great significance and seniority. Her cultural knowledge and artistic skill complement each other to produce a practice that holds great strength. Shirley is also a prominent leader in Warmun community and an incisive cross-cultural communicator.

Inspired by more senior Warmun artists including her late mother, the great Madigan Thomas, as well as Rover Thomas and Queenie McKenzie, Shirley began to paint her country in the early 1990s. Shirley’s uncle, artist Jack Britten, said to her, ‘Why don’t you try yourself for painting, you might be all right.'

Shirley says: 'It’s good to learn from old people. They keep saying when you paint you can remember that country, just like to take a photo, but there’s the Ngarranggarni (Dreaming) and everything. Good to put it in painting, your country, so kids can know and understand. When the old people die, young people can read the stories from the paintings. They can learn from the paintings and maybe they want to start painting too.’ Shirley’s body of work explores sites and narratives associated with the country of her mother and father and is characterized by a bold use of richly textured ochre.

Significant places such as Baloowa, Jirragin and Gilban lie on Country now taken in by Violet Valley and Mabel Downs cattle stations. Much of her work also explores spirituality and the relationship between Gija conceptions of Ngarranggarni (Dreaming) and Catholicism. In 2007 Shirley was awarded the Blake Prize for Religious Art for her major work Stations of the Cross.

Colonial histories of the region also figure in Shirley’s work in which she relates accounts of early contact, massacre, warfare and indentured labour since the incursion of pastoralists into Gija land in the late 1800s.

Shirley is presently working on a major publication of great cultural and ecological value, documenting through painting and in Gija language the plants and trees of her country - Goowoolem Gijam.

© the artist / art centre