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“When Martu paint, it’s like a map. Martu draw story on the ground and on the canvas, and all the circle and line there are the hunting areas and different waters and tracks where people used to walk, and [some you] can’t cross, like boundaries. So nowadays you see a colourful painting and wonder what it is, but that’s how Martu tell story long ago. It’s not just a lovely painting, it’s a story and a songline and a history and everything that goes with it.” 

– Ngalangka Nola Taylor and Joshua Booth

This work portrays an area of Country that can be interpreted in multiple ways. Firstly, the image may be read as an aerial representation of a particular location known to the artist- either land that they or their family travelled, from the pujiman (traditional, desert dwelling) era to now. During the pujiman period, Martu would traverse very large distances annually in small family groups, moving seasonally from water source to water source, and hunting and gathering bush tucker as they went. At this time, one’s survival depended on their intimate knowledge of the location of resources; thus physical elements of Country, such as sources of kapi (water), tali (sandhills), different varieties of warta (trees, vegetation), ngarrini (camps), and jina (tracks) are typically recorded with the use of a use of a system of iconographic forms universally shared across the desert. 

An additional layer of meaning in the work relates to more intangible concepts; life cycles based around kalyu (rain, water) and waru (fire) are also often evident. A thousands of year old practice, fire burning continues to be carried out as both an aid for hunting and a means of land management today. As the Martu travelled and hunted they would burn tracts of land, ensuring plant and animal biodiversity and reducing the risk of unmanageable, spontaneous bush fires. The patchwork nature of regrowth is evident in many landscape works, with each of the five distinctive phases of fire burning visually described with respect to the cycle of burning and regrowth.  

Finally, metaphysical information relating to a location may also be recorded; jukurrpa (dreaming) narratives chronicle the creation of physical landmarks, and can be referenced through depictions of ceremonial sites, songlines, and markers left in the land. Very often, however, information relating to jukurrpa is censored by omission, or alternatively painted over with dotted patterns.

Categories: Shire of East Pilbara (Martumili Artists)

Name: Clifford Brooks

Language: Kartujarra, Putijarra, Yulparrija

Community: Punmu

Biography:

“I’ve been travelling around my whole life. I mainly grew up in Jigalong- I been educated there in Jigalong, and then I did my senior schooling in Hedland. [Every weekend I went] out with the family camping in the rockhole, out bush. I went to work in Yarleen Station near Pannawonica to work as a cattle man in 1981, but then I went back to Jigalong community to work as a maintenance worker, building and plumbing. I went back to Jigalong to work with the old people and for law business. I been there for a while.

I moved into doing artworks when the old people asked me to do some painting. They gave me permission to paint certain Country areas, and to carry on painting stories about my grandfather and grandmother. That’s when I started with the Canning Stock Route Project. We travelled along the Canning Stock Route, painting and carving. Landscapes I was doing then, but now I use a more traditional style. I like working with ochre, but acrylics are alright. I just feel relaxed when I paint. Sometimes I’ll sit and have a cup of tea, think about what I gotta paint next. I like keeping busy with painting.”

 - Clifford Brooks

Clifford is a Kartujarra and Manyjilyjarra man, born at Jigalong Mission in 1959. He grew up at the mission and later in Port Hedland, but returned to Jigalong to work as a builder and cattleman. For many years Clifford worked in stations around the Pilbara, mustering cattle and repairing fencing and windmills, before again returning to Jigalong In the 1990s as the community’s chairperson. In recent years Clifford has explored his personal and artistic heritage by painting the story and following in the artistic footsteps of his father’s brother, the critically acclaimed Rover Thomas. He was a major contributor to the seminal Canning Stock Route Project exhibition. Clifford paints his Country employing a range of styles, from realist landscapes to more traditional Aboriginal compositions and symbology. 

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