In this artwork I made titled “Dhari Dance” for me means how traditional dance was passed down through generation to generations. Art Centre notes: The artwork is a (colour reduction/B/W) lino print, printed on BFK Rives paper (100% cotton rag with strong archival properties).
Ngokngok or mun-ngokngok is the Southern Boobook owl. Their clan is Warrawarra and the are connected to witch doctors and traditional healers.
“It is a foreign plant that came in on a camel. Buffalo grass came into Australia and now it’s taking over, everywhere you find it.”
– Zia-Rhian Dean
“It is a foreign plant that came in on a camel. Buffalo grass came into Australia and now it’s taking over, everywhere you find it.”
– Zia-Rhian Dean
“This painting is about my home. A small (block) or flat with one big house. The place I grew up. The tank in the painting was for drinking water and showers. The best thing about it is when I was little, me and my little brother used to climb it and watch the best sunsets. The pattern in the sky represents how many stops we have to make to get back there (Newman, Auskie, Hedland, Pardoo, Sandfire, Bidyadanga).”
– Ciarn Dean-Bullen
How did you get to this style of painting?
“Do you mean, what have I done with my life? (chuckles to herself) To me these paintings are a sense of energy. So if I see someone and they’re happy, I paint a happy vibe. Cos their spirit is happy. And sometimes it’s hard because on the outside they’re real happy but on the inside they’re real sad. Sometimes you do stuff (like a painting) and it adds up later on. But I still don’t know what it means and don’t know where my style comes from because it’s both the path I walk on and the cracks in the dirt. It’s like looking at a landscape but I haven’t been there yet. Maybe I’ll get there one day. I believe things happen for a reason.”
– Sylvia Wilson
“I do tuwa (sandhill) in my own style because that’s our Country. That’s a sandhill, that’s the Dreaming- the Jukurrpa. That’s our culture.
They stay there and we go through the sandhills at Puntawarri in the car. We go first tuwa, then the second tuwa, looking for the waterholes. Go up, up, up- ‘nother tuwa, ‘nother tuwa.
Long time [ago] in Puntawarri, when I was a little girl [with] my Nana and Pop [Dadda Samson and Yanjimi Peter Rowlands] we went climbing up the sandhill. And when I went up my Nana and Pop were at the bottom under a tree and I came down running then rolling, rolling right down to the ground! But I was ok- he right!”
– Judith Anya Samson
Puntawarri is an important cultural area located on the middle stretches of the Canning Stock Route and east of the Jigalong Mission (now Jigalong Aboriginal community), where Anya grew up with her grandmother and renowned Martumili Artist, Dadda Samson (dec.). Puntawarri is also the site of an abandoned community, a waterhole, creek and lake. Puntawarri’s close proximity to Jigalong Mission made it a popular site for Martu to visit during the ‘mission days’. While growing up at Jigalong Mission in the 1960’s, Dadda would return to Puntawarri every weekend to hunt and camp.
For many Martu, like Anya’s family, Jigalong Mission was the site where their pujiman (traditional, desert dwelling) lifestyle came to an end from the late 1940s as they transitioned to a life as stockmen and women working in cattle stations in the Pilbara region and beyond. In the wake of the extreme and prolonged drought of the 1960s, the last of the remaining pujimanpa (desert dwellers) were forced to move to missions like Jigalong, where a supply of food and water was assured. There, many Martu were reunited with family members that had already moved in from the desert.
The traditional lands of the Martu people encompass the Great Sandy Desert and Rudall River regions of Western Australia, an enormous tract dominated by distinctive red tali, or tuwa (sandhills). These sandhills present an unforgiving landscape; sparse vegetation covers a seemingly never ending expanse of dunes, and yet these lands and the location of resources within them was known intimately by its pujiman inhabitants.
“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.
“I was swimming there. Yeah, we go visit them a long time [ago]. We drink it, rain water from the rain. Big waterhole. It’s a fresh water, when the rain comes, fills it up. One for swimming and another rock hole for drinking.”
– Marlene Anderson
In this work Marlene depicts a waterhole and rock hole located in Mungili, the small outstation community located just off the Eagle Highway in Western Australia, approximately 430 kilometres northeast of Wiluna and 250 kilometres north of Warburton. Marlene grew up in Mungili, and as such it forms a significant part of her ‘ngurra’ (home Country, camp). Typically Marlene depicts this site with a central large circular form that represents the main waterhole, surrounded by smaller circular forms representing satellite water bodies.
During the pujiman (traditional, desert dwelling) period, knowledge of water sources was critical for survival, and today Martu Country is still defined in terms of the location and type of water. Each of the hundreds of claypans, rockholes, waterholes, soaks and springs found in the Martu desert homelands is known through real life experience and the recounting of Jukurrpa (Dreaming) narratives by name, location, quality and seasonal availability. This encyclopedic knowledge extends even to the nature and movement of arterial waterways, and sustained Martu as they travelled across their Country, hunting and gathering, visiting family, and fulfilling ceremonial obligations. They would traverse very large distances annually, visiting specific areas in the dry and wet season depending on the availability of water and the corresponding cycles of plant and animal life on which hunting and gathering bush tucker was reliant.
“I was swimming there. Yeah, we go visit them a long time [ago]. We drink it, rain water from the rain. Big waterhole. It’s a fresh water, when the rain comes, fills it up. One for swimming and another rock hole for drinking.”
– Marlene Anderson
In this work Marlene depicts a waterhole and rock hole located in Mungili, the small outstation community located just off the Eagle Highway in Western Australia, approximately 430 kilometres northeast of Wiluna and 250 kilometres north of Warburton. Marlene grew up in Mungili, and as such it forms a significant part of her ‘ngurra’ (home Country, camp). Typically Marlene depicts this site with a central large circular form that represents the main waterhole, surrounded by smaller circular forms representing satellite water bodies.
During the pujiman (traditional, desert dwelling) period, knowledge of water sources was critical for survival, and today Martu Country is still defined in terms of the location and type of water. Each of the hundreds of claypans, rockholes, waterholes, soaks and springs found in the Martu desert homelands is known through real life experience and the recounting of Jukurrpa (Dreaming) narratives by name, location, quality and seasonal availability. This encyclopedic knowledge extends even to the nature and movement of arterial waterways, and sustained Martu as they travelled across their Country, hunting and gathering, visiting family, and fulfilling ceremonial obligations. They would traverse very large distances annually, visiting specific areas in the dry and wet season depending on the availability of water and the corresponding cycles of plant and animal life on which hunting and gathering bush tucker was reliant.