National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | National Indigenous Art Triennial 07

This is Kuru Ala. These are creeks and rock holes everywhere, and many trees. There is puli (rocks) and apu (rocky hills). This is Minyma Tjuta Tjukurrpa (Seven Sisters Creation Story). This area is close to Tjuntjuntjarra [in Western Australia, near the South Australian border].

Maringka Baker, 2007

Yirrikapayi (male crocodile) was once a man who lived around [Cape] Fourcroy [Bathurst Island]. They been spear him. He crawled into the water and turned into a crocodile.

Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, 2007

Brown, from rural Victoria, began painting native animals when he was a teenager living rough and homeless. He depicts his beloved animals in idyllic bush settings, in an idiosyncratic style, having been encouraged to develop his art through adult art classes at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. His paintings of native fauna can be considered as metaphors for his people, as in Dreamtime kangaroo and bird 2006.

Colour blinded exemplifies the way we work together, when we work together. Destiny thinks her thoughts and Virginia thinks hers. Neither of us recalls a time we’ve talked much about making work together, or discussed ideas or methods except while doing it and even then only briefly.

In this case Destiny proposed doing something with sodium lights that Virginia had used before, though not in joint works. Destiny wanted to take black-and-white photos and Virginia suggested using orthochromatic film because of the way it reads and reduces colour. Destiny dreamt up and took the photos and proposed and directed most of the scenarios for the video, which Virginia shot and edited. Destiny had the idea for the snow dome and Virginia made it work. That’s the mechanics of it.

But the other things that go into it result from what we’ve each been separately thinking, doing and reading; our awareness of current events and our personal histories in contact with each other and anyone else we’re working with; materials, media and the occasion or opportunity for making and showing work.

The empty space in the installation is as important to us as the objects in it. When anyone walks into the space they’re absorbed into it and, visually at least, become part of the work, instead of getting in the way of it. It was exciting when a serious and respectable-looking older woman standing with her friend in Colour blinded in Paris clapped her hands and laughed and asked in French, ‘Are we alive or dead?’ Part of the point of the lights is always the same: the somewhat sinister thrill of the change they make to whatever and whoever is in their range, and the way they illustrate that how you look at things – literally the light you see them in – affects what you see.

Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, 2007

The weaving technique used in Yabby is shared by Indigenous nations of the southern and south-eastern regions, particularly along the river systems that meander across state borders and clan lines. The technique was transposed to Arnhem Land in the early 20th century by missionaries, who encouraged Aboriginal women to practice craft and create objects for sale through the tourist market of the time, in spite of the ancient weaving traditions of communities in the Top End. Treahna Hamm is one of a number of artists who over the past decade or so have researched customary techniques and been responsible for cultural revival and regeneration.

This work was the result of a dream. In Indigenous culture, teachings are very different from the concept of mainstream teachings. Many aspects of life are interpreted with listening to the land and to elders through stories that are then reinterpreted into our own lives. The work gives substance to my identity and that of my cultural teachings.

Treahna Hamm, 2007

Yawkyawk is a word in the Kunwinjku/kunwok language of Western Arnhem Land meaning ‘young woman’ and ‘young woman spirit being’. The different groups of Kunwinjku people (one of the Eastern dialect groups call themselves Kuninjku) each have Yawkyawk mythologies, which relate to specific locations in clan estates. These mythologies are represented in bark paintings and sculptures of Yawkyawk beings.

There are also a few examples of rock art images of these beings. The female water spirits Yawkyawk or Ngalkunburriyaymi are perhaps the most enigmatic of mythological themes. Sometimes compared to the European notion of mermaids, they exist as spiritual beings living in freshwater streams and rock pools, particularly those in the stone country. The spirit Yawkyawk is usually described and depicted with the tail of a fish. This the Kuninjku people sometimes call the ngalberddjenj which literally means ‘the young woman who has a tail like a fish’. They have long hair, which is associated with trailing blooms of green algae (called man-bak in Kuninjku).

At times they leave their aquatic homes to walk about on dry land, particularly at night. Aboriginal people believe that in the beginning most animals were humans. During the time of the creation of landscapes and plants and animals, these ancestral heroes in human form transmutated into their animal forms via a series of various significant events now recorded as oral mythologies. The creation ancestor Yawkyawk travelled the country in human form and changed into the form of Ngalkunburriyaymi as a result of various ancestral adventures. Today the Kuninjku believe that Ngalkunburriyaymi are alive and well and living in freshwater sites in a number of sacred locations. Some features of a respective country are equated with body parts of Yawkyawk. For example a bend in a river or creek may be said to be the tail of the Yawkyawk, a billabong may be the head of the Yawkyawk, and so on. Thus different groups can be linked together by means of a shared mythology featured in the landscape, which crosscuts clan and language group boundaries.

Felicity Green (ed.), Togart Contemporary Art Award (NT) 2007, exhibition catalogue, Darwin: Toga Group, 2007, p.20.

I can remember coming here as a boy in old wooden boats to be taught by my grandparents and my parents. I’ll be 57 this year and I have missed only one year when my daughter Leanne was born. Mutton birding is my life. To me it’s a gathering of our fellas where we sit and yarn, we remember and we honour all of those birders who have gone before us. Sometimes I just stand and look out across these beautiful islands remembering my people and I know I’m home. It makes me proud to be a strong Tasmanian black man. This is something that they can never take away from me.

Murray Mansell, Big Dog Island, Bass Strait, 2005

Wakkewakken, the legless women, is associated with the ancestral honey in areas around where Nadjamerrek lives – his country Kabulwarnamyo. Dulklorrkelorrkeng has legs, arms, an ‘arse like a monkey’ and the pushed backed face of the ghost bat. Nadjamerrek depicts Dulklorrkelorrkeng with a black whip snake at its thumb. The Wakkewakken was painted first and Nadjamerrek indicated early that he was going to paint a row of four or five of these beings – obviously a change of mind occurred soon after. The areas of hatching on the malevolent Dulklorrkelorrkeng and snake have been executed by two hands – Nadjamerrek’s and his son’s wife Jenny. Nadjamerrek moved to his granddaughter’s house to finish this work. Here his son and wife were also camped and Jenny was instructed to infill the marked out areas of his design. Her practical hand is honest and workman like, differing to his lines, which not only show his confident lightness of touch, creating tonal variation, but also of an old man’s tremor.

Dulklorrkelorrkeng are malignant spirits associated with a site of the same name in the Mok clan’s estate. Dulklorrkelorrkeng are usually described as evil spirits or devils similar in nature to the malevolent Namande spirits living throughout western Arnhem Land. Dulklorrkelorrkeng are of both genders and are only visible to the ‘clever men’. Nadjamerrek learnt what they look like, how they live and about their activities from his father, who was a ‘man with power’ as he had special qualities and could see the invisible. Dulklorrkelorrkeng eat poisonous snakes and angurrk (gum) from a number of local tree species. Their pets are djapo (northern quoll), but not the small species known to common people; their pets are djapo namandegen, large animals said to be as large as wolfhounds.

Dulklorrkelorrkeng live in anberrk (forest usually described as dry country as it lacks surface water) where they sit on hollow logs that serve as their home. They get their djiddjirrdok(drinking water) from hollow anbulurrdak and andjalen trees. If you tap these trees, you can hear the water splashing and the movement of Dulklorrkelorrkeng inside.

Marrapinti is the rock hole site west of the Pollock Hills in Western Australia.

Ancestral women of the Nangala and Napangati subsections camped at Marrapinti during their travels east. There, the women made nose bones, also known as marrapinti. During ceremonies relating to Marrapinti, the older women pierced the nasal septums of the younger women who were participating in the ceremony. Now, nose bones are only used by the older generation for ceremonies.

Upon completion of the ceremonies at Marrapinti, the women continued their travels east, passing through Wala Wala, Ngaminya and Wirrulnga, before heading north east to Wilkinkarra [Lake Mackay].

The lines in the painting represent the surrounding tali (sand hills) in the area around Wirrulnga. A group of ancestral women once gathered at this site to perform the dance and sing the songs associated with the area. Wirrulnga is known as a traditional birthing site for the women of the area, and while the women were at Wirrulnga a woman of the Napaltjarri kinship subsection gave birth to a son who was a Tjupurrula. While at Wirrulnga the women also gathered the edible berries known as kampurarrpa or desert raisin from the small shrub Solanum centrale. These berries can be eaten straight from the bush but are sometimes ground into a paste and cooked in the coals to form a type of damper.

Doreen Reid Nakamarra 2007