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

This is a legend that took place on the Mai Kusa River on the western coast of Papua New Guinea. Following the death of his wife, a man decided to give his daughter a pet to help console her and keep her company. He brought her a puppy but she didn’t like it. He then brought her a piglet but she didn’t like that either ... One day when he was out spearing fish in the back he came across a baby crocodile, which he caught and took home to show his daughter.

She really liked it and named the crocodile Ubirikubiri. As the crocodile grew, the man kept enlarging the pen. After Ubirikubiri had become fully grown, the father went to visit friends in another village, and he neglected to feed the crocodile the entire time he was away. When he returned Ubirikubiri was very hungry and very annoyed at having been left without food for such a long time.

As the father went to feed Ubirikubiri some fish, the crocodile grabbed him and killed him, then it broke out of the pen, placed the father on his back and headed to the Mai Kusa. The daughter, who had not been at home when Ubirikubiri seized her father, saw the broken pen and evidence of a skirmish. She followed Ubirikubiri’s tracks to the river, calling out to the crocodile to tell her about her father. At ziba ziba (dusk), Ubirikubiri appeared on the river bank with the girl’s father on his back. She pleaded with the crocodile to give up her father but, shaking his huge body, the crocodile refused and headed back into the river. There is a moral to part of this story that instructs us that if animals are taken from their natural environment they must be looked after and treated and cared for properly.

Dennis Nona and the Australian Art Print Network, 2007

Kuninjku artists Owen Yalandja and Anniebell Marrngamarrnga have created three-dimensional representations of the same ancestral being, the yawkyawk. Yawkyawk (also known as yawk yawk and yalk yalk) are female water spirits that are often referred to within European cultures as mermaids.

They are half fish, half Ancestral Being, who entice unsuspecting men beneath the water of the billabongs and lagoons, where they reside throughout Arnhem Land. In some representations they have long reed-like hair, referring to the waterweed, and are able to transform their features into that of a fish snake. They are able to morph further as they grow into adulthood, leaving their watery domicile and flying like dragonflies. Closely associated with the powerful Ancestral Being Ngalyod the Rainbow Serpent, yawkyawk are often linked with sorcery.

Yalandja’s majestic, elegant carvings of Yawkyawk 2007, hewn from eucalyptus trunk, denote strength and power. The chevron design, his signature design, indicates the shimmering scales on the fish-like body of the creatures, catching the light and suggesting the inherent power within the billabong where yawkyawk reside. Yalandja, the son of renowned carver and senior Mumeka custodian Anchor Kuningbal (c. 1922–1984), was taught to carve by his father.

A while ago I was asked to do some work about the Chris Hurley case. Because I wasn’t directly involved I decided to do a more general painting on black deaths in custody. This is it: FIGHT: To Survive; To Live; To Die!

My first thought was to depict a subversion of events. Instead of a blackfella being beaten by the cops, here, you’ve got the cops being beaten by a blackfella. My central figure is the key to this painting: an image of resilience, of fighting back against the odds.

The boxing tent to the left refers to a history of blackfellas fighting in Australia. Here I use it as a sign of empowerment with the blackfellas as heroes and the redneck crowd as villains. The left panel shows the faces of the rednecks. Like criminals, their faces are obscured by stockings. This obscurement refers to how racism can be masked or institutionalised. It’s a kind of crowd mentality.

The crow on the right of the central panel refers to the spirit of blackfellas who have died in custody, ascending from the jail cell. To its right, the dove symbolises the resting place of those spirits: a place of freedom and peace.

As for the global symbol, I’ve used this in the past. Global decisions impact on us locally, such as multinational companies drawing resources from Indigenous lands. It’s a reminder that the fight is not just against crooked cops.

Gordon Hookey, 2007

A wonderland of truly wondrous things

That nowhere else upon this Earth are found;

Of reptiles rare, and birds that have no wings,

And animals that live deep in the ground;

And those poor simple children of the Earth,

(A disappearing race you here may meet),

Whom whites have driven from their land of birth

To regions still untrod by booted feet.1

Danie Mellor’s (re)creation of this gleefully contrived never-never land is realised in his phantasmagorical tableau The contrivance of a vintage Wonderland (A magnificent flight of curious fancy for science buffs…a china ark of seductive whimsy…a divinely ordered special attraction…upheld in multifariousness) 2007, which is the kind of diorama that should have been on display in the social history museums of the past. Mellor’s magical installation conjures up flights of fancy that might have been the imaginations of those terrified and ignorant initial ‘boat people’.

Mellor’s creatures are manufactured from an amalgam of the man-made and the natural: real macropod paws and ears, and smaller marsupial possum paws and ears adorn life-size fibreglass models encrusted with a mosaic of shattered blue and white willow pattern Spode crockery – with one red and white willow pattern oddity.2 A motley flock of stuffed native birds – a giant emu, an owl, brilliantly coloured parrots, including hybrids – and a tree cloaked in mosaic rather than bark conjure metaphors of the hybridity that most of contemporary Indigenous Australians experience everyday.

Notes

1. AG Bolam, The trans-Australian wonderland, Melbourne: The McCubbin-James Press, 1927.

2. Spode is an English manufacturer of pottery and porcelain, based in Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom, c. 1770.

This painting represents a component of the Wagilag Sisters epic creation story. The upper-left corner of the work shows Wititj the sacred python emerging from its home, Mirarrmina waterhole. Wititj has already swallowed and regurgitated the sisters and their child, and the child is drinking the Mirarrmina water from a mungulk (a paperbark water vessel).

The rarrk roundels in the work are djamundurr or gunda, which are stones. The stones are found surrounding Mirarrmina waterhole and the sisters use the stones for killing goannas to eat.

‘How much goanna? one, two, three, four…buduk (wait)…five. Five goanna.’ The goannas are djarrka(the Mertens’ water goanna) who live in hollow logs around the waterhole. This goanna is painted as a body design on initiates in high-order ceremonies such as Ngulmarrk and Djungguwan. Not all men make it to this level of ceremonial initiation as it is reserved for the (potentially) more powerful leaders and lawmen.

The triangular shapes are ngambi (stone spearheads) collected from Ngilipitji, a quarry in the region. The women have used their fingernails to prise the rocks from the quarry.

There is a spear under the arm of the sister on the left. The Wagilag Sisters used spears in their time until other people were made and born, when men took over the use of spears for hunting. In the lower right quadrant of the painting there is rinytjangu (yam or bush tucker) next to a stone spearhead, between the legs of the sister on the right.

Both of the Wagilag Sisters are of the Dhuwa moiety. Reputedly the younger sister had fornicated with her brother, giving rise to the child. The child is the first Yirritja moiety person. Hence the creation of the Yirritja moiety.

The Wagilag Sisters are central to the four important ceremonies of the Dhuwa moiety: Djungguwan, Gunabibi, Ngulmarrk, Mandaialla. The story is primarily an account of how, in the distant past, the two Wagilag Sisters came out of the southern interior and came across the countryside to the Liyagalawumirr waterhole at Mirramina. There, the younger sister profaned the pool of the great python by accidentally allowing her blood to fall into the waterhole. Because of this the women and the child were swallowed by the python amid thunderstorms and rain – the first wet season. The great flood covered the land and all the other sacred pythons stood up with their heads in the clouds and talked to each other with voices like thunder. The python from Guruwana was one of those. He lives in a rocky mud bank where there are many oyster beds. The pythons discovered that they had different languages and skins. The Mirramina python confessed to eating the two women – his own moiety – and fell to earth, making a big depression in the ground. The big wind blew across the land and caused the first dry season. The python vomited the women up, but swallowed them again before going back into the waterhole.

The customary greeting between male relations and family members in Thompson’s The Sixth Mile and Desert Slippers both created 2006 are profoundly moving in the intensely personal rituals revealed to an unaware public audience. Thompson inhabits many bodies – young, male, urban, Blak, androgynous, playful, mimic, and performative – always Bidjara.1

[The video work] presents the viewer with a very intimate, family ritual. We see the artist and his father involved in what could be interpreted as a greeting ceremony. Speaking in Bidjara, their bodies turned towards each other, the men are engrossed in acting out the same gestures repetitively. The non-Bidjara viewer, who can’t understand what is being said, is nonetheless invited into this private space of communication and learning between father and son. The artist explains that this work follows on from earlier videos that similarly focused on Bidjara rituals, made visible by means of a Western visual language. It forms a response to the increasingly conservative government policies and, in particular, to the recent media coverage of dysfunction in Indigenous communities, something described by the artist as ‘Aboriginal man-bashing.’ Choosing video because of its potential for direct and intense audience engagement, Thompson offers insight into Indigenous rituals and notions of masculinity and father-child relationships in personal and challenging ways.

Marianne Riphagen, ‘Intersections in the screen pit’, RealTime, no.76, Dec–Jan, 2006, p.54.

Notes

1 The term ‘Blak’ was first used by Destiny Deacon in the exhibition Kudjeris at Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, 1991, with one of her works titled Blak lik mi.

Yunupingu’s source of inspiration is Garak the Universe, an important ancestral story – particularly for the Yolgnu of north-east Arnhem Land. Although Garak appears to be a literal representation of the Milky Way, Yunupingu has stated herself that her art is about the entire universe, all the stars that can be seen by the naked eye, and also everything that exists far beyond any scientific expedition or estimation – everything that can be imagined and all that cannot.

King No Beard 2007 is a direct appropriation of the portrait of King George III painted in London in 1773 by Nathaniel Dance, which is now held in the Hermitage collection in St Petersburg. Boyd’s regal portrait of King George III in all his frills and finery is brought undone by closer observation of the stately necklace: the expected gold orbs having been replaced by skulls. The portrait also contains a self-portrait, mockingly included as a decapitated specimen in a jar, gazing mournfully heavenward like a latter-day Saint Sebastian, martyred like so many of the first Indigenous resistance fighters of Australia.

Boyd’s portraits directly reference 18th-century portraits of figures associated with the earliest days of Australia’s colonisation. Within these portraits are other references, as is the case with the macabre self-portrait in which Boyd shares the fate of 18th-century Dharug/Dharuk resistance leader Pemulwuy (c. 1750–1802). Pemulwuy led uprisings against the colonisers for 12 years before finally being captured and executed – having escaped from captivity at least once. His severed head was then bottled and sent back to his home Country.

Boyd also alludes to the £50 million recently paid for British artist Damien Hirst’s work For the love of God, a diamond encrusted human skull, which was sold in June 2007. Boyd’s painting is a response to an art market gone absurd, particularly in light of the secondary and auction market for Aboriginal art.